PHILADELPHIA — Jewish people were a very small minority in Colonial America, said Josh Perelman. But, he added, they played an outsized role in the fight for freedom.
A senior advisor for content and strategic projects at the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, Perelman recently gave USA TODAY a tour of the museum ahead of its exhibit, "The First Salute," opening April 23, which highlights the role of a tiny Jewish community − and a tiny Caribbean island − in the Revolutionary War effort.
Jewish people had first permanently settled in the New World in 1654, coming from Amsterdam to live in New Amsterdam, the Dutch colony that would eventually become New York City. Others came from Brazil, where they'd enjoyed some measure of self-determination while it was under Dutch rule but, when the colony came under Portuguese rule, decided to leave rather than face forced conversion to Christianity, persecution or worse.
Many of America's earliest Jewish families had surnames like Lopez, Rodriguez and Gomez from their roots on the Iberian Peninsula, from which they were expelled in 1492 by order of the Catholic King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I after the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition.
