Catholicism and Judaism in the Colonies

Already by the mid-17th century, incipient Jewish and Catholic communities presaged the later expansion of American religious pluralism beyond Protestantism. Already, too, those communities were being changed by the challenges of American physical and cultural geography: distance from Europe, coastal orientation, river-fed Chesapeake farmlands, and Anglo-Protestant dominance.

Jews settled America as part of a long history of exile, migration, minority status, and intercultural blending. In this case, expulsion by Catholic Spain and Portugal in the 1490s sent them to lives of commerce in such Atlantic seaports as Amsterdam and Recife, Brazil. Portugal’s takeover of the latter in 1654 drove twenty-three people from there to New Amsterdam, where their commercial influence prevented their expulsion by the governor. They formed Congregation Shearith Israel in 1656 to meet their religious needs. Two years later, fifteen families from the Netherlands formed another congregation in relatively tolerant Newport, Rhode Island. By the mid-18th century, congregations appeared in other seaports: Savannah (1733), Charleston (1741), and Philadelphia (1745). These early communities consisted largely of Sephardic Jews, whose Iberian experience had generated variations on traditional rituals and a culture combining Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, and Muslim elements. Central and eastern European (Ashkenazic) Jews began arriving in the 18th century, becoming a significant presence in Philadelphia and outnumbering Sephardim in New York by 1800.

America was home to approximately 2,000 Jews in 1776. They faced discrimination, but commercial success and distance from European persecution freed them from overt hostility and encouraged interaction with their Christian peers. A more serious challenge was that their small numbers, urban settlement patterns, and colonial isolation from European Jewry left them perennially short of funds, without rabbinical services, and rent by ethnic tensions.

Catholicism was a target of persecution in Protestant England, but the well-connected Catholic Calvert family secured colonial havens, first in 1621 on Newfoundland’s Avalon peninsula, and then, after Avalon filled with Protestants, on a tract between Virginia and New Netherland named Maryland after the Catholic wife of King Charles I. In 1634, arriving colonists established their initial settlement, St. Mary’s, on the Potomac River. The new colony protected Catholicism by enacting religious toleration, and its landowning and officeholding elite was at first largely Catholic. Catholic religious life there was vital, with Jesuits offering regular catechisms, delivering Sunday sermons, erecting chapels, and opening schools and Indian missions. But migrating Puritans and other Protestants soon outnumbered Catholics—who constituted 25 percent of Maryland’s population by 1641 but only 9 percent by 1708—and challenged Catholic rule. The Calverts were overthrown temporarily in 1654 amid Puritan hegemony in England, and permanently in 1691, after the Glorious Revolution. Anglicanism then became Maryland’s established religion, and by 1750 there were three times as many Anglican as there were Catholic congregations in Maryland. Still, the Catholic presence—including gentry, indentured servants, and slaves, English, Irish, and African—remained more substantial there than in any other English colony, and Maryland continued to be the center of American Catholicism well into the 19th century.

Tolerant Pennsylvania attracted substantial numbers of German and Irish Catholics and—again thanks to Jesuit activity—became the only colony besides Maryland to develop stable Catholic institutions. By 1733, a small Jesuit chapel in Philadelphia catered to a diverse urban group of German, Indian, and (after 1755) French Catholics, and Jesuits opened rural missions for Germans at Reading, Conewago, Goshenhoppen, and Lancaster. Pennsylvania’s Catholic population was second only to Maryland’s by 1750, but it remained small (about 3 percent in 1765) and ethnically divided. Elsewhere in the colonies, official hostility prevented Catholics from creating lasting institutions. They avoided Puritan New England, where they were denied religious freedom and numbered only 600 by 1785. There were also few in the South. In New York, a brief period of toleration in the 1680s allowed Jesuit missionaries to open a chapel at Fort James and a school, but this period ended with the Glorious Revolution. Still, New York remained a cosmopolitan colony and continued to attract a multiethnic Catholic population.

America’s 25,000 Catholics continued to face Protestant mistrust on the eve of the American Revolution, but Catholic participation in the Continental Congress and the nation’s alliance with France improved Catholicism’s public image, and independence stimulated its organizational life. In Baltimore, America’s first diocese was established in 1789, Mount Saint Mary’s Seminary opened in 1791, and a cathedral was constructed in 1804; its Roman architecture declared both its Catholic and republican identities. A few years later, American nuns established the Sisters of Charity in Emmitsburg, Maryland.

As the 19th century dawned, American Jews and Catholics were small but firmly rooted communities, facing a future of ethnic multiplicity and adaptation to Protestant dominance.

Cecilius Calvert. The Catholic Calvert family established Maryland in 1634 as a haven for Roman Catholics, and until 1691 wielded political power there.