Examining the lives of some lesser-known but highly colorful American Jewish figures from the republic’s first decades, Jonathan Sarna notes a number who found different ways of criticizing the existing social, religious, and political order. Among them was Isaac Gomez, Jr., of a prominent New York Jewish family, who prudently kept his true views private:
[Gomez’s] Selections of a Father for the Use of His Children: In Prose and Verse (1820), an anthology “calculated to promote a taste for reading and to improve the mind in useful learning,” was the very model of propriety and . . . was highly praised by John Adams. . . .
In private, however, Gomez was much more critical—at least of the religious world that surrounded him. His unpublished manuscript, God is One and His Name One: Quotations from Scripture etc. to Prove God to be One And the Truth of the Jewish Faith, lovingly handwritten for the benefit of his only son, Moses Emanuel (1804-1878), was explicitly designed to buttress the views of a small Jewish minority seeking to maintain its distinctive religious identity amid a sea of Protestants eager to convert them. Inwardly and within the protective bosom of his own family, Gomez revealed his true feelings about the merits of his neighbors’ beliefs.
His purpose, he disclosed in his preface, was nothing less than “to shew, and to know, that we are the chosen people of God . . . as well as that God is one without addition or subtraction . . . that there never was nor never will be but One God.” This was, of course, an utterly subversive idea in the face of overwhelming Christian trinitarianism, and Gomez, whose ancestors had been crypto-Jews in Portugal, explicitly warned his son to keep the critique to himself: not “to be a religious disputant” and not to share the volume with anyone else, “never part with it, either by lending or otherwise.”
Read more on Tablet: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/197758/subversive-jews-american-culture