The spirit of American Judaism first asserted itself when Stuyvesant, the Governor of New Amsterdam, would not permit the few Jews who had emigrated from Portugal to unite with the other burghers in standing guard for the protection of their homes. When the tax-collector came to Asser Levy to demand a tax on this account, he asked whether that tax was imposed on all the residents of New Amsterdam. “No,” was the reply, “it is only imposed upon the Jews, because they do not stand guard!” “I have not asked to be exempted,” replied Asser Levy. “I am not only willing, but I demand the right to stand guard.” That right the Jews have asserted and exercised as officers in the ranks of the Continental Army and in every crisis of our national history from that time until the present day. The American spirit and the spirit of American Judaism were nurtured in the same cradle of Liberty, and were united in origin, in ideals, and in historical development. The closing chapter of the chronicles of the Jews on the Iberian peninsula forms the opening chapter of their history on this Continent. It was Luis Santangel, “the Beaconsfield of his time,” assisted by his kinsman Gabriel Sanches, the Royal Treasurer of Aragon, who advanced out of his own purse seventeen thousand florins which made the voyages of Columbus possible. Luis de Torres, the interpreter as well as the surgeon and the physician of the little fleet, and several of the sailors who were with Columbus on his first voyage, as shown by the record, were Jews. Looking back through this vista of more than four centuries, we have reason to remember with justified gratitude the foresight and signal services of those Spanish Jews who had the wisdom to divine the far-reaching possibilities of the plans of the great navigator, whom the King and the Queen, the Dukes and the Grandees united in regarding as merely “a visionary babbler” or, worse than this, as “a scheming adventurer.” The royal patrons were finally won over by the hope that Columbus might discover new treasures of gold and precious stones to enrich the Spanish crown. But not so with the Jewish patrons, who caused Columbus, or, as he was then called, Christopher Colon, to be recalled, and who, without security and without interest, advanced the money to fit out his caravels, since they saw, as by divine inspiration, the promise and possibility of the discovery of another world, which, in the words of the late Emilio Castelar--the historian, statesman, and one time President of Spain--“would afford to the quickening principles of human liberty a temple reared to the God of enfranchised and redeemed conscience, a land that would offer an unstained abode to the ideals of progress.” Fortunately, the records of these transactions are still preserved in the archives of Simancas in Seville.