“Gentiles cannot forsake their anti-Jewish prejudice.” In 1791, Rebecca Samuels wrote these words in Virginia. But in other letters she praised America as “the only country in the world for the common man” and admitted that “[a]s for the Gentiles, we have nothing to complain about.”
Living in a tiny Jewish community in the new American republic, her words show America’s early Jews holding two truths at the same time. Even as they flourished in the new nation, they understood that their neighbors had not only carried knapsacks across the ocean, they had also carried medieval ideas about nefarious Jews.
Presented by The Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History and 70 Faces Media as we commemorate 250 years of the Jewish experience in America and explore the profound ways Jewish identity and the American story have shaped one another. Through a series of monthly conversations over the course of this year with the nation’s leading historians, we will journey from the arrival of the first colonial settlers to the vibrant, diverse communities of the modern era.
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