A Jewish Utopia | Under Gods

(1825)
A JEWISH UTOPIA

Costumed and proclaiming himself the "Judge of Israel," Mordecai Manual Noah announces the creation of Project Ararat, a bold plan to create a "Jewish haven" on Grand Island, near Buffalo, New York. Sarah Imhoff tells the story against the backdrop of religious creativity and social reform in the Burned-Over District.

At 11 o’clock on September 2, 1825, in Buffalo, New York, a parade processed down Main Street from the courthouse to St Paul’s Episcopal Church. There, a crowd had gathered to hear Mordecai Manual Noah’s “Proclamation to the Jews,” in which he set out his plans for a worldwide “Hebrew government” and a Jewish agricultural settlement called Ararat. Few Jews lived in the village of Buffalo, total population 2,412, but a crowd of locals, invitees, reporters, and gawkers gathered with palpable fascination. In fact, the crowd was too big to ferry the few miles down the Niagara River to Grand Island, where Noah had purchased land for Ararat, and so they had to settle for gathering at St Paul’s. The Freemasons led the parade. City officials, local clergy, and a marching band followed. The parade included “masonic and military ceremonies,” and a rendition of Handel’s Judas Maccabeus when they arrived at the church. The great Seneca orator Red Jacket, now in the twilight of his life, still cut a regal figure as a distinguished invitee.

The sun was shining. Noah—newspaperman, playwright, diplomat, politician, and man of the hour—came out “wearing the judicial robes of crimson silk, trimmed with ermine and richly embossed golden medal suspended from the neck,” as one reporter described. The outfit was, in fact, a Richard III costume borrowed from the Park Theater, where several of Noah’s plays also had been staged. Noah himself was the most famous American Jew of his era, and his various careers and political connections drew attention to these opening ceremonies for Ararat.

George Catlin’s sketch of Noah

wearing his costume from the day of the dedication

American Jewish Archives

Ararat’s cornerstone lay on the communion table in St. Paul’s. It bore an engraved Hebrew prayer, the Shm’a, as well as the date in the Hebrew calendar and “the 50th year of American independence.” On top of it lay silver cups with wine, corn, and oil—symbolic foods from both the Bible and the Americas. The Episcopal priest Rev. Addison Searle presided over a “divine service” with hymns and readings from the Hebrew Bible, a journalist for the Washington Review and Examiner explained to his readers. “The church was filled with ladies, and the whole ceremony was impressive and unique.”

Then Noah delivered his address. He declared that Grand Island would be home to Ararat, “a city of refuge for the Jews,” named after the mountain where, according to tradition, Noah’s ark had come to rest. He proclaimed “the re-establishment of the Hebrew government.” Noah himself would be its leader, the “judge of Israel.”

None of this would come to pass.

And yet, the story of Noah and his Proclamation does not belong in the dustbin of historical irrelevance. It illustrates themes that ran throughout the early nineteenth century: theological claims about human relationships to land, critiques of sex and gender in society, and simultaneously religious and political utopian visions.

Cornerstone of Ararat

now on display at the Buffalo Museum

photo by Jesse Pitzler

In 1820, Noah had first proposed to the State of New York that he would buy land on Grand Island that would become an agricultural settlement for Jews. Grand Island had been Seneca hunting and fishing territory, and after they had suffered military defeats, forced removal, and deceit at the hands of both the British and American settlers, New York State bought it out from under them. A 1993 lawsuit that sought to return it to the Senecas was unsuccessful. When New York State surveyed and sold the island in 1824, Noah bought a section.

On that day in 1825, Noah told his audience that Jews “have been destined by Providence to remain a distinct people,” and that it was their “character,” “tenets,” and “faith” that made them distinctive. Yet they were also at home in America, land of enlightened religion and freedom. Noah saw it as his divinely ordained goal to “ameliorate the condition of the Jews.” He insisted on the superiority of the United States as a free and welcoming country for Jews, and so American Jews’ condition did not need improving. Those living abroad, he thought, faced persecution and needed a safe haven. Noah also thought that some Jewish societies were rather benighted, and perhaps even embarrassing: some North African Jews practiced polygamy, and others allowed divorce practically willy-nilly. “Man… has duties to perform to religion, to country, and to morality, and all these point to marriage as the great end by which they may be accomplished and fulfilled,” he wrote in his 1847 book Gleanings from a Gathered Harvest. Bringing Jews together under one government would help Noah rein in these inappropriate sexual practices that were being countenanced by those who had been doing Judaism wrong, in his view.

Noah declared: “I offer myself as a humble instrument of [Almighty God’s] divine will,” and he proceeded to describe his plan for the Hebrew government and Ararat. He called the project “this declaration of independence.” His invocation of a declaration of independence actually aimed to strengthen ties to the US, rather than to, well, declare independence. It was important to him that Ararat be located within “this free and happy republic,” and he seemed unconcerned with figuring out how, exactly, it could be both a Hebrew government and part of the United States. Because no one settled in Ararat, he never had to.

Detail of the County of Erie

showing “Arrarat” as an actual geographic location

David H. Burr

engraved by Rawdon, Clark, & Co., Albany

and Rawdon, Wright, & Co., New York
(1829)

Noah’s Ararat plan took place in a moment when many white Americans enthusiastically supported colonization. They believed it would benefit the people who settled the land, as well as the land itself. Colonization was a widespread and varied project in the nineteenth century, ranging from white Americans who wanted to send Black people to colonies in Africa (the “American Colonization Society”), to those who wanted to settle “Indian country” in the American West in order to civilize it, to Moses Elias Levy, who arrived in Florida territory and in 1822 created the first agricultural colony for Jews in 1822. In spite of their disparate aims, these projects shared a sense that human connection to the land was both economic and spiritual. Noah denied that Ararat was just another back-to-the-land colonization venture or real estate scheme: he would “aim at higher objects than mere colonization.”

The higher motives to which Noah referred were theological: His speech declared the superiority of agriculture as a way of life, and he wanted Jews to form connections to the land. “He who wishes to be truly religious and be surrounded with the admonitions of piety, should be an agriculturalist.” In this, he sounded much like other nineteenth-century US Americans who were not farmers but romanticized agricultural life. The United States offered the best location for Jews because, “in this free and happy country, distinctions in religion are unknown; here we enjoy liberty without licentiousness, and land without oppression.” Because of their appropriate social and marital relations and their ability to farm, American Jews could be the ideal religious Jews.

In the speech, Noah’s politics were theological, and his theology was political. He explained that the new government was patterned after biblical government. Jews “preserved within themselves the elements of government” because they had “carefully preserved the oracles of God assigned to their safekeeping.” The biblical “Judges of Israel” were “raised up by divine influence”—and by implication, so was Noah. To support this new government, every Jew across the earth was to pay three shekels, which, he explained, was equivalent to one Spanish dollar.

Noah’s theology also may have accounted for the presence of Sagoyewatha, or Red Jacket, at the Proclamation ceremony. By these later years of his life, Sagoyewatha was known among both Indigenous and white people for his leadership and powerful speeches. He had resisted conversion to Christianity, which set him apart from many of the other Seneca, and even from his own family. In a famous 1805 speech, he said: “Brother, our seats were once large and yours were small. You have now become a great people, and we have scarcely a place left to spread our blankets. You have got our country, but are not satisfied; you want to force your religion upon us.” Noah, too, had resisted conversion efforts. But that was not the imagined kinship that made him feel connected to the Seneca leader. He believed, like some other nineteenth-century Christians and Jews, that the Indigenous people of the Americas were part of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. It’s unlikely that Sagoyewatha found this convincing—relatively few Indigenous people did—but with his presence, he embodied a connection to the lands of the Seneca. If the Seneca were descended from the Lost Tribes, Noah believed, then through them Jews also had a connection to the land.

“He who wishes to be truly religious and be surrounded with the admonitions of piety, should be an agriculturalist.”

Noah’s Ararat speech dwelled on this conviction. He enumerated ritual and theological similarities between Jews and Indigenous Americans. He sought their reunion, though not on equal terms: “If the tribes could be brought together, could be made sensible of their origin, could be civilized and restored to their long-lost brethren, what joy to our people, what glory to our God, who clearly have the prophecies been fulfilled, how certain our dispersion, how miraculous our preservation, how providential our deliverance.” Ararat, maybe, could be that place—the place where God’s providence would see the reunification of the tribes of Israel.

Although Noah maintained that “there is no part of our religion which should be altered,” he also declared that the newly organized Hebrew government would have additional laws. He mentioned only two: outlawing polygamy and making divorce more difficult. He railed against the “indulgence” of polygamy: “Having personally witnessed the observance of this custom among the Jews in Africa, I have deemed it important as one among the first acts of the government, to protest against this practice, and abolish it forever.” He explained that the man cannot be a good husband and father because his duties are all mixed up with sensuality; the woman cannot be fulfilled in her role because she will not receive the respect she is due; and the whole thing leads to the “serious evils” of promiscuousness and incest. “Our religious divorces are too loosely exercised, and demand the strong arm of authority,” he declared. Both of these objections demonstrated Noah’s concern that some Jews were doing gender and sexuality wrong. Coming to Ararat would help right their relationship to the land and their relationships to one another.

Once Noah finished his proclamation, the military fired a grand salute, and the band played American patriotic songs. A Pennsylvanian journalist wrote: “A finer day, and more general satisfaction, had not been known on any similar occasion.” But when had there ever been a similar occasion?

Noah was a unique character. Born in Philadelphia in 1785, he began his political career in 1808 when he was elected to the post of major in the Pennsylvania militia. He became the US Consul to Tunis in 1813, but was recalled after he paid too large a sum to ransom hostages taken by pirates—or, perhaps, because his agent had spent money ransoming unapproved people. Disappointed that a prestigious and lucrative diplomatic career had not panned out, Noah turned to journalism. He became a highly accomplished playwright, an admirable but not lucrative pastime. His most popular, She Would be a Soldier, was a patriotic three-act play in which Christine dresses herself as a soldier to fight in the War of 1812. He won acclaim not only for the play but for being one of the few American playwrights whose work was staged in the US at a time when the market was dominated by European plays. In 1817, he began work as the editor of the Tammany Hall-sponsored newspaper The National Advocate. His changes, including introducing more humorous pieces, articles aimed at women, and back-and-forth criticism and controversy, marked him as a success and paralleled his influence within the Democratic party. He served as sheriff briefly, but was defeated in the 1822 election. In 1824 he jested in response to the large field of political candidates: “I have a great notion to offer as a candidate myself; it is time there should be a Jew president; it would be unanswerable proof of the perfect freedom of our political institutions.” Perhaps it was a joke with underlying truth from the man who would just a year later declare himself “Judge of Israel.”

Mordecai Manuel Noah

John Wood Dodge (1834)
watercolor on ivory, irregular

Smithsonian American Art Museum

Bequest of Ettie W. Noah Wilson, through John L. Laskey 1957.11.4.

Some observers, both at the time and through the lens of history, dismissed Noah’s Ararat as a get-rich-quick scheme, a power grab, or “egregious nonsense.” “Strange Doings at Buffalo,” one headline read. “This self-styled Judge of Israel was cracked,” a British writer declared. Playing on the biblical book of Esther, the writer had sympathy for the idea of a safe haven for Jews, but contempt for a man who would declare himself the earthly leader of the Jews: “Mordecai, who sitteth not at the King’s gate, but seems to have placed himself on the very throne, and to wield the scepter with as much ease as Ahasuerus himself.” Noah, although famous and influential, did not find himself universally popular in the wake of the Ararat plan.

Even though upstate New York had not seen the likes of Noah before, the region’s residents were no strangers to religious proclamations and spectacles. Many of the ladies who filled the church to listen to Noah’s Proclamation had attended a revival or a séance, or heard through the grapevine about the religious practices bubbling around them. Like Noah, leaders of these new religious movements and revivals often critiqued contemporary sexuality, marriage, and gender roles—though they had quite varying accounts of what was wrong and what the ideal should look like.

Upstate New York played a central role in the Second Great Awakening, a term for the early-nineteenth-century move toward more emotion in US Christianity, which was often accompanied by anticipations of the second coming of Jesus Christ. Many of the revivals in upstate New York enjoined listeners to leave behind their sinful ways and become saved—an idea that scandalized those Calvinists who believed that God had predetermined who would go to heaven and hell. It also scandalized others because of the public roles that women played: as revival participants, converts, and moral reformers.

But it was not just the Second Great Awakening that saw the religious contest over gender roles or sexuality. Mother Ann Lee, for example, led a spiritual community that others called the Shakers for the way they danced when they worshipped God. Lee preached about her revelation that Jesus’s second coming was imminent, and called for celibacy and the confession of sin. By the time of Noah’s speech, Lee’s followers had come to see her as Jesus’ female counterpart, and they continued her commitment to full gender equality in their quest for communal utopia. After Jemima Wilkinson suffered a severe illness in 1776, she died and came back to life as the Publick Universal Friend, a Christian evangelist beyond gender. The Friend stressed gender equality, did not use pronouns even among followers, and dressed in clerical robes or typically male clothing and hats. When pestered about dress, the Friend replied: “there is nothing indecent or improper in my dress or appearance; I am not accountable to mortals.” The Friend’s community believed in the ability of humans to choose how to live and thereby affect their own salvation. Both Lee and the Publick Universal Friend preached celibacy and claimed the equality of the sexes in all matters spiritual and earthly, messages that continued to animate their communities after their deaths in the years before Noah’s speech.

Sometimes punchline, sometimes fantasy, Noah’s project has hung around at the back of American Jewish imagination for two centuries now.

Noah’s 1825 Proclamation in Buffalo declared the end of polygamy in Judaism; the ostensible target of his concern was a small number of Sephardi Jews in Southwest Asia and North Africa who allowed men to marry more than one wife. At the same time, a nearby religious leader was just beginning his path that would lead to preaching the religious appropriateness of polygamy. Joseph Smith had been troubled by conflicting accounts given by different Christian churches, and received his first vision of God the Father and Jesus, who explained that none of the churches was correct. By 1825, the newly minted prophet Smith already had his first follower—his mother Lucy Mack Smith—and was courting his first wife, Emma. It would not be until 1830 that Smith and his small group of followers declared themselves a church, and at least a year later that he prayed about polygamy in the Old Testament and received the answer that the practice of plural marriage should be restored. It would be decades and hundreds of revelations later that the practice became more open and common within the LDS (Mormon) community. Noah, too, framed his religious project as one of reclaiming biblical law, but rather than embracing the polygamy of the patriarchs, he omitted it from his account entirely. His Judaism was one characterized by civilization and respectability in matters of sexuality.

By the time Noah came to town, the Shakers and the Friend's community were already flourishing in New York and Smith was beginning his career as a public religious figure. There were others who came in Noah’s wake. Charles Finney, the famed Presbyterian revivalist, preached about sin and grace, had women pray out loud, taught people regardless of race or sex, and introduced the anxious bench, a front-row seat for sinners struggling with salvation. John Humphrey Noyes, a disciple of Charles Finney, founded a community in 1848 in Oneida, New York. The community believed that Jesus had already returned, in AD 70, making it possible for them to bring about Jesus’s millennial kingdom themselves, and be free of sin and perfect in this world. Fleeing an indictment for “adulterous fornication,” he, his wife, and some of his followers left Vermont for New York. There he founded the Oneida Community, which had communally held property and possessions, ideas that also extended to marriage and sexuality. Noyes preached complex marriage, in which even sexual fidelity existed at the level of the community rather than between two partners, though Noyes exercised some control over who had sex with whom. They practiced “male continence” to preclude pregnancy and increase pleasure for women. Boys could practice this by having sex with women over 40. This community was to be an instantiation of the perfection of communal Christian living on earth. Noyes’s plan for the sexual life of a religious utopia could hardly be farther from Noah’s, but both saw religious regulation of marriage and sexuality as key to creating the ideal society.

By the end of the nineteenth century, western New York was dubbed “the Burned Over District” because it had been so hot with revivals and new religious movements. These decades of religious fervor in upstate New York show that Noah’s religious innovation may have been unique because of his Jewishness or the particulars of his theology, but it wasn’t out of character for the region. He also shared concerns with many of these other movements: regulating marriage, family, and sexuality. In fact, these were the only domains of religious law that he explicitly revised in his declaration of the new government. While people like Mother Ann Lee, the Publick Universal Friend, Joseph Smith, and John Humphrey Noyes had rules around sexuality that were quite different—celibacy, plural marriage, and complex marriage—all of them saw religion and sexuality as properly intertwined, and they each believed that the culture around them had been doing it incorrectly.

Noah’s vision of the future of Judaism insisted on the revision of marital relationships and sexual practices. In this way, it shared much with his visionary neighbors in the Burned-Over District. At the same time, his plans for creating an agricultural colony reflected broader US trends that emphasized the importance of settling the land.

Ararat never became a haven for Jews. No one paid their annual three shekels. No one addressed Noah as Judge. In the playwright Israel Zangwill’s 1899 short story “Noah’s Ark,” a Jew from Frankfurt comes to the promised land of Ararat and, finding no Jewish settlement, throws himself off Niagara Falls. In 1999, Noah became the hero of Ben Katchor’s graphic novel The Jew of New York. In the 2010s, the Mapping Ararat virtual reality walking tour showed “Lost Tribes Bookstore,” “Noah’s Ark Theme Park,” and “Red Jacket Casino.” Sometimes punchline, sometimes fantasy, Noah’s project has hung around at the back of American Jewish imagination for two centuries now. Although Ararat never succeeded as a colonial project, it participated in an influential American religious moment of reimagining the theology of land and religion’s role in determining sexuality and the family.

SOURCES & FURTHER READINGS

HEADER IMAGE: John Wood Dodge, Mordecai Manuel Noah, 1834, watercolor on ivory, irregular, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Ettie W. Noah Wilson, through John L. Laskey, 1957.11.4. Jonathan Sarna, Jacksonian Jew: The Worlds of Mordecai Noah (Holmes & Meier, 1981). Matthew W. Dougherty, Lost Tribes Found: Israelite Indians and Religious Nationalism in Early America (University of Oklahoma Press, 2023).