If the United States wished to declare some sort of Jewish American Heritage Day, September 2 might be a sensible choice. It coincides with Labor Day, whose origins point to the legacy of Jewish trade unionism. Its proximity to the High Holidays might please religious Jews. Its closeness to the first day of school highlights the achievements of secular Jews. Leaving aside such weighty coincidences, however, my derivation of the date is calibrated to the obscure interests of a tiny constituency: scholars of Jewish American literature. On September 2, 1825, the writer and politician Mordecai Manuel Noah pronounced into being the semi-independent “Jewish Nation” of Ararat in the middle of the Niagara River, on Grand Island, New York. While the physical existence of Noah’s Jewish utopia came to a close with the dawning of September 3, 1825, the symbolic power of its pronouncement continues to resonate among archaeologists of Jewish America’s literary origins, who can’t say enough about it. Our collective enthrallment with Noah’s big day in Buffalo (the event’s attendees couldn’t arrange transportation to Grand Island itself) epitomizes our sometimes outsized eagerness to assign symbolic meaning and historical significance to Jewish American texts and experiences. Despite (or maybe because of) its complete lack of substance (there were few actual Jews present for the ceremony) and laughable showiness (Noah processed through town dressed in an ermine robe, styling himself a “Judge of Israel”), the spectacle of September 2, 1825, embodies the often strained quality of Jewish thinking on the subject of America. Because Jews in America have so often noted the strange convergence of their own particular emancipation with the universal birth of freedom, Noah’s ostentatious and delusional declaration can’t help but capture the imagination of people who stumble upon its curious history. Its failure to amount to anything besides a bizarre parade sealed its truth: Jews did find a home in America, but how would they ever be able to make up their minds whether their having done so was historically preordained or just lucky?To put it differently, the study of Jewish American literary history frequently exposes us to and occasionally inspires us to produce sound and fury that signifies loudly about signification. Whether it has been fortuitous or cataclysmic, we want the Jewish encounter with America to mean something, and we comb its texts for symbolically-laden clues that it matters. Perhaps this attribute can explain why in my impromptu survey of the index in The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature I noticed that Noah’s single day of Jewish American performance merits a full four and a half inches of column space. Does Saul Bellow earn a mere inch more than Noah because critical acclaim is no longer a guarantor of literary historical interest or because, for all of his stylishness, Bellow never donned an ermine robe in order to march through the streets of Buffalo? “Alienation” and “Americanization” occupy not quite three inches and one and a half inches of the index, respectively. I take that to mean that the combined force of these two crucial abstract principles in Jewish American literary history is exactly equal to the memory of September 2, 1825. “Orthodox Judaism,” which successive Pew reports tell us is the only growth area in Jewish American demography and influence, lags two inches behind the Ararat dedication ceremony. Hundreds of thousands of babies notwithstanding, the grandiosity of that one afternoon in Buffalo is nearly twice as important to us, perhaps, because Noah once received a letter from John Adams that sounded vaguely philo-Semitic. For a final example of visual proof that shimmering symbolism can outweigh mere ubiquity in the minds of Jewish American literary historians, I present a riddle whose answer will be as obvious and symbolically declaratory as a colossus parked in front of a teeming city: which of these two figures owns nine inches of index space in the Cambridge History to the other’s eight and a half? Would it be Philip Roth, the author of twenty-seven widely read but disturbingly inconclusive novels, or Emma Lazarus, the author of the boldly idealistic inscription found inside the base of the Statue of Liberty?My focus on the bizarre legacy of Mordecai Manuel Noah results not only from the fact that he appears in four of the Cambridge History’s essays (receiving prominent treatment in Julian Levinson’s and Rachel Rubinstein’s pieces and passing mention in Michael Weingrad’s, and Sarah Phillips Casteel’s essays) but because the volume as a whole is shaped by an interest in speculative symbolic play that characterizes the entire field of Jewish American literary study. Levinson in particular captures this element in his essay “Encountering the Idea of America.” To Levinson’s way of thinking, Noah was “expressing … the deep logic of American political culture” when he declared the momentary existence of Ararat (25). Like several preceding generations of early Americans, from the Puritans to the purveyors of the American Revolution, Noah was an ideas man, and both Jews and America offered endless possibilities for linking concepts to people, whether or not the concepts fit the people in question or the people had any concept of the concepts. Readers of the Cambridge History are reminded of this at several turns in essays whose writers continually find ways to read the motley, sometimes incidental, corpus of Jewish American literature as a running commentary not only on America, but on modernity, race, indigeneity, and literature itself. Evaluators of the Jewish American experience have wanted meanings to accrue and history to mean something for quite some time now. Witness Isaac Mayer Wise’s 1858 statement that, after Moses’ interlude with God on Mount Sinai, “the fourth of July [was] the second redemption of mankind” (32).1 Even if we have long since abandoned the belief in Jewish American (or any other) exceptionalism, however, wholesale dismissal of America’s centrality to modern Jewish history is unsupported by the facts. Given how comfortable our lives have become, even in the age of Klan-endorsed presidents, the assumption of a broch tzu Columbus mentality would be just as absurdly dismissive of reality today as Noah’s delusional conjuring of a Jewish mini-republic in upstate New York in 1825.I am reminded of the origin story that Jonathan Sarna recounts in his introduction to American Judaism. When he first announced his interest in Jewish American history to a prominent rabbi, Sarna was instructed to abandon it immediately and study Talmud instead. “The Jews came to America … and disappeared,” the rabbi told him.2 Jews are one thing. America is another thing. From a certain, not entirely unreasonable perspective their convergence eliminates, rather than exalts, Judaism. In his pronouncement on the Judaic bankruptcy of America, the rabbi was evidently paraphrasing a famous Jewish American writer’s extremely famous sentence about the city of Oakland, California: “There is no there there.” (Incidentally, Gertrude Stein warrants not quite a quarter-inch of index space in the Cambridge History.)While many of us have been banking on the idea that exploring the Jewish American experience can be a mutually edifying endeavor from both an American and a Jewish standpoint, the possibility that it all means very little and that the happy coincidence of Jewish culture with American ideology has been at best coincidental and at worst disastrous will always leer at us from the margins of our inquiries. For all sorts of reasons, we should be glad that Jonathan Sarna took this rabbi’s counsel seriously but still pressed on to complicate, renovate, and orchestrate a field of scholarly inquiry that might otherwise have been headed for its own private Ararat without his multiple and inspiring interventions. By maintaining a practical awareness of the abyss of non-meaning while devoting full attention to the patterns by which Jews have decentered and problematized univocal readings of American literary history, scholars who have followed Sarna’s model and read America with an enthusiastic but skeptical eye for its occasional flashes of Jewish significance have achieved the exact sorts of edifying and lively results that fill the pages of the Cambridge History.It happens, of course, that Jonathan Sarna’s Jacksonian Jew (1981) comprises the supplest reading of Mordecai Manuel Noah’s legacy to date, offering us a view of Ararat’s founder as an enthusiastic, but absurdly ungrounded reader of “America’s three most enduring myths: the Wandering Pilgrim, the Noble Savage, and the Revolutionary Fathers.”3 Noah’s Ararat was only one among the numerous “failed” social experiments and utopias of the nineteenth century, and it was not the only Jewish inspired endeavor of its sort. Its singularity derived from its spectacular ephemerality. If America is a long-standing attempt to superimpose ideas over people and project meanings onto the landscapes they inhabit, Ararat offers us the ultimate example of what can happen when the ideas don’t suit the people and the people, as a separately constituted people, are indifferent or oblivious to the promise of the land. The stirring convergence that Noah was hoping to instigate in September 1825 was one that still eludes us, not because Jews haven’t been interested in seeking a haven, or a paradise, or, for that matter, an opportunity to stop being Jews in America. It eludes us because geography and peoplehood have less in common than mythologies of place lead us to believe, and no island (or continent) has proffered itself as an uncomplicated final resting place with our, or anyone else’s, name written on it.One of the most subtle but integral contributions that ideologically cautious Jewish writers have made to American literature has been their generous infusion of negative capability into its ongoing discourse on significance of place. Sarah Phillips Casteel explains this phenomenon in her “Landscapes” essay in the Cambridge History when she refers to Jewish American writers’ tendency to “unsettle … myths by exposing them to the profoundly historicist orientation of Jewish diasporic consciousness” (428). By virtue of their extended experience of exile, the Jews who came to America and wrote about it were, if anything, less habituated to mythologizing either their lands of origin or their new “homeland” than were their fellow immigrants from other places. They were perfectly prepared to embrace the new place and forget the old one, especially when doing so did not stipulate the pursuit of an all too provisional “oneness” with a land whose ephemerality might come back to haunt them. Jewish American writers knew how to appreciate the contingent, as well as the providential nature of their good fortune. Because they were all too aware of the dangers that might follow from an excess of ease, they made themselves at home while keeping their proverbially packed suitcases handy. The very first page of the Cambridge History hints strongly at this idea. As she calls our attention to the difference between “geography” and “ideology” in her introductory discussion of Lazarus’s celebration of the “virgin world” of the United States in her poem “1492” (1), Hana Wirth-Nesher reminds us that the land we inhabit will never be as Jewishly numinous as the meanings we have sometimes been tempted to foist upon it.