Conspicuously intended to protect Catholics at a time when their liberty and even their safety was far from guaranteed, the Toleration Act also reflected a broader reality that no one religious group could count on maintaining a majority within the quickly shifting demographics of colonial populations. This reality was underscored just five years later, when Catholics lost control of Maryland’s governance for a time, and a law opposite in its intentions was passed. The Act Concerning Religion of 1654 again preserved toleration for all varieties of Christians, with the exception of “the Popish Religion commonly known by the name of the Roman Catholick Religion,” adherents of which would not “be protected in this Province by the Lawes of England.” This act, in turn, was repealed when Lord Baltimore reclaimed control just four years later. Within a decade of Jacob Lumbrozo’s arrival, religious freedoms were granted, rescinded, and granted again.
Fickle laws of toleration aside, the members of the colony established, almost from the beginning, a reputation for being not only relatively broadminded but frequently scornful of the Old World’s orthodoxies. Back in Massachusetts Bay, for example, visiting Marylanders had more than once ruffled the feathers of the devout. Try as he might to keep his colony free of religious difference, Governor Winthrop found it washing against the shores of Massachusetts as frequently as the tides, occasionally on board vessels from the Calverts’ colony. Writing in his journal, Winthrop lamented that the shipmates of a vessel from Maryland jeered at Bostonians in the port, mocking their religiosity.
“It was informed the governour,” he wrote, referring to himself as he often did in the third person, “that some of our people, being aboard the bark of Maryland, the sailors did revile them, calling them holy brethren, the members, etc., and withal did course and swear most horribly, and use threatening speeches against us.” Unable to determine who the offending sailors were, the governor asked the ship’s captain to “bring no more disordered persons among us.”
Ten years later, Winthrop noted that no less a representative of Maryland than Lord Baltimore himself made a more veiled comment on religious life in Massachusetts when he “made tender of land in Maryland to any of ours that would transport themselves thither, with free liberty of religion, and all other privileges which the place afforded.” Winthrop fumed at the implication that his colonists had any reason to desire such a thing. Dismissing the idea as a heresy bordering on absurdity, Winthrop wrote, “Our captain had no mind to further his desire therein, nor had any of our people temptation that way.”
Others did not take Baltimore’s offer so lightly, however. This same year, a group of Puritans from Anglican-controlled Virginia fled to Maryland, where they established the city of Providence, later called Annapolis. Virginia Quakers likewise fled persecution at the invitation of Lord Baltimore and settled on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay. Such rapidly accumulating diversity seemed for a time to guarantee that Maryland truly would be, as in the early twentieth-century historian Hester Dorsey Richardson’s too sunny assessment of the province’s early days, “the only spot on the earth where the principle of Live and Let Live was the law of the land.”
The growing population of religious dissenters of a number of persuasions might have made Maryland an excellent choice for Jacob Lumbrozo, except for one small detail: Under Maryland’s so-called Act of Toleration, the penalty for blasphemy, defined simply as any denial of the central tenets of the Christian faith, was death:
Bee it therefore ordayned and enacted… that whatsoever person or persons within this province and the islands thereunto belonging, shall from henceforth blaspheme God, that is, to curse him, or shall deny our Savior Jesus Christ to be the Son of God, or shall deny the Holy Trinity, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, or the Godhead or any of the sayd Three Persons of the Trinity, or the Unity of the Godhead, or shall use or utter any reproachful speeches, words or languages concerning the Holy Trinity, or any of the sayd three persons thereof, shall be punished with death, and confiscation or forfeiture of all his or her land and goods to the lord proprietary and his heires.
In other words, whatever Maryland’s various laws concerning religion might have done to avoid the kinds of faith-based attacks colonists regularly made against each other in places like Massachusetts Bay, they offered no protection to a Jewish doctor who made the possibly fatal mistake of saying that Jesus Christ was nothing but a glorified magician, his miracles a sham, his resurrection a legend built upon lies.
Lumbrozo’s troubles began when he had been in Maryland less than a year. On a summer evening in 1657, he was in the company of fellow colonists John Hoffsett, Josias Cole, and Richard Preston Jr. and their conversation took a theological turn. The setting was apparently Preston’s home (it is referred to in court documents as “ye house of Mr. Preston”), or perhaps the home of his father, also named Richard Preston. The latter’s house served throughout the period as a semi-official seat of provincial government, owing to the elder Preston’s standing in the community. Preston-on-the-Patuxent, as this home was known, was the place to which residents of the province would travel in order to argue a tariff or petition for a regulation, such as the law adopted that year which made it legal to kill wolves by “meanes in any kind whatsoever,” or the law that made it illegal to “beguile or deceive” authorities about the size of one’s tobacco crop, punishable by a fine of 1,000 pounds of tobacco for every cask or hogshead concealed. Whether for these or similar reasons, a new resident like Lumbrozo had ample reason to visit.
Whatever brought him to Preston’s home and into the company of Cole and Hoffsett, Lumbrozo seems to have fallen into a conversation about something other than wolves or tobacco. Perhaps goading Lumbrozo, or perhaps sincerely curious to hear the opinion of the only Jew he had likely ever met, Hoffsett asked the doctor his thoughts on various religious matters. Hoffsett was at the time a man in his mid-forties, so one might suppose he was old enough to put away childish things, but there nonetheless seems a measure of mischief in his attempt to push Lumbrozo’s buttons. What, he wanted to know, did the good doctor think of “our Blessed Savior, Christ”? Hoffsett himself professed that anyone should agree that Jesus “was more than a man.” For evidence, he simply pointed toward the fact of his death and resurrection. How else could his disciples have found an empty tomb on Easter morning?
Apparently not one to hold his tongue, Lumbrozo replied to Hoffsett that the disappearance of Jesus’s body, and hence the moment that sparked the legend of the resurrection, could be very easily explained on natural rather than supernatural grounds. And then the only Jew in Maryland began methodically to dig his own grave.
“His disciples stole him away,” Lumbrozo said.
The astonished Hoffsett, perhaps hearing more irreverence than he had hoped to incite, answered with piqued astonishment: “Yet no man ever did such miracles as he!”
With the air of a man recently arrived in the backward American provinces from the civilized cities of Europe, Lumbrozo attempted to enlighten his conversation partner. “Such works might be done,” he said, “by necromancy or sorcery.”
To this, Hoffsett could only answer that it was surely Lumbrozo himself who must be the necromancer to say such a thing. Lumbrozo simply laughed at the accusation, as if he put more faith in the colony’s supposed spirit of religious toleration than in its willingness to ruthlessly carry out the letter of its laws.
That might have been the end of it, but Hoffsett was not the only man in Maryland who claimed to have had such a conversation with Lumbrozo. Significantly, Richard Preston Jr. later did not recall this conversation occurring at the Preston house at all, as Hoffsett had suggested. As the eldest son of one of the more prominent colonists, he perhaps had reason to distance such goings-on from their family home. In Preston’s recollection, he was traveling with Lumbrozo and Josias Cole when Cole pointedly asked the “Jew doctor” whether or not Jews waited for the coming of the messiah.
Lumbrozo replied with an unambiguous aff
irmation that they did, which suggests that he was fully open with his faith, even proud to declare it. He may have even explained that every day, three times a day, observant Jews pray the Amidah, which alludes specifically to the coming of the messiah. However, to Jews the word messiah, mashiach, simply means the anointed one, not the son of God Christians believe in. This response already might have labeled the doctor a blasphemer, but his self-incrimination had only begun. As if springing a trap, Cole then peppered Lumbrozo with questions, eager to lead him to ever greater perdition.
“And what was he that was crucified at Jerusalem?”
“He was a man.”
“But then how did he do all his miracles?”
“He did them by the art of magic,” Lumbrozo said.
“How did his disciples do the same miracles after Jesus was crucified?”
The answer was apparently clear enough to Lumbrozo. Just as other, more experienced physicians had taught him the medical arts, surely one of history’s great practitioners of magic would teach his techniques to pupils eager to learn.
“He taught them his art,” Lumbrozo replied matter-of-factly.
In popular memory of these events, it should be noted, the men are often depicted as well into their cups by this point. Though the historical record nowhere reflects this, this might explain Lumbrozo’s steady ratcheting up of the level of irreverence throughout his interrogation. It seems at times as if he was truly trying to get their goat, making a game of finding precisely the answer that would most upset his antagonists, paying no heed to the consequences.
But the consequences were dire: Harmless as these exchanges now seem, at a time when the meaning of religious toleration was shifting beneath the feet of this Jewish doctor and his Christian interlocutors, the conversation was enough to see Lumbrozo arrested and charged with blasphemy.
Curiously, the arrest seems to have occurred six months after he made his supposedly damning remarks. Why the delay? Lumbrozo had come to Maryland in the wake of New Amsterdam’s Jewish refugees feeling the effects of far-off hostilities between the Dutch and the Portuguese. He was caught in the current of political changes that seemed to have little to do with him. When he committed his alleged blasphemy, the original Act Concerning Religion had been repealed by the Protestant regime. He was brought to trial only after Lord Baltimore’s reclaimed control of the province allowed the Toleration Act to be restored. At the time Lumbrozo made his comments, in other words, blasphemy was not punishable by death, but then suddenly it was once more. In this, the Jewish doctor was an unintended victim of the ongoing dispute between Catholics and Protestants in England. Had he been executed for his crime, he would have been collateral damage of a fight over religious tolerance unfolding an ocean away.
Lumbrozo, however, had enough affinity for the law to mount a spirited defense. Hearing the testimony against him, he admitted that he had indeed spoken of Jesus’s death and other religious questions with his accusers. Despite the differences in their accounts, Preston and Hoffsett were united against him, so a simple denial would have gotten Lumbrozo nowhere. Yet, with the benefit of some distance on that possibly drunken night, he insisted that he had not sought to force his views on them. They had asked his opinion, and he had given it honestly “to some particular demands when urged.”
As the court documents explain, when pressed further on the matter of magic and miracles, Lumbrozo shrewdly suggested that his supposedly impious and offensive answers were actually scriptural references. Far from calling Jesus a necromancer, he had only “declared what remains written concerning Moses and ye Magicians of Egypt”—a reference to the Exodus story of the duel, of sorts, between the Liberator of Israel, his brother Aaron, and the sorcerers Pharaoh summoned to discredit the signs Moses used as demonstrations of God’s power:
The LORD said to Moses and Aaron, “When Pharaoh says to you, ‘Perform a miracle,’ then say to Aaron, ‘Take your staff and throw it down before Pharaoh,’ and it will become a snake.”
So Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and did just as the LORD commanded. Aaron threw his staff down in front of Pharaoh and his officials, and it became a snake. Pharaoh then summoned wise men and sorcerers, and the Egyptian magicians also did the same things by their secret arts: Each one threw down his staff and it became a snake. But Aaron’s staff swallowed up their staffs.
Using a scriptural reference anyone hearing him would have known, Lumbrozo suggested that he had only compared Jesus to Moses, which, if a blasphemy, was one Saint Paul was guilty of as well. Moreover, Lumbrozo insisted, he “said not anything scoffingly, or in derogation of Him Christians acknowledge for the Messiah.” According to his testimony, he could not have spoken any other way, for he answered “by his profession”—not as a blasphemer but as a Jew.
Lumbrozo’s defense, in other words, rested on two planks: First, that by reason of his faith, he could not have answered otherwise when asked such questions. Second, the texts upon which he based his beliefs and his answers to the specific questions he had been asked were also a cornerstone of the faith of those who had demanded he answer. Citing a biblical precedent even for his supposed blasphemy, he played the barbaric law of toleration against itself—conjuring a snake of his own, perhaps, to eat those of his accusers.
Neither Preston’s nor Hoffsett’s responses to this argument were recorded, but we do know something of their own religious commitments that makes the very fact of their accusation rather surprising. One of the most striking things about this episode is that those leading the charge against Lumbrozo—at least one of the men who testified against him, and two of those who are mentioned in the proceedings—were neither Catholics nor Puritans, but Quakers. They were themselves a religious minority threatened elsewhere in the colonies; members of a group who had been chased out of Massachusetts and Virginia and had only recently arrived in Maryland. Having come at the invitation of Lord Baltimore just as the Act Concerning Religion was repealed, rewritten, and then restored, they would have rightly wondered what the extent of toleration in the colony might be. There might have been less dramatic means of testing these waters than accusing a Jew of blasphemy, but nevertheless the Lumbrozo affair eventually provided an answer.
With little fanfare, Lumbrozo was ultimately pardoned. It is unlikely his freedom came as the result of his efforts to offer biblical justification for describing Jesus as a magician. More likely he was freed during a general amnesty offered as part of yet another power struggle for control of the kingdom of England. Just eight days after he heard Lumbrozo’s case, the governor of Maryland heeded the new law of the land as decreed an ocean away, declaring, “I doe hereby pardon & acquit All & Every person or persons wch this Court in any Criminal Cause stood indicted Convicted or condemned to dye Resyding att this time within this province.” Arrested as part of the ongoing struggle for control of Maryland, he was freed because of a dispute under way even farther from home, namely the Restoration, the ongoing turmoil over the Crown and its religious affiliation that consumed the middle decades of the century.
Lumbrozo went on to live another eight years in Maryland. During that time, as if in confirmation that a lasting peace had been reached between himself and his neighbors, he was permitted to conduct himself openly as a Jew in a province caught in a tug of war between two kinds of Christians. Moreover, he was granted letters of denization that allowed him to own land and hold public office. He acquired a plantation of his own and named it, intriguingly, Lumbrozo’s Discovery.
It is tempting to think that what Jacob Lumbrozo had discovered is that a little tolerance can be a dangerous thing. Or perhaps he had discovered what so many spiritual outliers in American history have realized since: that survival often depends on following Lord Baltimore’s advice to practice religion “as privately as may be.” Before his death in 1666, the outspoken Lumbrozo frequently found himself involved in disputes with fellow colonists, but there was never again a disagreement so theologically charged. In this way, i
t might be said that the man known as Jacob Lumbrozo was indeed put to death following his dispute as a supposed blasphemer: Following his pardon, he changed his name to John.
Whether or not this adoption of an alias should be taken as an indication that Lumbrozo was the first Jewish immigrant to attempt assimilation in America, his experience does point beyond the fate of just one individual. The 1649 Act Concerning Religion, which nearly cost a blameless man his life, is generally regarded as a precursor to the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment guarantee of religious liberty. Yet it bears remembering that, just as the Toleration Act did nothing to protect non-Christians, the First Amendment itself did not immediately offer religious freedom to all, as the status of Jews in Maryland long after Lumbrozo’s trial clearly shows. In 1723, the colony passed an act proposing that those denying the divinity of Christ should be punished with tongue-boring; for the second offense, the blasphemer was to be branded on the forehead with the letter B. Even the Maryland state constitution, adopted just months after American independence was declared in 1776, offers a striking echo of earlier ambivalent intentions. “No other test or qualification ought to be required” of those wishing to serve the new government, it declares, than an “oath of support and fidelity to this state” and “a declaration of belief in the Christian religion.” Gone, of course, was the penalty of death, but no less than in 1649, non-Christians were automatically disqualified from full protection under the law.
Further rights for the spiritual descendants of Maryland’s first Jews were not secured until fifty years after the Revolution, when another piece of dubiously named legislation, the Jew Bill of 1826, sought “to extend to the sect of people professing the Jewish religion the same rights and privileges that are enjoyed by Christians.” When the act passed, barely, it served as a reminder that if not for the willingness, and perhaps the occasional chutzpah, of those on the margins of the dominant faith to maintain their beliefs, the freedoms the majority takes for granted might be strangled, as Jacob Lumbrozo nearly was, in a noose of selective toleration.
One Nation, Under Gods Page 11