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It was pointed out to me today that probably the first settlers in the New World who celebrated Thanksgiving besides being Christian were also anti-Semites. So my question how do most American Jews feel about celebrating Thanksgiving?
I was curious about the statement you made as the basis of your thread, as I often am when someone declares that a particular "They" group-think/do/say thus-and-so. I had never heard of any reference one way or another as to what the Puritan separatists who became known as "The Pilgrims" thought about Jews. So, I looked it up.
The Puritans in England (named because of their stated desire to purify The Church of England) revered the Jews as being closer to their way of thinking than the state Church. The separatists who ended up coming to what is now Massachussets to dodge persecution saw themselves as being in a similar situation to the Hebrews during the Exodus, and the religious laws they established were based more heavily on the laws of the "OT" than the "NT". Of course, they were NOT Jews, they were Christians, and if a guy named Liebowitz had been on the Mayflower, I'm pretty sure there would have been intense efforts to convert him.
There doesn't seem to be much evidence that the first Puritans were anti-Semitic beyond their basic belief that Christianity was the right religion, but they seemed much more concerned that THEIR Christianity was the correct form because it was closer to its Jewish origins than the Church of England from which they had fled.
To the Jewish posters here who do celebrate Thanksgiving, I hope it was a happy day full of blessings.
Thank you. It was.
Growing up in the 1950's/60s as an American Jew with large extended family here and in Israel (pre-establishment of the modern state), my family enjoyed Thanksgiving as the one American national holiday we could enjoy fully. We had issues with many of the rest of America's national holidays except Veterans related, as nearly all age-capable in our family had volunteered to serve in WWII. Of course, Christmas and Easter, which are also American national holidays, are nothing to us. By contrast, Thanksgiving was something all my bubbes/zaydes/tantes could get their heads and hearts around for what it represented to them as recent immigrants to the US. They felt, and often expressed, a deep gratitude not to the Pilgrims but to the U.S.A. for having taken them in during the late 19th/early20th century, providing safety and opportunity in free public education to their children, which led to eventual university in fields unavailable to Jews back in pre-Bolshevik Russia (lawyer, doctor..). The physical safety from pogroms and draft into the army of Russia was a huge relief to them all. So the classic Thanksgiving history of Columbus, Pilgrims and Puritans was just a curious historic pre-story for what they really loved about America, namely, its freedom from persecution. Here, they could be confident they'd be free under the law to practice Judaism and not be killed, persecuted, or discriminated against in the public sphere simply for being who they are, which is: Jews.
My husband's and my own grandparents all emigrated to the U.S. before the Holocaust, but the American-born first generations (my parents) all enlisted to fight in American armies against Hitler. So we feel genuinely grateful to the USA as rescuers of the early 20th-century immigrant, including the European Jews of that time, and as a great military adversary against the Nazi regime. Pilgrims are just something we study in public school, not much care for or against them, except that they laid the groundwork for the American Constitution which really did interst my family for its revolutionary democratic form of government that ensured American Jews, and later as connection to Israel for support of mid and late 20th c wars, that all my cousins there fought through as soldiers. The democracy connection between the USA and Israel resonates as another Thanksgiving theme in our households.
Those of my aunts and cousins who've made aliyah to Israel since then do get homesick for Thanksgiving and still serve those "American" foods and gather for that in Israel sometimes still.
Scheduling on a Thursday was easy, including long-distance travel needs across this large country. In USA, everyone had the day off work and school. The long-distance university students all had at least 4 days off and could travel home, athough they often had term papers and exam study to do over that weekend.
My older brother brought many friends home, and the folksinging together I remember still resonates in my mind 50+ years later to today.
As I raised my own children, we paused to each express to everyone around the table to each say what we felt was especially reason for gratitude in this past autumn season or year. Then we did the Hebrew motzi for any meal and enjoyed a well-cooked meal. Since it's on a Thursday, I particularly enjoyed some peace the next day because most of the Shabbat meal was already cooked; I just reassembled the leftovers into casserole dishes for the following Friday night. Very easy.
As for history and what the holiday represents, my parents/uncles/grandparents were all immigrants and first-generations out of Czarist Russia persecution of Jews. My husband's family, same thing. My own grandfather had run away from home in Baltimore to then-"Palestine" to join the Jewish Legion in 1917 to help General Allenby free the Jewish homeland from the Ottoman Empire. We talked more about those histories than the Pilgrim messages, although at one point in my life I did live 20 minutes from Plymouth Rock so I know all of that history, too, from public school training as a school child. That history I updated a bit, by reading and listening each year to rabbinic sermons which were always amped up because, with college students visiting home, the families came out in strongest numbers for Shabbat as a college-age homecoming pleasure together. Students saw each other in temple who hadn't seen each other since high school, so they were glad. For many, Thanksgiving was the first time they'd been home since departing each year for college, so it was a "don't miss" trip home. My brother brought home his Jewish college friends who lived very far away, geographically from their own families and couldn't fly back and forth within the 4-day window. That's how all that American folksinging tradition began in our house after the dinner, as they arrived with their guitars. They were so handsome and musical that I decided to apply to their same college, which is where I eventually met the man I married, so I feel extra happy about remembering Thanksgiving.
On the history, over the years my husband has been keen to update us all on the progress proving Columbus was most likely Jewish, since his departure dates connect with the certain key points in the Spanish Inquisition. Unusually, he required his ship crew to stay on-board the night before departure, which history knows was the exact day of expulsion of Jews from Spain. He wanted to get off at earliest hour and might have been protecting them, or with the many who were already living hidden Jewish lives by then (Marannos), didn't want to lose any crew members.
It is certainly known in history that Columbus' cartographer was Jewish, and it was a Jewish profession in those days because it required knowledge of many languages, travel experience and literacy skills (math) not available to the average ship crew member. And since some understand the cartographer was first to actually set foot on the American soil, for all we know.. it could be after such a harrowing long ocean voyage, the first European words spoken on this soil weren't European at all, but the Hebrew prayer of Gomel! Anyway, these were the kinds of things the rabbis liked to sermonize or we chatted up[ around our Thanksgiving tables over many years. FOr years, everyone tried to prove Columbus was Jewish, as a source of pride, but now that he's been shown to be terrible in other ethical practices, and connected with a culture of slave-trading in the Caribbean, Jews aren't happy to claim him as their possible Moranno ancestor any more.
As for the early Pilgrims, the leaders' diary has some Hebrew as was normal for literate men of his time. He writes comparatively of the Pilgrim's experience to the Exodus from Egypt, escaping King James of England and religious persecution against their own practices there. There were some comparisons of the historic "first Thanksgiving meal" (now known to be one of many autumn feasts with Indians) to Sukkot, and his diary goes on about this comparison a bit. The Mayflower landed after a difficult boat voyage, losing some on board and even more the first winter in the Bay Colony of Massachusetts. They nearly starved until the Indians showed them some better ways of planting the following Spring. SO by the time autumn came around, they were truly exhausted but grateful to harvest food and eat well, knowing they had some different kinds of foods that would last through the upcoming cold winter. The gratitude to the Indians for not killing them and also showing them some better farming practices was probably a genuine feeling at that time between the two communities then. As we know later, the European history about Indians is frought with bad intentions and results.
Yes, the early Puritans were antiSemitic, as well as anti-woman (Salem witch trials), all in ways that were no more or less than other British of their times. It can't be excused.
But, as a very large canvas for an American Jewish family to appreciate that we got out of pogrom-country and onto safe soil, where freedom to practice religion was ensured, and there would be no establishment of a Christian government, either, by our constitution's First Amendment. Read George Washington in his letter to the Truro Congregation in Rhode Island, basically a thank-you note to the American Jews of his time (specifically, Chaim Solomon) for funding his Revolutionary army when they were freezing and starving. He knew without that injection of money that winter, with Congress unable to provide for troops, he'd have lost the Revolutionary War without the Jewish help. So he was thanking the Truro Congregatio (Sephardim, with Portugese roots in Recife,Brazil, and escaping from the Portugese Inquisition up from South America to North America/Rhode Island today). In his letter, he assured them that in this new nation he intended, there'd be no religious persecution or toleration for bigotry. That exact language reappeared next in the First Amendment of the American Constitution as preface to the "Establishment Clause" which is really the anti-establishment clause stating this would not be a Christian religion nation in its laws. It's all very,very important; often nicknamed "Separation of Church and State." For American Jews, it's been a key to our ability to live and find refuge here for hundreds of years.
Well, you get a sense of how the conversations went around our Thanksgiving table over the decades.
Last edited by BrightRabbit; 11-30-2015 at 10:39 AM..
Touro Congregation is in Rhode Island. Truro's a pretty little beach town on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Since I've visited both, they stuck together in my head!
I was curious about the statement you made as the basis of your thread, as I often am when someone declares that a particular "They" group-think/do/say thus-and-so. I had never heard of any reference one way or another as to what the Puritan separatists who became known as "The Pilgrims" thought about Jews. So, I looked it up.
The Puritans in England (named because of their stated desire to purify The Church of England) revered the Jews as being closer to their way of thinking than the state Church. The separatists who ended up coming to what is now Massachussets to dodge persecution saw themselves as being in a similar situation to the Hebrews during the Exodus, and the religious laws they established were based more heavily on the laws of the "OT" than the "NT". Of course, they were NOT Jews, they were Christians, and if a guy named Liebowitz had been on the Mayflower, I'm pretty sure there would have been intense efforts to convert him.
There doesn't seem to be much evidence that the first Puritans were anti-Semitic beyond their basic belief that Christianity was the right religion, but they seemed much more concerned that THEIR Christianity was the correct form because it was closer to its Jewish origins than the Church of England from which they had fled.
Growing up in the 1950's/60s as an American Jew with large extended family here and in Israel (pre-establishment of the modern state), my family enjoyed Thanksgiving as the one American national holiday we could enjoy fully. We had issues with many of the rest of America's national holidays except Veterans related, as nearly all age-capable in our family had volunteered to serve in WWII. Of course, Christmas and Easter, which are also American national holidays, are nothing to us. By contrast, Thanksgiving was something all my bubbes/zaydes/tantes could get their heads and hearts around for what it represented to them as recent immigrants to the US. They felt, and often expressed, a deep gratitude not to the Pilgrims but to the U.S.A. for having taken them in during the late 19th/early20th century, providing safety and opportunity in free public education to their children, which led to eventual university in fields unavailable to Jews back in pre-Bolshevik Russia (lawyer, doctor..). The physical safety from pogroms and draft into the army of Russia was a huge relief to them all. So the classic Thanksgiving history of Columbus, Pilgrims and Puritans was just a curious historic pre-story for what they really loved about America, namely, its freedom from persecution. Here, they could be confident they'd be free under the law to practice Judaism and not be killed, persecuted, or discriminated against in the public sphere simply for being who they are, which is: Jews.
My husband's and my own grandparents all emigrated to the U.S. before the Holocaust, but the American-born first generations (my parents) all enlisted to fight in American armies against Hitler. So we feel genuinely grateful to the USA as rescuers of the early 20th-century immigrant, including the European Jews of that time, and as a great military adversary against the Nazi regime. Pilgrims are just something we study in public school, not much care for or against them, except that they laid the groundwork for the American Constitution which really did interst my family for its revolutionary democratic form of government that ensured American Jews, and later as connection to Israel for support of mid and late 20th c wars, that all my cousins there fought through as soldiers. The democracy connection between the USA and Israel resonates as another Thanksgiving theme in our households.
Those of my aunts and cousins who've made aliyah to Israel since then do get homesick for Thanksgiving and still serve those "American" foods and gather for that in Israel sometimes still.
Scheduling on a Thursday was easy, including long-distance travel needs across this large country. In USA, everyone had the day off work and school. The long-distance university students all had at least 4 days off and could travel home, athough they often had term papers and exam study to do over that weekend.
My older brother brought many friends home, and the folksinging together I remember still resonates in my mind 50+ years later to today.
As I raised my own children, we paused to each express to everyone around the table to each say what we felt was especially reason for gratitude in this past autumn season or year. Then we did the Hebrew motzi for any meal and enjoyed a well-cooked meal. Since it's on a Thursday, I particularly enjoyed some peace the next day because most of the Shabbat meal was already cooked; I just reassembled the leftovers into casserole dishes for the following Friday night. Very easy.
As for history and what the holiday represents, my parents/uncles/grandparents were all immigrants and first-generations out of Czarist Russia persecution of Jews. My husband's family, same thing. My own grandfather had run away from home in Baltimore to then-"Palestine" to join the Jewish Legion in 1917 to help General Allenby free the Jewish homeland from the Ottoman Empire. We talked more about those histories than the Pilgrim messages, although at one point in my life I did live 20 minutes from Plymouth Rock so I know all of that history, too, from public school training as a school child. That history I updated a bit, by reading and listening each year to rabbinic sermons which were always amped up because, with college students visiting home, the families came out in strongest numbers for Shabbat as a college-age homecoming pleasure together. Students saw each other in temple who hadn't seen each other since high school, so they were glad. For many, Thanksgiving was the first time they'd been home since departing each year for college, so it was a "don't miss" trip home. My brother brought home his Jewish college friends who lived very far away, geographically from their own families and couldn't fly back and forth within the 4-day window. That's how all that American folksinging tradition began in our house after the dinner, as they arrived with their guitars. They were so handsome and musical that I decided to apply to their same college, which is where I eventually met the man I married, so I feel extra happy about remembering Thanksgiving.
On the history, over the years my husband has been keen to update us all on the progress proving Columbus was most likely Jewish, since his departure dates connect with the certain key points in the Spanish Inquisition. Unusually, he required his ship crew to stay on-board the night before departure, which history knows was the exact day of expulsion of Jews from Spain. He wanted to get off at earliest hour and might have been protecting them, or with the many who were already living hidden Jewish lives by then (Marannos), didn't want to lose any crew members.
It is certainly known in history that Columbus' cartographer was Jewish, and it was a Jewish profession in those days because it required knowledge of many languages, travel experience and literacy skills (math) not available to the average ship crew member. And since some understand the cartographer was first to actually set foot on the American soil, for all we know.. it could be after such a harrowing long ocean voyage, the first European words spoken on this soil weren't European at all, but the Hebrew prayer of Gomel! Anyway, these were the kinds of things the rabbis liked to sermonize or we chatted up[ around our Thanksgiving tables over many years. FOr years, everyone tried to prove Columbus was Jewish, as a source of pride, but now that he's been shown to be terrible in other ethical practices, and connected with a culture of slave-trading in the Caribbean, Jews aren't happy to claim him as their possible Moranno ancestor any more.
As for the early Pilgrims, the leaders' diary has some Hebrew as was normal for literate men of his time. He writes comparatively of the Pilgrim's experience to the Exodus from Egypt, escaping King James of England and religious persecution against their own practices there. There were some comparisons of the historic "first Thanksgiving meal" (now known to be one of many autumn feasts with Indians) to Sukkot, and his diary goes on about this comparison a bit. The Mayflower landed after a difficult boat voyage, losing some on board and even more the first winter in the Bay Colony of Massachusetts. They nearly starved until the Indians showed them some better ways of planting the following Spring. SO by the time autumn came around, they were truly exhausted but grateful to harvest food and eat well, knowing they had some different kinds of foods that would last through the upcoming cold winter. The gratitude to the Indians for not killing them and also showing them some better farming practices was probably a genuine feeling at that time between the two communities then. As we know later, the European history about Indians is frought with bad intentions and results.
Yes, the early Puritans were antiSemitic, as well as anti-woman (Salem witch trials), all in ways that were no more or less than other British of their times. It can't be excused.
But, as a very large canvas for an American Jewish family to appreciate that we got out of pogrom-country and onto safe soil, where freedom to practice religion was ensured, and there would be no establishment of a Christian government, either, by our constitution's First Amendment. Read George Washington in his letter to the Truro Congregation in Rhode Island, basically a thank-you note to the American Jews of his time (specifically, Chaim Solomon) for funding his Revolutionary army when they were freezing and starving. He knew without that injection of money that winter, with Congress unable to provide for troops, he'd have lost the Revolutionary War without the Jewish help. So he was thanking the Truro Congregatio (Sephardim, with Portugese roots in Recife,Brazil, and escaping from the Portugese Inquisition up from South America to North America/Rhode Island today). In his letter, he assured them that in this new nation he intended, there'd be no religious persecution or toleration for bigotry. That exact language reappeared next in the First Amendment of the American Constitution as preface to the "Establishment Clause" which is really the anti-establishment clause stating this would not be a Christian religion nation in its laws. It's all very,very important; often nicknamed "Separation of Church and State." For American Jews, it's been a key to our ability to live and find refuge here for hundreds of years.
Well, you get a sense of how the conversations went around our Thanksgiving table over the decades.
This was really interesting. Thank you for taking the time to share your family history and perspective.
Thanksgiving, one American national holiday we could enjoy fully.. For American Jews, it's been a key to our ability to live and find refuge here for hundreds of years.
Amen. Great post Rabbit.
Personally, I don't see a conflict between personal religious beliefs, and the giving of patriotic thanks. In historical, relative terms, America has been uniquely understanding of varying religious beliefs, both for Christian sectarians and Jews. America's been a safety valve for all the persecuted religious groups of Europe especially, but more recently, the entire world.
And u make a great point about Columbus, whose first trip was heavily advocated for, and financed by, a Jewish man (Luis de Santangel). The net effect of his voyages, was to create that safety valve for future generations of religious groups fleeing religious bigotries of Europe; I believe that aspect should always be honored. Peace.
Thanksgiving is a secular American holiday, so as an American Jew it does not have any religious connotation for me. I have lived for decades in areas with large First Nation populations (indigenous Native Americans) so Thanksgiving for me has if anything sadness to it, because it is associated with the mistreatment and genocide of a people who extended hospitality, kindness, help, to strangers, and then were murdered.
It is like inviting someone to dinner, and they partake of your hospitality, then they move into your house and claim they own it, then they kill you and steal your house and land. For that reason there is sadness for me associated with the holiday you mention.
Something else I learned while living in these areas is that we are free to pick and choose which holidays we celebrate. I was impressed and pleased when an entire town, which included a state university, removed Columbus Day from the calendar, for the same reason, that it is associated with the genocide of First Nations peoples, and is not a cause for celebration. I find a lot of dignity and respect in this. I have since removed several holidays from my own calendar, and this feels wonderful.
This is patent nonsense.
1. These two events did not necessarily happen in the same day or even in the same year. We didnt celebrate Thanksgiving only to go "Mwahaha, now youre here eating turkey I'll kill you all! :doctorevilfinger:" They lived at peace at certain times, and other times the negotiations broke down.
2. Thansgiving, contrary to popular myth, did not start with the pilgrims. As wikipedia notes, a number of other countries also celebrate it. In fact, if we trace it back, it is basically a harvest festival, being thankful not for surviving in US but for that which was grown that year.
3. In fact, Thanksgiving is incredibly similar to the Sukkot (spelling?) in that regard.
It is only ignorant people with too much white guilt who have turned this into some massacre celebration. The same ignorant white people that apparently think it is okay to act like we shouldnt have come here in the first place (the message getting rid of columbus day says). Yes, we did make mistakes, but we also inspired othrer democracies to form. If not for us, monarchies would be it.
You can celebrate both, just as there are some Christians that celebrate Passover and Easter.
Last edited by bulmabriefs144; 10-18-2016 at 08:58 AM..
I grew up in a not extremely observant Reform Jewish American household; and we happily celebrated Thanksgiving every year as a time to be grateful for our blessings. I still do whenever possible. We really didn't think about the possible anti-semitism of early English settlers in the New World.
You can celebrate both, just as there are some Christians that celebrate Passover and Easter.
But thats not the same. Thanksgiving has nothing to do with being Christian or Jewish. Passover and Easter do. A Jew would not celebrate Easter. If they do, they are Messianic, which is not what this thread is about.
---
We dont do Thanksgiving for reasons other than belief.
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Made me go read up on a subject I might not otherwise have read about.
