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of the most original minds in the colonies. His copious writings on physics, botany, history, and ethnography (especially his History of the Five Indian Nations, first published by William Bradford in 1727) would earn him an international reputation—New York’s answer, as it were, to Benjamin Franklin. Boasting a library of three thousand books, not much smaller than that of Harvard College, Golden was a devoted student of Cicero, Virgil, Tacitus, Shakespeare, Milton, and Addison. He composed poetry, dabbled in the natural sciences, and taught the Linnaean system of plant categorization to his daughter Jane, whose subsequent research made her something of a celebrity among botanists on both sides of the Atlantic.

The same need for mercantile and professional expertise that helped break down resistance to dissenting Protestants helped revitalize New York’s Jewish community. The first generation of immigrants had moved elsewhere by the early 1660s—Asser Levy was for many years the only one remaining in town—but the 1680s brought a steady trickle of Portuguese-speaking Sephardim from the West Indies, Surinam, France, and England. Religious services had resumed in 1682, and although its appeals for formal recognition of the right to public worship were consistently rejected, the congregation wasn’t molested. By the mid-eighties it had acquired a private burying ground (a corner of which still survives on St. James Place opposite Chatham Square); by the mid-nineties, if not earlier, it was openly using a house on Beaver Street as a synagogue.

Yet New York Jews faced legal hurdles to earning a livelihood in the city. The great majority weren’t English citizens, and the Navigation Acts explicitly prohibited them from doing business in England or in any English colony (even the right of native-born Jews to engage in trade or own property remained less than secure). Legal naturalization didn’t provide an attractive solution to the problem, since Parliament required prospective subjects to swear an Anglican oath of allegiance. The alternative was to obtain a patent of denization from the crown, allowing the recipient to settle and trade in specified parts of the realm. But this required money and political connections, and only a dozen or so Jewish residents of New York ever managed to become endenizened in England. In addition, the provincial assembly, in 1683, had decreed that anyone wishing to be naturalized in New York would have to be a professing Christian.

Almost immediately, however, the potentially adverse effects of such a restriction on the city’s commercial interests compelled local authorities to be more accommodating (just as they had once compelled the West India Company to make Stuyvesant accept the presence of Jews in New Amsterdam). Governor Fletcher began the practice, continued by his successors, of granting letters of endenization to Jews and other aliens, for a fee, few or no questions asked. After 1718, moreover, the Assembly routinely naturalized Jews on its own authority and permitted them to omit the phrase “on the true faith of a Christian” from the necessary oaths. The municipal corporation meanwhile quietly ignored instructions from England that the privileges and duties of freemanship be restricted to native-born, naturalized, or endenizened subjects. Even before the turn of the century, as a result, Jews were serving on juries, in the militia, and on the Common Council; many would hold the office of constable (one of whose duties was to collect taxes for the Anglican Church). Similarly, although the English Test Act of 1673 barred Jews (and Catholics) from sitting in the Assembly or holding appointive office, local custom allowed Jews to vote freely in provincial as well as municipal elections. (When this was called into question in 1737, the Assembly voted to deprive Jews of the franchise. The decision wasn’t strictly enforced, though, and within a few years Jews were again going to the polls without interference.) Of equal importance, Jews inherited the economic right—for which Asser Levy had fought