NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY
101 South Independence Mall East, Philadelphia, PA
The first Jew to arrive on North American shores did not stay long. Joachim Gaunse (or Gans or Ganz) was a Bohemian mining engineer who had been invited to England by the Royal Mining Company in 1581. In 1584, after the clever Gaunse achieved some notoriety by shrinking the time it took to purify copper ore (from four months to four days), he was recruited by Sir Walter Raleigh to join his expedition to the New World. Gaunse was part of the crew who settled and fortified the northern tip of Roanoke Island; chunks of smelted copper found by archaeologists are thought to have been his handiwork. But within two years, exhausted by short supplies, arduous heat, and attacks by indigenous tribes, he and the others abandoned the settlement and returned to England.
Back in England, while teaching Hebrew to gentlemen in Bristol, Gaunse was asked point-blank if he denied the divinity of Jesus Christ, the son of God. Exactly what possessed the savvy, seasoned Gaunse to quip, "What needeth the Almighty God to have a son; is He not Almighty?" is lost to time. But Gaunse's testimony that he'd been circumcised, "brought up in the Talmud," and never baptized suggests that he was counting on the time-honored immunity of the infidel; besides, he knew he had friends in high places. Indeed, his blasphemy case was remanded to the Queen's Privy Council, which appears to have let him off the hook. At least there is no record of penalty or punishment.
Gaunse's story epitomizes the American Jewish story in many respects. It is a tale of enterprise and mobility, expertise and ingratiation, adaptability and resourcefulness. But in the new National Museum of American Jewish History (NMAJH) in Philadelphia . . .
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