The Maccabaean

MAjor Nordecai Manuel Noah’s attempt to establish a Jewish city of refuge on Grand Island, near Buffalo, is the one in- <ident in his career that now attracts the inquiring archaeologist, but there was a great deal more of interest in the Major’s life than that picturesque episode. It would, in fact, be a pity if the rest of his career were allowed to be pushed into oblivion bv a single theatrical scene. Major Noah would have deserved to be remembered if he had never gone to Buffalo and never dedicated the City of Ararat. in the Episconpal Church there.

The Grand Island idea was not the outcome of a sudden Quixotic whim’ The thought of the restoration of the Jews to their own land was one to which Noah often returned, and had spoken of it in a public address long before the sale of Grand Island by New York state gave him an opportunity, as he believed, of establishing a temporary Jewish state which should serve as a haven of refuge for the victims of persecution until Providence should restore the nation to its ancestral home. It was at the dedication of Shearith Israel Synagogue in New York, in 1818, seventeen years before Ararat, that Noah said: “The signal for breaking the Turkish scepter in Europe will be their (the Jews’) emancipation; they will deliver the nortlı of Africa from its oppressors; they will assist to establish civilization in European Turkey, and may revive commerce and the arts in Greece; they will march in triumphant numbers and possess themselves once more of Syria, and take their rank among the governments of the earth. This is not fancy. I ‘have been too much among them in Europe .and Africa. I am too well acquainted with their views and sentiments in Asia,

to doubt their intentions. They hold the purse strings and can wield the sword; they can bring 100,000 men into the field." The resemblance of the point of view here taken ninety years ago to that of some modern Zionists scarcely needs to be pointed out. In 1808, ten years before this date and fully a hundred years ago Noah had written a letter to Thomas Jefferson on the subject and received a sympathetic reply which he proudly prints in an appendix to his "Travels," together with one by John Adams and by James Madison. Again in 1844, nineteen years after Ararat, Noah delivered a public discourse in New York, in which he expressed to an audience of Christians his firm confidence in the restoration of Israel to the Promised Land.

The tenacity with which Noah held to his Jewish nationalistic ideas is all the more remarkable in view of the fact that he was so thoroughly American. His great-great-grandfather he said in one of the addresses referred to, was buried in the cemetery at Chatham Square. He himself was a great literary and political lion in New York. It was said that he told the best story, rounded the best sentence and wrote the best play of all his contemporaries. He was one of the most prominent editors of the city. He held, at different times, the offices of Consul General to Tunis, Sheriff of New York County, Surveyor of 'the Port, and Judge of the Court of Sessions.

it hurt Noah sorely to be recalled froın his consulship at Tunis on the pretext that his religion, in the President’s opinion, would be an obstacle to the exercise of his consular duties. So Monroe, who was secretary of state, put it in a curt letter. It was not supposed at the time of his ap-