Under the Fig Tree

When the Portuguese conquered the Dutch colony of Recife on the coast of Brazil in 1654, they gave the Jewish settlers the same terms as the Protestant Dutch: accept the Roman Catholic faith or get out. Some of the Recife Jews who chose to get out were (according to one account) captured by pirates on the high seas, then rescued by the French privateer St. Charles. In September 1654, the St.

Charles landed its 23 Jewish passengers--men, women and children--at the nearest Dutch port, New Amsterdam (pop. 800). They were the first Jewish settlers in what is now U.S. territory.

This week Jewish congregations all over the nation held special services to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the landing at New Amsterdam. The ceremonies began a scheduled nine-month round of tercentenary observances with the theme: "Man's Opportunities and Responsibilities under Freedom."* At the Manhattan synagogue of Shearith Israel (Remnant of Israel), the congregation founded by the settlers of 1654, the Rev. Dr. Louis C. Gerstein intoned the tercentenary prayer: "Lord our God ... deep gratitude wells up in our hearts as we remember that 300 years ago Thou didst guide a little band of Israel's children to these shores . . ."

The 23 refugees from Brazil got a cold reception at the hands of New Amsterdam's peg-legged Governor Peter Stuyvesant. a cast-iron Calvinist who considered Judaism "an abominable religion." He wrote to the directors of the West India Company in Amsterdam, suggesting that Jews be banned. The company instructed the governor to let the Jews stay on the understanding that "the poor among them shall not become a burden to the Company or community, but be supported by their own nation."

A Letter from Newport. In the English colonies along the American coast, Jewish immigrants found a freedom beyond anything they had known in Europe. On paper the colonies severely restricted religious freedom, but the restrictions were seldom enforced against Jews. In 17th century Maryland, a stiff-necked Jewish physician named Jacob Lombroso was tried for blasphemy (he had publicly denied the divinity of Christ), but though he was plainly guilty under the law, the court set the case aside. Lombroso continued to live and prosper in Maryland.

In 1790, after the Revolution had swept away even the paper disabilities of religious minorities, Moses Seixas wrote to President Washington on behalf of the Jews of Newport, R. I. to tell him how thankful they were to be living under "a government which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance." Wrote Washington in reply: "It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. [In this nation] everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid."

Revolutions & Pogroms. Before 1848, there were only about 20,000 Jews in a U.S. population of more than 20 million. Most of the pre-1848 settlers were Sephardic Jews, whose ancestors had lived in Spain or Portugal. In the two decades after Europe's revolutionary tremors of 1848, more than 200,000 European Jews, most of them German-speaking, migrated to the U.S. Their Americanization was rapid and thorough, gave rise to a Reform Judaism that outspokenly rejected the traditional idea of Jewish nationhood.

In the 1880s a series of bloody pogroms in the Russia of Czar Alexander III set off another great wave of Jewish immigration --2,000,000 came to the U.S. between 1881 and 1914. mostly from Russia and Poland. These Eastern Jews brought with them orthodoxy, Zionism, the Yiddish language and a tighter grip on their Jewish traditions than the Germans had shown.

Today nearly half the world's Jews live in the U.S., more than 5,000,000. New York City has more Jewish inhabitants (2,250.000) than Israel, more than any other city in history. Tercentenary orators and writers happily bat up statistics, e.g., as a group the Jews supply twice their proportionate share of the nation's college students and only half their share of the jailbirds. But, beyond anything that statistics could express, the Jews' life under America's sheltering trees was a new experience after their long wanderings. Writes Historian Oscar Handlin: "Looking backward from 1954, the three hundred years of Jewish life in the U.S. seem an adventure in freedom."

*The tercentenary has already produced two readable histories of U.S. Jewry: Oscar Hand-lin's Adventure in Freedom (McGraw-Hill; $3.75) and Rufus Learsi's The Jews in America (World; $6).

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