From an August 11^th arti­cle by Jonathan D. Sarna pub­lished on The Jew­ish Daily Forward’s web­site:

When New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg stood on Gov­er­nors Island, in sight of the Statue of Lib­erty, and force­fully defended the right of Mus­lims to build a com­mu­nity cen­ter and mosque two blocks from Ground Zero, he expressly made a point of dis­tanc­ing him­self from an ear­lier leader of the city: Peter Stuyvesant, who under­stood the rela­tion­ship between reli­gion and state alto­gether dif­fer­ently than Bloomberg does.

As gov­er­nor of what was then called New Ams­ter­dam, from 1647 – 1664, Stuyvesant worked to enforce Calvin­ist ortho­doxy. He objected to pub­lic wor­ship for Luther­ans, fought Catholi­cism and threat­ened those who har­bored Quak­ers with fines and impris­on­ment. One might eas­ily imag­ine how he would have treated Muslims.

When Jew­ish refugees arrived in his city, in 1654, Stuyvesant was deter­mined to bar them com­pletely. Jews, he com­plained, were “deceit­ful,” “very repug­nant” and “hate­ful ene­mies and blas­phe­mers of the name of Christ.” He wanted them sent elsewhere.

Stuyvesant’s supe­ri­ors in Hol­land over­ruled him, cit­ing eco­nomic and polit­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tions. He con­tin­ued, how­ever, to restrict Jews to the prac­tice of their reli­gion “in all quiet­ness” and “within their houses.” Being as sus­pi­cious of all Jews as some today are of all Mus­lims, he never allowed them to build a syn­a­gogue of their own.

It was not until the early 1700s that Jews won the right to wor­ship in pub­lic in New York City. In Con­necti­cut that right was not granted until 1843, and the reac­tion of The New Haven Reg­is­ter, which “viewed the syn­a­gogue as a pub­lic defeat for Chris­ten­dom,” is instructive:

“The Jews…,” the paper thun­dered, “have out­flanked us here, and effected a foot­ing in the very cen­tre of our own fortress. Strange as it may sound, it is nev­er­the­less true that a Jew­ish syn­a­gogue has been estab­lished in this city — and their place of wor­ship (in Grand Street, over the store of Heller and Man­del­baum) was ded­i­cated on Fri­day after­noon. Yale Col­lege divin­ity deserves a Court-martial for bad generalship.”

It took an act of Con­gress, signed by Pres­i­dent Franklin Pierce, for Jews to be able to wor­ship in pub­lic in Wash­ing­ton, DC, where some con­tended that the Reli­gious Cor­po­ra­tion Act granted the right to pur­chase real estate only to Chris­t­ian churches; and just in case you think that Jews no longer run into such prob­lems in the United States, Sarna cites a case from 1999 in which “oppo­nents of a new Ortho­dox syn­a­gogue seek­ing to build in New Rochelle, N.Y. [used] warn­ings [about] ‘rats,’ ‘traf­fic’ and ‘creep­ing com­mer­cial­iza­tion’ [to hide their] real fear, [which was] that ‘the iden­tity of the neigh­bor­hood would change.’”

Mus­lims have been wor­ship­ing in pub­lic near Ground Zero for three decades. The Cor­doba House com­mu­nity cen­ter will not, in other words, be bring­ing some­thing entirely new to the area. Rather, it will pro­vide much needed space for a com­mu­nity that already exists there – not to men­tion the much needed space it will pro­vide for Mus­lims and peo­ple of other faiths to inter­act. The sim­i­lar­i­ties between much of the rhetoric being employed to argue against the build­ing of Cor­doba House and The New Haven Register’s The Jews have out­flanked us ought to dis­turb us all.