ABSTRACT
On May 16, 1743, John Peter Zenger's New-York Weekly Journal described an incident in which a Jewish funeral procession had been assaulted by a mob. According to one learned Christian who had borne aggrieved witness to it, the mob had “insulted the dead in such a vile manner that to mention all would shock a human ear.” 1 The incident was exceptional, even in 1743, but it indicated that America was not in every respect a new world. If some hundred and twenty years later the historian George Bancroft could write that American law was “not an acquisition from abroad,” but was “begotten from the American mind, of which it was a natural and inevitable, but also a slow and gradual development,” 2 the growth of political equality for the American Jew — and for other religious minorities as well — is a measure of how slowly and gradually that “American mind” could work. What Sanford Cobb said of the reception tendered Roger Williams' notions of religious liberty, that
not in a day will the enunciation of a new principle, especially if it be radical and revolutionary, lodge itself in the minds of men with all those details of regulated application to which only experience can give form and authority, 3
