The Jews and Torah in Early America, 1654–1830

This chapter is concerned at heart with the attitudes toward and appropriations of Torah (i.e., Mosaic Law) among early Jewish American communities and questions of the possible influence of those attitudes and/or appropriations on conceptions or framings of American Constitutional or national law. It opens with a brief overview of the origins and development of Jewish communities in early America down to 1830. Jewish American communities themselves have left behind few archival or primary sources prior to the 1800s, particularly dealing with issues of Torah. One of the earliest sources on American Jewry, situated within a context of world Jewry, dates back to 1812, namely a History of the Jews penned by an early American Christian author who touches on issues of Mosaic Law within that history, both within America and beyond. The same author and work, likewise, provide a curious snapshot of American Christian depictions, drawn from a seventeenth-century European Jewish source, of Native Americans (i.e., Indians) as the alleged “Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.” This comes by virtue of their alleged observance of customs which supposedly resemble Mosaic legal traditions. These sources are prior to and distinguished from though related to Mormon claims of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel coming to the Americas. The chapter concludes with a brief look at early Mosaic legal reforms within the seedbeds of American Reform Judaism.