Forum: Jews and Pietists in Early America

Introduction: Intersecting Diasporas

Richard J. Ross

THE theme of cultural exchange has been at the heart of early American history and ethnohistory for two decades. The organizers of the Pennsylvania State-Max Kade German-American Research Institute conference on "Jews and Pietists in Dialogue in Enlightenment America" charged participants with uncovering "cultural exchange" among two groups not usually studied in this way: Jews and German-speaking colonists.1 The relative scarcity of direct evidence on the issue, although frustrating, encouraged creative approaches as the following essays illustrate. A. G. Roeber, for instance, explores how German pietists in British America reshaped inherited European ideas about the nature and effects of natural law, or law "written on the heart," in the face of colonial ethnic, religious, and racial pluralism. Seeking to understand the power of natural law among different groups, the pietists established a graded hierarchy. According to this hierarchy, law written on the heart exercised its strongest sway among Christians conversant with revealed Scripture, while touching weakly, if at all, "heathen" Africans and Native Americans. Jews who embraced the revelation of the Old Testament but not the Gospel, the pietists thought, shared characteristics with both Christians and heathens and so occupied a middle position on the spectrum. Jews served as an important theological category for the pietists, even while leaving comparatively few traces in surviving records of their interactions with German Christians. In contrast to Roeber, Holly Snyder focuses intensively on one of those traces. In 1759, a Lutheran minister in Georgia recorded in his diary that a Jewish shopkeeper encouraged him to read a Berlin rabbi's sermon, translated and reprinted in The American Magazine, a Philadelphia periodical edited by an Anglican clergyman. Snyder undertakes a "close interrogation" of this single conversation to uncover the pattern of Jewish and pietist religious dialogue in the colony. German-speaking Jews, living in tension with their co-religionists from Portugal, sought out pietists connected to them by language and by shared approval of the present Prussian-British alliance. But these affinities never overcame the strains of disparate faiths and disputes over conversion.	1
The conference organizers, however, did more than direct a familiar inquiry toward new groups. They innovated by investigating dialogues between two peoples, Jews and Germans, whom they termed "diaspora" communities.2 Scholars of cultural exchange in early America have not typically focused on interacting diasporas, or at least have not conceptualized their work in these terms. The predominant model of cultural exchange is between a core and a periphery--either between a British metropolis and its colonies, or between an Anglophone settler population connected to that metropolis and a variety of European, African, and Native American populations.	2
To call Germans and Jews members of a diaspora implies more than that they lived outside a homeland. As the concept is used in the burgeoning political science and ethnic studies literature, a diaspora results when a group migrates to a host country where it becomes a minority striving to preserve cultural cohesion and maintain identification with the original homeland. Facing an ambivalent reception, the diasporic community suspects that it will never be fully accepted by the host society and may long, at times, for a return to the homeland. It typically builds communal organizations that cultivate solidarity within the group while creating divided or dual loyalties to the host country and homeland.3 By this token, English settlers in North America experienced the cultural displacement of a periphery rather than a diaspora. However conflicted their relationship to the metropolis, however much they feared degeneration and provincialism or celebrated their reforms, they worked variants on English models. They did not live as a self-conscious minority in a land run by others, the French, say, or the Spanish, struggling to sustain language, folkways, and ethnic identity against the incomprehension, skepticism, or prodding curiosity of officials and neighbors. The English established the ground rules in the colonies that they populated and controlled. In the last instance, politics, the economy, and law remain tied to their metropolis. English settlers were not "guests" in someone else's "home."	. . .