You’re quite welcome! The comments reminded me of what Howard Fast wrote in a novel that I read over 30 years ago so I checked it out. I found that Fast wrote a novel about Haym Solomon who is mentioned in that link.
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Jewish people came to America over 200 years before the Revolution. They’ve been here for almost five centuries.
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The first Jewish person to set foot in what now is the United States (ca. 1570) was Luis de Carabajal y Cueva, the Spanish Governor of Nuevo León. He was a converso whom the Inquisition later accused of secretly practicing Judaism. He died in prison, and members of his family were burned at the stake.
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Beginning in the 1600s, Jewish pioneers lived from New England to Georgia, and as far West as what now are Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee.
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In 1657, Mordecai Campanall, a Jewish settler in what now is Rhode Island, introduced Freemasonry to America.
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John Locke’s 1669 charter for South Carolina explicitly welcomed “Jews, heathens, and other dissenters”.
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By 1722, the first Jewish person (Judah Monis) taught at Harvard.
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The first white male child born in Georgia (Philip Minis, 1734) was Jewish.
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In 1775, Francis Salvador became the first Jewish person elected to public office in the Western World (South Carolina Provincial Congress).
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One in 20 Jewish colonists bore arms in the Revolution, a rate much higher than any other group.
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It’s plausible that Alexander Hamilton was Jewish. He studied at a synagogue until age seven, spoke Hebrew, and publicly championed Jewish equality in America. Bizarrely for a presumed Christian of his day, he was never baptized, and never joined any church. His own grandson described Hamilton’s father as a “Danish Jew”.
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Jean Lafitte, naval commander at the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812, was Jewish.
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Our first Jewish commodore, Uriah Phillips Levy, abolished flogging in the US Navy.
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During the Texas Revolution, Levi Charles Meyers Harby, commander of the Republic of Texas Navy ship Brutus, was Jewish.
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Albert Moses Levy, Surgeon-in-Chief for the Republic of Texas, was Jewish.
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Abolitionists Theodore Wiener, Jacob Benjamin, and August Bondi, who fought with John Brown at the Battle of Blackjack, were Jewish.
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18,000 Jewish soldiers fought in the Civil War, including Officers of Color, two all-Jewish military units, nine Union generals, and six Medal of Honor recipients.
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Levi Strauss, who invented blue jeans, was Jewish.
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There were Jewish chiefs of Native American tribes, including Solomon Bibo of the Acoma Pueblo.
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Wyatt Earp adopted Judaism. His common-law wife of 50 years was Jewish. He wore a kippah, attended Seder, did mezuzah, and is buried in a Jewish cemetery. (Doc Holliday accused him of “becoming a damn Jew-boy”.)
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By the end of the 1800s, every major settlement west of the Mississippi had elected a Jewish mayor, including Dodge City, Deadwood, El Paso, Denver, Phoenix, Tucson, Tombstone, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boise, Portland, and Seattle. Even Boot Hill had a Jewish cemetery.
You’d never know any of that, because the only Jewish history taught in American classrooms is Ellis Island – and Jewish people are portrayed as late coming, immigrant “others”. Quite the opposite is true, of course: Jewish Americans were here from the start, and are foundational to this Nation.
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A few years ago we visited Savannah and toured the third oldest synagogue in the US. The Georgia colony was established in 1732 as a buffer to Spanish Florida. In 1733 a ship of mostly Spanish and Portuguese Jews arrived during an epidemic Ref re Savannah epidemic according to our guide, Savannah’s doctor had died. The arriving Jews were asked whether they had a doctor, and since they did, they were welcome to stay.
Random piece of Jewish geography: my great-great-grandfather was a Jewish Confederate officer from Alabama. He was captured and sent to a POW camp near Indianapolis. When the war ended, he stayed and married a Jewish woman who had been bringing food to him.
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Dig a little further. Read what he’s said about Syria: https://www.newarab.com/news/pink-floyd-stars-attack-syrian-rescuers-provokes-outrage
Read what he’s said about Russia and Ukraine:
Read what David Gilmour and his wife think about Waters:
None of the above criticism is due ot his support of the Palestinians. In truth, he’s a tankie and an antisemite, and he uses his support of the Palestinians as a convenient cover.
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“the Jews”. Excuse me? Not all Jews are Israelis. And if you think that fighting antisemitism worldwide is not necesary unless/until the Israeli government starts treating Palestinians differently, you’re part of the problem.
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If something happened in the US that caused millions of American Jews to want to emigrate all at once, that means some really serious shit has gone down.
In that scenario, Israel could and would admit American refugees in the hundreds of thousands, as they did for immigrants from the USSR, from Ethiopia, and from MENA countries. Millions would be a stretch. But they’d find a way.
Re: “implicit denigration of the native Palestinians”
Let me know what other country would be willing to absorb millions of American Jewish refugees in that scenario? Or perhaps you are willing to sacrifice us in order to save the Palestinians from being “implictly denigrated” when I rent an apartment in Modiin?
I have, and what he’s said about the White Hats in Syria, and what he’s said about China. It all reads like a hell of a lot of other late-60s hippies have sounded like over the years where they flatly decide that everyone involved in any war is to blame for it all, so they are going to stick with whoever they currently feel better upholds the collectivist principles of Marx and Engels right at this red hot second. 
Usually, it just ends up with them sounding like delusional morons… like Waters usually does… but there’s a difference between delusional would-be-communists, and Nazis—which is the essence of the Berlin complaint.
With that in mind, it doesn’t at all surprise me that he tries to have it both ways on the issue of the Ukraine war. But just like I can agree with people who think Susan Sarandon was a fucking idiot who enabled Trump because of her Bernie-Bro leftist purity bullshit in 2016 without saying she’s pro-Nazi or supported Charlottesville or Jan 6, I can believe Waters is a delusional twit with more of a grasp on whether there’s more money in Russian concerts than in Polish ones than actual geopolitics, without saying he’s a Nazi.
As for Gilmour… Gilmour and Waters1 have literally been fighting over every single topic imaginable since the Millennials started being born. Neither one has a clean track record on their feud, and both of them have called one another pretty much every shitty name under the sun for decades. Where the other is concerned, neither of them can be considered a reliable and objective source.
Waters is an idiot, a contrarian, and a deluded fool who believes that the nations he still thinks of as bastions of ‘Leftist thought’ are ideologically superior. Doesn’t make him a Nazi. There are plenty of other varieties of pieces of shit out there.
1. And for the record, I take Gilmour’s side in their long-standing feud. Waters was a shit-head who wanted the band to shut down just because he left, and some of their best music absolutely came after he was out of the way. (I mean, On the Turning Away? If I believed in a god, that god would be David Gilmour’s outro on this track. And the rest of the song is about the closest thing to ‘holy’ I recognize.) Don’t take any of this as me saying Roger Waters is a wonderful guy. Just that asshole != Nazi, and Gilmour’s take on Waters has to be taken with the same Gibraltar-sized grain of salt as Waters’ take on Gilmour.
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It’s also why the way Israel’s approached relations with the Palestinians is so damned frustrating. Not only do they become the tyrants and bigots they were victims of, but they guarantee the children whose necks they’ve been standing on (esp since Rabin’s assassination by right-wing Israelis) grow up to hate them and perpetuate the litany of grievance.
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I only knew of Jews (Sephardic) inhabiting our (Northern American) part of the world, starting in the mid 1600s. But a century or more earlier in what we know as Central and South America Thank you for your taking the time to list this extraordinary history! I am happy to learn about these stories and peoples.
I was never very interested in American History in my public school education. My best friends were Native Americans, and they had a much richer telling of this land we immigrants were determined to conquer.
Thank you for this wonderful post!
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Nice post. Thanks.
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I think he word was borrowed from linguistics “conflate this text with that one”.
It was put to good use to describe the phenomenon of confusing and mixing unrelated concepts and memes, especially in connection with social and political matters.
Propagandists know this and take full advantage of the conflation of unrelated issues.
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They can also wander into antisemitism by applying different standards to those they believe are Jewish.
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Arguing against saving some because it may be impossible to save all is illogical. It also devalues the lives of those who could be saved.
The right to exist takes precedence over the right to live in a particular patch of land.
My lineage fled religious persecution by fleeing across an ocean in tiny boats. I find myself unsympathetic to Palestinian lamentations for being forced off their land.
So far more exposure for DeSantis has decreased his standing with the American public.
The Right needs a back up to Trump but is having trouble selling what appeals to Trump’s base to anyone else.
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It’s mutual. There are now generations of Israelis whose initial exposure to Palestinians was as the people who were firing rockets at them when they were children.
News…
Building collapses in Davenport, Iowa
Lukashenko in Belarus is offering nuclear weapons to any nation willing to join the union of Belarus and Russia.
And the president of Uganda signed a bill basically making homosexuality worthy of the death penalty
I think I will go back to bed as it is still early here
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Yup. Absolutely true.
But when one side is herding millions of people into ever-shrinking parcels of non-arable land, expanding illegal settlements in occupied territory, using tanks to bulldoze houses, and re-enacting the Boston Massacre only using the kind of rubber bullets the Redcoats didn’t have access to in 1774 whenever someone chucks a rock at a guy in full combat armor from half a football field away…
Very much not a supporter of Hamas, but the Palestinians aren’t the ones who chose to create this situation.
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The Palestinians were stuck with the anemic leadership of Arafat for years; now they are stuck with malevolent machinations of Netanyahu.
Hard to believe there’s a god,
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I look forward to your next post, “The so-called ‘Holocaust’: another perspective.”
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And before that, they were stuck with the UN deciding to force them off their land out of guilt.
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