There were few Jews in the early Republic. They numbered between thirteen hundred and three thousand in 1790, and only seven communities—Newport, Rhode Island; New York City; Philadelphia and Lancaster, Pennsylvania; Richmond, Virginia; Savannah, Georgia; and Charleston, South Carolina—had the requisite minyan, or ten men, to hold services. By 1830 the Newport and Lancaster congregations had gone out of existence, and the Jewish population had risen only slightly, numbering between four and six thousand. Many Jews converted to Christianity since they could not marry outside the faith and retain it. An astonishing 40 percent never wed. Other Jews were isolated merchants in smaller towns or were frontier traders.
By the 1790s Jews could vote in all states and hold public office in most states. Maryland explicitly granted them that right in 1826. They ensured this through service in the Revolution and their subsequent endorsement by George Washington. When the synagogues congratulated him on his election as president, he responded that "it is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. . . . The Government of the United States gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance." Prominent Revolutionary Jews were Mordecai Sheftall (17351795), who headed Savannah's Revolutionary committee; Major Francis Salvador (1747-1776) of South Carolina, killed early in the war, who served in the Provincial Congress; and Haym Salomon (1740-1785) of New York and later Philadelphia, who gave large sums of money to the new Republic and negotiated much of its foreign exchange. A brigade from Charleston, South Carolina, that included twenty-six Jews ("Lushington's" or "the Jews' brigade) acquitted themselves nobly when the British besieged Savannah in 1779. David Salisbury Franks was an aide to General Washington and later negotiated the United States' first treaty with Morocco.
Anti-Semitism far out of proportion to the presence of Jews was a feature of American political life before 1800. Foreign-born clergy and newspaper publishers whose loyalty to the nation was suspect were leaders in projecting their own marginality onto Jews. During the 1790s, anti-Semitism shifted from anti-Federalist to Federalist hands, as the Jews almost unanimously supported the French Revolution, which granted them full equality, and hence Jefferson's party, which supported that revolution. Jews joined and were leading members of the Democratic Societies and later the Republican Party in several cities. Even practicing Christians, such as Israel Israel and his son John, two prominent Pennsylvania leaders, were objects of anti-Semitism, since it was thought that they could abandon Judaism as a faith but not their Jewish ethnicity. With Jefferson's election to the presidency in 1800, anti-Semitism died out in public debate. Jefferson appointed Jews to office, although he despised Jews who clung to the formalities of a religion he considered superstitious.
Although they were few in number, by the early 1800s German and Central European Jews (Ash-kenazim) had established separate synagogues in several cities. Largely poorer immigrants who came to America after 1760, they chafed under the power of the earlier, wealthy Jewish communities that followed the Sephardic ritual and perpetuated their leadership through self-selection of ruling elders. The newcomers differed in appearance, wearing beards and robes, from the assimilated elite whose numerous portraits are indistinguishable from those of gentiles.
Both groups, however, strictly observed rituals and holidays, performed lengthy services in Hebrew that few could understand, and restricted burials to members in good standing. Young, secularized men in the new Republic sought the religious selfgovernment and comprehensible ritual of their Protestant neighbors: the first Reformed Jewish congregation was founded in 1824 by Isaac Harby (17881828), although few followed before the Civil War. Like Americans in general, Jews—wherever they were sufficiently numerous—also established charitable and fraternal orders. The most visible Jew of the early Republic was Manuel Mordecai Noah (17851851). A controversial figure who served as consul to Tunis and high sheriff of New York City, he fought a duel in Charleston, tried to combat anti-Semitic stereotypes with his plays on the New York stage, was an early Zionist, and planned a rural colony for Jews on Grand Island, south of Niagara Falls, that never attracted his urban coreligionists. Naval captain Uriah Levy (1792-1862) also fought a duel and was a focus of attention for his ultimately successful campaign to abolish flogging. Merchant Judah Touro (1775-1854) of New Orleans was one of the nation's leading philanthropists; he donated ten thousand dollars to help finish the Bunker Hill Monument and gave hundreds of thousands to numerous Christian as well as Jewish charities throughout the nation. Philadelphia's Rebecca Gratz (1781-1869) and her Christian beloved, Samuel Ewing, refused to marry outside their respective faiths; she became the model for Rebecca in Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (1819) and was known throughout Europe and America for her beauty as well as her philanthropy. In the early Republic, Jews were so few in number compared to other groups like the Irish and Germans that following the Federalists' defeat, they attracted little attention until large numbers began to arrive in the 1840s.