Here’s a story for Jewish American Heritage Month and the nation’s approaching 250th birthday that you probably didn’t know:
When American Colonies formally declared their independence on July 4, 1776, the first foreign government to recognize them as the United States of America was the tiny Caribbean island of Sint (Saint) Eustatius, a Dutch-controlled outpost and international trading hub. The recognition came in the form of an official gun salute to the arriving American brig Andrew Doria and has gone down in history as the “first salute” to the new nation.
After that symbolic moment, the island’s 600 or so Jewish citizens, many who had family and business ties in the American Colonies, got to work as some of the new nation’s best suppliers. They sent guns, provisions and basic supplies around the British blockade and into the hands of revolutionaries. During the war, the island’s harbors teemed with American ships. The supply route helped the Americans keep fighting and infuriated the British crown.
“For the British, the island of St. Eustatius becomes a huge thorn in the side, and Admiral [Sir George] Rodney recognizes that Jews are playing a decisive role in terms of sending provisions,” said Laura Arnold Leibman, the Leonard J. Milberg professor in American Jewish Studies at Princeton University, during a lecture at the Library earlier this month. “He decides he’s going to invade the island. He rounds up all the Jews, kicks them off the island and takes all of their goods.”
Rodney wrote in 1781 that “had it not been for that nest of vipers … this infamous island, the American rebellion could not possibly have subsisted.”
British control of the island (today known locally as Statia) didn’t last, but Jewish contributions to the American cause did. Jews were only about 0.1 percent of the Colonial population of about 2.5 million in 1776 but participated in ways that established their future in the new nation.
“The Revolution both shaped Jewish American communities and changed the course of Jewish American history,” Leibman told her afternoon crowd in the Jefferson Building. “… Like their Christian neighbors, Jews came to the Colonies seeking religious freedom and economic opportunity, and they often came escaping persecution in other places, whether that was pogroms or just social discrimination.”