OSCAR SOLOMON STRAUS

THE FIRST SETTLEMENT OF THE JEWS IN THE UNITED STATES

Oscar Straus (born 1850, died 1926) was Secretary of the Department of Commerce and Labor in the cabinet of President Roosevelt and Ambassador to Turkey, 1909-1910. He was the head of many civic and benevolent organizations and was well known as author and speaker. The following address was delivered in Faneuil Hall, Boston, Nov. 29, 1905. Another speech by Mr. Straus is printed in Volume III.

"FEW greater calamities," says Lecky, "can befall a nation than to cut herself off, as France did in her great revolution, from all vital connection with her own past." "" Here in this historic hall, dedicated by that great commoner, James Otis, as "The Cradle of Liberty," were held town meetings throbbing with the nascent principles of democracy. Herein also, where a decade later Samuel Adams and Joseph Warren first organized resistance to arbitrary government, it is most fitting and proper to celebrate an historical event, insignificant in itself, yet whose threads, dyed in the blood of martyrs for soul-liberty, find a fitting place in the composite fabric of our continent's history and in the development of our civil and religious liberties. The historian of the persecution of the Jews, Dr. Kayserling, says, "Where the history of the Jews in Spain ends, their history in America begins; the Inquisition is the last chapter of the confessors of Judaism on the Pyrenean Peninsula and their first chapter on the continent of the Western hemisphere." The expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal, and the discovery of America, are linked together not only as contemporaneous events, but also in some important contributory relations. Emilio Castelar, in his "History of Columbus," says that as soon as Luis Santangel, the comptroller-general of Reprinted from "The American Spirit," published and copyrighted by The Century Co., 1913.

Aragon, "one of those antique Jews who have so greatly helped to enlighten the Christian world," heard of the dismissal of Columbus, he prevailed upon the Queen to order his return, and when she complained of the emptiness of the Castilian treasury, Santangel assured her majesty of the flourishing state of the Aragonese finances-doubtless, says the historian, because of the revenues derived from the confiscation of the property of the expelled Jews. From the archives of Simancas, which are still preserved at Seville, it is clear that Santangel, whom the historian has named the Beaconsfield of his time, and whose uncle of the same name, and other kinsmen, died at the stake in Saragossa, not only was instrumental in connection with Juan Cabrera, also of Jewish lineage, in successfully interposing in behalf of Columbus, but it is proven beyond question that out of his personal belongings he advanced the money that made the voyage of discovery possible. Furthermore, the first and second letters of Columbus narrating the facts of his great discoveries were addressed to Santangel and his brother-in-law, also a Marrano, a secret Jew, Gabriel Sanches.

In order to obtain the crews to man the caravels of Columbus, it was necessary to throw open the doors of the prisons of Palos and other seaports. Within their dungeon walls were found many members of the hunted and expelled race, and it is not surprising that to such men the dangers of the unknown seas would be an attractive escape from their pitiable condition. It is known that the interpreter, the surgeon, and the physician of the fleet, besides several sailors who were with Columbus on his first voyage, were Jews. Castelar says: "It chanced that one of the last vessels transporting into exile the Jews expelled from Spain by religious intolerance of which the recently created and odious tribunal of the faith was the embodiment, passed by the little fleet bound in search of another world, whose new-born creation should afford a haven to the quickening principle of human liberty and be a temple reared to the God of enfranchised and redeemed conscience. . . . The accursed spirit of reaction was wreaking one of its stupendous and futile crimes in that very hour when the genius of liberty was searching the waves for the land that must needs arise to offer an unstained abode for the ideals of progress."

Among the earliest and certainly the most enlightened colonists who came to this continent, to South America, and to the islands in the Atlantic, were many Jews who left Spain and Portugal in order to escape the rack and the stake of the merciless bloodhounds of the Holy Office. The number of the children and grandchildren of those Jews who had been burnt and condemned by the Inquisition, and who settled on the American continent shortly after the discovery, was so large that in 1511 Queen Johanna considered it necessary to take measures against them.

In 1620, when the Dutch West India Company was formed, Jews became influential stockholders, and subsequently were directors therein; and in 1654, when the Dutch colony of Brazil came under Portuguese control, many thousand Jews had again to seek a new place of refuge. In September of that year twenty-three of these fugitives arrived at New Amsterdam. They did not receive a hearty welcome by the not overamiable Dutch Governor, Peter Stuyvesant, whose conception of our future metropolis was to make it a comfortable village with a monopoly of fur trade with the Indians. When six months later, the Governor endeavored to expel the newcomers he was reprimanded by the directors of the Company in Holland, and instructed that the right of the Jews to live unmolested within the colony was unreservedly granted, because to prohibit them "would be unreasonable and unfair, especially because of the considerable loss they had sustained in the capture of Brazil, and because of the large amount of capital they had invested in the shares of the company."

This is the beginning of the first Jewish settlement within the limits of the United States, the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of which we are commemorating to-night. The same year, 1655, through the persistent efforts of Menassah Ben Israel, through the kindly favor of the tolerant Oliver Cromwell, the Jews regained admission into Great Britain, from which country they had been expelled in 1290 under Edward I. Here it should be noted that one of the foremost advocates for the readmission of the Jews into Great Britain was Roger Williams, that immortal pioneer of soul-liberty, the first true type of an American freeman, who was then in London to

obtain a new charter, uniting the several Rhode Island towns, and to secure and safeguard those inestimable blessings to which he consecrated his life, under which “all men may walk as their conscience persuades them, every one in the name of his God."

Three and a half decades before the Santa Catarina brought to our shores the little band of hunted and despoiled fugitives from Brazil, another little bark had plowed its way in midwinter through the stormy ocean, wafted by the airs of heaven to yon bleak coast. There she landed her little crew of refugees-men, women, and children-on Plymouth Rock, that stepping-stone to the temple of our liberties, whose capstone, bathed in the blood of their descendants, was placed two hundred and forty years later by the hands of the immortal liberator, Abraham Lincoln. They were purists without priests or priestly orders, separated from the national church, but at one with their God, and drawing their inspiration directly from the Bible, not from the catechism of Archbishop Laud, but from the open Bible of Moses and Luther. They were in all a hundred souls, whom two hundred years of struggle for freedom had prepared for this voyage. They studied the Old Testament in order to better understand the New. From the former they drew the civil polity; from the latter their church discipline and ceremonials. Moses was their law-giver, the Pentateuch their code, and Israel under the Judges their ideal of popular government. The path of the crusaders to recover the holy sepulcher was dyed with the blood of the hunted professors of Judaism; and from a hatred organized by the church against "the people of the Book," the Book itself fell into disesteema feeling that was carried over with many of the Roman rites into the early Protestant church. With the rise of the Puritans, and their struggle for independence and freedom from ecclesiastical tyranny, came a revival of the study of the Old Testament, of Hebrew and of Hebraic learning. With the American Puritans especially, the Mosaic code and the Hebrew commonwealth were living realities, so intense was their interest, so earnest was their religious life. No architect drew his plans with more fidelity of purpose to reconstruct a building after an ancient model, than did the Puritans study this Biblical code

and the Hebraic form of government which they endeavored to apply literally to their New Canaan. Elsewhere I have dwelt in detail upon the Hebraic mortar that cemented the foundations of our American democracy, and told how through the windows of the Puritan churches the new West looked back to the old East.

It was only a few years after their first settlement in New York when several of the fugitives and others who had arrived from over sea settled in Newport, where they were hospitably received in consonance with the spirit of the colony's founder, Roger Williams. With these early Puritans, austere in manner and with a church polity exacting and narrow, calling no man master, and with a deep sense of equality before God, it was but a step to equality among one another, and thus they built up their civil state upon a purely religious, democratic foundation. As Lecky says: "It is at least an historical fact, 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 American Jews, as loyal and faithful citizens, have shared willingly in all the trials our country has passed through, from the days of the Revolution until the present time, and she has found none more ready than they to make every sacrifice that true patriotism demanded. During the Revolution there were only a few hundred Jews within the limits of the United States, yet in the Continental army-not to speak of the ranks there were two colonels, Colonel Baum of Pennsylvania, and the other Colonel Franks, who was closely associated with Washington, and was the bearer of the treaty of peace to England. Thomas Wentworth Higginson relates that in 1788 in Philadelphia, in honor of the adoption of the Constitution, a rabbi and two Christian ministers marched side by side, "really," are his words, "constituting the first parliament of religions in this country." In our Civil War more than seven thousand names of Jewish patriots have been identified, and in our lesser war with Spain two thousand and seven hundred participated, and several regiments were formed, but their services were not required.