More Than Religious Freedom

A Core Connections program featuring scholar Eric Eisner Join the Jewish Museum of Maryland for the next event in our Core Connections program series exploring themes within the Museum’s new core exhibition, Jews of Maryland at the Crossroads of Identity, featuring exhibition advisor, Eric Eisner. The “Jew Bill,” a historic piece of state legislation creating the right for Jews to hold public office in Maryland, was controversial in its time. While the Jew Bill represents a significant milestone in America’s path toward religious freedom, it was not a straightforward win for equal citizenship. The complex questions at the intersection of race, religion, Jewishness, and belonging that emerged in the debate over the Jew Bill continue to confront Americans today. See a copy of the Jew Bill inside the core exhibition, engage with Eric Eisner through an audience question and answer session following the presentation, and add your own voice to the exhibition in the Museum’s production studio. More About the Jew Bill Maryland was the site of the most highly publicized debate over Jewish belonging in the antebellum United States. From 1818 to 1826, Maryland debated whether Jews deserved the full rights of citizenship. Newspapers from as far away as Maine and South Carolina covered the controversy. The Maryland Jew Bill, passed in 1826, allowed Jewish men to hold state and local office in Maryland for the first time. Yet only around 150 Jews lived in Maryland at the time of the law’s passage. Why did the debate over Jewish rights in Maryland become such a prominent political question in Maryland and a topic of interest throughout the country? The debate over the Jew Bill was a high-visibility referendum on what kind of state Maryland wanted to be, and who deserved to participate in government. In the early nineteenth century, a rising ideology of white male citizenship defined political rights as the universal and exclusive province of white men. Political rights for…