Background Information
When the United States Constitution was ratified in 1776, a Jew could be elected president but not to a city council in Maryland. It was one of the last states to remove barriers preventing Jewish people from holding office. The Maryland State Constitution, ratified the same year, provided only that “all persons professing the Christian religion are equally entitled to protection in their religious liberty.” Specifically, in Article 35, it was written, “No other test or qualification ought to be required on admission to any office of trust or profit than such oath of support and fidelity to the State… and a declaration of belief in Christian religion.” Maryland Jews and other non-Christians were unable to serve in municipal or state office, become commissioned officers in the military, or practice law. In 1797, Solomon Etting, a prominent Jew in Baltimore, petitioned to have the State Constitution amended to end discrimination of Jews. He petitioned several times over the next few years without success. Even after President Thomas Jefferson appointed his older brother, Reuben Etting, to the position of U.S. Marshall for the District of Maryland, the legislature would not vote to consider the bill. The bill was dropped until 1818, when a freshman legislator from Hagerstown, Thomas Kennedy, took up the cause. While Kennedy had not even met a Jew before, he was a devoted follower of the Jeffersonian belief in the equality of all peoples. He proposed the first official form of the bill entitled, An Act for the Relief of the Jews in Maryland, or the Jew Bill, in 1818. At that time, there was little public sentiment in favor of such a bill, and it did not pass.
He continued pressing in favor of the Jew Bill until it passed in the 1822-23 session of the State Legislature. However, this was not enough. The bill needed to pass not once but in two sequential sessions of the legislature. In the 1823 election, Benjamin Galloway defeated Kennedy. Galloway campaigned as the head of the “Christian Ticket,” appealing to widespread antisemitism in Kennedy’s district. The Jews of Maryland did not sit idly by. They actively petitioned the legislature in 1824 for the bill’s passage. They wrote to editors in local and national newspapers, which began to run editorials in favor of the Jew Bill. Many people were offended to learn that such religious discrimination still existed in the government, nearly fifty years after the Constitution was established. Maryland was one of only three states to have such discrimination in its constitution. The other states were North Carolina and New Hampshire.
The Galloway victory was only temporary as Kennedy was re-elected as an independent in 1825. In a slightly revised form, the bill passed both the 1824-25 and 1825-26 sessions of the State Legislature. The Jew Bill did not formally change the Maryland State Constitution but gave Maryland Jews full rights as citizens. It still required a belief in a divine being and afterlife. Following the bill’s passing, both Jacob I. Cohen and Solomon Etting, who had initially proposed the end of Jewish discrimination, were elected to the Baltimore City Council. Etting was even elected president of one of its sections.
