Americans Remember Who and What We Are

In the weeks since the American people rejected the ruling Democrats and voted back into power Donald Trump, all parts of the Democratic Party have been pointing fingers, blaming each other for the electoral debacle. Some commentators on the left demand that the Party entirely shift its position in the Middle East. That generally pro-Israel position is opposed by the left’s Progressive wing, who believe any support of Israel is being forced upon the party by a powerful and wealthy “Jewish Lobby.” Unfortunately for the Progressives, that view of an ulterior motive for Americans overwhelmingly positive view toward Jews and the State of Israel is completely contrary to American history.

On March 5, 1891, a document was delivered to the desk of President Benjamin Harrison. Known as the “Blackstone Memorial” and signed by 413 dignitaries, the document urged President Harrison to “consider the condition of the Israelites and their claims to Palestine as their ancient home, and to promote, in all other just and proper ways, the alleviation of their suffering condition” by using the military power of the United States to seize the Holy Land (then not called either “Israel” or “Palestine” but part of the Ottoman Empire) and deliver it to the Jews. Among the 413 signatories were such non-Jews as John D. Rockefeller, the wealthiest man in the world, J. P. Morgan, future President William McKinley, Speaker of the House of Representatives Thomas Reed and Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court Melville Fuller. In 1891 there were few Jews in the United States, and even fewer of them were wealthy, so clearly none of these men were influenced by a non-existent “Jewish Lobby.” Instead, they followed a traditional American tradition of thinking of themselves as the “New Jews.” These giants of American history were philosemites, not antisemites.

During the 1800’s the area now known as Israel was a dreary, desolate backwater of the Ottoman Empire. Few westerners traveled there, as there was little to see. One American who was determined to go, however, was the famed author Mark Twain, author of “Huckleberry Finn” and “Tom Sawyer.” In 1867 he journeyed there, where he filed a series of dispatches. Chronicled in “The Innocents Abroad,” Twain was scathing in his feelings toward the Holy Land. Jerusalem was a “mournful and dreary and lifeless” city. The entire area was a “hopeless, dreary, heart-broken land.” While in 2024 the Palestinians talk of their eternal connection to Palestine, it certainly was not in evidence to Twain in 1867, and his dispatches, which became best sellers in America, were read across the country.

Five years earlier, in 1862 during the American Civil War, Union General Ulysses S. Grant was concerned about war profiteering in southern-produced cotton in the area he then administered, which consisted of parts of the states of Tennessee, Mississippi and Kentucky. Despite having no known history of antisemitism, Grant became convinced that the trade was being run “mostly by Jews and other unprincipled traders”. On December 17, 1862, Grant issued General Order 11, which expelled all Jews from Grant’s military district. The few Jews affected were rounded up at Holly Springs, Mississippi and forced to evacuate on foot. At Paducah, Kentucky thirty Jewish families were forcibly expelled.

When he heard about the situation, President Abraham Lincoln was appalled. On January 4, 1863 he countermanded the order. Chastened, Grant rarely spoke of General Order 11 again, and as president he exhibited no signs of antisemitism.

Twenty years before that, during the 1840’s, a movement called the “Restorationists” arose that dreamed of teaching Jews how to return to their ancient homeland and once again become farmers. As Ambassador Michel Oren described in his book, “Power, Faith and Fantasy,” the Dickson family from Groton, Massachusetts founded a colony for Jews outside of Jaffa and hired a German family of restorationists named Grossteinbeck to assist. Indeed two Grossteinbeck brothers married two Dickson daughters. In 1858 however, in a scene to be repeated on October 7, 2023, Arabs attacked the farm, slashing and raping the two Dickson girls, killing one, and killing one of the Grossteinbeck brothers. The surviving brother, Johann, fled to America, shortened his name went to California to seek his fortune, fought for the Union Army and generally faded into history. Students of American literature, however, cannot truly understand the religious imagery in such masterpieces as “East of Eden”, “Go Down Moses” or “The Grapes of Wrath” without knowing that John Steinbeck’s great uncle was murdered and his grandfather gravely wounded by Arabs because they believed in the historic connection of Jews to the Land of Israel.

The understanding of that connection was in evidence at the very founding of the American nation. On July 4, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was read publicly for the first time at the home of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. That same day, the Congress instructed Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams to design a seal for the new United States. A few weeks later Franklin proposed an image. In his own words it was a biblical image:

“Moses standing on the Shore, and extending his Hand over the Sea, thereby causing the same to overwhelm Pharoh, who is sitting in an open Chariot, a Crown on his Head and a Sword in his Hand. Rays from a Pillar of Fire in the Clouds reaching to Moses, to express that he acts by Command of the Diety. Motto, Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.”

75 years earlier, in 1701, the Congregationalist clergy of the Connecticut colony founded Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. It was the third institution of higher learning in the United States. On its coat or arms, the clergy inscribed in Hebrew letters ”Urim ve Thummim”. While mistranslated into Latin as “light and truth”, it actually refers to the special stones that were kept in a pouch behind the breastplate of Aaron in the first Temple (see Exodus 28:30).

Of course you can still go back further. In 1654 23 Jewish refugees landed in New Amsterdam (later New York). This did not please the Dutch Governor, Peter Stuyvesant, who petitioned his bosses at the Dutch West India Company in Amsterdam for permission to expel the Jews. When that did not work he tried to ban Jews from certain rights and services in the colony, including buying real estate in certain parts of the City. On February 15, 1655, the Dutch West India Company put Stuyvesant in his place. Jews, they ruled,…

“may quietly and peacefully… exercise in all quietness their religion within their houses, for which end they must without doubt endeavor to build the houses close together in a convenient place on one of the other side of New Amsterdam at their choice…”

In fact, the connection of Americans to the people and land of Israel goes all the way back to the first Europeans who came here. One of the signers of the Declaration of Independence was Josiah Bartlett, delegate from New Hampshire. As with so many of the early Americans, Bartlett possessed an ancient biblical name, that of King Josiah from the book of Second Kings. While there were many Johns, Williams and Roberts among the first American settlers to the New World, there also were numerous Obadiahs and Jebidiahs. That is because they saw themselves in many ways as the “New Jews’” intending to sail to America to create their “New Jerusalem.”  In 1630 as the ship Arbella was about to set sail from Southampton in England to America, Puritan minister John Cotton blessed the journey by reading from II Samuel 7:10:

“Moreover, I will appoint a place for my people Israel, and will plant them, that they may dwell in a place of their own, and move no more.”

Not everyone who has lived “from sea to shining sea” has been a philosemite of course. Over the years America has had its share of Peter Stuyvesants, Father Coughlins, Charles Lindberghs and Joseph Kennedys. Now we have Lewis Farrakhan, Rashida Tlaib and too many faculty members and administrators at our colleges and universities. Still, from the time the first pilgrims fled Europe for shores of America they came with a deep connection to Judaism, the Jewish people and the Land of Israel. That has been reinforced over 400 years.

After years of watching many modern leftist intellectuals try to reshape America’s beliefs, culminating in the past year’s attempt to divorce America from its founding roots and values toward the Jewish People and Israel, the historic America arose and demanded to be counted again. Whatever one’s political feelings, that fact portends well for Israel, and for American Jews.