It’s a hot Sunday afternoon in July 1844, and a man is kneeling on the steps of a Catholic church, facing down a mob. All year, he has been warning that Irish Catholic immigration will be the ruin of the United States. He shouldn’t be surprised that some teenagers and young men interpreted his message as an instruction to destroy those immigrants’ churches. Yet the man thinks otherwise, or so he claims. “I am pledged to defend this church,” he tells them, “and I will do it at the peril of my life.” The men and boys with the battering ram respect him enough not to push past and destroy the church’s front door. Instead, they move a few yards to his left and batter down a brick wall, thus gaining access to an alley and the church’s side door and windows. As they tear into the church, the man on the step wails. “I am ruined!” he shouts. “I am sacrificed! And you sacrifice me!”
But they have not sacrificed him. Just over three months later, the man on the steps will win a three-way race to represent Pennsylvania’s First District in the United States House of Representatives, probably with the help of the votes of some of the men with the battering ram. His name is Lewis Charles Levin, and he is, arguably, the first Jew to be elected to Congress.
Levin was a rabble-rouser, conspiracy theorist, bigot, and shanda fur di goyim. In an age of resurgent nativism and fake news, he is all too familiar. Yet he is also mysterious. As a newspaper editor and congressman, Levin spoke and wrote countless thousands of words against demon rum and the Catholic menace. But he offered hardly any account of his private life, leaving historians to wonder about both the facts of his biography and the sincerity of his tirades. Where did a nice Jewish boy learn so much hate?
Levin was born on Nov. 10, 1808, in Charleston, South Carolina, to parents who had immigrated from England. Charleston was then home to about 700 Jews, which was enough to make it the largest community of Jews in the United States.
Over the next 30 years, Levin pursued at least three careers in at least five states, maybe more. He spent two years in Columbia, South Carolina, attending college and running a dry goods store. He next became a schoolmaster, starting one school in Cincinnati, and then, a year later, another one in Woodville, Mississippi. He next moved to Vicksburg, then Nashville, then Baltimore, probably with sojourns in Kentucky and Louisiana as well. Along the way he learned enough law to call himself “L. C. Levin, Esq.,” though what legal training he received, and even what bars admitted him, remain obscure.