The Jewish calendar is full of anniversaries, but so is the regular calendar.
Every week marks the anniversary of events that helped shape Jewish history, whether that’s a Nobel Prize-winning discovery, a pivotal Supreme Court decision, the birth of an iconic artist, the founding of a community, or a moment that changed the course of the Jewish people.
Welcome to Unpacked’s latest series, “This Week in Jewish History.” Each week, we’ll take a look back at the stories worth remembering and why they still matter today.
Check out previous editions here.
The Nazis pass the Nuremberg Race Laws (September 15, 1935)
Over the past decade, some corners of the anti-Israel left have become preoccupied with the racial identity of the Jewish people. Jews, they insist, are white settler-colonizers so foreign to the Middle East that even their bodies reject their presence there, as supposedly evidenced by allergies to local tree pollen or high rates of skin cancer.
This rhetoric is not the same as Nazi racial ideology, but its fixation on blood, ancestry and biological belonging echoes a much older form of antisemitism: the idea that Jews constitute an alien race whose bodies reveal that they do not truly belong in the places they call home.
On September 15, 1935, Nazi Germany enacted the infamous Nuremberg Race Laws, which transformed that idea into law. The legislation excluded Jews from German citizenship on the basis of their supposedly non-German “blood.” In the Nazis’ worldview, Jewish bodies simply did not belong within the German nation.
The Nuremberg Laws consisted of two pieces of legislation. The Reich Citizenship Law reserved full citizenship and political rights for people of “German or kindred blood,” reducing Jews to subjects of the state. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor outlawed marriages and sexual relationships between Jews and non-Jewish Germans. The Nazis described such relationships as Rassenschande, or “race defilement.”
The second law also prohibited Jews from employing German women under the age of 45 as domestic workers, based on the antisemitic assumption that Jewish men might sexually “defile” them. Jews were also forbidden from flying the German flag or displaying the colors of the Reich. They were permitted to display what the law called “Jewish colors” — widely understood as the blue and white associated with the Zionist movement and later adopted for the flag of Israel.
Today, race is generally understood as a social construct whose boundaries shift across different historical, cultural and national contexts. Nazi racial ideology, however, presented race as an immutable biological fact. Within its pseudoscientific hierarchy, Jews were cast as an alien and dangerous “Semitic race” with no place in a flourishing German state.
But the Nuremberg Laws contained a fundamental problem: The Nazis had declared Jews a biological race without establishing any scientifically coherent way to determine who was Jewish.
Two months later, on November 14, the regime issued a supplementary decree attempting to resolve that contradiction through genealogy. A person with three or four grandparents who had belonged to a Jewish religious community was legally classified as a Jew, regardless of that person’s own beliefs or identity. Someone with two Jewish grandparents was generally classified as a Mischling, or person of “mixed blood,” in the first degree; someone with one was classified as a Mischling in the second degree.
Certain people with two Jewish grandparents were nevertheless classified as Jews — including those who belonged to a Jewish religious community or were married to a Jew. The result was an elaborate system that assigned racial identities to people through a mixture of ancestry, religion and family relationships, exposing the incoherence beneath the Nazis’ claim that Jewishness could be determined biologically.
Those legally classified as Jews lost their citizenship and fundamental rights. Mischlinge initially occupied a complicated position between those the Nazis considered Jewish and those they considered “German-blooded,” but many of their remaining rights were gradually curtailed as the regime tightened its racial restrictions.
In Nazi Germany, then, Jews were emphatically not considered “white” in any meaningful equivalent of the category. Today, some anti-Israel activists place Jews firmly within whiteness instead. The categories have changed, but the underlying impulse can sound disturbingly familiar: the insistence that Jews’ ancestry and racial makeup render them biologically incompatible with the land they call home.
Jewish history is a story of both tragedy and triumph. This week is no exception.
Mordecai Manuel Noah dedicates Ararat, a Jewish refuge in New York (September 15, 1825)
There has been no shortage of proposed Jewish homelands throughout history. Although only one such project ultimately succeeded — the modern State of Israel, of course — Jewish and non-Jewish advocates alike have imagined Jewish territories across the four corners of the earth. There was Birobidzhan in the frigid Russian Far East (you’ve probably heard of that one), the so-called Uganda Scheme in what is now Kenya (you may have heard of that one, too) and a proposed settlement in the Australian outback (this one’s a tad more obscure).
Naturally, the United States — with its growing Jewish population and foundational commitment to religious freedom — produced proposals of its own. The best-known was the Galveston Movement, which redirected roughly 10,000 Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe away from the crowded cities of the East Coast and toward communities across the American interior.
To be fair, the Galveston Movement was not an attempt to create a Jewish state, or even a specifically Jewish territory. But another, lesser-known proposal came closer: a Jewish “city of refuge” on Grand Island in the Niagara River, near Buffalo, New York.
It was to be called Ararat.
Mount Ararat, if you’ll recall from your childhood Hebrew school lessons, was where Noah’s Ark came to rest after the Great Flood. The symbolism was clear: Jews needed refuge from the flood of antisemitism, and the city of Ararat would provide it. The name also contained a not-so-subtle reference to the project’s founder, Mordecai Manuel Noah.
Noah — a Jewish American playwright, journalist, politician and diplomat — conceived of the plan in the early 19th century, decades before the emergence of modern political Zionism. He envisioned Ararat not as a sovereign Jewish state but as an autonomous Jewish settlement operating under American law, where persecuted Jews from around the world could find safety.
On September 15, 1825, Noah held an elaborate dedication ceremony. There was just one problem: The ceremony did not take place on Grand Island.
Organizers had planned to travel to the island, but the necessary boats reportedly could not accommodate the crowd. Instead, Noah led a theatrical procession through Buffalo to St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, accompanied by local officials, Christian clergy, Freemasons, a military company and Native American representatives, including the prominent Seneca leader Red Jacket.
There, Noah unveiled a cornerstone inscribed in English and Hebrew: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One. Ararat, a City of Refuge for the Jews, founded by Mordecai M. Noah, in the month Tishri, September 1825, and in the 50th year of American Independence.”
The stone still exists today. It is housed at the Buffalo History Museum — which is more than can be said for the city it was supposed to inaugurate.
The Jewish refugees never came.
In fact, few American Jews appear to have attended Noah’s lavish ceremony. Jewish communities in both Europe and the United States greeted his proposal with skepticism, if not outright ridicule. It probably did not help that Noah proclaimed himself “Governor and Judge of Israel,” a title that struck many of his contemporaries as more than a little self-important.
For many American Jews, a separate Jewish territory also appeared unnecessary — and potentially dangerous. Establishing an exclusively Jewish settlement, they feared, could reinforce the antisemitic idea that Jews constituted a nation apart and did not truly belong in the United States. They instead placed their faith in the Constitution’s promise of religious liberty and equal citizenship.
Ararat never progressed beyond its dedication ceremony. No city was built, and Noah himself reportedly left Buffalo without ever setting foot on Grand Island.
Still, the episode offers a fascinating — and slightly absurd — glimpse into American Jewish life before modern Zionism. It reflects both the precarious position of Jews around the world and the extraordinary faith many placed in the American experiment. It also produced a memorable moment of Jewish, Christian and Native American participation in a refuge that existed, in the end, almost entirely in one man’s imagination.
