“Jews, Heathens, and

Other Dissenters”:
Governing Religion in the
English Atlantic World,
1614–1790

Shari Rabin

Abstract
This article argues that discussions about how Judaism “became a religion” should
include consideration of early modern English thought and colonial governance. In
the seventeenth century, Jews gradually came to be understood in relationship to new
concepts of “religion” and “religions,” even as they were beginning to inhabit English
territories for the first time since their 1290 expulsion. In particular, Jews were related
to a racialized spectrum that ranged from white Protestant dissent to Native and
African heathenism. When Jews were granted rights, it was because they were under-
stood not only as white settlers but as a religious group and even explicitly classified
as Protestants. Centering the English imperial context and the plantation colonies of
Barbados, Carolina, and Georgia, this article offers a critical prehistory of Jewish reli-
gious freedom in the United States, showing it to be far less sudden, complete, and
benign than is often assumed.
Key words: Atlantic, colonialism, England, Jewish, religion, whiteness

W
hen English colonization in the Americas began in earnest
in 1607, Jews had been banned from settling in England
for over 300 years. By the time of the founding of the
United States less than 200 years later, the presence of Jews in British

Shari Rabin, “‘Jews, Heathens, and Other Dissenters’: Governing Religion

in the English Atlantic World, 1614–1790,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Cul-
ture, Society n.s. 27, no. 3 (Fall 2022): 32–57. Copyright © 2022 The Trustees of
Indiana University. doi:10.2979/jewisocistud.27.3.02
territories was so widely accepted as to go almost totally unremarked
upon. In recent decades, scholars in various fields have highlighted
the manifold transformations that early modernity wrought upon [33]
Jews. Historians of England and its colonies have considered Jews as
part of the history of “toleration,” and within Jewish studies, David Jews,
Heathens,
Sorkin’s recent Jewish Emancipation has placed this history in the and Other
broader context of expanding Jewish rights.1 Separately, a large body Dissenters
of scholarship has developed under the rubric of the “Jewish Atlantic •
World,” delineating the interconnected economic and cultural life of Shari Rabin
Jews in English and Dutch territories.2
What goes under-appreciated in these accounts, however, is how
the relationship between Jews and European empires intersected with
the emergence of “religion” as a category. Liora Batnitzky has argued
that Judaism “became a religion” in the late eighteenth century in
the work of the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn.3 And yet, a
robust body of religious studies scholarship has shown that it was in
the early modern imperial context that “religion” first emerged in ear-
nest. Jonathan Z. Smith famously argued that religion “is a category
imposed from the outside on some aspect of native culture.” It was a
product of both colonialism and the Enlightenment, of encounters
with indigenous peoples abroad and with Protestant sectarianism at
home: “it is the question of the plural religions (both Christian and
non-Christian) that forced a new interest in the singular, generic
religion.”4
Historians of early modernity have noticed “the importance of
ideas about ‘Jews’ and ‘Judaizing’ in the long history of Christian
disputes over power,” demonstrating that Jews served as a model
for understanding Native Americans and as a rhetorical tool within
intra-Christian polemics.5 As models of human difference and of theo-
logical deviance, as lost tribes to convert and biblical rulers to emu-
late, Jews were very much present within the intellectual convulsions
that produced “religion.” And yet, Jews were not just present (in scare
quotes) as ideas; they also were physically present, and increasingly so
in English territories after 1650. This meant that the influence went
both ways: understandings of Native Americans and of Protestant
diversity turned back on Jews and had an impact on how they were
viewed and governed. As Peter Harrison has put it, religion “came to
be an outsider’s description of a dubious theological enterprise . . . a
matter of asking what was believed, and if it was true.”6 Yiddish has no
word for “religion,” and the word’s current Hebrew translation, dat,
was traditionally understood to mean “law.”7 Early modern Jews were
likeliest to describe themselves as a “nation,” but as they came into
 contact with modern states, they could not escape the growing heft of
“religion.”8
[34] Foregrounding this history of Jews, “religion,” and English coloni-
alism helps us understand how Jewish settlement came to be accepted
Jewish within the rough and tumble world of imperial politics, in which indig-
Social
Studies enous removal and chattel slavery were central. Indeed, as a growing
body of work has convincingly demonstrated, “religion” and “race”
• as we understand them not only emerged in the same early modern
Vol. 27
No. 3 historical context but are in fact “co-constituted.”9 Racial theories
originated in theological concepts and the category of religion was
built upon racialized assumptions of who was—and was not—worthy
of respect and rights.10 For Jews this meant that they were increasingly
related to new and mutually reinforcing categories of “white” and
“religion.” In English territories, Jews were not only accepted insofar
as they were seen as white but also as dissenting Protestants.
This article begins by reconsidering the debate over the readmis-
sion of Jews to England within the context of emerging discourses of
“religion” and “religions.” Next, it traces how Jews came to be accepted
in Barbados and anticipated in Carolina, both originally English
colonies with an early Jewish presence as well as plantation econo-
mies rooted in chattel slavery. It will discuss the 1669 Fundamental
Constitutions of Carolina, an English colonial founding document
that specifically names Jews. Next, it turns to the Plantation Act of
1740; to Georgia, which was cut out of Carolina; and to the advent
of American independence, highlighting the successes—and limita-
tions—of the equation of Jews with white Protestant dissenters. It ends
with a consideration of George Washington’s 1790 exchange with the
Jews of Savannah, which has long languished in the shadow of his later
correspondence with their coreligionists in Newport.
Narratives of American Jewish history usually begin in New
Amsterdam, tracing an escape from Portuguese to Dutch rule, while
those of early American religion have traditionally begun with Puritan
Massachusetts, centering Protestant theological diversity.11 However,
the English imperial context was of crucial importance in the his-
tory of Jews and of religion in colonial America. As Evan Haefeli has
recently argued, while they followed distinct trajectories, “the colonies
were not refuges from England but extensions of it overseas.”12 Tracing
the English word “religion,” its relationship to race and its deployment
within the legal and political discourse that the United States would
inherit shows that Jews were not merely subjected to straightforward
“toleration” or “prejudice.” Furthermore, it sheds light on the knotty
origins of “religious freedom,” challenging narratives of American
Jewish exceptionalism.13 Forged in the crucible of English colonial-
ism, Jewish “religious freedom” was not an innocent or untroubled
offering that emerged overnight. Rather, it was dependent on under- [35]
standing Jews as white people in possession of a religion, a long-sim-
mering and unfinished project rooted in a racialized divide between Jews,
Heathens,
idolatry and sectarianism, “heathens” and “dissenters.” and Other
Dissenters
•
I. Religion, Religions, and the Readmission of Jews to England Shari Rabin

After their expulsion from England in 1290, Jews continued to loom

large in the English Christian imagination.14 The Church of England’s
Book of Common Prayer asked for God’s “mercy upon all Jews, Turks,
infidels, and heretics, and [to] take from them all ignorance, hard-
ness of heart, and contempt of thy Word.”15 In church, Jews were
classed theologically with others who denied Christ, but in popular
discourse they were understood as particularly stubborn enemies who
possessed inherent, and even monstrous, forms of difference.16 In
the plays of William Shakespeare, alone, as David Nirenberg puts it,
“Jews remain in some sense ontologically alien, irreducibly more lit-
eral and less loving than the Christians.”17 Henry Blount’s 1636 Voyage
into the Levant described Jews as having “more swarthy” complexions
from “wallowing in the dirt,” and in 1648 John Warner, the bishop of
Rochester, described Jews as “children of the devil.”18
Almost since the beginning of Christianity, the persistent refusal of
most Jews to embrace Jesus Christ as their savior had posed a theolog-
ical problem for Christians. The most influential solution was offered
by Augustine of Hippo, who argued that Jews should be preserved as
witnesses to the truth of the Old Testament but humiliated in order to
demonstrate the sorry fate of those who deny Christ. Jews in Christian
Europe lived in a precarious position, relying on contingent—and, sig-
nificantly, revocable—charters, which carefully delineated their eco-
nomic rights and granted them autonomous rule. These documents
could not, however, protect them from the ire of local Christians,
whose resentment of Jews’ economic roles and theological differences
could evolve into fantastical accusations of Jewish wrongdoing, like
the notorious blood libel, and bubble over into physical violence, as
during the Crusades.19
Beginning in the sixteenth century, however, English understand-
ings of human difference began to change. In 1533, Richard Eden had
written of America, “At Columbus first comming thether, the inhab-
itants went naked, without shame, religion, or knowledge of God.”20
 When England settled its first permanent colony at Jamestown in 1607,
among its goals was “propagating of the Christian religion to such
[36] People, as yet live in Darkness and miserable Ignorance of the true
Knowledge and Worship of God.”21 In exchange for extracting wealth
Jewish from these new lands, the English would supply indigenous peoples
Social
Studies with Christian truth. Many wondered whether Native Americans were
lost tribes of Israel, or, in the language of Thomas Thorowgood’s
• 1650 book, whether there were Iewes in America. Although initially
Vol. 27
No. 3 accepted as Christians, however, indigenous Americans—and a grow-
ing population of enslaved Africans—gradually came to be under-
stood as “hereditary heathens” who were inherently unsuitable for
inclusion in the Christian community.22
After Jamestown, English colonial charters continued to express
concern for “God’s holy and true Christian Religion,” “the purity
of religion,” and “the Religion nowe professed in the Church of
England.”23 This increased specificity was one sign of growing
Christian diversity and, in particular, the flourishing of non-Anglican
or “dissenting” Protestant groups. In the aftermath of the religious
and political upheavals of the English Civil War in the 1640s, there was
increasing attention paid to biblical models of governance and to the
problem of explaining and managing different religious opinions.24
For instance, Maryland’s 1649 Toleration Act included punishments
for anyone who called another colonist,

An heritick, Scismatick, Idolator, puritan, Independant, Prespiterian

popish prest, Jesuite, Jesuited papist, Lutheran, Calvenist, Anabaptist,
Brownist, Antinomian, Barrowist, Roundhead, Separatist, or any other
name or terme in a reproachfull manner relating to matter of Religion.25

English officials continued to draw and redraw the boundaries of

belonging to include diverse Christians. In 1653, Lord Protector
Oliver Cromwell promised “exercise of their religion” to “such as pro-
fess faith in God by Jesus Christ.”26 Later, after England’s return to
Protestant rule in 1688, inclusion was extended to all except Catholics
and “any person that shall deny in his preaching or writing the doc-
trine of the blessed Trinity.”27
The plural “religions” first entered the English language in 1593
and was popularized by Edward Brerewood’s 1614 Enquiries Touching
the Diversity of Languages and Religions through the Chiefe Parts of the World,
which included descriptions of “Christianity, Mohametanism, Judaism,
and Idolatry,” described in minute detail to entertain and intrigue.28
In this four-part schema, Judaism, along with Islam, was positioned in
between true Christianity and false idolatry. According to Brerewood,
Jews were “dispersed abroad among forrain Nations, for their ancient
Idolatries, and their latter unthankfulness, in rejecting their Savior [37]
the Son of God.”29 Brerewood also included an in-depth consider-
ation of whether Tartars and Native Americans were members of the Jews,
Heathens,
ancient Israelite “race,” clearly placing Judaism closer to “idolatry” and Other
on this new spectrum of false religion, which was rooted not only in Dissenters
theological distinctions but in the inherent characteristics of different •
people groups. Shari Rabin
Judaism and Islam were placed in a similar position, but Muslims
were external competitors for global power, while Jews were geo-
graphically “dispersed” and possibly already—or soon to be—settled
within English realms. The Dutch had granted Jews permission to
settle in Amsterdam and the Dutch colonies in 1604, providing new
destinations for descendants of Iberian Jews, both those who had fled
in 1492 and those whose families had publicly embraced Catholicism
but quietly maintained Jewish identity and practice.30 There was talk
of readmitting Jews to England as early as 1648, when a petition was
published by Joanna and Ebenezer Cartwright, English Baptists living
in Amsterdam, “amongst some of Izraells race, called Jewes.”31 In his
1653 Pansebeia, or a View of all Religions in the World, Alexander Ross—
who classified Judaism with the “The Religions of Asia”—argued that
Christian princes could allow “Jews to exercise their own religion,” as
long as “they dishonour not Christ, nor traduce or molest his Church.”
Whereas Brerewood had emphasized Jews’ “ancient Idolatries,” Ross
understood Judaism to be closer to Christianity. He noted that “they
worship the same God with us, though not in the same manner, and
read the same Scriptures though not in the same sense.”32 Rhode
Island’s founder, Roger Williams, echoed this material in his January
1655 letter to the town of Providence. He imagined that “papists
and protestants, Jews and Turks, may be embarked upon one” col-
lective civic enterprise.33 Williams maintained a distinction between
Christians and non-Christians, but also elaborated an expanded vision
of religious toleration that could include all who were not cast as idol-
aters or heathens.
A small group of crypto-Jewish merchants, who presented them-
selves as Spanish Catholics, had already established themselves in
London, and in 1653 Samuel Soeiro and Manuel Martinez Dormido
undertook a failed mission from Amsterdam to petition for formal
readmission.34 In the fall of 1655, Menasseh ben Israel—a rabbi and
the author of Mikveh Israel, or “hope of Israel,” a pamphlet arguing that
Native Americans were the lost tribes of Israel—arrived in London.
 He presented a formal request for the readmission of the Jews, The
Humble Addresses of Menasseh Ben Israel, a Divine, and Doctor of Physick,
[38] in behalfe of the Jewish Nation.35 That December, Oliver Cromwell con-
vened the Whitehall Conference, a meeting of 28 clergymen, mer-
Jewish chants, and politicians charged with discussing the issue.
Social
Studies The debate that ensued was shaped by a mixture of economic
considerations, messianic hopes, constitutional politics, and national
• mythologies, but also by the category of “religion.”36 Among the
Vol. 27
No. 3 attendees’ concerns was Jews’ “Blaspheming Christ, and Christian
Religion,” although there were also arguments that the English “are
not like to be taken with the Jewish Religion, that deny Christ, and
deny the Gospel; and have nothing in their solemn Worship that
is so taking, but rather much that is very ridiculous.”37 Participants
at Whitehall, like others of the day, used “religion” to reinforce an
antagonism between Jewish and Christian theologies. By placing Jews
within a broader rubric of human difference, however, “religion” also
opened new discursive possibilities. Indeed, Whitehall’s participants
were directly responding to ben Israel’s request that “the Hebrew
Nation may be received” in England and allowed to “have publick
synagogues . . . to observe their Religion.”38 In his Humble Addresses,
he had more specifically invoked the language of “free exercise of
our religion,” which he linked to synagogue worship.39 In response to
concerns about Jewish proselytizing, he wrote, “We do not seduce any
one, but contrarily, avoid disputing with men, concerning religion.”40
He cast “religion” as something possessed by a nation and as a general
category of human discourse, avoiding the construction of “Jewish
religion” or “Christian religion.” In making the case for Jewish settle-
ment, then, he used “religion” to rhetorically remove Jews from the
fray of public theological debate. Ben Israel argued “you have so great
knowledge of, and adore the same one onely God of Israel, together
with us,” situating Judaism in close proximity to Christianity.41
In the cascade of pamphlets that Whitehall inspired, some echoed
the arguments of Ross and ben Israel, asserting, “their brethren we
are; of the same father Abraham; they naturally after the flesh, we
believers after the spirit.”42 They “worship the true God . . . and hear-
ing his holy Law, and his prophets read unto them every week, pub-
lickly.”43 Opponents equated Jews with Catholics, who were tainted by
residual paganism, claiming that Jews believed in and manipulated
evil spirits.44 One author cited a “prayer which they call schone esre, that
is eighteen, consisting of 18 particulars by which they think all sin is
pardoned, of equal esteem as the papists have the pope’s pardons.”45
Others considered Jewish readmission within the sectarian geopolitics
of the day. Some claimed that Catholics and Muslims only allowed
Jewish settlement because of their greed, some emphasized the piti-
able persecution Jews faced under Catholic and Muslim rule, and still [39]
others asked, “Shall they be tolerated by the pope, and by the duke
of Florence; by the Turks, and by the barbarians and others and shal Jews,
Heathens,
England stil have laws in force against them?”46 The prospect of Jewish and Other
settlement intersected with questions about the nature of Jewish dif- Dissenters
ference and about England’s self-conception as a Protestant empire. •
Indeed, English officials transformed their categories for understand- Shari Rabin
ing humanity and their relationship to Jews within the immediate con-
text of their growing global ambitions.

II. Governing Jews in Barbados and Carolina

The Whitehall Conference ended without a definitive decision,

although Cromwell tacitly allowed Jewish settlement in London.
Within a few years a Jewish congregation was established in the city.
Jewish communities were also operating in Jamaica (captured from
the Spanish in 1655), Rhode Island, New York (captured from the
Dutch in 1664), Suriname (to be lost to the Dutch in 1667), and
Barbados.47 In fact, while the Whitehall Conference debated the wis-
dom of a Jewish presence in the heart of the metropole, in Barbados,
“free enjoyment of Religion” had already been extended to “all the
Inhabitants” of the island and Jews explicitly allowed to “enjoy the
privileges . . . relating to foreigners and strangers.” In 1637, the ten-
year-old colony was described as containing “a continual concourse
of many nations, religions, & factions,” which, according to several
sources, included a number of Jews.48 In stark contrast to the con-
tentious debates over Jewish settlement within England proper, here
Jewish settlement and toleration were ushered in without controversy.
In his classic study of the English West Indies, Richard S. Dunn
wrote of Barbados that “the English were a narrowly ethnocentric peo-
ple, exceedingly reluctant to live among foreigners of any sort, even
Scots or Irish or Dutchmen, let alone really alien peoples such as Jews
or Indians or Negroes.”49 Yet, in the midst of the latter two groups,
so-called “heathens” whose forced labor facilitated the island’s growing
plantation economy, the bounds of acceptable “religion” expanded
to include Jews alongside other European foreigners. In the 1640s,
the colony began to grow as its economy shifted decisively toward the
cultivation of sugar and a dependence on enslaved labor.50 In 1654,
it became home to a congregation of Jews, products of the same
 migration from Brazil—which also had a sugar-based economy—that
first led to a Jewish community in New Amsterdam.51 Jews living under
[40] Dutch Protestant rule fled the conquering Portuguese Catholics, who
had previously expelled them, and resettled in friendlier territories.
Jewish Nevertheless, in 1655 a visitor to Barbados situated Jews at the bound-
Social
Studies ary of European Christian belonging. The island was, Henry Whistler
wrote, “inhabited with all sortes: with English, French Dutch, Scotes,
• Irish, Spaniards they being Iues [Jews]: with Ingoned [Indians] and
Vol. 27
No. 3 miserabell Negors.”52 Fifteen years later, Roger Williams placed Jews in
a context of marked, if questionable, religious toleration: “The Kings
Ma[jes]tie wincks at Barbadoes where Jews and all sorts of Christians
and Antichristian perswasions are free.”53
The Jewish congregation in Bridgetown, Barbados, was called
Nidhe Israel, or “dispersed of Israel,” pointing to the congregants’
hopes of an eventual ingathering of the exiles in the world to come.54
If this name situated them at a remove from their local context, how-
ever, in other ways they were fully immersed in it. By 1680, there were
54 Jewish households in Bridgetown, all but five of which included
enslaved people.55 Jews were allowed to testify in court on the five
books of Moses, “as is usual, and the religion of the said Nation doth
admit.”56 According to Katharine Gerbner, the Barbadian elite “con-
structed a caste system based on Christian status, in which ‘heathen-
ish’ slaves were afforded no rights or privileges while Catholics, Jews,
and non-conforming Protestants were viewed with suspicion and dis-
trust, but granted more protections.”57 In the legal documents in this
period, “Christian” was increasingly replaced by “white” as the primary
category of freedom and inclusion. According to Gerbner, “whiteness
emerged from the protoethnic term ‘Christian,’” in response to the
perceived threat posed by growing numbers of Black and indigenous
Christians.58 The island’s growing Jewish population may have con-
tributed to this change, however, and they certainly benefited from it.
Barbadian elites working to shore up the system of racialized slavery
were incentivized to classify local Jews as “white” and Judaism as an
acceptable if incorrect religion, political-rhetorical moves that were
not just parallel but mutually reinforcing.59 Older Christian-Jewish
antagonisms were now increasingly overlaid with newer, more gener-
alizable conceptions of human difference.
In 1663, the new colony of Carolina was chartered and defined
in explicit opposition to indigenous peoples and to Catholics. The
colony’s goal was described as “the propagation of the Christian
faith, and the enlargement of our empire and dominions.” Its lands,
which were understood to be “only inhabited by some barbarous
people,” provocatively abutted Spanish Florida. Early documents
from Carolina promised toleration of dissenting “opinions” and “free-
dom and liberty of conscience in all religious or spiritual things.”60 Six [41]
years later, after the colony was chartered, Anthony Ashley Cooper
and a young John Locke authored the Fundamental Constitutions of Jews,
Heathens,
Carolina (FCC), a utopian plan that was frequently revised and never and Other
fully implemented. Nevertheless, it was widely circulated as an adver- Dissenters
tisement for emigration and its vision helped shape the contours •
of Carolinian society and politics.61 In punctilious detail, the FCC Shari Rabin
envisioned an orderly society run by a hereditary nobility under the
authority of the king and the Church of England.62 It also granted—
just 14 years after the Whitehall Conference—explicit permission to,
“Jews, heathens, and other dissenters from the purity of Christian
religion,” to create “a church or profession.”63
This vision of possible Jewish settlement is notable within the
bureaucratic paperwork of English colonialism. While Jews appear
frequently and in various configurations in quotidian governmental
documents, as we have seen, here they are explicitly mentioned in a
founding document. It is unclear what Cooper and Locke thought
about the readmission of Jews to England, and in fact, in his unpub-
lished Essay on Toleration written just two years earlier, Locke had
described “the Jewish religion” as “directly opposite to the princi-
ples of Christianity.”64 Toleration of Jews was a fundamentally differ-
ent matter than toleration of dissenting Christians, he argued. Tisa
Wenger has argued that the FCC’s high degree of toleration “reflected
the economic imperatives of a colony that desperately wanted settlers,
even if some of them were not English.”65 Jews were worth mention-
ing by name, then, because among them were well-connected mer-
chants already contributing to economic life in Barbados—where
Cooper had owned a sugar plantation and enslaved nine people—and
other Caribbean islands.66 As victims of Spanish Catholic zealotry, too,
they were perhaps desirable as settlers in a colony created to counter
Florida.
These proximate reasons for Jews’ inclusion relied upon and fur-
ther fueled shifting ideas about Jewish difference. At first glance,
“Jews, heathens, and other dissenters from the purity of the Christian
religion,” would seem to include Jews and “heathens” as equals within
a larger category of dissent. However, the relevant section of the FCC,
number 97, begins by clearly delineating two categories of people out-
side of the Church of England. There are “the natives of that place
. . . [who are] utterly strangers to Christianity” and “those who remove
from other parts to plant there [who] will unavoidably be of different
 opinions concerning matters of religion.” The former, “whose idola-
try, ignorance, or mistake gives us no right to expel or use them ill,”
[42] are granted a negative form of toleration, while the latter will posi-
tively “expect to have [liberty] allowed them.”67 Cooper and Locke
Jewish thus delineated between passive “heathens,” who lacked religion, and
Social
Studies active “dissenters,” who possessed the wrong kind of religion.
The FCC specified that colonists believe in God and attend some
• kind of public worship, and although its stated hope was that all
Vol. 27
No. 3 non-Anglicans “may be won over to embrace and unfeignedly receive
the truth,” it insisted that “No person whatsoever shall disturb, molest,
or persecute another for his speculative opinions in religion, or his
way of worship.”68 Although creating a vision of toleration, the FCC
both assumed Anglican truth and expressed “an implicitly Christian
model for what counted as religion.”69 Dissenters were those “of dif-
ferent opinions,” and even for “heathens,” the end result of toleration
was the limited ability to create a “church or profession.” Jews were also
cast as recipients of this delimited—and strategic—largesse, although
their place within the FCC’s dichotomous vision of non-Anglicans is
ambiguous, harkening back to Brerewood’s spectrum of humanity’s
religious orientations. Jews were not “natives of the place,” but their
explicit mention raises doubts about whether they are straightfor-
wardly understood as white dissenters.70 Here, as in Barbados, racial
dynamics were central. The FCC planned for the toleration of reli-
gious difference but also for the entrenchment of slavery, casting the
underpinnings of Carolinian society in racial terms. It declared that
“Every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority
over his negro slaves, of what opinion or religion soever,” reiterating
that religious affiliation was a matter of conscience alone that would
not affect “any man’s civil estate or right.”71 While for enslaved Natives
and Africans this was a devastating move, closing off conversion as a
pathway to freedom, for Jews it augured the possibility of unrestrained
access to the newly empowered category of whiteness.72
Jews did eventually trickle into Carolina, amongst and alongside
large numbers of migrants from Barbados, who encouraged the colo-
ny’s embrace of monocultural agriculture and chattel slavery, as well
as, perhaps, its toleration of Jews. While documentation from this
early period is scarce, it shows Jews actively participating in the colo-
nial enterprise. In 1695, we find Governor John Archdale, a Quaker,
using a Spanish-speaking “Jew for an interpreter” with the Yamasee
Indians, who would violently revolt against English rule two decades
later.73 The next year, Simon Valentine, a Jewish merchant who had
previously lived in New York and Jamaica, purchased an enslaved
man named Dick from Samuel Mincks, a fellow Jew.74 And in 1697,
the colonial legislature granted naturalization to Valentine and a
small group of fellow Jewish men, alongside local Huguenots, as part [43]
of an “Act for Making Aliens Free of this Part of this Province, and
Granting Liberty of Conscience to all Protestants.”75 Gerbner argues Jews,
Heathens,
that, “Protestantism remained bound to whiteness,” but arguably the and Other
reverse was also true: in order to count as white—and as English—Jews Dissenters
had to be categorized as Protestants.76 •
In both Barbados and Carolina, then, Jews essentially functioned as Shari Rabin
white dissenters, but there were limitations to “religion” as a means of
describing public forms of Jewish difference. For one, older forms of
anti-Jewish sentiment remained; as early as 1671 an inhabitant wrote
to Cooper, “I Pray God send more thankful spirits and grateful hearts
. . . than those stubborn, hard hearted, stiff-necked, and rebellious
Jews.”77 Throughout England’s Caribbean colonies there was a spate
of laws limiting the economic and political activities of “person[s] of
the Hebrew nation.” And in Barbados in 1688—the same year as the
Protestant restoration in England—restrictions were placed on Jewish
slaveholding, a clear sign of ambivalence about their inclusion as
white settlers; the law was repealed 18 years later, in 1706.78
While Judaism might be seen as an acceptable religion, Jews
could still be cast as theological antagonists and/or as racialized out-
siders, and their political and economic rights restrained on those
bases. Among those most skeptical of Jewish inclusion were actual
white Protestant dissenters. In Carolina in 1704, Jews were invoked
by dissenting Protestants, disgruntled by the recent establishment of
the Anglican Church, to raise questions about the legitimacy of the
governing assembly.79 They complained to the House of Lords that,
“all sorts of people, even aliens, Jews, servants, common sailors, and
negroes were admitted to vote at elections.”80 In trying to recover their
own rights, Protestant dissenters carved out a conception of political
belonging that excluded Jews and classed them with a range of com-
munal outsiders marked not by theology but by nationality, class, and
race.81

III. Georgia and the Path to American Religious Freedom

By 1700, Anglicans accounted for less than half of European settlers

in Carolina, and an array of dissenting Protestant groups was present,
including Huguenots—Protestant refugees from Catholic France—
as well as Scottish Presbyterians, Quakers, Lutherans, and Baptists.82
 There was a clear impulse to place Jews in British territories among
these Christian “dissenters,” reflected in philosopher John Toland’s
[44] 1714 Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews in Great Britain and Ireland, which
“extended the bounds of Christendom to include Jews and Muslims,”
Jewish and reinforced via naturalization law in 1740.83 Parliament passed “An
Social
Studies Act for naturalizing such foreign Protestants, and others therein men-
tioned, as are settled or shall settle, in any of his Majesty’s Colonies in
• America,” which allowed Jews, along with Quakers, to obtain a form
Vol. 27
No. 3 of naturalization that would transcend any one colony, and to do so
without making an oath “upon the true Faith of a Christian.”84 Yet
again, naturalization required a formal, if not substantive, identity not
just as white—which was assumed but not mentioned in the act—but
as Protestant or near-Protestant.
The question of whether to consider Jews as akin to “foreign
Protestants” had emerged seven years earlier in the new colony of
Georgia, which was cut out of Carolina in order to serve as a mili-
tary buffer and a sanctuary for impoverished Englishmen and perse-
cuted European Protestants.85 Among those supporting the enterprise
were a group of London Jews, who interpreted the colony’s prom-
ise as maximally inclusive and used their funds to send coreligionists
to Georgia.86 On paper, the colony’s charter offered “liberty of con-
science . . . in the worship of God to all persons . . . except papists,”
which would seem to include Jews.87 In practice, however the trustees
complained that “certain Jews have been sent to Georgia contrary to
the intentions of the Trustees, and which may be of ill consequences
to the Colony.”88 The group of 41 Jewish migrants had already arrived,
however, and to a community in the midst of a vicious epidemic, which
Samuel Nunes Ribeiro, a Portuguese Jewish physician, treated without
pay.89 Jews were implicitly excluded from the vision of the colony of
Georgia, but the precarity of the colonial endeavor helped them to
claim a place within it.
The Jewish settlers had brought with them ritual implements—a
Torah scroll and a circumcision box—and by 1735 they had estab-
lished a Jewish congregation in Savannah, which they called Mikveh
Israel. It echoed the names of ben Israel’s 1650 publication and of
the Jewish congregation in Curaçao, gesturing toward the messianic
expectations also found in the Jewish community of Barbados. Jews in
Georgia owned land and worked in a number of capacities in support
of the colony. For instance, Abraham Minis supplied the colonial mili-
tary fort at Frederica in addition to operating a tavern.90 Colonial offi-
cials noticed and complimented Jewish contributions. In 1735, one
wrote that “a Jew workman bred in the Brazil taught” the colonists to
build houses “nimbly and in a neat manner.” Six years later, another
wrote that “nothing had given me so much pleasure since my arrival”
as the vineyard of “Mr. Lyon, a Portuguese Jew.”91 That these men took [45]
notice of these particular activities was no coincidence. The English
understood the construction of homes as a sign of land’s possession Jews,
Heathens,
and Lyon’s vineyard was not only important because of the colony’s and Other
aspiration to produce luxury goods, but because they envisioned the Dissenters
“New World” overall as a garden which they should cause to “be fruit- •
ful and multiply.”92 Shari Rabin
Although there was initially no slavery in the colony, Georgia’s gene-
alogy ran through Carolina and Barbados, and it was also an original
English colony that was home to a diverse Protestant population.93 As
in its predecessor colonies, Jews were included as settlers, but their sta-
tus was occasionally contested. Dissenting Protestants again asserted
a divide between Jews and Christians in their sparring with dominant
Anglicans. The minister of a group of Salzburger Lutherans, Johannes
Boltzius, tried and failed to convert local Jews to Christianity and in
1740 complained,

The Englishmen, nobility and common folks alike, treat the Jews as their
equal. They drink, gamble, and walk together with them; in fact, let them
take part in all their fun. Yes, they desecrate Sunday with them, a thing
that no Jew would do on their Sabbath just to please a Christian.94

Boltzius contrasted Jews with Englishmen and with Christians, casting

their public visibility as a moral threat.
On another occasion, Jews in Savannah were excluded from join-
ing a petition that requested more liberal land policies and “the use of
negros” in the hopes of “occasion[ing] great numbers of white people
to come here.” The petitioners offered specific reasons for excluding
certain groups on the basis of class, gender, and age: servants were
prohibited from signing to avoid the appearance of duress, as were
widows and orphans, because some might claim “that they were not
proper judges.” Of Jews the organizers reported only that they “did
not think it proper to join them in any of our measures” although they
sought out the participation of Boltzius’s community of Lutherans.95
As non-Christians—and in a context in which enslaved Africans
were absent if anticipated—Jews were understood to be outside the
bounds of Savannah’s white community, even as they clearly sought to
align themselves with it.
All but two Jewish families would soon flee Savannah out of fear of
Spanish encroachment during the War of Jenkin’s Ear, but the Jewish
 community in Charleston would steadily grow, leading to the estab-
lishment of a Jewish congregation there in 1749. Unlike other Atlantic
[46] Jewish communities, which selected names revolving around the peo-
ple of Israel and their hopes of messianic redemption, Charleston’s
Jewish Jews chose Beth Elohim, or “house of God.”96 The name drew on
Social
Studies Genesis 28:17, which describes the site of Jacob’s ladder, in Beer Sheva,
which the medieval French commentator Rashi noted was located in
• the south.97 The second half of the verse refers to sha’arei shamayim,
Vol. 27
No. 3 or “the gates of heaven,” which referred to the Jerusalem Temple,
and to the Spanish and Portuguese congregation at Bevis Marks in
London, founded in 1701. Charleston’s Jews thus linked themselves—
in the south of Britain’s North American colonies—to London and
the Iberian peninsula, as well as to Jerusalem and to heaven itself. It
suggests a feeling of attachment to the place where they had chosen
to erect their edifice to the divine, as well as a recategorization of the
Jewish community into a “church or profession.”98
In less than a century following their readmission to England, then,
Jews saw themselves as a permanent presence within English impe-
rial spaces. This development was facilitated by the emergence of the
intersecting categories of “religion” and “white.” Judaism, once seen
as an insidious opponent of true Christianity, was now classified by
many as one of a number of “religions,” hovering somewhere between
Christianity and idolatry. In practice, especially in colonial settings
with large populations of Black and indigenous people understood
to be “heathens,” Jews functioned as dissenting Protestants, wrong
in their opinions but nevertheless useful white colonizers. This con-
version was never total, however. It was periodically challenged by
Christian anti-Jewish polemics, by dissenting Protestants who wanted
to reassert Christianity—if not the Church of England—as the ground
of belonging and inclusion, and by public forms of Jewish difference
that overflowed the constraints of belief and worship alone.
This discussion reemerged in the 1770s as England’s continental
colonies began to pave the way for independence. In 1770, “several
Persons professing the Jewish Religion” requested that the Georgia
assembly incorporate their burial plot in Savannah, “where several
of their Relations and Friends now lie interred.”99 This move would
guarantee possession and eliminate an onerous fee to the Church
of England. By this point, there were an estimated 27 Jewish men,
women, and children in the city out of a total population of almost
2,000. Slavery had been legalized in the colony in the 1750s, and Jews’
share of the city’s enslaved people (2.6 percent) was now slightly larger
than their share of the population (2.2 percent).100 Their petition to
the assembly emphasized Jews’ early arrival in the colony and founder
James Oglethorpe’s role in granting them the land in question.
Presbyterians made a similar petition at the same time and the local [47]
Anglican minister, Samuel Frink, rejected their proposal as an “Attack
upon the privileges of the established Church.” He argued that if the Jews,
Heathens,
measure passed, “every different sect and denomination of Christians and Other
as well as those who totally differ from the Christian Church in Discipline and Dissenters
Principle might think themselves entitled to that indulgence.”101 •
Jews were at once part of a general threat against the religious Shari Rabin
establishment and an issue of particular concern. One group of peti-
tioners argued it would be especially undesirable to live next to a
burial ground “belonging to a people who might be presumed, from
prejudice of education to have imbedded principles entirely repug-
nant to those of our holy religion,” presumably meaning Protestant
Christianity if not the Anglican Church alone.102 Jewish difference
posed a threat of contamination, generated by belief as well as social-
ization. Describing the burial plot conflict in a letter to the Society
for the Propagation of the Gospel, Frink argued, “The late Commons
House of Assembly were so far intoxicated with liberty principles as
to endeavor to put Jews and Dissenters of all Denominations upon
a footing with the church there.”103 Although the rough and tumble
of local conflict had replaced the FCC’s vision of harmonious tolera-
tion, a century later Jews were again understood as proximate to—but
ultimately distinct from—white dissenters. The legislation passed the
House of Assembly but was rejected by the upper house. While their
request for equal religious treatment was denied, however, Jews still
had the power of white colonists, including land ownership. Mordecai
Sheftall, who had been born in Savannah in 1735, donated part of his
own burial ground for the use of the Jewish community.104
In the aftermath of American independence, rhetoric of religious
liberty flourished, and although both Georgia and South Carolina
abandoned the Church of England’s establishment, initially the for-
mer restricted officeholding to those “of the Protestant religion” and
the latter maintained an establishment of “The Christian Protestant
religion.”105 Many insisted that Protestantism was a basic prerequisite
of morality and social cohesion.106 The challenges this raised for Jews
became clear in October 1776, when a Charleston grand jury con-
demned “the ill practice of Jews opening their shops and selling of
goods on Sunday, to the profanation of the Lord’s-Day.” For Jews who
were religiously mandated to rest on Saturdays, giving up business on
Sunday was a major economic blow. The grand jury also singled out
“Jews and others” for “allowing their negroes to sell goods in shops,
 as such practice may induce other negroes to steal and barter with
them.”107 Jews were seen as troubling insofar as they publicly punc-
[48] tured Christian temporality and facilitated Black autonomy, in other
words, insofar as their difference went beyond dissenting “conscience”
Jewish or “speculative opinions” alone.
Social
Studies
• Conclusion
Vol. 27
No. 3
The category of “religion” was a key component of colonial gover-
nance, and its target was not only sectarian factions at home and
indigenous Americans and Africans overseas but also Jews, with
whom the English were newly confronted in both settings after three
centuries of physical absence and many more of imaginative encoun-
ter. Judaism may have “become a religion” in Jewish philosophical
circles at the end of the eighteenth century, but it had already been
cast as a religion for several centuries by Christian authors, colonial
officials, and Jews who interacted with them. Jews had been under-
stood as a permanently different and unacceptable “other” within
Christendom, but as they were related to the category of “religion,”
new questions arose: were Jews closer to idolaters or Christians,
heathens or dissenters? In colonial settings, the answer was increas-
ingly the latter, a development intertwined with the new category of
“white.” Jewish settlers’ status as people of European descent who
contributed to the project of colonial exploitation and as a group in
possession of an acceptable religion relied upon one another. These
were unstable, contingent, and ultimately limited categorizations,
however. Jews could be naturalized as “Protestants” of a kind, but the
residue of earlier histories remained, along with forms of difference
that went beyond “opinions.” Indeed, “religion” facilitated toleration
of Jews, but it also limited the boundaries of that toleration to belief
and worship.
This was the cultural and political background that informed the
place of Jews in the new United States. In June of 1790, Levi Sheftall,
president of Savannah’s Mikveh Israel congregation and brother of
Mordecai, wrote to the newly elected President George Washington:

Your unexampled liberality and extensive philanthropy have dispelled

that cloud of bigotry and superstition which has long, as a veil, shaded
religion—unrivetted the fetters of enthusiasm—enfranchised us with all
the privileges and immunities of free citizens, and initiated us into the
grand mass of legislative mechanism.108
Enlightened “religion” had overcome the old antagonism between
Jews and Christians, he argued, and recast Jews as individual citizens.
The United States Constitution had not mentioned Jews at all, nor [49]
had the Bill of Rights, with its First Amendment promise of “free
exercise” of religion. Jews simply assumed that this applied to them, Jews,
Heathens,
along with the Naturalization Act of 1790, which had passed a few and Other
months before Sheftall’s letter, and its offer of citizenship to “free Dissenters
white person[s].”109 •
Washington’s letter to the Jewish congregation of Newport, Shari Rabin
Rhode Island, has proven much more commanding of scholarly and
popular interest than this letter, even though Sheftall anticipated
his northern coreligionists by three months. And yet the Savannah
letter helps us see—in ways that the Newport letter can obscure—
the constraints of “religion” and the importance of whiteness in the
story of Jews and religious freedom. The Jews of Newport recounted
in passing that they had previously been “deprived . . . of the inval-
uable rights of free Citizens,” but focused on the future, on “the
blessings of civil and religious liberty” and the new government,
“which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”
The Savannah letter theorized past Jewish exclusion more robustly
and directly in relationship to “religion” and its excesses, “super-
stition” and “enthusiasm.” Furthermore, written by a longtime
enslaver living in a majority Black city, it did not describe citizenship
as “generously afford[ed] to All . . . of whatever Nation, tongue, or
language.”110
In his response to Sheftall, Washington ended with a prayer that
“the inhabitants of every denomination participate in the temporal and
spiritual blessings of that people whose God is Jehovah.”111 Washington
assimilated Jews into the category of “denomination,” the successor
to “dissenter” in a context of federal disestablishment. That he did
so was not the product of a spontaneous new ethos of American reli-
gious freedom, an impression that might be fostered by narratives
of American religious history that begin with Puritans, casting early
America as uniformly Christian, or those of American Jewish history
that begin in New Amsterdam, casting Jews as benighted refugees.
Turning to the English colonial context and the emerging language of
“religion” helps us see that Washington’s words were the result of over
a century of thought and governance, which made it conceivable to
think of Jews—at least some of the time—as fellow white people with
different opinions. Religious freedom assumed and required a form
of white Protestantism that could—but need not always—include Jews
under its umbrella.
 Notes

[50] An early draft of this article was presented at the Newberry Library’s Seminar
on Religion and Culture in the Americas. My thanks go to the workshop
Jewish participants, especially Tisa Wenger and Jon Butler, as well as to Matthew
Social Berkman, Katharine Gerbner, and Laura Leibman.
Studies
• 1 John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration, and Early Enlightenment Culture
Vol. 27 (New York, 2006); Chris Beneke, Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins
No. 3 of American Pluralism (New York, 2008); Benjamin Kaplan, Divided by
Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe
(Cambridge, MA, 2009); Evan Haefeli, “Toleration,” Religion Compass
4, no. 4 (2010): 253–62; Jeremy Fradkin, “Religious Toleration and
Protestant Expansion in Revolutionary England, 1642–1658” (PhD
diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2019); Sheldon J. Godfrey and Judith C.
Godfrey, Search out the Land: The Jews and the Growth of Equality in British
Colonial America, 1740–1867 (Montreal, 1995); David Sorkin, Jewish
Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries (Princeton, 2019).
2 Holly Snyder, “A Sense of Place: Jews, Identity, and Social Status in
Colonial British America, 1654–1831” (PhD diss., Brandeis University,
2000); Jonathan Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (New
York, 2004); Laura Leibman, Messianism, Mysticism, and Secrecy (Portland,
OR, 2012); Jane S. Gerber, ed., The Jews in the Caribbean (Portland,
OR, 2014); Sina Rauschenbach and Jonathan Schorsch, ed., The
Sephardic Atlantic: Colonial Histories and Postcolonial Perspectives (Cham,
2019); Aviva Ben-Ur, Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the
Atlantic World, 1651–1825 (Philadelphia, 2020); Stanley Mirvis, The
Jews of Eighteenth-Century Jamaica: A Testamentary History of a Diaspora in
Transition (New Haven, 2020).
3 Liora Batnitzky, How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern
Jewish Thought (Princeton, 2013).
4 J. Z. Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious,” in Critical Terms for Religious
Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago, 2013 [1998]), 269–94, at 269, 271.
5 David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York, 2013),
309. See Peter Harrison, “Religion” and the Religions in the English
Enlightenment (New York, 1990); Jonathan Boyarin, The Unconverted Self:
Jews, Indians, and the Identity of Christian Europe (Chicago, 2009); and
Elizabeth Fenton, Old Canaan in a New World: Native Americans and the
Lost Tribes of Israel (New York, 2020).
6 Harrison, “Religion” and the Religions, 1–2.
7 Max Weinreich, “Yidishkayt and Yiddish: On the Impact of Religion
on Language in Ashkenazic Jewry,” in Mordecai M. Kaplan Jubilee Volume
on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Moshe Davis (New York,
1953), 481–514; Menachem Lorberbaum, Politics and the Limits of Law:
Secularizing the Political in Medieval Jewish Thought (Stanford, 2002),
 72–73. On “Judaism” as an invention of Christianity, see Daniel Boyarin,
Judaism: The Genealogy of a Modern Notion (Rutgers, NJ, 2018).
8 Leibman, Messianism, Mysticism, and Secrecy, 87–88. [51]
9 Henry Goldschmidt, “Introduction: Race, Nation, and Religion,”
in Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas, ed. idem and Elizabeth Jews,
McAlister (New York, 2004), 3–31, at 6–11; Kathryn Gin Lum, Heathen: Heathens,
Religion and Race in American History (Cambridge, MA, 2022). and Other
10 Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic Dissenters
World, 1600–2000 (New York, 2006); Dennis Austin Britton, Becoming •
Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance (New York, Shari Rabin
2014); Tisa Wenger, Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American
Ideal (Chapel Hill, NC, 2017).
11 R. Marie Griffiths, American Religions: A Documentary History (New York,
2008); Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven, 2004).
12 Evan Haefeli, Accidental Pluralism: America and the Religious Politics of
English Expansion, 1497–1662 (Chicago, 2021), 9.
13 David Sorkin, “Is American Jewry Exceptional? Comparing Jewish
Emancipation in Europe and America,” American Jewish History 96, no. 3
(2010): 175–200.
14 Sholom A. Singer, “The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290,”
Jewish Quarterly Review 55, no. 2 (1964): 117–36; Sophia Menache, “Faith,
Myth, and Politics: The Stereotype of the Jews and their Expulsion from
England and France,” Jewish Quarterly Review 75, no. 4 (1985): 351–74.
15 “The Third Collect, for Good Friday,” The Book of Common Prayer, 1559:
The Elizabethan Prayer Book, ed. John E. Booty (Charlottesville, VA, 1976),
144.
16 Bernard Glassman, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes without Jews: Images of the Jews in
England (Detroit, 1975); Kathy Lavezzo, The Accommodated Jew: English
Antisemitism from Bede to Milton (Ithaca, NY, 2016).
17 Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 295.
18 Ibid., 379.
19 Ibid., 131–34; Mark Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle
Ages (Princeton, 1994).
20 Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious,” 269.
21 “The First Charter of Virginia, April 10, 1606,” The Avalon Project:
Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy, accessed July 23, 2020,
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/va01.asp.
22 Rebecca Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race
(Baltimore, MD, 2012).
23 “The Charter of Maryland: 1632,” The Avalon Project: Documents in
Law, History, and Diplomacy, accessed July 23, 2020, https://avalon.law
.yale.edu/17th_century/ma01.asp; “Government of New Haven Colony,
1643,” The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy,
accessed July 23, 2020, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century
/ct02.asp; “Grant of the Province of Maine: 1639,” The Avalon Project:
 Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy, accessed July 23, 2020,
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/me02.asp.
[52] 24 Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 311; Harrison, “Religion” and the Religions.
25 “Maryland Toleration Act; September 21, 1649,” The Avalon Project:
Jewish Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy, accessed July 23, 2020,
Social https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/maryland_toleration.asp/.
Studies 26 “Commonwealth Instrument of Government” (1653), Modern History
• Sourcebook, accessed July 25, 2022, https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu
Vol. 27 /mod/1653intrumentgovt.asp/.
No. 3 27 “The Toleration Act, 1689: An Act for exempting their Majesties’
Protestant Subjects Dissenting from the Church of England from the
Penalties of Certain Laws,” Protestant Nonconformist Texts, ed. R. Tudor
Jones, Arthur Long, and Rosemary Moore, 4 vol. (Eugene, OR, 2007), 1:
399.
28 Harrison, “Religion” and the Religions, 39; Edward Brerewood, Enquiries
Touching the Diversity of Languages and Religions through the Chiefe Parts of
the World (London, 1614).
29 Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, or How European
Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago, 2005);
Brerewood, Enquiries, 112.
30 Jonathan Israel, Empires and Entrepots: The Dutch, the Spanish Monarchy,
and the Jews, 1585–1713 (London, 1990).
31 David Sorkin, Jewish Emancipation, 32; Jonathan D. Sarna, “The Jews in
British America,” The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450
to 1800, ed. Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering (New York, 2001),
519; The Petition of the Jewes for the Repealing of the Act of Parliament for
Their Banishment Out of England. Presented to His Excellency and the Generall
Councell of Officers on Fryday Jan. 5. 1648. With Their Favourable Acceptance
Thereof. Also a Petition of Divers Commanmanders [sic], Prisoners in the Kings
Bench, for the Releasing of All Prisoners for Debt, according to the Custome of
Other Countries (London, 1649).
32 Alexander Ross, Pansebeia, or a View of all Religions in the World (London,
1653), 40–41.
33 “Letter to the Town of Providence,” in American Religions: A Documentary
History, ed. Marie Griffiths (New York, 2008), 75.
34 Todd Endelman, The Jews of Modern Britain, 1656–2000 (Berkeley, 2002),
18, 23.
35 Menasseh ben Israel, The Humble Addresses of Menasseh Ben Israel, a
Divine, and Doctor of Physick, in behalfe of the Jewish Nation (1655); Steven
Nadler, Menasseh ben Israel: Rabbi of Amsterdam (New Haven, 2018); Sina
Rauchenbusch, Judaism for Christians: Menasseh ben Israel (1604–1657)
(Lanham, MD, 2019).
36 Ismar Schorsch, “From Messianism to Realpolitik: Menasseh Ben Israel
and the Readmission of the Jews to England,” Proceedings of the American
Academy of Jewish Research 45 (1978): 187–208; David Katz, Philo-Semitism
and the Readmission of the Jews to England, 1603–1655 (New York, 1982);
 Avinoam Yuval-Naeh, “England, Usury, and Jews in the Mid-Seventeenth
Century,” Journal of Early Modern History (2017): 489–515; Endelman, Jews
of Modern Britain, 15, 25; Andrew Crome, Christian Zionism and English [53]
National Identity, 1600–1850, (London, 2018), 67–104.
37 Henry Jessey, A Narrative of the Late Proceeds at White-Hall concerning Jews,
the Jews Who Had Desired by R. Manasses an Agent for Them, that They Heathens,
Might Return into England, and Worship the God of Their Fathers Here in and Other
Their Synagogues, &c.: Published for Satisfaction to Many in Several Parts Dissenters
of England, that are Desirous, and Inquisitive to Hear the Truth Thereof •
(London, 1656), 2 (italics in original), 8. Shari Rabin
38 Jessey, Narrative of the Late Proceeds.
39 Menasseh ben Israel, Humble Addresses, 5–6.
40 Lucien Wolf, ed., Menasseh ben Israel’s Mission to Oliver Cromwell (London,
1901), 138.
41 Ibid., 77.
42 Henry Jessey, Narrative of the Late Proceeds, 3.
43 Ibid., 5.
44 Lum, Heathen, 12.
45 Ibid., 4.
46 In ibid., 11; M. Wilensky, “The Literary Controversy in 1656 concerning
the Return of the Jews to England,” Proceedings of the American Academy for
Jewish Research 20 (1951): 357–93, at 363, 365, 366, 372.
47 Leibman, Messianism, Mysticism, and Secrecy.
48 Larry Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted: The English Colonization of Barbados,
1627–1660 (New York, 2003), 69, 74, 75–76; E. M. Shilstone, Monumental
Inscriptions in the Burial Ground of the Jewish Synagogue at Bridgetown,
Barbados (Boston, 1959), xvii. Richard Ligon, a traveler in the late 1640s,
noted, “there was an ingenious Jew upon the Island whose name was
Solomon that undertook to teach the making of [bricks], yet for all that
when it came to the touch his wisdom failed and we were deceived in
our expectations” (Shilstone, Monumental Inscriptions, xviii).
49 Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the
English West Indies, 1624–1713, 72; Jacob Selwood explains how Jews
in early modern London were related to foreign Protestants as fellow
aliens; Diversity and Difference in Early Modern London (New York, 2016).
50 Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 59.
51 Ibid., 61.
52 Henry Whitsler, “Extracts from Henry Whistler’s Journal of the West
India Expedition,” Appendix E, in The Narrative of General Venables: With
an Appendix of Papers Relating to the Expedition to the West Indies and the
Conquest of Jamaica, 1654–1655, ed. C. H. Firth (London, 1900), 14, cited
in Haefeli, Accidental Pluralism, 256.
53 Roger Williams to Maj. John Mason and Gov. Thomas Prence, June
22, 1670, in Glenn W. LaFantasie and Bradford F. Swan, ed., The
Correspondence of Roger Williams, 1629–1682, 2 vol. (Hanover, NH, 1988),
2: 616–17, cited in Snyder, “A Sense of Place,” 55.
 54 Leibman, Messianism, Mysticism, and Secrecy.
55 Karl Watson, “Shifting Identities: Religion, Race, and Creolization
[54] among the Sephardi Jews of Barbados, 1654–1900,” in Jews in the
Caribbean, ed. Gerber, 211–12; Leibman, Messianism, Mysticism, and
Jewish Secrecy, xxiv. On the experiences of enslaved women in Barbados, see
Social Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the
Studies Archive (Philadelphia, 2016).
• 56 Richard Hall, Acts Passed on the Island of Barbados, From 1643 to 1762, 2
Vol. 27 vol. (London, 1764), 1: 84.
No. 3 57 Katharine Gerbner, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant
Atlantic World (Philadelphia, 2018), 3.
58 Ibid., 74.
59 Watson, “Shifting Identities,” 212; Jonathan Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in
the Early Modern World (New York, 2004).
60 “Charter of Carolina – March 24, 1663,” The Avalon Project: Documents
in Law, History, and Diplomacy, accessed Jan. 31, 2021, https://avalon
.law.yale.edu/17th_century/nc01.asp; “A Declaration and Proposals of
the Lord Proprietor of Carolina, Aug. 25–Sept. 4, 1663,” The Avalon
Project: Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy, accessed Jan. 31,
2021, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/nc02.asp.
61 David Armitage, “John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of
Government,” Political Theory 32, no. 5 (2004): 602–27, at 608.
62 T. D. Wilson, The Ashley Cooper Plan: The Founding of Carolina and the
Origins of Southern Political Culture (Chapel Hill, NC, 2016).
63 “The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, March 1, 1669,” The
Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy, accessed
July 23, 2020, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/nc05.asp.
64 Nabil I. Matar, “John Locke and the Jews,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History
44, no. 1 (1993): 45–62, at 49. David Nirenberg has argued, “treatises
on toleration and freedom of thought depended on separating Judaism
from Christianity, and isolating the former in an archaic and execrable
past”; Anti-Judaism, 357.
65 Wenger, Religious Freedom, 7.
66 Holly Brewer, “Slavery, Sovereignty, and ‘Inheritable Blood’:
Reconsidering John Locke and the Origins of American Slavery,”
American Historical Review 122, no. 4 (2017): 1038–78, at 1053 n. 37.
67 “Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina.”
68 Ibid. (emphasis mine).
69 Wenger, Religious Freedom, 6.
70 “Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina.”
71 Ibid.
72 According to Kathryn Gin Lum, “Whiteness” is in fact “a fragile religio-
racial claim continually articulated with and against the figure of the
heathen.” See idem, Heathen, 18.
73 John Archdale, A New Description of that Fertile and Pleasant Province of
Carolina, 22, cited in James Hagy, This Happy Land: The Jews of Colonial
 and Antebellum Charleston (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1993), 6; Charles Lippy,
“Chastized by Scorpions: Christianity and Culture in Colonial South
Carolina, 1669–1740,” Church History 79, no. 2 (2010): 253–70, at 262. [55]
On the exploitation of Native peoples in Carolina, see Allan Gallay, The
Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, Jews,
1670–1717 (New Haven, 2008). Heathens,
74 South Carolina, Wills and Probate Records, 1670–1980, vol. 54, 1694–1704, and Other
p. 362, accessed July 27, 2021, https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui Dissenters
-content/view/1368289:9080?_phsrc=RRV1657&_phstart=success •
Source&gsfn=simon&gsln=valentine&ml_rpos=1&queryId= Shari Rabin
15044f94163857a9069d4d9205dfa507. See also Hagy, This Happy Land,
57, and Dale Rosengarten, “Port Jews and Plantation Jews: Carolina-
Caribbean Connections,” in Jews in the Caribbean, ed. Gerber, 294–95.
On enslaved people in South Carolina, see Peter Wood, Black Majority:
Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion
(New York, 1974).
75 “An Act for Making Aliens Free of this Part of this Province, and
Granting Liberty of Conscience to all Protestants,” in The Statutes at
Large of South Carolina, 10 vol., ed. Thomas Cooper (Columbia, SC,
1837), 2: 131–32; Hagy, This Happy Land, 6; Grants, Sales, etc., Book
D, 1703-9, Colonial Records of South Carolina. Copied from the State
Paper office, London. Secretary of State’s Office, Columbia, SC, cited in
Barnet Elzas, The Jews of South Carolina: From the Earliest Time to the Present
Day (Charleston, SC, 1905), 20.
76 Gerbner, Christian Slavery, 75. This form of conflation mirrored that
which rendered diverse people groups across time as a single category of
“heathens.” Lum, Heathen, 24.
77 Wiliam Pencak, Jews and Gentiles in Early America, 1654–1800 (Ann Arbor,
MI, 2005), 117.
78 Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 108; Watson, “Shifting Identities,” 211–12.
79 Pencak, Jews and Gentiles, 121–22.
80 Frederick Dalcho, An Historical Account of the Protestant Episcopal Church
in South Carolina, from the First Settlement of the Province to the War of the
Revolution (Charleston, SC, 1820), 65.
81 Pencak, Jews and Gentiles, 122; “An Act to Encourage the Importation of
White Servants into the Province,” in Statutes at Large of South Carolina,
ed. Cooper, 2: 647. Following the 1712 split between North and South
Carolina, in 1729 South Carolina became a royal colony.
82 Charles S. Bolton, Southern Anglicanism: The Church of England in Colonial
South Carolina (Westport, CT, 1982), 19; Thomas Little, The Origins
of Southern Evangelicalism: Religious Revivalism in the South Carolina
Lowcountry, 1670–1760 (Columbia, SC, 2013).
83 Harrison, “Religion” and the Religions, 165–66.
84 Sorkin, Jewish Emancipation.
 85 Betty Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 1730–1775 (Athens, GA, 2007),
4–5.
[56] 86 Aviva Ben-Ur, “Jewish Savannah in Atlantic Perspective: A
Reconsideration of North America’s First Intentional Jewish
Jewish Community,” in Sephardic Atlantic, ed. Rauschenbach and Schorsch,
Social 183–214.
Studies 87 “Charter of Georgia: 1732,” The Avalon Project: Documents in Law,
• History, and Diplomacy, accessed July 23, 2020, https://avalon.law.yale
Vol. 27 .edu/18th_century/ga01.asp.
No. 3 88 Mark I. Greenberg, “One Religion, Different Worlds: Sephardic and
Ashkenazic Immigrants in Eighteenth-Century Savannah,” in Jewish Roots
in Southern Soil: A New History, ed. Marcie Ferris and Mark I. Greenberg
(Waltham, MA, 2006), 27–45, at 28.
89 Edward J. Cashin, ed., Setting Out to Begin a New World: Colonial Georgia: A
Documentary History (Savannah, GA, 1995), 29–30.
90 Pencak, Jews and Gentiles, 152.
91 Cashin, ed., Setting Out to Begin a New World, 44, 61.
92 Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World,
1492–1640 (New York, 1995), 18, 34.
93 Noeleen McIlvenna, The Short Life of Free Georgia: Class and Slavery in the
Colonial South (Chapel Hill, NC, 2015); Wood, Slavery in Georgia.
94 Malcolm H. Stern, “New Light on the Jewish Settlement in Savannah,”
American Jewish Historical Quarterly 52, no. 3 (1963): 169–99, at 186; Holly
Snyder, “A Tree with Two Different Fruits: The Jewish Encounter with
German Pietists in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World,” William and
Mary Quarterly 58, no. 4 (2001): 855–82.
95 Pat. Tailfer, Hugh Anderson, and Da. Douglas, A True and Historical
Narrative of the Colony of Georgia in America (Charleston, SC, 1741), in
Collections of the Georgia Historical Society, 4 vol. (Savannah, GA, 1842), 2:
217–20.
96 Mordehay Arbell, The Portuguese Jews of Jamaica (Kingston, 2000), 29. The
congregation founded five years earlier in Kingston, Jamaica, chose the
same name as London’s Bevis Marks, Sha’ar ha Shamayim, or “gate of
heaven.”
97 Pentateuch with Rashi’s Commentary by M. Rosenbaum and A.M.
Silbermann, Sefaria.org, accessed July 27, 2021, https://www.sefaria
.org/Rashi_on_Genesis.28.17.1?ven=Pentateuch_with_Rashi%27s
_commentary_by_M._Rosenbaum_and_A.M._Silbermann,_1929-
1934&vhe=Pentateuch_with_Rashi%27s_commentary_by_M.
_Rosenbaum_and_A.M._Silbermann,_1929-1934&lang=bi.
98 Thank you to Jonathan Sarna for these suggestions on the name “Beth
Elohim.”
99 Allan D. Candler, ed., The Colonial Records of the State of Georgia, 32 vol.
(Atlanta, GA, 1907), 15: 145–46.
100 Albert S. Britt Jr. and Lilla M. Hawes, ed., “The Mackenzie Papers, Part
II,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 57, no. 1 (1973): 85–145, at 140.
101 Candler, ed., Colonial Records of the State of Georgia, 17: 561 (emphasis [57]
mine).
102 Ibid., 573. Jews,
103 Britt and Hawes, ed., “The Mackenzie Papers, Part II,” 141. On religion Heathens,
and the British Empire in the eighteenth century, see Katherine Carté, and Other
Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History (Chapel Hill, NC, Dissenters
2021). •
104 Pencak, Jews and Gentiles, 161; B. H. Levy, Mordecai Sheftall: Jewish Shari Rabin
Revolutionary Patriot (Savannah, GA, 1999), 41–42.
105 “Constitution of Georgia; February 5, 1777,” The Avalon Project:
Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy, accessed July 27, 2021,
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/ga02.asp/; “Constitution
of South Carolina – March 19, 1778,” The Avalon Project: Documents
in Law, History, and Diplomacy, accessed July 27, 2021, https://
avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/sc02.asp/. South Carolina also
forbade disturbing or using “abusive language against any church,”
not only because it disturbed the peace but because it “hinder[ed] the
conversion of any to the truth.” Ibid.
106 David Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom (New York, 2011).
107 Hagy, This Happy Land, 38; The Remembrancer, or Impartial Repository of
Public Events (London, 1778), 342.
108 “From George Washington to the Savannah, Ga., Hebrew Congregation,
14 June 1790,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed Apr. 11,
2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington
/05-05-02-0279.
109 Shari Rabin, Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century
America (New York, 2017), 21.
110 “From George Washington to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport,
Rhode Island, 18 August 1790,” Founders Online, National Archives,
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-06-02-0135.
111 “From George Washington to the Savannah, Ga., Hebrew Congregation”
(emphasis mine). On legal understandings of Jewish difference in the
early republic, see Morton Borden, Jews, Turks, and Infidels (Chapel Hill,
NC, 1984).

SHARI RABIN is associate professor of Jewish Studies and religion

at Oberlin College. She is the author of Jews on the Frontier: Religion
and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America (NYU Press, 2017), which
won the National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies
and was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. She
is currently at work on a history of Jews, religion, and race in the
US South. srabin@oberlin.edu
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