This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories,

the show where America is the star and the American people. And we love to tell

stories about America's founding. We also love to tell stories about America's faith heritage.

And this next story combines both. Here to tell the story about Jews in America around the time

of the revolution is Adam Jortner. He's a professor

of history and religion at Auburn University. His book, A Promise Land, Jewish Patriots,

the American Revolution, and the birth of religious freedom. Professor Jortner, what brought you to study this idea of Jews in

the Revolution? I'm a real history buff. I had no idea, no clue that Jews had been a part of the

fighting of the war effort. Yeah, it sounds fake. It sounds like a comedy routine. I'll tell you about Jews in the revolution. That's the shocking thing to me. And the more I read about it, the more there was to find about it. Talk about how you came to write about this subject. I wrote a book about Mormons. I've written a book about Native American prophets. And my wife was pregnant

with my second kid. I was very nervous. And I was like, well, I need a small project. I'll

work on Jews and the revolution because that won't, that won't take very long. My second son's

now 10 years old. So it did take a while. But what I found out was not only are there Jews in the United States during the revolution, they're really passionate patriots for the most part.

A lot of Jews rush to sign up and a lot of them end up because of the way the Revolutionary War works out.

A lot of them end up in the same city.

They're all in Philadelphia.

And they form this synagogue.

They reform the local synagogue, Mikva Israel, in Philadelphia, in the 1780s,

which makes them one of the very first kind of national religious groups.

So not only is there, you know, Jews in the revolution, not only are Jews part of the American

religious history, they're there from the very beginning of the Republic.

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