History’s Traitors: How Jewish Tories Trouble Early American Jewish Historiography

• In Event: Jewish Troubles in the Sephardic Atlantic World

Abstract

In the nearly two and a half centuries since the American Revolution, the legacy of Jewish Toryism has been a marker of Jewish troublemaking in the Atlantic World. Stories about Jews who sided with the British complicated early Jewish American historians’ efforts to portray Jews as communitarian-minded United States citizens. Jewish Tories continue to haunt later histories. Since the consequences that followed from Jewish Tories’ affiliations with the Crown often proved to be dire, Loyalists also challenged scholars’ ability to argue that the Jews of British America acted out of communal or individual self-interest. From the notorious 1780 trial of David Salisbury Franks to the violent death of Newport, Rhode Island’s onetime hazzan, Isaac Touro, narratives of Jewish Loyalism have consistently necessitated a transnational and contingency-minded historiography. The shifting meanings that have accrued to these narratives shed light on an existential tension that is integral to the practice of Jewish American history. Should the Jewish American experience be viewed as a mere footnote in a wider narrative whose actual scope not only transcends ethno-religious and national boundaries, but also negates our attempts to ascribe coherent motivations to historical actors?

As Jack P. Greene has written, the American Revolution was a tumultuous event that instilled both a “mood of optimism” and a “pervasive . . . sense of failure” among its participants and witnesses. Like all civil wars, it was a bewildering moment whose meaning and significance could only unfold in historical hindsight and in keeping with shifting epistemologies and ideological frameworks. Because their actions, or alleged actions, eventually placed them on the “wrong side” of historical destiny, the record of Jewish Loyalism stimulated a disproportionate amount of scholarly attention. Whether they have acted the parts of apologists seeking to account for the Tories’ ostensibly aberrant actions or of realists who are eager to point out how justifiable those actions were under the extraordinary circumstances that dictated them, chroniclers of Jewish Loyalism cannot help but generate trouble by complicating the narrative frameworks upon which historians rely. The Loyalists remind us that history itself is comprised of idiosyncratic, problematic, and perpetually non-conforming stories.

Author

• Michael Hoberman, Fitchburg State University