How a Swiss Expulsion Order Sparked a National Jewish Protest in 1857

In 1856, an American merchant named A. H. Gootman received an order to leave La Chaux-de-Fonds, a town in the Swiss canton of Neuchâtel where he had done business for 5 years. The authorities gave one reason: Gootman was Jewish.

His expulsion notice pulled a forgotten problem back into view. Washington had ratified a commercial treaty with Switzerland in November 1855 that left the Swiss cantons free to turn away American Jews, and the proclamation had passed with little notice. American Jews had fought that treaty since 1851, when the Senate first took it up, and Gootman’s case revived their campaign. In 1857, protest meetings spread from Charleston to Indianapolis, and a convention of Jewish delegates in Baltimore that October sent a delegation to President James Buchanan.

Theodore Fay, the U.S. minister in Berne, took up the case, though he showed little appetite for a fight at first. He grew more committed and pressed the Swiss for years. Though his position was weak. Swiss law left each canton in charge of who could settle within its borders, and the Federal Council in Berne had no power to overrule them. The Jewish Encyclopedia entry on the United States, by Cyrus Adler, Herbert Friedenwald and colleagues, records the outcome bluntly. “He succeeded in procuring permission for Gootman to remain, but only as an act of grace, not by right.”

What began as one man’s residency fight became a question of formal U.S. policy. On November 25, 1850, special agent A. Dudley Mann signed a commercial convention with the Swiss Confederation at Berne. President Millard Fillmore sent it to the Senate on February 13, 1851, and quoted its offending clause in a special message. “On account of the tenor of the federal constitution of Switzerland, Christians alone are entitled to the enjoyment of the privileges guaranteed by the present article in the Swiss Cantons.” Fillmore called the clause “a decisive objection” and stated the principle at stake. “It is quite certain that neither by law, nor by treaty, nor by any other official proceeding is it competent for the Government of the United States to establish any distinction between its citizens founded on differences in religious beliefs.”

The clause mirrored Swiss law. Historian Patrik Süess, writing for the Swiss National Museum, explains that Article 41 of the 1848 federal constitution gave an unconditional right of settlement only to “Swiss citizens of a Christian denomination.” Therefore, cantons could bar Jews, and most ended up doing so.

American Jews mobilized quickly. Secretary of State Daniel Webster and Senator Henry Clay opposed the clause in February 1851, while Isaac Leeser of Jewish periodical The Occident, Rabbi David Einhorn, J. M. Cardozo of Charleston and Capt. Jonas P. Levy of New York led the agitation. Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan spoke against the treaty in 1854 and, on April 19 of that year, presented a petition that Jews across the country had signed at the urging of a New York committee chaired by Alexander J. Kursheedt. The Senate amended the text, and Washington proclaimed the treaty on November 9, 1855.

The ratified wording dropped the sentence naming Christians but still made the rights of foreign citizens subject to the legal provisions of each canton. The historical account by Jewish Encyclopedia judged the fix as merely cosmetic. “But the amendment, though less objectionable in phraseology, retained the same connotation and rendered it possible, under its terms, for the Swiss cantons to discriminate against Jews in the manner they had adopted in 1851.”

In response, Jews held protest meetings in 1857 in Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, Easton, Charleston and Baltimore. Isaac Mayer Wise attacked the treaty in The Israelite, Einhorn in Sinai, and Leeser in The Occident. That October, a convention of Jewish delegates met in Baltimore, and 7 of them, from Maryland, Ohio, Kentucky and Illinois, signed a memorial to President James Buchanan dated October 29. The convention then sent a delegation to Washington to ask him to abrogate the treaty. The encyclopedia’s Wise biography states, “In 1857, when a new treaty was to be concluded between the United States and Switzerland, he visited Washington as chairman of a delegation to protest against the ratification of this treaty unless Switzerland should cease its discriminations against American Jews.” Buchanan, the main entry reports, “promised to take steps to accede to their request so far as lay in his power.”

The agitation outlived the delegation to Buchanan. Congregations, editors and town meetings carried the campaign until the Board of Delegates of American Israelites formed in November 1859, partly in response to the Mortara case—a case that dealt with a Jewish child from Bologna whom papal police took from his parents because a Christian servant said she had baptized him in secret. The Board’s executive committee moved to continue the Swiss agitation in 1860. Historian Jacob Rader Marcus, quoted in a catalogue entry for the 1860 congressional report on the affair, saw the deeper meaning. “The greatest benefit that accrued to American Jewry,” Marcus observed, “was the growth of a sense of Jewish homogeneity in the land. A common threat created a common Jewry … national agitation made for national Jewish unity. There was still no national organization tying Jews together but there is no question that national Jewish unity was slowly but surely being forged.”

Jewish advocacy group B’nai B’rith later claimed a leading role. Its official timeline lists the effort under 1851. “B’nai B’rith intercedes with U.S. Secretary of State Daniel Webster, Senator Henry Clay and other American leaders, to speak out against Switzerland’s discrimination against Jewish residents.”

Fay, initially reluctant, became the principal American actor in the negotiations. In 1859 he delivered an extensive “Israelite Note” to the Swiss Federal Council. Süess quotes the report’s account of a Jewish American who travels through France or Prussia without trouble, “but once he gets to Switzerland, the situation changes. He is regarded as a swindler, a usurer, an enemy, even though he has not come here to do harm to any person. […] If he is not immediately and unceremoniously expelled from the canton by a gendarme, a police officer soon appears, to shower him with abuse and demand an excessive fee.” The Federal Council offered German and French translations for sale, and Graubünden, Zurich and St. Gallen dropped their restrictions on Jewish settlement. While Article 41 stood, though, no canton had to follow.

Under Lincoln, Secretary of State William H. Seward kept the pressure on. After Board of Delegates president Henry I. Hart raised the matter with him in 1861, Seward told Fay’s successor, George G. Fogg, to follow up. His instruction of September 14, 1861, judged that Fay’s efforts to remove the restrictions, “though not completely successful, have no doubt had much effect in smoothing the way to such a result.”

Paris supplied the decisive leverage. The Netherlands refused to ratify a Swiss trade agreement in 1863, Süess writes, and France refused to negotiate further unless Switzerland admitted French Jews. On July 2, 1864, Fogg reported to Seward, “In relation to the Israelite question, the exigencies of commerce are rapidly solving it, and are quite too important for a few small Catholic cantons to long hold out against the tolerant tendencies of the age.” Swiss Federal President Jakob Dubs urged ratification and argued, “No nation any longer wishes to enter into an agreement with us in which we denigrate a portion of its citizenry. This position has become untenable without great harm to our honour and our interests.” On August 29, Fogg predicted, “The treaty with France once ratified, the whole question is practically settled. When the thousands of French Jews are tolerated and protected, it will be absurd to proscribe and persecute the dozens or hundreds of other nations.” The Federal Assembly ratified the French treaty that October by a very large majority, Fogg reported, though it protected only French Jews.

He proved right. On January 14, 1866, Swiss voters lifted the Christian requirement for settlement with 53.2% support and a majority of cantons. The 1874 constitution finally guaranteed broad religious freedom.

Washington kept its treaty in force. The encyclopedia noted in 1905 that “the treaty of 1855 is still in force.” British Jewish historian Lucien Wolf reprinted its first article in his 1919 diplomatic history. The diplomacy yielded modest gains. The lasting result came at home, where American Jews learned to act as a national bloc to change U.S. policy in their favor.

It is uncomfortable to acknowledge, but the United States has long functioned as a philosemitic polity, possessing a deep-seated, historic softness for Jewish interests. Though the total capture we witness today was not yet fully formed in the 19th century, the seeds were sown during this diplomatic incident, which served as the first national exercise in forcing Washington to act for the benefit of organized Jewry. When such subversive groups are given even a small amount of breathing room to exert political influence, they will not stop until they have occupied the entire political edifice. Gentiles would be wise to heed this lesson for the sake of the civilizations’ well-being.

José Niño is a freelance writer based in Charlotte, North Carolina. You can contact him via Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to his “Substack” newsletter by visiting “José Niño Unfiltered” on Substack.com.