America Is Different

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Saturday, May 5, 2007

Can you name the first Jew to sit on the Supreme Court? What about the first Jewish Cabinet member? I think those are fairly well known. Louis Brandies in 1916 was the first Jew to serve on the Supreme Court and Oscar Straus was Secretary of Labor and Commerce, the first Jewish Cabinet official.

What about the state which first had a Jewish Governor?

(Idaho, believe it or not, Governor Moses Alexander, elected in 1915.) Or the first Jewish Congressman? ( Here there is a dispute. Some count David Levy Yulee of Florida, elected to Congress in 1841 as he was of Jewish descent. Others say credit should go to Louis Charles Levin of Pennsylvania, a practicing Jew, elected in 1844.) Of course Jewish political participation began much earlier. Francis Salvador, one of the early Sephardic immigrants to the United States served as a member of South Carolina’s Provincial Congress back in 1774.

I’m asking these questions because May is Jewish American Heritage Month and the same people who brought us those wonderful posters at the time of the 350th anniversary of Jewish life in America, are putting out a weekly trivia quiz. Each week this month they are sending out questions to test our knowledge of the history of Jews in this country.

While its fun to answer questions about who was the first Jewish this or that, and to figure out whether some well known figure is or isn’t Jewish, these bits of trivia merely fill in the details in the story of Jews in America, a story given its shape by more overarching questions. For me the most interesting and basic question is what has made America different.

Jewish history in so many parts of the world is a history of discrimination and persecution, but, while life in America has not always been perfect, the Jewish experience in America is qualitatively different than in other parts of the world. Though there were times when there were quotas for Jews in the major universities, and hotels at which Jews were not welcome, times when Jews had to change their names in order to secure employment, or felt welcome only in some neighborhoods and school system, still anti-Semitism in America has never been enshrined in law and statute, nor with one exception, pursued as government policy. In other parts of the world, Jews have been dealt with as a group apart from the mainstream and never fully part of the societies in which they lived. Even at the height of the Golden Age in Spain, during the flourishing Jewish culture under Islam, Jews were still dhimmi, a protected but still second class minority. A Jew could rise high in that society, even being chief advisor to ruler of the land, but a Jew would never be a true citizen of that society. In Christian Europe too, and even after emancipation, the folk aspect of nationality made many people feel that a Jew could never really be German, never really be a Frenchman. A Jew, even if he was an officer in the army, like Alfred Dreyfus, or an important writer like Heinrich Heine, would still always be considered an outsider.

America has been different, because (with the one brief exception of General Grant’s order banishing Jews from the battlegrounds of the Civil War which was quickly rescinded) Jews have never been treated legally as a separate group or class. I think this difference flows directly from something unique about the nature of American identity. Because being an America is something that one can become as well as be born into, and because so many other peoples were also becoming Americans, Jews were able to be American in a way that we have never been able to be Russian or Tunisian or even British.

Jeremy and Adrian, your Torah portion dealt with a situation in which a person who wished to pitch his tent as a member of the community was excluded to ill effect. And there are texts in the Bible, as for example in the words of Ezra the scribe, that seem to push outsiders away. But there is much more that testifies to the importance of welcoming those who wish to join the Jewish people. We find this in subtle ways and also stated very explicitly. One subtle way outsiders were included has to do with geneology. If you read the Bible very carefully you will notice that certain family clans, listed as part of the tribes of Israel in some parts of the Bible, appear on the lists of peoples in the genealogies in the book of Genesis as non-Israelites. What seems to have happened is that as a family clan joined the Israelites, their ancestry was gently shifted and they were given Jewish great great great grandparents. Another important argument for inclusion is the Book of Ruth, which we will be reading in just a few weeks on Shavuot. Here the Bible goes out of its way to tell us that King David and by implication the Messiah, is the descendant of a Moabite woman who threw her lot in with the Jewish people.

The ability to become an American has made possible the flourishing American Jewish history that we have enjoyed. The welcome that those who have thrown their lot in with the Jewish people have enjoyed has similarly enriched our people. Though the story you read this morning from your Torah portion provides evidence of unfairness in the treatment of outsiders, the legal principle enunciated as a result of the incident, stated principles of fairness that continue to be important up through out own day: “You shall have one law for the citizen and the stranger alike, I am Adonai your God.”