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JEWISH BOOK ANNUAL
achieve full cultural independence. Politics and culture, central
concerns o f the young Republic, became his central concerns as
well.
Noah’s early literary contributions focus around these twin
preoccupations. As a young man in his twenties, he first achieved
repute in the field o f political journalism. He wrote copy on be
half o f Simon Snyder, Democratic-Republican candidate for gov
ernor o f Pennsylvania in 1808. He authorized a pseudonymous
pamphlet attacking New York Governor De Witt Clinton’s bid
for the presidency in 1812. And he published a noteworthy series
o f articles in the
Charleston City Gazette,
in 1813, that helped ex
pose some attempted political chicanery on the part o f South
Carolina’s governor, Joseph Alston.3
At the same time, Noah authored the first o f his plays. He had
long been a devotee o f the theater (“ I had an early hankering for
the national drama,” he later admitted, “a kind o f juvenile patri
otism.”4), and he subsequently became an important critic. But
“The Fortress o f Sorrento,” and “Paul and Alexis” were hardly
great works. The former, Noah himself later remarked, he was
“almost ashamed to own.”5The latter, he excused as being merely
a favor written for a friend. The plays he wrote when he was
older, all o f them devoted to American themes, proved some
what more enduring, and won Noah a place among the front
ranks o f early American dramatists. In one, “She would Be a
Soldier, or the Plains o f Chippewa,” he introduced onto the stage
a remarkably benevolent Indian, one brave enough to criticize
the white man’s encroachments, and educated enough to speak
perfectly standard English. In another, “Marion, or the Hero o f
Lake George,” he broached a subject ignored in most literary
treatments o f the American Revolution, the tragedy o f conflict
ing allegiances that rent families asunder, pitting brothers
against one another. Both plays, and other Noah plays too, en
joyed long and successful runs. Yet Noah himself realized, by the
time he was middle-aged and no longer writing plays, that his
were somewhat “amateur” productions, composed at odd mo
3 Jonathan D. Sarna,
Jacksonian Jew: The Two Worlds o f Mordecai Noah
(New
York, 1981), pp. 1-14.
4 Noah to William Dunlap (July 11,1832), reprinted in
Publications o f the Ameri
can Jewish Historical Society,
6 (1897), p. 116.
5 Ibid, p. 118.