ABSTRACT
It is what might be termed a cardinal principle of American Jewish historical study that, in the decisive eighteenth-century conflict that marked the birth of the United States, the whole of the diminutive Jewish community almost without exception embraced the “patriot” cause. The assertion is to be found in virtually every treatise on American Jewish history, and was even endorsed by the committee appointed in 1913 by the American Jewish Historical Society to report on material in foreign archives. They discovered in fact, surprising though it may seem, no more than two unmistakably Jewish names in the findings of the Commission of Enquiry, appointed to go into the claims made by Loyalist sufferers at the close of the War of Independence (transcriptions of which are accessible in New York). Nor were they slow to point out the lesson which they drew from this fact. As the late Albert M. Friedenberg wrote in his Report: 1
I have not … the purpose of emphasizing or giving point to the special plea that the Jews of America during the Revolutionary War were almost to a man adherents of the patriot cause, although this was the indubitable fact ….
… it is fairly deducible … that the two names of Jewish Tories … comprise practically all the Jews mentioned in the American Loyalist papers. Hence these documents may be adduced as an additional and tolerably positive proof that the Jews of America during our Revolution were, quite uniformly, holders of the patriot fortunes.
