Jewish New York Inside and Out: Violence, Ethnicity, and Embeddedness in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan

Jewish New York Inside and OutViolence, Ethnicity, and Embeddedness in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan John M. Dixon (bio) In August 1729, a grand jury of New York’s Court of Quarter Sessions indicted five Jewish men for conducting “a riot” at the home of laborer James Long. The indictment alleged that the gang had broken the home’s widows and door, disturbed its sleeping household, and threatened Long with “other enormities to [his] damage.” Soon afterward the five men settled with Long, prompting the attorney general to drop the case. The whole incident slipped into obscurity, and its details survive only in a brief court minute less than a hundred words long.1 This indictment of five New York Jews occurred as Manhattan’s Jewish community was becoming more sizable and stable. Immigration following the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) boosted New York’s total Jewish population from perhaps as few as one hundred at the turn of the century to more than two hundred by the late 1720s. Encouraged by that gain, New York’s sole Jewish congregation, Shearith Israel, adopted a new constitution, sought to enlarge Manhattan’s Jewish cemetery, and purchased a lot for its first purpose-built synagogue in 1728.2 All five defendants at the James Long trial had a hand in these community developments. Nathan and Isaac Levy, Judah and Abraham Mears, and Solomon Isaacs were members of Shearith Israel. Nathan Levy had signed the congregation’s 1728 bylaws, had petitioned for the cemetery expansion, and had helped to fund and organize the new synagogue building. Judah Mears had similarly signed the new bylaws and had joined with [End Page 4] Nathan and Isaac Levy in donating £3 to help purchase cemetery land in 1728. Later, Isaac Levy, Abraham Mears, and Solomon Isaacs also gave money to the synagogue.3 How do we reconcile these men’s upstanding acts of Jewish community building with their indictment for a violent home invasion and the harassment of a non-Jewish laborer? A conventional solution to this conundrum would be to separate the two sets of events by attributing them to detached Jewish and non-Jewish spheres of urban activity. Standard histories of colonial New York define the city as normatively non-Jewish. That is to say, they disassociate Jewishness from the everyday life of the city, locating it in and around the synagogue.4 Historians customarily describe the mid-eighteenth-century city as ethnically diverse, but also as British American in terms of its core identity and culture. Accordingly, they designate as “Jewish” only those actions by colonial Jews that were private or that obviously contradicted mainstream practices. This approach not only homogenizes urban culture but also devalues large portions of Jewish life in eighteenth-century New York. By decentering our perception of colonial Manhattan and reimagining the urban space as ethnically contested rather than as British American by default, we can more fully recover how Jews interacted with the city, asserted their belonging, and sustained a group identity outside of specific Jewish arenas such as the synagogue and private Jewish homes. It should be noted that historians already accept that some British New Yorkers used mob actions and street violence to exclude rather than include Jews. In particular, current scholarship identifies a violent home invasion by the powerful and thuggish Oliver DeLancey on a Jewish residence in 1749 as an overtly anti-Semitic act. DeLancey, an Anglican of Huguenot descent and brother of the provincial Chief Justice, was married to Phila Franks, Nathan and Isaac Levy’s niece and daughter of prominent New York Jews Jacob Franks and Abigaill Levy Franks.5 Nevertheless, he apparently engaged in regular “Jew-baiting” during the 1740s and is the known or suspected perpetrator of several public attacks on New York Jews, including an assault on Jacob Mears in 1742, a mobbish protest at a Jewish funeral procession in 1743 that perhaps involved DeLancey carrying a crucifix and masquerading as a Catholic, and the vandalizing of Manhattan’s Jewish cemetery in 1746.6 [End Page 5] As these outbursts of apparent anti-Semitism all occurred in the aftermath of New York’s infamous slave conspiracy trials, executions, and supposed “Popish...

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