Revolutionary Jews From Spinoza to Marx by Jonathan I. Israel;

Author:Jonathan I. Israel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)

JEWS AND SPANISH AMERICA’S STRUGGLE FOR LIBERATION

Despite Nassy’s attraction to “the great principles of liberty and equality of which the United States gave the first example to the world,” he kept his promise to return to Surinam after three years. Heading back to the Caribbean, he departed Philadelphia extolling the new American reality. He sailed by way of St. Thomas, a Danish island where he next spent several months getting to know local conditions and the Jewish community there.52 Whilst there, Nassy found himself confronted and on all sides surrounded by the greatest contest between major European powers ever to occur in the Caribbean region as revolutionary France and its new Dutch ally pressed on with their relentless war of principles and arms against the opposing efforts of Britain allied to Bourbon royalist Spain, which strove to stem the Haitian Revolution by invading from Puerto Rico and to check the occasional overspill of revolutionary ferment from Curaçao and neighboring islands onto Venezuela. Nassy finally reached Surinam in January 1796, a year after the French revolutionary conquest of the United Provinces. On arriving back, he found himself amidst a tide of optimism in the Dutch colonies, the wider Caribbean, and with increasing impact also in the neighboring parts of Spanish America—at least among those with views resembling his own; for some, it was a moment of almost messianic expectation of the redemption of mankind. Nassy and his friends celebrated the birth of the revolutionary new age, warmly embracing the principles of liberty and equality in full expectation of a period of intense constitutional debate and reform, of drawing up plans for revising virtually every aspect of colonial public life, administration, education and law.53

Nassy and those like-minded active in the late eighteenth-century New World Jewish Enlightenment were eager enough to celebrate the Batavian together with the American and French Revolutions, sharing as they did the fervor of Condorcet, Priestley, Price, Jefferson, Franklin and Paine in outright opposition to Robespierre and the Montagne on the one side, and America’s “aristocrats” opposing the democratic tendency (and the French Revolution)—Washington, Hamilton, Adams, Gouverneur Morris and America’s political Anglophiles—on the other. To those who thought like Nassy and the American Jeffersonians and Paineites opposing the “Federalists,” the fundamental principles of the two great revolutions, those of America and France, were indeed one and the same with democratic republican equality the unifying and overriding thread.54 Nassy’s 1798 pamphlet, indebted especially to Dohm and Mendelssohn for its political and moral arguments, urges Jewish emancipation not on the basis of economic usefulness but for the purpose of transforming Jews into equal citizens fully participating and integrated into society.

In addition, Nassy hoped the Jewish contribution to the sciences and general learning, to improving the wider world, would increase once the heavy burden of prejudice and restrictions finally lifted: “if, despite the abject state in which it finds itself, this nation has the honor of having given to the world the likes of Spinoza, Orobio, Uriel da Costa, and Zacuto,” how

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