Two hundred years ago, the state of Maryland passed a piece of legislation that has since come to be known as “the Jew Bill.”
The bill allowed for Jewish Marylanders to hold public office in the state, just like their Christian counterparts, and it heralded a landmark moment in the Jewish American fight for equality, promised in the Constitution, but not always easy to obtain.
With the 200th anniversary of the Jew Bill falling in 2026, the Jewish Museum of Maryland is preparing programming to celebrate it. And now, the museum has announced that it has acquired a rare artifact from 1829 that holds speeches given during the deliberation over the bill.
The museum’s executive director, Sol Davis, said that this artifact will provide great context to museum visitors who seek to understand the climate surrounding the deliberations over the Jew Bill.
“This volume is a critical acquisition for JMM that will support research and deepen understanding of the central arguments surrounding this watershed legislation within the early 19th-century Maryland General Assembly,” he said. “The volume represents a critical set of transcriptions of speeches that reveal major social and political tensions as the Maryland General Assembly considered the passage of the so-called Jew Bill.”
The museum acquired the volume at auction, with funds largely being provided by the community. This includes donors and Jewish organizations, like the Chestertown Havurah, as well as non-Jewish entities.
“The fact that this was a community-sourced acquisition and that support came in from across the state reflects the statewide trust JMM has developed as stewards of Maryland’s Jewish history and an enduring commitment to developing the museum’s collection of material culture,” Davis said.
Support came from outside Maryland as well.
“Word spread across the state and beyond, resulting in more than 20 people providing funds to support the cause,” Davis said. “The donors came from Baltimore, New York, Boston, Chestertown, the Thomas Kennedy Center in Hagerstown and Temple B’nai Israel in Easton.”
This year is, of course, also the United States’ semiquincentennial. Davis said that the confluence of important anniversaries is something that the museum will use to shape the message around the Jew Bill.
“The 200th anniversary of the ‘Jew Bill’ coincides with the 250th year of the United States, providing a major opportunity for us all to consider the ideals imbued within the founding of the nation and the ongoing work of realizing those ideals,” he said.
The artifact will be central to the museum’s new core exhibit, opening in April, titled “The Jews of Maryland: Crossroads of Identity,” which Davis said “will present the experiences of Jewish Marylanders through a statewide historical lens, using Maryland’s 1826 ‘Jew Bill’ as a thematic focal point.”
The volume of speeches was published in 1829 and includes remarks from some of the Jew Bill’s most prominent advocates. One of the entries includes the full correspondence between President George Washington and Jewish communal leaders in Newport, Rhode Island, a famous exchange in which Washington expressed support for religious freedom in the United States.
Davis said that the new core exhibit coming this spring, not just the volume of speeches, will help Jewish and non-Jewish Marylanders understand the place of Jews in the Old Line State, both then and now.
“The exhibition expands notions of Jewish Marylanders’ identities and history within the context of the diverse and complicated history of the United States,” Davis said.
