By Meir Y. Soloveichik
Thursday, January 22, 2026
When President George Washington visited Newport, R.I.,
in the summer of 1790, he could scarcely have imagined that he would end up
penning, in the midst of his trip, one of the enduring expressions of American
equality. Yet his letter to the Jews of Newport is still celebrated, and it
appears in debates about America to this day. Justice Antonin Scalia, for whom
it was a favorite citation, quoted it in his Supreme Court opinions. Justice
Elena Kagan also cited the letter to Newport’s Jews in a dissent, though she
had to issue a correction when she referred to that community as the oldest
Jewish congregation in America. That distinction is held by Congregation
Shearith Israel of New York; it is the house of worship in Newport that is the
oldest synagogue structure in the United States. But as famous as the
often-quoted letter is, few know its background; and as we celebrate America’s
250th birthday, the letter’s story is worth rediscovering.
Perhaps the least-known interesting fact about the
Newport letter is why Washington came to Rhode Island in the first place. Until
that summer, Rhode Island was not really part of the United States. In 1788,
Rhode Islanders had refused to ratify the Constitution and therefore also
refused in 1789 to participate in the first national election. Washington
became the president of the United States in April of that year, but only
twelve of the 13 states were truly united. Because of its civic recalcitrance,
the state was known to much of the country as “Rogue Island.” One might say
that Rhode Island was the progenitor of the hashtag #NotMyPresident.
But things changed on June 1, 1790. Washington sent a
letter to Congress, excitedly announcing that the Constitution had just been
ratified by Rhode Island, two years after the other states had ratified it. The
president journeyed to Rhode Island essentially as a reward for its finally
embracing the nascent system of government. That Washington went to Newport
that summer is a sign of his greatness: He was willing to overlook any insult
and would go out of his way to embrace a small state so he could be president
of everyone. It was in this spirit, while there, that he interacted with the
Jewish community in Newport.
This Jewish community was on its last legs. It had never
recovered since the years leading up to the Revolutionary War; most Jews were
patriots and would have fled Newport when it was occupied by the British. By
1790, Newport’s synagogue had no clerical figure overseeing services. Its lay
leader, Moses Seixas, could find no one qualified to read from the Torah on the
Sabbath. With Jews not returning for many decades, the Newport synagogue was on
the cusp of shutting down. Nevertheless, Seixas felt it was his responsibility
to represent his community when the president arrived, and he therefore
delivered to Washington written words of greeting on behalf of Newport’s Jews
and, indeed, on behalf of Jews in America in general: “Permit the children of
the Stock of Abraham to approach you with the most cordial affection and esteem
for your person & merits — and to join with our fellow Citizens in
welcoming you to New Port.”
***
Washington may have been surprised to receive this
letter, as he had already heard from America’s Jews. Soon after his election,
minority faith communities reached out to the new president, ostensibly to
extend their congratulations, but implicitly to also ensure their equality in
the American republic. Washington received letters from the leaders of American
Catholics, Baptists, and Quakers. The Jews of America, meanwhile, reflecting
the lack of organizational leadership that would mark their early history in
this country, failed to unify in writing to the president. In the end,
Washington would receive three separate letters from American Jewry. In June
1790, he had already corresponded with Savannah’s Jews. Then, in August, he
received Seixas’s letter, which celebrated the new Constitution. (The third
letter arrived in December 1790; when the capital was moved to Philadelphia,
the leaders of Jewish congregations in Charleston, S.C., Richmond, Va., New
York, and Philadelphia presented a letter to Washington.) Seixas’s August
letter reads:
Deprived as we
heretofore have been of the invaluable rights of free Citizens, we now (with a
deep sense of gratitude to the Almighty disposer of all events) behold a
Government, erected by the Majesty of the People — a Government, which to
bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance — but generously
affording to All liberty of conscience, and immunities of Citizenship.
The ringing words “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution
no assistance” are often ascribed to Washington himself, but the president was
echoing Seixas’s original phrasing. It is also misunderstood why Seixas
described the new government in this way. This was not a reference to the First
Amendment, which would not be ratified for another year and a half. Rather,
Seixas was referring to the clause in the new Constitution that banned any
religious test for federal office. When America was born in 1776, many states
still restricted their legislatures to Christians alone, as they did after the
Revolution came to a close, when the Articles of Confederation were in effect.
To Jews in America, this legislative restriction was, in
the simplest sense, un-American, and they had frequently and publicly inveighed
against it. In 1787, a prominent Jew in Philadelphia named Jonas Phillips had
written to Washington, who was presiding over the Constitutional Convention in
that city. Phillips had invested great hopes in the American future. Those
visiting the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia today can see an
early copy of the Declaration of Independence — a printed paper that is older
than the parchment in the National Archives — that Phillips had excitedly sent
to a fellow Jew across the Atlantic, along with a letter describing the war
with England that had broken out. To Jews such as Phillips, who had served in
the militia during the Revolution, the civic inequality maintained by the
states was a violation of the creed for which they had fought, and he told
Washington how he felt:
It is well Known
among all the Citizens of the 13 united states that the Jews have been true and
faithfull whigs; and during the late contest with England they have been
foremost in aiding and assisting the states with their lifes and fortunes, they
have supported the cause, have bravely fought and bleed for Liberty which they
can not Enjoy.
Washington did not respond to this letter, but the
convention produced a Constitution that made good, in Jewish eyes, on the
promise of equality that the Declaration of Independence had originally voiced.
While the constitutional clause was operative only for federal offices, the
standard of equality had been set, and state restrictions would soon disappear.
It was in this Constitution that Seixas saw, finally, a system of government
that “to bigotry gives no sanction.”
Washington immediately understood what Seixas meant by
this phrase. In his response, he chose to echo Seixas’s language and to add
several phrases of his own:
The Citizens of
the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having
given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of
imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of
citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it
was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise
of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United
States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires
only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good
citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support. [Emphasis
added.]
Here Washington is building on the entire history of
Anglo-American political thought. A century before, John Locke had written his
“Letter Concerning Toleration,” in which he argued that because we cannot
control an individual’s thoughts, we should not persecute anyone for his
beliefs. Though Locke explicitly sought to exclude Catholics from his capacious
approach, his doctrine of toleration was nevertheless an important step forward
in the intellectual story of religious liberty.
Yet for Washington, mere toleration was insufficient. In
Europe, Washington was implying to American Jewry, you were tolerated,
but the watchword of America is not religious toleration. We are going
much further than that; we are embracing equality. You are not here
because we are allowing you to be; you deserve to be here just as much
as we do.
***
The correspondence between Seixas and Washington allows
us to better understand the uniqueness of the American Jewish experience.
America is often described as a “land of opportunity,” and it is indeed that.
But it is not economic opportunity that Jews uniquely found in the United
States. Until the Gilded Age, no American Jew would approach the economic
success achieved by certain Jews in Western Europe. It is political equality
that Jews found in America, unlike anywhere else. In the United Kingdom,
Parliament would refuse to seat Jews until the second half of the 19th century,
and only after a vituperative debate. And if Jews in America never experienced
the horrors that Jews encountered on the European continent, it was, in part,
because this country’s founders embraced its Jews from the beginning and
decried Jew-hatred as un-American. Thus did Washington draw on his favorite
biblical verse, from the book of Micah, in concluding his letter:
May the Children
of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy
the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety
under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid. May
the father of all mercies scatter light and not darkness in our paths, and make
us all in our several vocations useful here, and in his own due time and way
everlastingly happy.
Of course, many have made American Jews afraid
today. The antisemitism that has been manifest for some years on the
progressive left has now been joined by the rabid voices of the “woke right.”
It is therefore all the more inspiring when non-Jewish figures turn to
Washington’s letter as a promissory note to American Jewry. The most eloquent
example of this phenomenon has been Senator Ted Cruz, who, in a recent speech
to the Republican Jewish Coalition, cited Washington’s words to Newport’s Jews
in declaring antisemitism “an existential crisis in our party and our country.”
Yet Washington’s correspondence with Seixas is worth
quoting not only because of what it means to American Jewry but also because of
what it teaches all Americans. If there is a truly “only in America” citation
of the Newport letter, it is to be found in the writings of Scalia, not in a
judicial decision but in a speech delivered to the National Italian American
Foundation, one month after he became the first American of Italian descent to
sit on the Supreme Court. For Scalia, Washington’s letter to the Jews ought to
be read by Italians — and all Americans — because it teaches us the truth about
American identity itself:
While taking pride
in what we have brought to America, we should not fail to be grateful for what
America has given to us. . . . What makes an American, it has told us, is not
the name or the blood or even the place of birth, but the belief in the principles
of freedom and equality that this country stands for. . . . If you do not
believe that, you need look no further than the actions of the greatest
American of them all, the Father of our Country, George Washington. During his
first term in office as president, Washington wrote a letter that is a model of
Americanism, addressed to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island.
This blue-blooded, aristocratic Virginian assured that small community that his
administration, his country, would brook no discrimination against that small
and politically impotent community. And that the children of Abraham, as he put
it, were welcome in this country, to live in peace and never to have fear.
Scalia was right. Perhaps a thousand Jews lived in the
United States in Washington’s time, and he received letters from three separate
Jewish communities. “Small and politically impotent” they certainly were.
Washington could so easily have ignored them. Instead, he produced a reflection
that teaches us all about the meaning of America and what it means to celebrate
its 250th birthday this year.
No comments:
Post a Comment