One of my occasional hobbies is to glance at auction catalogs of Jewish books. In them, I learn about fascinating works that I never heard of, as well as editions of famous tomes that are particularly rare, early, and valuable. Reading the descriptions of the works and their provenance provides its own sort of education.
This week, I received notice from Dan Wyman Books about the sale of a complete edition of the first American Jewish periodical. The author / editor / publisher, Samuel Henry Jackson, was apparently the first publisher of Jewish and Hebrew books in New York City. At the time, in the first quarter of the 19th century, there were only 3,000 Jews in the country out of 10 million who lived along the Atlantic coast–almost 1,000 of them in New York City. For someone so thoroughly forgotten, Jackson published a number of US firsts, including the first Hebrew prayer book and the first Haggadah.
Jackson’s publication was called, jarringly, The Jew, and its subtitle indicates its purpose: “A defence of Judaism against all adversaries and particularly against the insidious attacks of Israel’s Advocate.” The latter was, in the words of the auction house, a benign sounding “publication of the American Society for Meliorating the Condition of the Jews (ASMCJ), a missionary publication endeavoring to convert Jews to Christianity.” In other words, the first US Jewish magazine was created to fight Christian missionaries. It ran as a monthly for two years, 1823-25, 24 issues, before running out of money. Its rarity derives from the fact that few subscribed and fewer saved their copies; even the Library of Congress lacks a full set.
Jackson apparently wrote all, or nearly all, the articles, even some items ostensibly contributed by other pseudonymous authors (Abraham, Moses, Camden). Much of the content came in response to material in the missionary publication. Perhaps Jackson’s most interesting point is that the Hebrew language can serve as a bulwark against missionaries; he laments the widespread ignorance of the language that reflects a similar ignorance of Jewish texts and practices among his American co-religionists. As he colorfully puts it,”By neglecting the teaching of our natal language, we leave our members, our brothers, our children, exposed to the wiles, the machinations of the enemy, who thirst to mislead them.”Jackson’s activities broadly were an attempt to educate other Jews; he helped to found Hevrat Hinnukh Ne’arim, a society to promote Jewish education, which later became the foundation for the Manhattan synagogue B’nai Jeshurun.
According to an article about The Jew, the ASMCJ was the first missionary organization in the US targeting Jews. Jews had certainly been subjected to ample attempts at conversion previously, since their arrival in the US in 1654, but only one-on-one. This organization was founded by a British Jewish convert affiliated with the bluntly named Society for the Conversion of the Jews in London, who seeded nearly 200 chapters of the ASMCJ. Fortunately, it too did not last for very long, losing funding and enthusiasm over time. As Jackson pointed out, even as American Jews were subjected to missionary efforts, they were also allowed the freedom, unlike Jews in Eastern Europe, to voice their opposition to those efforts in the public sphere.
In our times, it’s rare to find Jewish literature that is openly setting out to defend Judaism, presumably because we no longer feel the need for such writing, but until recently a great many Jewish authors wrote in an apologetic spirit. At times when Jews were largely viewed with suspicion, when our religion was portrayed with dangerous caricature, generally through the polemics of the New Testament, and our society and character was considered pernicious, most Jewish writers saw their role as rising to the defense of our people and traditions. Today, as we have been seeing a resurgence of antisemitism and organizing conferences about ways to combat it, we might consider the noble efforts of Samuel Henry Jackson who, like contemporary Jewish schools, saw in Jewish education the best means for instilling Jews with the knowledge and pride needed to combat attacks against us.