STEPHEN WHITFIELD
A special meaning for July 4THIS YEAR marks 350 years of Jewish history in America, beginning with 23 refugees who landed in New Amsterdam in 1654. Their descendants have had much cause for gratitude. They have attached special meaning to the Fourth of July, the holiday that promised the Jews neither tolerance nor grudging respect but unprecedented freedom. Thanks to the way national independence was justified in 1776, this minority has welcomed the opportunity to enjoy inalienable rights.
As early as 1788, when European Jewry still awaited its emancipation, the cantor of a Philadelphia synagogue celebrated Independence Day by marching down the main street arm-in-arm with two Protestant ministers. The parade ended with a banquet that featured a table laden with kosher cuisine. In the New World no ghetto walls needed to be smashed, since equality with other white Americans was formally assured -- and often informally too. The author of the Declaration of Independence would also demand a separation of church and state, and thus cleansed the atmosphere of any whiff of official religious oppression. Indeed the last letter that Thomas Jefferson ever wrote proclaimed his hostility to "monkish ignorance and superstition." Then he died, eerily, half a century to the day after July 4, 1776, as did John Adams, his collaborator in writing the Declaration. (Put that in a novel, and no one would believe it.) Their successors were so respectful of Jewish sensitivities that only one presidential inaugural address ever alluded to the Savior (in 1841). William Henry Harrison died one month later -- the only chief executive never to celebrate the Fourth (though divine displeasure with this breach of the wall of separation cannot be confirmed as the cause). There is much stronger evidence for the anti-Americanism of Sigmund Freud, which a visit to Worcester did not temper. (His sole experience of the United States, in 1909, stemmed from a lecture invitation at Clark University.) To Freud, Jefferson's "pursuit of happiness" made little sense, because psychoanalysis deemed the renunciation of pleasure to be the price we mortals pay for civilization. Jefferson, however, had regarded the prospect of happiness as the test of a civilization. The political liberalism to which Freud nevertheless adhered led him to hang in his office in Vienna a copy of the Declaration of Independence. A century ago such ideals helped draw over 2 million Jews from Eastern Europe to the United States, where no journalist addressed these Yiddish-speaking masses more adroitly than Abraham Cahan. His 1917 novel, "The Rise of David Levinsky," poignantly captures the allure of upward mobility and the psychic penalties that it exacted upon such immigrants. When Cahan's protagonist attends a seder at the home of a prospective fiancee, her father describes Passover in terms that the Americanized children can grasp, as "the Fourth of July of our unhappy people." Escape from Egyptian bondage was merely the prelude to emancipation from the British empire. Continued... |
