17 Spring 2026 Jews actively participated in the revolution, and despite the minuscule size of the Jewish population (about 2,0003,000), the Revolutionary army had about a dozen Jewish officers, including one full colonel and a handful of lieutenant colonels and majors. During the War, Congress sent Lieutenant Colonel David S. Franks to Morocco and Tunisia as a diplomat. Franks later served as Chief of Staff during Thomas Jefferson’s diplomatic mission to France.4 In 1776 Jefferson marked up a proposed Virginia law to allow “all Foreign Protestants” to naturalize. Crossing out the discriminatory language, Jefferson wrote in the margin: “Jews [are] advantageous.” The law subsequently passed without any religious restriction.5 In 1790 the federal naturalization act had no religious qualification for citizenship. However, it restricted naturalization to “any free white person.”6 From the beginning, Jewish immigrants were considered “white,” and vast numbers of them became citizens.7 Congress did not remove the limitation to “white” persons naturalizing until 1952. Jews happily accepted their status as being religious, rather than racial or ethnic, especially because the Bill of Rights and all state constitutions guaranteed Jews freedom of worship. The U.S. Constitution flatly prohibited any religious tests for federal office holding, and from the beginning Jews held various federal positions. Ten of the first state constitutions (including the fourteenth state, Vermont) limited state office holding to Protestants or Christians. By 1800, five of these states removed such discrimination, and after 1791 every new state banned religious tests for office holding. This discrimination only applied to state offices, and in 1801 President Jefferson appointed Reuben Etting to be the U.S. Marshal for Maryland, even though as a Jew he could not have held a state office in Maryland. By the Civil War only New Hampshire and North Carolina (both with tiny Jewish communities) prohibited Jewish officeholding. Following the American Revolution, Jews served in state legislatures and local governments, and as lawyers, judges, college professors, diplomats, students at the United States Military Academy (West Point), and naval officers. Jews served in the U.S. House and Senate starting in the 1840s. During the Civil War, Lincoln’s army had six Jewish generals and about 50 colonels, lieutenant colonels, and majors. This contrasts with the British army and all western European armies, where there were no Jewish generals and hardly any other high ranking officers.8 This integration into the mainstream of American society continued until World War I. The American Jewish community grew from about 15,000 in 1840 to more than 150,000 by 1860, as Jews from the failed European revolutions of the 1840s came to America. Among them were Adolph and Frederika Brandeis, who moved from Prague to Louisville, Kentucky, where their son Louis D. Brandeis was born in 1856. In 1916 he would become the first Jew on the U.S. Supreme Court and the leader of the American Zionist movement. By then the American Jewish population would be close to four million. 4. Paul Finkelman and Lance J. Sussman, “Defeating Antisemitism in the World’s First Democratic Republic: The American Revolution and Jewish Legal and Political Equality,” 40 TOURO L. REV. 121-71 (2025); Paul Finkelman and Lance J. Sussman, “The American Revolution and the Emergence of Jewish Legal and Political Equality in the New Nation,” 75 AMER. JEWISH ARCHIVES J. 1-47 (2023). 5. 1 THE PAPERS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON 558 (Julian P. Boyd ed., 1950) (Oct. 14, 1776). 6. Naturalization Act of 1790, ch. 3, 1 Stat. 103 (1790). For a full discussion of this, see generally Gabriel J. Chin & Paul Finkelman, “The ‘Free White Persons’ Clause of the Naturalization Act of 1790 as Super-Statute,” 65 WM. & MARY L. REV. 1047, 1047-48 (2024). 7. Karen Brodkin, HOW THE JEWS BECAME WHITE FOLKS AND WHAT THAT SAYS ABOUT RACE IN AMERICA (1988) offers sociological arguments about discrimination against Jews but ignores the very clear legal position of Jews in law that they were in fact “white” for purposes of naturalization and immigration. Furthermore, the comparison ignores the differences between private social discrimination and mandatory required segregation of African Americans in much of the United States until the passage of federal civil rights legislation in the 1960s. No states created separate schools or other institutions for Jews and none ever denied them the right to vote, marry other “white” people, or operate their own houses of worship or enter any professions they chose. While Congress prohibited Blacks from military service until the Civil War, and then segregated Black soldiers until the 1940s, Jews served in the military, graduated from service academies, and reached the highest level of the officer corps. 8. Adam D. Mendelsohn, JEWISH SOLDIERS IN THE CIVIL WAR: THE UNION ARMY (2022); Derek J. Penslar, JEWS AND THE MILITARY: A HISTORY (2013).
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