For many liberal American Jews today, civil rights means some sputtering greybeard who was once within spitting distance of MLK. History though tells us a different story.
Jewish civil rights in America arguably began with the Right to Bear Arms.
The time is the mid 1600s. New York is still under Dutch rule and is known as New Amsterdam. There are about a thousand people there. A fort protects Manhattan at one end. The streets are dirt. The atmosphere is dangerous inside and outside.
What will become one of the world’s major cities is still just an outpost, a tiny thumbnail on the end of a vast mostly unknown continent whose ports and forts are being fought over by European powers. And the residents who came to the New World to be free are on the front line.
Asher (Asser) Levy owns a butcher shop around what will become the Wall Street area. He’s going to become a reasonably successful businessman and even loan the money to build the first Lutheran church in America. His descendants will go on to play a role in Colonial American life. But for the moment, he’s just a small businessman in New Amsterdam.
Everyone in New Amsterdam is on high alert because of the Second Northern War over in Europe. These wars have a way of spreading to America and drawing in Indian tribes as allies of one side or another. And that can mean bloody massacres because the tribes, and the occasional European mercenaries brought over by the powers to fight their wars, don’t play by the rules. They murder women and children. They mutilate bodies and plant heads on sticks.
It’s a nasty ugly business and New York in the mid 1600s looks a lot more like a struggling frontier town in the West than the city we know it as today. Everyone has to do their part by standing guard and being ready to fight.
by Daniel Greenfield
