One Nation, Under Gods

by Manseau, Peter

  A man of dark complexion, described as “black” in at least one court record and so possibly of North African ancestry, Lumbrozo similarly might have found it reassuring that in this colony, unlike its neighbors, the color of a man’s skin did not yet seem destined to become a determinant of his legal rights. He also may have chosen his new home on entirely practical, economic grounds. Though he would eventually become a trader, a lawyer, a landowner, and a cultivator of corn and tobacco, he was trained as a physician. Maryland was still a small colony of fewer than a thousand souls, with only a handful of doctors. It was certain to grow, and as it did, it would surely be in need of his services. If rumors of compensation had ways of spreading through a profession then as they do now, he likely would have heard that men with similar skills had been given hundreds of acres and bushels of corn simply for transporting themselves into the province to practice their art.

  Given all these logical reasons for his choice of a colony in which to settle, it is unlikely Jacob Lumbrozo was prepared for the possibility that in Maryland he would face precisely the kind of Inquisition his forebears had attempted to leave behind: an accusation and arrest on charges of blasphemy that threatened to end his life.

  During the court proceedings against him, the first documented Jew in a colony founded by Catholics would show himself to be a reason-driven man, suspicious of overly symbolic meanings when literal explanations would suffice. And yet in his ordeal Jacob Lumbrozo himself became something of a symbol, raising a question that would determine the future of the land he had made his own: Would the New World offer merely another iteration of the most ancient of Old World hatreds, or could it find another way?

  Though of Portuguese descent and born in Lisbon, Lumbrozo seems to have come to Maryland from London, then home to a small Jewish community newly reestablished following the end of a three-century ban prohibiting Jews from living in England. The Jews that returned upon formal readmission, as well as those who had been there secretly all along, were the descendants of those who had fled the ecclesiastical harassment found in the Catholic kingdoms of Spain and Portugal. The Iberian states throughout this time were in seemingly endless political upheaval, joining together under a common Crown and splitting apart again within less than a century. No matter the sovereign, however, the persecution of Jews continued, with special animosity reserved for conversos, also known as New Christians, who were often accused of being Christians in name alone, holding abiding allegiance to the faith they had renounced. Not infrequently, this was actually the case.

  Pushed by these forces, pockets of Sephardic Jews—Jews originally from the regions known by the Hebrew term for the Iberian Peninsula, Sepharad—established themselves in the traditional centers within Ashkenaz, the medieval Jewish name for Germany, which when used more broadly as a signifier of a particular strain of Jewish identity has come to include the rest of northern and eastern Europe. Though distinctly Sephardic, the Lumbrozo name could by this time be found in England, Germany, and Holland, where Jacob’s sister Rebecca was then living, and which had become a safe haven for the Jewish communities fleeing the Inquisitors’ dangerous attentions. Amsterdam, especially, had emerged late in the previous century as a place where Spanish and Portuguese Jews, arriving as refugees from church-sponsored violence, eventually built a stronghold of relative freedom and prosperity. Emboldened by their improved security and social standing, many of the Jewish families who had practiced the rituals of Judaism covertly for generations now came to openly reembrace the faith.

  Elsewhere in the Jewish world, others who had fled the Inquisition were not so lucky. In the Portuguese colony of Brazil, many conversos had arrived early in the sixteenth century, hoping that putting an ocean between themselves and the church tribunals would provide some protection. When the Inquisition arrived in Brazil in 1579, however, they were driven even further underground.

  It was from these two communities of devotion—Amsterdam and Brazil, one whose Jewishness had been reclaimed, another in which it remained largely hidden—that the earliest and largest Jewish population in North America was drawn. Like almost all of colonial history in the New World, the path that first brought Jews to New Amsterdam, as New York City was then called, was an unexpected consequence of longstanding European rivalries playing out in a new arena.

  For much of the seventeenth century, the Netherlands had been vying with Portugal over the sugar-producing regions of Brazil. After taking control of the northeast portion of the Amazon River basin, the Dutch West India Company encouraged immigration to establish Dutch culture and economic life in an area that was otherwise solidly under the control of the kingdoms of southern Europe. As a result, more than a thousand Jews had traveled there by 1645. As they had done in Amsterdam, they quickly created a vibrant cultural center, which included the first synagogue in the Americas, Kahal Zur Israel in the city of Recife. Only then did the New Christians who had been there for generations return to open expression of their faith. When the Portuguese regained control ten years later, however, the Jewish population once again was forced into exile, fearing the worst from the Catholic powers their ancestors had escaped.

  Twenty-seven of these transplanted Amsterdam Jews pleaded with a Dutch ship captain to bring them out of Brazil to the oldest Dutch colony in the Americas: New Netherlands. When they landed in the settlement of New Amsterdam, however, the colony’s governor, Peter Stuyvesant, was not happy to see them. There were already a small number of Jews living under his authority, but these refugees had the makings of a congregation. Not only did they present the possibility of religious difference organized into a potentially troublesome faction, they brought more immediate controversy as well. Upon arrival in port, the ship’s captain claimed his passengers had not paid sufficient fare for their passage from Brazil and sued to recover his costs. Stuyvesant had the Jews’ belongings seized and sold at auction to pay the damages, and wanted nothing more than for these new arrivals to leave the colony as quickly as possible.

  Saddled with penniless newcomers from a population he feared would bring only spiritual contamination, Stuyvesant wrote to his sponsors in the Dutch West India Company. Seeking their support in the removal of the Jews for fear they might begin their “customary usury and deceitful trading with the Christians,” Stuyvesant said that he “deemed it useful to require them in a friendly way to depart.”

  Of course, considering how few other options the Jews from Recife had, it is difficult to see anything “friendly” about it. Nor did Stuyvesant maintain this fiction when explaining to his backers why he felt they had to go. His reasons ranged from the practical—because of the Jews’ “present indigence,” he said, “they might become a charge in the coming winter”—to the theological: “Such hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ,” he opined, should “be not allowed to further infect and trouble this new colony.”

  Like the Spanish to the south, like the English to the north, this Dutchman’s primary concern was that allowing certain religious differences into the colony would amount to a spiritual infection that must be treated with extreme measures. His sponsors, however, saw things differently.

  Unbeknownst to the governor, the refugees had outflanked him. They, too, had written back to Amsterdam, asking members of their community there to remind the colony’s backers not only that Jews were allowed to live in Holland unmolested but that, more to the point, Jews were among the founders and investors in the very institution from which Stuyvesant had sought relief. The heads of the company wrote back to Stuyvesant on April 26, 1655:

  We would have liked to effectuate and fulfill your wishes and request that the new territories should no more be allowed to be infected by people of the Jewish nation, for we foresee there from the same difficulties which you fear, but after having further weighed and considered the matter, we observe that this would be somewhat unreasonable and unfair, especially because of the considerable loss sustained by this nation, with others, in the taking o
f Brazil, as also because of the large amount of capital which they still have invested in the shares of this company.

  The leadership of the company concluded that, contrary to Stuyvesant’s wishes, the “Portuguese Jews” should be allowed to “travel and trade to and in New Netherlands and live and remain there.” The only solace they offered to the aggrieved governor was that this policy would be implemented on the condition that “the poor among them shall not become a burden to the company or to the community, but be supported by their own nation.” In further correspondence, they agreed with Stuyvesant that under no circumstances should these religious outliers practice their religion.

  Jews were permitted to live among the Christians of New Netherlands, in other words, but could not flaunt their spiritual differences. Clearly unsatisfied, Stuyvesant continued to complain about their presence for months, noting a year later that “[t]hey have many times requested of us the free and public exercise of their abominable religion, but this cannot yet be accorded to them.”

  Despite his obvious antipathy toward a people he referred to as “that deceitful race,” however, it was soon determined that the problem of religion in New Netherlands was henceforth to be a matter of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” As a law passed at this time declared:

  No man shall raise or bring forward any question or argument on the subject of religion, on pain of being placed on bread and water three days in the ship’s galley. And if any difficulties should arise out of the said disputes, the author thereof shall be arbitrarily punished.

  While the Jews of New Amsterdam eventually did win the right not only to remain in the colony but to openly practice some elements of their faith, the earliest form this practice took was the establishment of a Jewish cemetery in 1656. Still unhappy about being forced to allow Jews to live in his colony, Peter Stuyvesant was apparently less bothered with letting them die there.

  Jacob Lumbrozo was no doubt aware of the treatment received by the New Netherlands’ Brazilian refugees when he set sail from England in 1656. He also likely knew that the colony established twelve years earlier on the Chesapeake Bay envisioned itself as a place in stark contrast to the colonies whose residents were then basing hopes for the future on the idea of religious homogeneity.

  The Province of Maryland had been founded by George Calvert and his son Cecil, the first and second Barons of Baltimore, as something of a safety valve for the ongoing persecution of Catholics in England. The very name of the province speaks of the fraught inter-religious history that brought it into being. Upon granting the elder Calvert a charter for a colony near Virginia, King Charles I proposed naming it for his Catholic wife, Henrietta Maria of France. The king had received no shortage of criticism for marrying a Catholic, an act that fostered fears that he would tip the scales in their favor in the ongoing struggle for religious control of the Crown. While his decision to name the new colony after her was a confirmation of her influence, his first suggestion of a name, Mariana, was deemed ill-advised by his court. Though more euphonious than other possibilities (which included “Crescentia” and “Terra Henriettae”), it also called to mind an infamous Jesuit of the day, Juan Mariana, whose writings encouraged regicide. Considering the fate Charles I eventually met (he lost his head in 1649), the name would have been morbidly prescient, but he settled instead on Terra Mariae, “Mary’s Land.”

  George Calvert died two months before the charter could be finalized, and so the task of bringing the establishment of the colony to fruition fell to his son, who was referred to throughout the colonies thereafter as Lord Baltimore.

  The first ships full of those taking advantage of the protection he offered, the Ark and the Dove, traveled to Maryland by way of the West Indies in 1634. Lord Baltimore’s instructions to these earliest arrivals listed the peaceful coexistence between religious factions as a requirement for the colony:

  His Lordship requires his said Governor & Commissioners that in their voyage to Mary Land they be very careful to preserve unity & peace amongst all the passengers on Shipboard, and that they suffer no scandal nor offence to be given to any of the Protestants… and that for that end, they cause all Acts of Roman Catholic Religion to be done as privately as may be, and that they instruct all the Roman Catholics to be silent upon all occasions of discourse concerning matters of Religion; and that the said Governor & Commissioners treat the Protestants with as much mildness and favor as Justice will permit. And this to be observed at Land as well as at Sea.

  Writing three years after Winthrop penned “A Model of Christian Charity” aboard the Arabella, Lord Baltimore gave advice concerning how religion ought to be lived in the New World precisely opposite to Winthrop’s approach. Under no circumstances, in Calvert’s opinion, should Catholics act as if they were establishing a city upon a hill, with the light of their convictions on display for all to see. On the contrary, though they shared a creed with the colony’s founder and protector, their faith should be kept out of sight for the sake of preserving the peace.

  This is not exactly what happened. Upon landing, the Catholics aboard the Ark and the Dove hewed a large cross from Maryland timber and held an open-air mass in its shadow, likely the first time the Catholic sacraments were administered in the English settlements of North America. Though this would seem precisely the kind of conspicuous “Acts of Roman Catholic Religion” Lord Baltimore had required “be done as privately as may be,” there were no significant disputes over the matter. Indeed, the only distress suffered by the priest who had performed the mass that day was that a small boat carrying maids sent to shore to wash his church linens—altar cloth, chasuble, stole, and other ritual elements apparently soiled during the ocean passage—had capsized. The maids were recovered, but, to the priest’s chagrin, the linens were lost.

  With the feud between those divided by the Reformation seeming to be solved, at least for now, by Catholics mostly practicing discreetly and Protestants looking the other way when they did not, some among the settlers turned their attention to the new varieties of religious difference all around them. None other than the Jesuit priest who had performed the first mass, Father Andrew White, became the earliest chronicler of the region, and reported on the customs and beliefs of the local Yaocomico tribe in great detail.

  “Upon the whole, they cultivate generous minds,” he wrote of his colony’s hosts, from whom the English had purchased land soon after landing. “Whatever kindness you may confer, they repay. They determine nothing rashly, or when actuated by a sudden impulse of mind, but with reflection; so that when any thing of moment is, at any time, proposed, they are for a time silent in a thoughtful manner; then they answer briefly, Yes or No, and are very firm of their purpose.”

  Yet for all their straightforwardness, White admitted, there was a gap in his Jesuit understanding. “They are possessed with a wonderful desire of civilization,” he noted, but “ignorance of their language renders it still doubtful for me to state what views they entertain concerning religion.”

  Despite the seeming détente between the Old World adversaries, White did not trust “Protestant interpreters” in this important matter, and so what he knew of Native American beliefs was limited to what he could glean from observation and interpretation. “These few things we have learned at different times: They recognise one God of heaven, whom they call ‘Our God,’ nevertheless, they pay him no external worship, but by every means in their power, endeavor to appease a certain evil spirit which they call Okee, that he may not hurt them. They worship corn and fire, as I am informed, as Gods wonderfully beneficent to the human race.”

  Others among the early settlers were sufficiently comfortable with the religious differences the Yaocomico represented that they took part in a native ceremony at a site the English referred to as a “temple” near the Patuxent River. It was there, on an apparent day of celebration, that a large number of men, women, and children gathered around a great fire. The children first formed a ring around the flames, with their eld
ers behind. A piece of deer fat was then thrown into the fire, causing the gathering place to fill with smoke, and the flames to jump with the greasy fuel. As all hands and voices rose in response, a procession around the fire began behind a medicine man carrying a sacred pouch of tobacco. The children followed his movements, singing in what White found to be “an agreeable voice.” When the procession ended, pipes were lit with the holy leaves, and smoke was blown on all in attendance, apparently consecrating Indians and Englishmen alike.

  The Jesuit White records all this with great sympathy and a remarkably anthropological eye. Unlike Puritan missionaries to the north, or even other Catholics in the Spanish or French territories, his first priority seems not to have been conversion. As a consequence of coming from a persecuted minority, the English Catholics were far more concerned with their own spiritual survival.

  It was this concern that led to the creation, a dozen years after White made note of local beliefs and rituals, of the 1649 Act Concerning Religion, Maryland’s statute protecting those of a variety of sects—a variety of Christian sects, that is—from the negative attention of the colonial government. Though often referred to as the Toleration Act, in fact it tolerated only those “professing to believe in Jesus Christ.” These believers, and only these believers, would henceforth be protected from being “troubled, Molested or discountenanced for or in respect of his or her religion nor in the free exercise thereof within this Province… nor any way compelled to the belief or exercise of any other Religion against his or her consent…”