A portion of the cover of Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense,” the pamphlet originally published in 1776.

The American Revolution was stoked in part by an antisemitic pamphlet, a British historian contends in a new book defending King George III.

Common Sense, the 1776 broadside by Thomas Paine, was a runaway bestseller, described by Benjamin Franklin as having had “great effect on the minds of the people at the beginning of the revolution.” The historian of the American Revolution Bernard Bailyn has written that it had “unique power.”

In his new book, The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III, Andrew Roberts derides Common Sense for what he says is “all its antisemitism, absurd exaggeration, anti-Catholic bigotry, and bogus claims of objectivity.”

Paine, Roberts writes, “squarely blamed the Jews for the institution of monarchy.” Roberts writes that in so doing, Paine was “blaming history’s oldest scapegoats.”

In a footnote, Roberts writes, “The mention of George as Pharaoh ought to have reminded readers that the Jews could not be blamed for the concept of monarchy, given that the Egyptian monarchy preceded theirs by centuries.”

It’s become newly fashionable to fault the American founders for bigotry. The New York Times’ 1619 Project originally claimed that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” That claim has been fiercely contested.

I’m the author of a biography of Samuel Adams and was an American history major in college (where I took Bailyn’s class on the American Revolution) but until Roberts’ book I’d yet to encounter the claim that antisemitism played any role in independence. If anything, to the contrary: the philosemitism of the Puritan settlers in New England has been stressed by writers such as Michael Oren, David Gelernter, and Meir Soloveichik.

Paine eventually turned against all organized religions. But the notion that Common Sense or its author is to be faulted for counting monarchy as among the sins of the Jews strikes me as a stretch. The Jewish Publication Society translation of I Samuel 13, verse 19 and following, says, “The people all said to Samuel, ‘Intercede for your servants with the Lord your God that we may not die, for we have added to all our sins, the wickedness of asking for a king.’ But Samuel said to the people, “Have no fear. You have, indeed, done all those wicked things….”

It’s not Paine, or Common Sense, that viewed the children of Israel’s request for a monarch as sinful; it’s right there in the biblical text. As Paine himself wrote in Common Sense, “these portions of scripture are direct and positive. They admit of no equivocal construction.” The Bible, in Deuteronomy 17, requires a Jewish king to sit on his throne writing a copy of the Torah, which by the way isn’t exactly what George III was up to, either, notwithstanding all of Roberts’ kvelling about the British monarch’s libraries and book-collecting.

Accusing Common Sense of antisemitism for pretty much accurately recording the biblical skepticism of monarchy would be like accusing the British of antisemitism for having arrested the Jewish financier of the revolutionary cause, Haym Solomon. Roberts’ book leaves Solomon unmentioned. It’s not antisemitic to note that the Jews in the Bible sometimes act in ways that fall short of ideal.

Anyway, it is an intriguing argument by Roberts, who is energetic and creative in attempting to rehabilitate the reputation of George III. That task is a heavy lift, at least for an American audience, especially as the sestercenentennial, or the semiquincentennial, approaches in 2026. I guess it says something positive that Roberts figures an association with antisemitism would hurt the contemporary reputation of Paine (and that of Common Sense’s revolutionary readers) rather than help it.

Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.