The Political Rights of the Jews in the United States:

T h e Political Rights of the Jews in the United States: 1776- 1840 STANLEY F. CHYET On May 16, 1743, John Peter Zenger's New-York Weekly Journal des...
Author: Derrick Ford
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T h e Political Rights of the Jews in the United States: 1776- 1840 STANLEY F. CHYET

On May 16, 1743, John Peter Zenger's New-York Weekly Journal described an incident in which a Jewish fimeral procession had been assaulted by a mob. According to one learned Christian who had borne aggrieved witness to it, the mob had "insulted the dead in such a vile manner that to mention all would shock a human ear."^ The incident was exceptional, even in 1743, but it indicated that America was not in every respect a new world. If some hundred and twenty years later the historian George Bancroft could write that American law was "not an acquisition from abroad," but was "begotten from the American mind, of which it was a natural and inevitable, but also a slow and gradual development,"° the growth of political equality for the American Jew -and for other religious minorities as well -is a measure of how slowly and gradually that "American mind" could work. What Sanford Cobb said of the reception tendered Roger Williams' notions of religious liberty, that not in a day will the enunciation of a new principle, especially if it be radical and revolutionary, lodge itself in the minds of men with all those details of regulated application to which only experience can give form and authority,J Rabbi Stanley F. Chyet is the Harrison Jules Louis Frank and Leon Harrison Frank Research Fellow in American Jewish History at the Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati. This article, originally prepared as a Snninararbcit for Dr. Jacob R. Marcus of the H. U. C. - J, I. R., is limited to a study of the political rights of the Jews as defined in the Federal and state constitutions of the United States up to the year 1840.

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is perhaps even truer of the rise of political liberty for the American Jew. Religious liberty was never an especially great problem for the Jew in America. Almost from the beginning, he "found little trouble in securing religious freedom," and "no colony drove him out because he was a Jew."4 Whether through a grant of the freedom of the city, through letters patent of denization, through naturalization acts or "administrative connivance or indifference," the Jew did receive "the right to establish himself in those colonies which appealed to him."5 Even economic rights were granted him by 1700.~Where the Jew was concerned, it was most notably in the area of political rights that "the American mind" underwent

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