At a moment when institutions across the country are asking how to celebrate America’s 250th birthday, the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History is putting Jews at the center of the origin story.
Its new exhibition, “The First Salute,” is about the tiny Caribbean island of Sint Eustatius and the relative handful of Sephardic Jewish merchants who were at the center of what became a pivotal moment in the Revolutionary War.
The show opens with a cinematic retelling of Nov. 16, 1776, when the American brig Andrew Doria sailed into the island’s harbor flying the Grand Union flag, an early iteration of what became the Stars and Stripes. After firing a 13-gun salute, it received a return volley from the Dutch governor, an exchange widely regarded as the first formal recognition of the fledgling United States by a foreign power.
But as the exhibit makes clear, the diplomatic provocation was the culmination of a commercial and cultural drama in which Jews played an outsized role.
By the eve of the American Revolution, Sint Eustatius, known as the “Golden Rock," had become one of the busiest free ports in the Atlantic world. Sugar, textiles, rum, and, crucially, arms and gunpowder passed through its docks.
Sephardic Jewish merchants, many of them descendants of refugees from Iberian persecution, had built far-flung family and business networks stretching from Amsterdam to the Caribbean.
“These were people who understood statelessness, vulnerability, and opportunity all at once,” said Jonathan Sarna, one of the historians who consulted on the exhibit, at Wednesday’s media opening. “They leveraged those networks not only to survive, but to participate in what they recognized as a revolutionary moment.”
The exhibition argues that Jewish merchants on St. Eustatius were instrumental in supplying the American colonies with the material needed to sustain their war against Britain, a risky proposition that would eventually invite British retaliation. In 1781, British forces under Admiral George Rodney seized the island, targeting its Jewish population for plunder and deportation.
According to one of three major videos that anchor the exhibit, Rodney’s obsession with what he called the island’s “nest of vipers” allowed unhindered French ships to trap the British Army at Yorktown, forcing the surrender that effectively ended the Revolution.
The show is organized as a journey, beginning with the Sephardic diaspora, moving through the Revolutionary era in both the colonies and the Caribbean, and ending with a coda that asks what independence meant in practice for those who had helped secure it.
Multimedia installations place visitors in the bustling port of Sint Eustatius; 18th-century portraits come “alive” to explain the tense geopolitics of the late 18th century. Artifacts from around the world, many on view in the United States for the first time, reinforce the narrative: shipping records, personal correspondence, ritual objects carried across oceans.
For Laura Arnold Leibman, the Princeton professor of American Jewish studies who helped shape the exhibit’s focus around those objects, the exhibit’s power lies in its insistence on interconnectedness. “Early American history didn’t happen in isolation,” she said. “It was shaped by global migrations, by diasporas, by people who moved goods and ideas across borders. Jewish merchants were central to that story.”
Also central to the story is race. A display that includes wrist shackles used by slave owners notes that enslaved Africans were “a significant part of the island’s population and economy.” It cites a 1781 census recording that Jews on the island owned 86 people, or 6.4% of the island’s total population.
Although the Weitzman is a Smithsonian “affiliate,” the museum is autonomous and independent, said Dan Tadmor, its president and CEO, in an interview. As a result, it is not subject to the efforts by the Trump administration to shape what can and can’t be said about slavery, the treatment of Native Americans, and other reminders of the nation’s founding paradox. Steps away from the Weitzman is the President’s House monument, where efforts by the administration to remove panels that deal bluntly with George Washington and the enslaved people in his household have landed in the courts.
“We must say honestly, the freedoms practiced on its shores did not extend equally to all who lived there,” said Alida Francis, the island governor of Sint Eustatius, in her remarks at the opening. “But history is rarely simple, and the truth does not become weaker when we tell it fully.”
Leibman, who has written extensively about the Jews in the Caribbean, said it was important to talk about the anniversary and the Jewish community, in all its complexity and contradictions. The exhibit also includes a Torah scroll from Suriname, where, by 1800, about half of the Jewish community had at least one African ancestor, making it perhaps “the most multiracial Jewish community at the time, but also, honestly, today,” said Leibman.
Reframing patriotism
The exhibit also reframes patriotism, rejecting the “heritage American” idea championed by JD Vance and others, which defines Americanness by ancestry. Instead, the exhibit celebrates an identity rooted in an adherence to a set of universal principles, including religious liberty. In “The First Salute,” the Jews represent all of the newcomers, who, as one of the exhibit’s films puts it, “leverage their trade networks and family ties for a risky and revolutionary cause: freedom.”
Sarna pointed to a facsimile of a letter written by Jonas Phillips, a German Jewish trader who arrived in the New World as an indentured servant. In a letter home, written in Yiddish, Phillips included a copy of the newly issued Declaration of Independence. Sharing news of the newly created country, he also suggested that the Revolution offered new and exciting business opportunities.
For Sarna, professor of Jewish history at Brandeis University and one of the museum’s founding historians, Phillips’ correspondence is distinctly American, written at a time when Jews were offered rights in Europe only at the indulgence of its various governments and sovereigns. “It’s all wrapped up here in the rags-to-riches story that is so American,” said Sarna. “A lot of people came to America with that [economic] hope, but also of liberty. So you have in one little Yiddish handwritten letter all sorts of ideas that are going to be central” to the idea of America.
That framing is not incidental. The Weitzman, located just blocks from Independence Hall, has since its opening in 2010 positioned itself, and by extension the Jews, at the center of American history. With “The First Salute,” it doubles down on that mission, using the semiquincentennial to argue that the story of American independence cannot be fully told without its Jewish protagonists.
“For these merchants, commerce and ideology were intertwined,” said Pamela Nadell, the American University historian who specializes in American Jewish history. “They were not simply neutral traders. They were people whose own histories of exile and exclusion made the American cause legible and compelling.”
With the growth of Christian nationalism, which insists that the United States was founded as an explicitly Christian nation, that message is more important than ever, said Tadmor.
Overlap between Jewish values and founding fathers' values
“There was an overlap between core Jewish values and the values of the founding fathers,” he said. “The idea that America was founded as a Christian nation is based on a misconception and a lie. The founding fathers, who were Christian men, founded this country on religious liberty and not on any denomination or specific faith. So all of that is in here.”
“The First Salute” will be on view at the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia through April 2027.