“Jews, heathens and dissenters” were granted full liberty of conscience in the liberal charter which the celebrated English philosopher, John Locke (1632–1704) drew up for the governance of the Carolinas (1669), and the spirit of tolerance was always retained there. Still few Jews were attracted there at the beginning, and about thirty years later we know of only one Jew, Solomon Valentine, as living in Charleston. A few others followed him, and in 1703 a protest was raised against “Jew strangers” voting for members of the Assembly. About the middle of the eighteenth century the number of Jews in Charleston suddenly increased through the above-mentioned exodus from Georgia, and the first Synagogue of the Congregation Bet Elohim was established in 1750. Its first minister was Isaac da Costa, and among its earliest members were Joseph and Michael Tobias, Moses Cohen, Abraham da Costa, Moses Pimenta, David de Olivera, Mordecai Sheftal, Michael Lazarus and Abraham Nuñez Cardozo. The first Synagogue was a small building on Union street; its present edifice is situated at Hassell street. A Hebrew Benevolent Society, which still survives, was also organized at an early date. A German-Jewish congregation was also in existence in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Several prominent Jews of London purchased large tracts of land in South Carolina, near Fort Ninety-six, which became known as the “Jews’ Land.” Moses Lindo who arrived from London in 1756, became engaged in indigo manufacture, which he made one of the principal industries in the colony. Another London Jew, Francis Salvador (d. 1776), was the most prominent Jew in South Carolina at the time of the outbreak of the Revolutionary War.
PART III.
THE REVOLUTION AND THE PERIOD OF EXPANSION.
CHAPTER XI.
THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE.
Spirit of the Old Testament in the Revolutionary War—Sermons in favor of the original Jewish form of Government—The New Nation as “God’s American Israel”—The Quebec Act—The intolerance of sects as the cause of separation of Church and State—A Memorial sent by German Jews to the Continental Congress—Fear expressed in North Carolina that the Pope might be elected President of the United States—None of the liberties won were lost by post-revolutionary reaction, as happened elsewhere.
The spirit of the old Testament which was prevalent among the early settlers of New England was perhaps still more manifest there at the time of the outbreak of the Revolutionary War of Independence. The ever-increasing antagonism which was aroused by the attempt of the Parliament of England to regulate and to tax the colonies, found expression in Biblical terms to an extent which can hardly be appreciated in the present time. The people in America had to fight over again the same battles for constitutional liberties which the English had fought before them, and George III., so far as his claims over the colonies were concerned, relied as much upon the kingly prerogative, the doctrine of “Divine Right,” as ever did James I. All of these pretensions, all the questions of right and liberty had to be re-argued. To refute this false theory of kingly power it was not only expedient but necessary to revert to the earliest times, to the most sacred record, the Old Testament, for illustration and for argument, chiefly because the doctrine of Divine Right of a King by the Grace of God and its corollaries, “unlimited submission and non-resistance,” were deduced, or rather distorted, from the New Testament, having been brought into the field of politics with the object of enslaving the masses through their religious creed. “It is, at least, an historical fact—says the historian Lecky—that in the great majority of instances the early Protestant defenders of civil liberty derived their political principles chiefly from the Old Testament, and the defenders of despotism from the New. The rebellions that were so frequent in Jewish history formed the favorite topic of the one, the unreserved submission inculcated by St. Paul, the other.”11
While there were many free thinkers or Deists among the intellectual leaders of the Revolution, the masses of the colonists were intensely religious, and an argument from Scripture carried more weight with them than any other. Education was limited at that period in the colonies; there were not many newspapers, they were rarely issued more than once a week, and the number of subscribers was but few. The pulpit had their place, and the pastors in their sermons dealt with politics not less than with religion. Sermons were for the people the principal sources of general instruction. These pastors, in the way of history, knew above all that of the Jewish people, and they were the first to bring before their audiences the ideals of the old Hebrew commonwealth. Rev. Jonathan Mayhew (1720–66), whose discourse, in 1750, against unlimited submission was characterized as “the morning gun of the Revolution,” declared in a later oration on the “Repeal of the Stamp Act” which he delivered in Boston on May 23, 1766: “God gave Israel a king in His anger because they had not sense and virtue enough to like a free commonwealth, and to have Himself for their King—where the spirit of the Lord is there is liberty—and if any miserable people on the continent or isles of Europe be driven in their extremity to seek a safe retreat from slavery in some far distant clime—O let them find one in America.” Rev. Samuel Langdon (1723–97), President of Harvard College, delivered an election sermon before the “Honorable Congress of Massachusetts Bay” on the 31st of May, 1775, taking as his text the passage in Isaiah 1. 26, “And I will restore thy judges as at first,” in which he said: “The Jewish government, according to the original constitution, which was divinely established, if considered only in a civil view, was a perfect republic. And let them who cry up the divine right of Kings consider, that the form of government which had a proper claim to a divine establishment was so far from including the idea of a King, that it was a high crime for Israel to ask to be in this respect like other nations, and when they were thus gratified, it was rather as a just punishment for their folly.... The civil polity of Israel is doubtless an excellent general model, allowing for some peculiarities: at least some principal laws and orders of it may be copied in more modern establishments.” Almost everybody at that time knew by heart the admonitions of Samuel to the children of Israel, describing the manner in which a King would rule over them.
Sermons drawing a parallel between George III. and Pharaoh, inferring that the same providence of God which had rescued the Israelites from Egyptian bondage would free the colonies, were common in that period; and they probably had more effect with the masses than the great orations of the statesmen or the philosophical essays of the publicists which came down to us in the literature of the Revolution. The success of the War of Independence was also accepted in that sense. The election sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Ezra Stiles, President of Yale College, on May 8, 1783, at Hartford, before Governor Trumbull and the General Assembly of the State of Connecticut, may be cited as an instance. Dr. Stiles took for his text Deut. XXVI, 19: “And to make you high above all nations which he has made, in praise, and in name, and in honor, etc.” This sermon takes up one hundred and twenty closely