A Promised Land: Jewish Patriots, the American Revolution, and the Birth of Religious Freedom - Hardcover

by Adam Jortner (Author)

A new history that centers Judaism at the dawn of the United States

Jews played a critical role both in winning the American Revolution--fighting for the Patriot cause from Bunker Hill to Yorktown--and in defining the republic that was created from it. As the most visible non-Christian religion, Judaism was central to the debate over religious freedom in America at a critical juncture. During the war every city with a synagogue fell to the British-with the exception of Philadelphia, birthplace to the Declaration of Independence and a core of resistance. Jewish patriots throughout the colonies flocked to the city, where they re-founded the local synagogue as a distinctively American organization. After the war, Jews began to press for full citizenship in the hope that liberty would apply to everyone, and that the limits to freedom imposed on Jews in the Old World would be removed in the New.

As Adam Jortner shows in this eye-opening account, the decision to extend citizenship to all religions was not a twentieth-century phenomenon prompted by immigration and Supreme Court rulings, but a debate the Founding generation itself had had-unambiguously deciding against the idea of nation defined exclusively by Christianity. Instead, the Founders, Jewish patriots, and their allies, sought and achieved the broadest possible definition of religious liberty, and the separation of church and state. A Promised Land sheds new light on this key struggle in early America and the driving forces behind it.

Author Biography

Adam Jortner is Goodwin-Philpott Professor of History at Auburn University. He was a writer of the TV show Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego? and the creator of series 10 Great What-Ifs in American History, as well as the Audible Originals series Faith and the Founding Fathers and American Monsters. He is the author of The Gods of Prophetstown: The Battle of Tippecanoe and the Holy War for the American Frontier, published by Oxford University Press.