The Jewish Founding Father: Asser Levy

Asser Levy was known as the most litigious person in New Amsterdam. And he was absolutely loved for it.

We’re used to thinking of American Jews as liberals. For 100 years, the vast majority of the Jewish community has voted for Democrats. Yet this was by no means a foregone conclusion.

The history of Jews in America began 250 years before the alliance of Jews and the Left, in 1654, with the arrival of a ragtag group of 23 refugees who had been through quite an ordeal by the time they docked in what was then New Amsterdam, a booming Dutch port town on the Hudson. These Jewish Pilgrim Fathers and Mothers were named as four men, their wives, and children. Among them was Jewish Founding Father Asser Levy.

These 23 refugees had been fleeing Recife, Brazil, which had been retaken from the Dutch by the Spanish. Spain was in the throes of the Inquisition and and gave the Jews three months to get lost. 15 ships full of Jews sailed from Recife back to Amsterdam, and 14 made it safely. But it was the fifteenth that would change the course of history, when it was blown off course, beset upon by pirates, rescued by a French captain, and taken where he was headed—to New Amsterdam.

Their problems were just beginning. When the Jews arrived in New Amsterdam, the French captain refused to relinquish their belongings, insisting that the Jewish refugees owed him money for their rescue. The courts were conflicted: The policy of New Amsterdam was to welcome immigrants, but they felt the captain could not just be ignored. It was decided that the Jews’ property would be sold at auction to pay their fare.

How surprised those Jewish refugees must have been when “a group of New Netherlanders who had been defending the Jews arrived early, began buying up items at nominal prices, and then handed them over to their original owners,” as one historian tells it, in “one of the earliest recorded examples of what might be called Christian charity in America.”

It wasn’t all Christian charity all the time. The Jewish pilgrims faced open bigotry from New Amsterdam’s governor, Peter Stuyvesant, who wrote to the headquarters of the Dutch West India Company in Amsterdam asking for permission to expel the Jews from the colony. To Stuyvesant’s dismay, the Company told him the Jews must be allowed to stay; it seems the Jews of Holland had written to remind the Company “that many of the Jewish Nation are principal shareholders of the West India Company.”

It would not be the last time Stuyvesant would learn just how much of a thorn the Jews could be in his side—one Jew especially: Asser Levy.

When Stuyvesant got orders to attack the Swedes on the Delaware, he enlisted all the adults in the New Amsterdam colony to stand guard—but not the Jews. Them Stuyvesant excluded “owing to the disgust and unwillingness of the trainbands to be fellow soldiers with the aforesaid nation, and to be on guard with the same at the guard house,” as he put it in a pure projection of his own antisemitism. Instead, he decided that the Jews should be forced to pay a monthly fine in lieu of guard duty.

And to this, Asser Levy simply said no. He would not pay. He would serve guard duty like everyone else.

In his “no,” in even considering refusing the benignly bigoted standard that was imposed on him, Asser Levy drew a line in the sand. He would not accept being told he was a second-class citizen. He would not accept a different standard for himself based on his faith. He would not allow an antisemite to define him, or convince him that he was loathed or less than. He would not pay that tax. He would serve as a guardsman like everyone else.

Asser Levy’s refusal was a defining moment for America’s Jews about what it meant to be a Jew on American soil. But it went beyond that. It got to the heart of what it meant to be an American.

Asser Levy’s refusal to accept bigotry from the state signified a new standard for all, a standard whereby a man committed to his faith could make such a demand—and be heard; after an initial rejection (Stuyvesant told Levy that “if he was not satisfied with the law, he might go elsewhere if he liked,” something Asser Levy had absolutely no intention of doing), Levy appealed to Holland, which once again informed Stuyvesant that he’d better stop risking the investments of the shareholders of the West India Company.

That settled it: Asser Levy would stand for guard duty.

From Day 1, Jewish life in America was destined to be different, as if the soil itself, even before there was a Bill of Rights or a Constitution or a First Amendment, rejected the Jew hatred that seeped out of every cobblestone and pillar of Europe, where the very land cried out with the blood of Jews.

It was a major victory for the fledgling Jewish community—but it was not enough for Levy. Having been granted the responsibility of standing guard, he went right back to court and immediately demanded the citizens’ rights that accompanied guard duty for the Christian citizens of the colony.

“The Jew claims that such ought not to be refused him as he keeps watch and ward like other burghers or citizens, showing a burgher certificate from the city of Amsterdam that the Jew is burgher there,” the court recorded.

Once again, the request went back and forth to Holland, and on April 21, 1657, the Jews were given rights as burghers in New Amsterdam.

This zealousness for his rights, for the equal status that was owed him by the state despite worshipping differently, because this was America, dammit, became his signature move, as an American and as a Jew, for the rest of his life. Asser Levy petitioned, again successfully, to become one of just six people licensed as a butcher in the whole settlement, one of the most important jobs of the colony and a job granted only to those deemed to have the finest character. He also became the first Jewish real estate owner in America, and it was in Asser Levy’s synagogue that the first Torah scroll in America would be read from.

But it was primarily as a litigant that Levy came to be known. Again and again, he would apply to the courts to stand up for his rights, whether he was suing the local government or his fellow citizens. The name Asser Levy appears in New Amsterdam court documents more prominently than that of any other citizen. His suits covered a range of topics, from arrests to building contracts to apprenticeships. More than once, he secured the reprimand of an official who had insulted him, or the punishment of a court officer who had failed to do his job well.

Just six years before Asser Levy arrived in America, Ukrainian Cossacks killed 50,000 Jews in mass pogroms. Now, Asser Levy was suing the most powerful officials in the colony for insulting him. From its earliest days, Jewish life in America was destined to be different.

What’s truly amazing is that New Amsterdam’s most litigious citizen was universally loved and respected. “Though a litigant is not an amiable character to contemplate, in Levy’s case this characteristic certainly had a good effect,” notes one 19th-century historian Leon Hühner. “It taught his opponents that he was at all times ready to defend his rights.” And in New Amsterdam, this was a precious, even enviable quality. “His honest opposition to imposition and insult, his constant jealousy of his rights, his sterling, honesty and integrity, seem to have gained for him the respect and friendship of his Christian fellows.” Levy was frequently asked to be the executor of the wills of his Christian neighbors and was trusted to watch over a defendant’s goods until court decisions came in. He intervened on behalf of Jews in other states and succeeded in having court-imposed fines reduced, “as a token of [the court’s] respect to the said Mr. Asser Levy.”

The impact Asser Levy had on the colony was immense. It was Asser Levy, a litigious Jew, who taught his fellow burghers not only what it meant to be a citizen, what it meant to have rights, but what it meant to hold them dear, to fight for them, to accept nothing less than the fullest respect from the authorities—for it was not the authorities who granted freedom but God. It was something the people who lived here seemed to understand intuitively.

The impact Asser Levy had on the colony was immense. It was Asser Levy, a litigious Jew, who taught his fellow burghers what it truly meant to be an American.

It was its own revolution. For the previous 2 millennia, Jews had existed as a tiny and hated minority throughout Christendom. They were only allowed to live in specific places, work in specific industries, and even marry under specific conditions and auspices. They were subject to conspiracy theories which regularly led to mass murder—that they poisoned the wells, that they murdered Christian children and baked their blood into matzas, that they had killed Jesus Christ, that they manipulated currencies for their own nefarious ends.

Yet from Day 1, Jewish life in America was destined to be different. It’s as if the soil itself, even before there was a Bill of Rights or a Constitution or a First Amendment, rejected the Jew hatred that seeped out of every cobblestone and pillar of Europe, where the very land cried out with the blood of Jews.

On this land, the soil would not cry out. On this land, Jewish blood would not be spilt. No one here would die as a Jew, and if they did, their murderers would be hunted down and punished to the fullest extent of the law.

The more dignified, sensitive Jewish souls who came ashore with Asser Levy may have been content to exist without the malicious antisemitism of the Inquisition they escaped. But it was Asser Levy—gregarious, litigious, obstinate, uncompromising, zealous of his rights and willing to go to court every damn day to have them protected—who prevailed upon a hostile governor to give up the fight against equal rights for Jews in New Amsterdam, and in so doing, taught his Christian neighbors what it means to be an American.

This essay is excerpted from The Jews and the Left, which comes out next week. Order a copy here.