Fighting Antisemitism with Humanity: Lessons from James Oglethorpe's Life

To understand this story, we have to begin not in Georgia, nor even in England — but in Portugal.

Below is a podcast of the main story arc.

How a Jewish doctor saved Georgia

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The hero doctor

This is the early 1700s. Portugal was a perilous place to be a Jew.

Centuries earlier, the Jews there had been forced to convert to Catholicism or flee.

Many converted outwardly while keeping their faith in secret — the so-called "New Christians," or crypto-Jews.

And the Inquisition hunted them relentlessly, watching for any trace of the old rituals, punishing "heresy" with imprisonment, torture and the stake.

Into this world was born Dr Samuel Nunes — Nunez, in some tellings — one of the most respected physicians in Lisbon.

He treated the city's elite, including as physician to the King and members of the Royal Family. And all the while, behind closed doors, his family kept the Jewish faith alive.

Eventually the Inquisition came for him. He was arrested, questioned, held.

Then fortune turned on a bitter irony. One of his captors — an inquisitor, by some tellings — fell gravely ill, and there was no one of skill to treat him but the very prisoner in the cells.

They needed Dr Nunes.

He agreed to attend the sick man, and his care also bought him a reprieve: released from the dungeon into house arrest, watched but no longer caged.

The story of his escape has the shape of legend.

From that house arrest, Nunes is said to have invited the captain of a British brigantine to dine with his family aboard ship — and once they were all on board, the vessel quietly slipped its moorings and sailed for England, carrying the whole family to freedom.

However it truly happened, by the mid-1720s Dr Nunes was safe in London.

London and an unlikely plan

In London, Nunes joined a small but established Sephardic community — Jews of Spanish and Portuguese descent — gathered around the Bevis Marks synagogue.

They were prosperous, and they were watchful.

They knew what their kin were still suffering under the Inquisition, and they longed for a place of refuge across the ocean.

Britain was no safe haven either, as you will read later.

Then an opportunity appeared.

A new colony was being founded in America — Georgia — expressly as a haven for the persecuted, with liberty of conscience promised in its charter.

It is not hard to see why it drew them.

A fresh start. A charter that spoke their language of refuge. Somewhere their people might finally be safe.

The Georgia Trustees needed money. And so they appointed several prominent Bevis Marks merchants to help raise charitable funds.

Those funds were meant for impoverished British Protestants — not for Jews. The Charter did not prohibit Jews, it was prejudice.

So the London organisers made a bold, and quietly defiant, decision.

Rather than simply hand the money over, they used it to charter a ship of their own — the William & Sarah — with some forty-two Jewish refugees, Dr Nunes among them, and sent them straight to Savannah.

They did not ask permission. They knew exactly what the answer would be.

Strict instructions

Because the Trustees back in London had been perfectly clear.

Oglethorpe, on the ground in the new colony, was operating under strict instructions.

The charter kept out Catholics; the Trustees had no intention of filling their fragile experiment with Jews either.

When word reached them that a shipload of Jewish refugees was on its way — funded, no less, with money meant for Christians — they were furious. Blindsided. Duped.

Their instruction to Oglethorpe was simple: turn them away.

The ship in the river

The William & Sarah reached Savannah in July 1733.

And it arrived at a perfect time. The new colony, less than a year old, was in the midst of a deadly catastrophe.

Oglethorpe needed help, from somewhere, anywhere.

A fever — most likely yellow fever — was sweeping the tiny settlement.

Colonists were dying. And the one doctor the colony had was gone, dead.

Oglethorpe was not expecting the ship.

He went aboard. There he found Dr Samuel Nunes — a trained, experienced physician — and forty-one other Jewish men, women and children who had crossed an ocean with nowhere else on earth to go.

Can you just imagine his reaction? He is in the midst of a new colony, thousands of miles away from his native England, and nowhere near other populations.

He was alone, he was desperate. The colony was dying, his colony was dying, literally.

The Trustees had given Oglethorpe strict orders. He should have sent them away.

He asked if Dr Nunes would tend to the sick people in the colony.

Nunes would not abandon his people. The doctor and refugees were one.

A pathway

Here Oglethorpe did what Oglethorpe always did. He looked for a way.

He was, above all, an enterprising and practical mind — and he had a dying colony and a trained doctor standing in front of him.

So he read the charter again, closely. It barred Catholics. It said nothing — nothing at all — against Jews.

He sought legal advice. And the advice confirmed what he had hoped: there was a pathway.

The Charter Oglethorpe helped draft allowed Jews

That was all he needed.

Deliverance

Oglethorpe let them stay.

And he placed the health of the colony in the hands of the brilliant Dr Nunes.

And he did not treat the fever as other physicians of his age would have.

Where the standard remedy of the day was to bleed and purge, bloodletting, an already weakening patient, Nunes reached instead for cooling — cold baths, cooling drinks, wet cloths tucked into the armpits to bring a raging fever down.

Radical methods for the time, and enough to raise eyebrows. But they worked.

The results were extraordinary.

Where the previous doctor's patients had died, Nunes' patients lived.

He brought the outbreak under control and pulled the little settlement back from the very edge of collapse.

Oglethorpe never forgot.

He wrote home crediting Dr Nunes, by name, with saving Georgia from ruin. He noted that every person that Dr Nunes attended to was saved, every person.

His gratitude turned into something lasting.

Defying the Trustees' explicit orders to evict them, Oglethorpe granted the Jewish families the same fifty-acre plots as every Christian settler — the same legal standing, the same right to worship, the same place in the town's defences.

Put this in context. In England, Jews could not own land, vote, or hold public office.

In Oglethorpe's Savannah, they were freeholders and neighbours.

More so, they were friends.

By 1735, they had founded Congregation Mickve Israel — today the third-oldest Jewish congregation in America — worshipping around a deerskin Torah scroll they had carried with them from Europe.

It is preserved still.

A country that had not seen a Jew in nearly four hundred years

To feel how astonishing this was, you have to understand the Britain that Oglethorpe came from.

Jews had been expelled from England in 1290, and only readmitted in 1656 — a gap of very nearly four hundred years.

For most of that time, there had been no Jewish community in the country at all — at least not formally.

Which meant that the overwhelming majority of Britons in Oglethorpe's day had quite simply never met a Jew.

What they had instead was caricature.

The grasping moneylender. The villain.

Shakespeare's Shylock, in The Merchant of Venice, sharpening his knife for his pound of flesh — a figure who shaped the popular imagination and hardened prejudice into what felt like common sense.

And here is the honest truth: we do not know what Oglethorpe himself thought of Jews before that day at the ship.

The record is silent.

He may well have shared the assumptions of his age. He may never knowingly have met a Jew in his life.

Which is exactly why this moment matters so much.

Because proximity changed him.

Standing face to face with Dr Nunes — watching him work, watching him save life after life, watching his refusal to abandon his people — the caricature could not survive contact with the man.

Prejudice rarely survives proximity. Oglethorpe's did not.

The ripples

What Oglethorpe protected went on to ripple out across the centuries.

Savannah's Jewish community put down deep roots.

Benjamin Sheftall's son, Mordecai Sheftall, became the highest-ranking Jewish officer in the American Revolution.

In 1789, the Mickve Israel congregation wrote to the newly inaugurated President George Washington — and received his now-famous reply celebrating religious liberty as a model for the world.

By 1895, Savannah had elected Herman Myers, its first Jewish mayor.

When Juliette Gordon Low, from Oglethorpe's Savannah, founded the Girl Scouts in 1912, three of her first five troop leaders came from that same Jewish congregation.

And the ripples spread far beyond Georgia.

When Spain later threatened invasion, many of the William & Sarah families moved on to Charleston and New York — helping to seed two of the oldest Jewish communities in America.

Dr Nunes' own descendants were among them, including, generations later, Mordecai Manuel Noah — one of the most prominent Jewish figures in early American public life.

One doctor. One ship. One choice, one decision to look for a pathway rather than an excuse.

The Jew Act, 1753

The story might have ended there — a good deed, twenty years in the past.

But Oglethorpe was not finished standing up for the oppressed. And this time, it would cost him everything.

In 1753, the British Whig Government introduced the Jewish Naturalisation Act — the so-called "Jew Bill."

It would allow foreign-born Jews who had settled in Britain to become naturalised citizens, removing the old requirement to take the Anglican sacrament that had always barred them.

Oglethorpe supported it — passionately.

And that made him a rarity.

For Oglethorpe was a Tory. And the Tories had made fierce opposition to the bill their rallying cry.

They cast themselves as the defenders of the Church of England, arguing that to naturalise non-Christians was an insult to God and a threat to the very Christian character of the nation.

Oglethorpe was one of the very few Tories to cross the floor and vote with the government.

On one of the most emotionally charged culture-war issues of the age, he broke ranks with his own party — for the Jews.

This matters because antisemitism rarely presents itself first as violence. It usually begins as distance.

The price he paid

The bill passed, and received royal assent in July 1753.

Then came the backlash — a wave of public antisemitism so ferocious, so laced with medieval conspiracy and hatred, that the terrified government repealed its own Act just months later, in December 1753, rather than lose the election due the following year.

And Oglethorpe's enemies came for him.

They weaponised his past.

Pamphleteers dug up his actions in Savannah, twenty years before — his welcome of Dr Nunes and the Jewish refugees — and held it up as "proof" that here was a man with a long-standing, hidden agenda to raise Jewish interests above British Christian ones.

The very act of mercy that had once saved a colony was turned into evidence against him.

In the general election of 1754, Oglethorpe stood in both Haslemere and Westminster. He was defeated in both — decisively.

It ended a career in the House of Commons that had lasted thirty-two years, and forced him into permanent political retirement.

The government caved. Oglethorpe did not.

He never recanted his support for the Act, never disowned the Jews of Savannah or of London.

He gave up his political life rather than betray a cause he had believed in since that day beside the ship.

As you'll see in another post, what was sent to harm him simply created another opportunity, because his moral and human gravity was such.

It only served to create a new pathway.

From what I can see, it leads to the 1776 American Declaration of Independence, providing a thriving home for Jews, away from the antisemitism that had plagued Britain for centuries.

Proximity changes everything

Here, then, is the lesson of Oglethorpe's life for our own age.

Antisemitism — like every hatred — feeds on distance. On caricature. On the villain you have never actually met.

Oglethorpe was likely no better than his contemporaries, right up until the day he stood on the deck of a ship and met a real human being: a doctor who would not leave his people.

Proximity did what no argument could.

It turned a stranger into a neighbour, a caricature into a colleague, prejudice into gratitude — and gratitude into a lifelong stand that he refused to abandon even when it cost him everything.

That is still how it works.

We do not overcome hatred by shouting it down.

We overcome it by drawing close, and by letting real human stories do what they have always done — remind us that there is no such thing as a lesser human being.

That is the whole of it.

Get close. Listen to the story.

And let your humanity be called forward.

Become a Champion

Oglethorpe's story shows that humanity is not a soft alternative to performance.

It is a performance multiplier.

When people are seen, protected and trusted, systems become stronger, not weaker.

If this story stirs something in you, don't let it stay a feeling.

Do what Oglethorpe did — turn it into a choice, a connection and then create the future you want to see, become that future!

• Join the 35Champions site as a free member, and follow the movement as it grows.
• Pay it forward as a paid member, helping young people join the Champions program and become Humanity Champions in their own communities.
• Most of all, choose a pathway of humanity — center your leadership on what makes us human, and create ripples of your own.

Join as a member, read and share Stories of Humanity, and help fund the next generation of young Champions.

I'd love to hear your reflections below.

Glen