Thanksgiving and the Jews: Pennsylvania, 1868

Two major national holidays, Thanksgiving and Christmas, illuminate for American Jews the delicate balance between their Jewish and American identities. In this week of Thanksgiving, it is useful to examine the origins of the holiday and an earlier American Jewish response to its Christian roots.

The first "American" Thanksgiving was held in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1621, attended by 90 native Americans and 50 English Pilgrim settlers. That first Thanksgiving mirrored ancient harvest feasts such as the Jewish Succoth; the ancient Greek mid-June Thesmophorian celebration; and the ancient Roman Cerealian rites celebrated in mid-April.

The Pilgrims’ Thanksgiving was not an annual event, and did not become an American ritual for more than 200 years. To mark the adoption of the Constitution and the establishment of a new government, of which he was the head, president George Washington declared that November 26, 1789, was to be a day of thanksgiving and prayer. However, Washington did not renew his declaration. It was not until 1863, in the midst of a terrible Civil War, that President Abraham Lincoln fixed the last Thursday of each November as a "day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father." When the Union was triumphant in the war, Thanksgiving Day became an even more significant observance in the northern states.

It was in this context that Governor John W. Geary of Pennsylvania, in 1868, issued a proclamation to the citizens of his state calling on them to celebrate Thanksgiving. The terms which Geary employed roused a unified protest from Philadelphia’s rabbis because, in the words of America’s first English-language Jewish newspaper, The Occident, Geary "apparently intended to exclude Israelites" from the celebration. Geary’s proclamation read in part:

Unto God our Creator we are indebted for life and all its blessings. It therefore becomes us at all times to render unto Him the homage of grateful hearts . . .and I recommend that the people of this Commonwealth on [November 26^th] refrain from their usual avocations and pursuits, and assemble at their chosen place of worship, to ?praise the name of God and magnify Him with thanksgiving.’

While such sentiments were not offensive, some of Geary’s additional words were: "Let us thank Him with Christian humility for health and prosperity," Geary urged, and he called on Pennsylvanians to pray that "our paths through life may be directed by the example and instructions of the Redeemer, who died that we might enjoy the blessings which temporarily flow therefrom, and eternal life in the world to come."

By 1868, Philadelphia Jewish population was the nation’s largest, numbering as many as 4,000 souls. According to The Occident, a week after Geary’s proclamation the "Hebrew Ministers" of Philadelphia "deemed it their duty" to draft a powerful petition against it. Their "solemn protest" was signed by all seven of the city’s rabbis, including Sabato Morais, who later played a central role in establishing the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York, and Morris Jastrow, a leading Philadelphia reformer. Regarding Geary’s choice of words, the rabbis ? regardless of their affiliation ? affirmed that:

An [elected] official, chosen by a large constituency, as the guardian of inalienable rights, ought not to have evinced a spirit of exclusiveness. He should have remembered that the people he governs are not of one mind touching religious dogmas, and that by asking all to pray that ?their paths through life may be directed by the example and instruction of the Redeemer’ . . . he casts reflections upon thousands, who hold a different creed from that which he avows.

The rabbis speculated that, in his private capacity, Governor Geary would resent being told by a Catholic priest that, on a national holiday, he should go make confession, or that any other public officer might try to tell him what religious observance he must perform. The rabbis observed, "The freedom-loving authors of the American Constitution opened indiscriminately to all the avenues of greatness, so that the position now filled by a follower of . . . [Protestant theologians] Calvin or Wesley may tomorrow be occupied by the descendant of Abraham, or, perchance, by a free-thinker."

The rabbis condemned Geary’s proclamation as "an encroachment upon the immunities we are entitled to share with all the inhabitants thereof; and we appeal to the sense of justice which animates our fellow-citizens, that a conduct so unwarrantable may receive the rebuke it deserves, being universally stigmatized as an offence against liberty of conscience, unbecoming a public functionary, and derogatory to the honor of the noble state he represents."

Despite this outspoken rabbinical indictment, Geary did not revoke his proclamation, and Pennsylvania officially celebrated a Christianized Thanksgiving that year. As decades have passed, however, Thanksgiving retains ever less of its original English Pilgrim origins other than the traditional turkey and cranberry dressing. Today, signs in the windows of butcher shops in Jewish neighborhoods advertise kosher turkeys for Thanksgiving. Most of American Jewry has absorbed the holiday, shorn of its Christian trappings, and made it a time for family gathering, much in the style of other Americans. In 1868, Pennsylvania’s rabbis expressed what would become the majority American view that government-declared holidays should ? with the possible exception of Christmas ? be totally devoid of religious content, and that each individual may bring to it whatever, if any, spirituality he or she wishes.

Source: Michael Feldberg, PhD.