ABSTRACT
Though this scholarly work does not add much to the detailed knowledge of the history of the Jews which we already owe to Leon Buhner and others, it illumines the general situation in which Jews, though treated as foreign refugees in England, became leading citizens in the youngest of our original thirteen states, and played a leading part in the Revolution which established the independence of our country. In a humane but realistic spirit Dr. Strickland shows how the original motives for the settlement — Dr. Bray’s missionary zeal to convert the negroes and Oglethorpe’s desire to help those who were poor, imprisoned for debt, or out of work in London — were modified by the colonists’ sympathy with the suffering Protestants in Germany and by the imperialist commercial policy of England — so that instead of a colony for members of the Church of England there developed an asylum for most diverse peoples and a state with a liberally tolerant regime. Even the philanthropic Oglethorpe was at first disinclined to let the Jews stay in the new colony, but the beneficent work of Dr. Nunez and the great helpfulness of the Jewish settlers generally made them indispensable for the growth of the settlement.
