Washington's Rebuke to Bigotry: Reflections on Our First President's Famous 1790 Letter to the Hebrew Congregation In Newport, Rhode Island

By Facing History and Ourselves

George Washington’s 1790 Letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, a foundational document in the history of religious freedom in the United States, embodies a vision of religious harmony that remains deeply pertinent in our increasingly diverse society. In Washington’s Rebuke to Bigotry, scholars from across the disciplines use the letter as a springboard to engage with important and timely questions regarding religious freedom, religious diversity, and civic identity. 

Washington’s Rebuke to Bigotry introduces readers to the complexities of the historical moment in which Washington wrote the letter, when America’s founding leaders were negotiating how the new democracy would approach religious difference. Many essays in this collection also bring the spirit of Washington’s letter into the present, reflecting on contemporary issues such as gay rights in the United States, restrictions on religious practice in the public sphere in European countries, and the place of religion in education.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Facing History and Ourselves
• Release date: Jul 28, 2015
• ISBN: 9781940457093

Facing History and Ourselves

Facing History and Ourselves is an international educational and professional development organization whose mission is to engage students of diverse backgrounds in an examination of racism, prejudice, and antisemitism in order to promote the development of a more humane and informed citizenry. By studying the historical development of the Holocaust and other examples of genocide, students make connections between history and the moral choices they confront in their own lives.

Book preview

Facing History and Ourselves is an international educational and professional development organization whose mission is to engage students of diverse backgrounds in an examination of racism, prejudice, and antisemitism in order to promote the development of a more humane and informed citizenry. By studying the historical development of the Holocaust and other examples of genocide, students make the essential connection between history and the moral choices they confront in their own lives. For more information about Facing History and Ourselves, please visit our website at www.facinghistory.org.

The views and opinions expressed in this anthology are solely those of the contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of Facing History and Ourselves or the George Washington Institute for Religious Freedom.

Copyright © 2015 by Facing History and Ourselves. All rights reserved.

All authors hold copyright to their respective essays.

Facing History and Ourselves® is a trademark registered in the US Patent & Trademark Office.

ISBN-13: 978-1-940457-09-3

Acknowledgments

Editors: Adam Strom, Dan Eshet, and Michael Feldberg

Washington’s Rebuke to Bigotry was made possible with generous support from the George Washington Institute for Religious Freedom and its founder and chairman, Ambassador John L. Loeb, Jr. Both Ambassador Loeb and Michael Feldberg, the Institute’s executive director, worked closely with Facing History throughout the anthology’s development. We extend special gratitude for their tireless work and innumerable contributions.

The book’s content reflects the complex, thoughtful, and sometimes provocative ideas put forth by its many authors. All of them joined the project with utmost enthusiasm. Their scholarship made this volume an outstanding learning experience.

Facing History and Ourselves would like to thank its staff members who made significant contributions to the production of the book. In particular, we owe gratitude to Marty Sleeper and Margot Stern Strom for their wisdom, direction, and editorial contributions. Sam Gilbert edited most of the essays included in this volume. His terrific editorial work helped make the content of the book lucid and accessible. Special gratitude is also due to Catherine O’Keefe, Ariel Perry, and Alissa Parra. They worked endlessly on preparing the manuscript for publication. A great many thanks to Anika Bachhuber and Samantha Landry for their project management, as well as to our development, web, and program teams, who have made possible many aspects of this project.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Preface

The Letters

The Letter to George Washington from Moses Seixas

George Washington’s Letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, August 1790

Setting the Scene

The Origins of American Religious Liberty

Gordon S. Wood

The World Turned Upside Down: Roger Williams’s Revolutionary Vision of Religious Freedom

John M. Barry

John Clarke, the Rhode Island Charter (1663), and Religious Liberty in America

James Wermuth

America’s White Slaves

Eve LaPlante

Exploring the Letters

George Washington’s Correspondence with the Jews of Newport

Jonathan D. Sarna

George Washington and Religion

Dan Eshet and Michael Feldberg

Creating an American Metaphor for American Liberty: Washington’s Vine and Fig Tree

Daniel L. Dreisbach

The Evolution of Meaning

Kwame Anthony Appiah

Comparative Text

Compelle Intrare (Force Them to Conform)

Olivier Roy

Of Vines, Fig Trees, and the Ashes of Bigotry

Zvi Ben-Dor Benite

Making Room for All the All-Americans

Lee A. Daniels

From Toleration to Equality: George Washington’s Letter in Comparative Context

David N. Myers

Arthur Szyk: Artist for Freedom

Irvin Ungar

The Letter and the Law

Welcome to America: Get Used to Disagreements!

Martha L. Minow

Between Toleration and Rights: Echoes of the George Washington Letter in Contemporary Legal Debates

Robert A. Burt

Reflections on George Washington’s Letter to the Hebrew Congregation

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Madison’s Influence on George Washington’s View of Toleration

Martha C. Nussbaum

The Letter in Our Time

The Most American Thing You Can Do

Eboo Patel

When the Buddha Went Down to Memphis

David Waters

The Impact of Leadership on Prejudice

Jason Marsh and Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton

Religious Liberty after September 11

Eli N. Evans

Education

Breaking Down Barriers: Education in a Globalized World

Adam Strom

All Possess Alike Liberty of Conscience: The Vision of Roger Williams

Charles C. Haynes

If I Am Not for Myself: Speaking Out Against Bigotry

Phyllis Goldstein

Making Democracy Work: A Civic Lesson for the Twenty-First Century

Fernando Reimers

Liberty of Conscience and Universal Toleration in France

Jean-Louis Auduc

Understanding a Core Ideal: The Meaning of Religious Freedom for Twenty-First-Century American Students

James W. Fraser

Postscript

A Rebuke to Bigotry

John Sexton

Prologue

Margot Stern Strom, Senior Scholar and President Emerita

Washington’s Rebuke to Bigotry includes the voices of scholars from different disciplines, geographies, and perspectives reflecting on Washington’s promise to give to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.

With the support of the George Washington Institute for Religious Freedom, the passionate attention of Ambassador John L. Loeb, and guidance from the Institute’s executive director, Michael Feldberg, we at Facing History and Ourselves have had the rare opportunity to deepen our knowledge and understanding of the history of religious freedom in the United States and its implications for societies across the globe. Through symposiums, workshops, and conferences, and now through this book, we are able to provide educators, students, and communities with resources that explore the various ways that people respond to religious differences.

Ambassador Loeb has a love of the history that will inform generations of citizens from across the globe about religious freedom and religious tolerance. He has traced his family history to colonial America and takes great pride in being descended from its earliest Jews. He attributes his efforts to educate about religious freedom to a boyhood memory from a high-school assembly he attended. There, for the first time, he confronted religious intolerance. In 1944, at the movies he and his classmates watched every weekend at school, they saw the first newsreels of the death camps. He recalls that the entire student body cheered at that sight and, believe it or not, some of the students said afterwards, Well, we don’t like Hitler, but at least he’s killed the Jews.

Following this early encounter, the ambassador understood the need to confront bigotry. Loeb found his muse in the letter George Washington wrote to Moses Seixas and the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island. He inspired Facing History and Ourselves to investigate the origins of religious freedom and liberties in the United States with the hope of helping educators who feel ill equipped to facilitate civic conversations about religion and government.

As a Jewish student in my public high school in Memphis, Tennessee, I remember each day in homeroom beginning with a series of religious rituals. We recited the Lord’s Prayer in unison, and I waited my turn to read a passage from the New Testament. I do not remember any class discussion about religious liberty, religious freedom, or separation of church and state. We pledged allegiance each day to the United States of America, and in 1954, we were instructed to add the phrase under God with no further explanation.

I do recall mention of Roger Williams in my history class. I knew he had left the Church of England in 1631 and brought his new ideas to the colonies across the ocean. I knew he was a wanderer and an agitator, but I do not remember any critical discussion about why he was so controversial and why his ideas made him so unwelcome. The history of the right to follow one’s own religious beliefs regardless of anyone else’s views was indeed controversial in Williams’s time. This right to freedom of conscience was government-conferred, and it was a step toward toleration in the modern sense of the word because it acknowledged the rights and beliefs of others.

In his book The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, Williams wrote about the relationship between church and state and argued that when the hedge or wall of separation between the Garden of the Church and the Wilderness of the World breaks down, the only way to set things right is to replant that hedge, to rebuild that wall. In 1635, Williams was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for having such erroneous and very dangerous opinions. To Williams, who founded the colony of Rhode Island after his exile, mere toleration was not enough. He advocated total freedom of conscience and insisted that it be extended to all.

I also remember sitting under the gaze of the portrait of George Washington that hung in my Tennessee history classroom and thinking that this was a man who could be trusted. However, I do not recall a single lesson that provoked or promoted a conversation about the ideas that ultimately joined George Washington and Roger Williams in the history of the liberties and protections promised by the Bill of Rights—the first 10 amendments of the US Constitution. These were missed opportunities.

A 2015 Pew report found that roughly one quarter of the world’s countries are grappling with high levels of religious hostilities within their borders.1 It is our conviction at Facing History and Ourselves that we can address differences in peaceful and meaningful ways without the vitriol that often marks exchanges on school playgrounds, in the media, on the Internet, or in political and legal debates about religious symbols in public spaces and public schools. As educator and philosopher John Dewey explained, schools are the training ground for democracy. What we teach and what we avoid teaching both matter.

This book provides a place to start these important conversations.

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1 Pew Research Center, Latest Trends in Religious Restrictions and Hostilities, February 26, 2015, http://www.pewforum.org/files/2015/02/Restrictions2015_fullReport.pdf .

Preface

Ambassador John L. Loeb, Jr., chairman of the George Washington Institute for Religious Freedom

The founding documents of the United States contain some of the most powerful ideas and principles ever written. The Declaration of Independence asserts, All men are created equal. The Bill of Rights decrees, Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. These foundational rebukes to bigotry have inspired the world for more than two centuries.

Less famous but equally significant for defining religious rights is a letter our first president wrote in 1790 to the small Jewish community in Newport, Rhode Island. It is the basis of the book you are about to read. With the support of the George Washington Institute for Religious Freedom, which I founded in 2009, Facing History and Ourselves has published this remarkable collection of essays exploring the many levels of Washington’s 1790 letter. Our shared hope is that, through this book, the letter will become more universally known and appreciated as one of this nation’s truly formative documents.

Now I’m going to tell you a story. It takes place in the fall of 1945, toward the end of World War II. It is about a boy sent to boarding school in 1939, when he was only nine. He is now 15. His high school is large, with a mostly American, all white-male student body whose families are well-to-do and well educated. There are few minorities in this school—only five foreigners (refugees from Europe) and two American Jews. One of the latter two is this boy.

Saturday night is movie night, and the whole student body attends. The first newsreel pictures of the German concentration camps appear on the screen—horrible, disturbing images of the dead and the near-dead—emaciated men, women, and children in degrading striped uniforms. The pictures take that boy’s breath away.

What happens next completely knocks the wind out of him: the entire student body cheers and hoots. Afterward, as they leave the auditorium, a group of classmates approaches him and someone sneers, Well, we don’t like Hitler, but at least he’s killed the Jews.

That boy was me.

I was stunned. I had thought we were all Americans, and that our religion didn’t matter as long as we were good Americans. After all, my grandmother, Adeline Moses Loeb, had American ancestors going all the way back to before the Revolutionary War—in fact, to 1697. She was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Now I was told I was a despised outsider.

Not long after, I became the victim of taunts and bullying by one of the other boys. The faculty decided that the best way to deal with "my problem was for the other boy and me to don boxing gloves and settle our situation" in the ring, mano a mano. Today, of course, any school suggesting that its students fight over religious taunting could be charged with child abuse, but this was the 1940s. We went three rounds together. While neither of us was particularly effective, I did manage to give him a black eye. The eyewitnesses declared me the winner. The bullying and Jew-baiting stopped.

My experience that terrible night of the Holocaust newsreel and the battle with my tormentor fired my lifelong quest to find the basis for the mindless hatred aimed at the Jews.

Did my teachers make the right decision in setting up the boxing match to deal with "my problem"? Well, as an adult, I have sought peace in my own heart and peaceful ways to teach young people how to live with more than mere tolerance—to live with warmth for, and understanding of, people whose backgrounds and beliefs are different from one’s own. And this brings me to another part of my story.

After my high-school experience, I tried to learn what our Founding Fathers thought about God and religion. In my reading, I came upon the extraordinary letter President George Washington sent to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island. I’d never before heard of that letter, and I discovered that practically nobody I knew at the time had heard of it, either.

Washington was responding to an eloquent message of greeting he received from Moses Seixas, warden of the Hebrew Congregation, during the president’s goodwill visit to Newport that summer.

Seixas’s words so moved the president that when he wrote to the Hebrew Congregation a few days later, Washington went well beyond Seixas’s hope for mere acceptance of Jews and other minorities. Drawing on Seixas’s words and transforming them into a lofty declaration of national values, Washington echoes down to us more than two centuries later:

It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were 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.

A year after Washington made his new government’s promise to the Jews of Newport for full liberty of conscience regardless of religious background, the states ratified the Bill of Rights. The first 10 amendments to our Constitution established our most sacred rights.

Today, 225 years after Washington dedicated the government of the United States to respect for the religious diversity of its citizens, this freedom of and for religion still eludes millions around the globe. It is the work of both Facing History and Ourselves and the George Washington Institute for Religious Freedom to promote, through education, a broader acceptance of the idea that religious belief is, as Washington proclaimed, the inherent natural right of each individual.

Washington concluded his historic letter to the Hebrew Congregation with these words: 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 fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.

We hope that this book helps to bring Washington’s biblical vision of peace and harmony closer to fulfillment, not simply for the children of the stock of Abraham but for all those who seek, whatever their faith or beliefs, to live in goodwill and harmony with their fellow human beings.

The Letters

The Letter to George Washington from Moses Seixas

Sir:

Permit the children of the stock of Abraham to approach you with the most cordial affection and esteem for your person and merits—and to join with our fellow citizens in welcoming you to Newport.

With pleasure we reflect on those days—those days of difficulty, and danger, when the God of Israel, who delivered David from the peril of the sword—shielded Your head in the day of battle: and we rejoice to think, that the same Spirit, who rested in the Bosom of the greatly beloved Daniel enabling him to preside over the Provinces of the Babylonish Empire, rests and ever will rest, upon you, enabling you to discharge the arduous duties of Chief Magistrate in these States.

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: deeming every one, of whatever Nation, tongue, or language equal parts of the great governmental Machine:

This so ample and extensive Federal Union whose basis is Philanthropy, Mutual confidence and Public Virtue, we cannot but acknowledge to be the work of the Great God, who ruleth in the Armies of Heaven, and among the Inhabitants of the Earth, doing whatever seemeth him good.

For all these Blessings of civil and religious liberty which we enjoy under an equal benign administration, we desire to send up our thanks to the Ancient of Days, the great preserver of Men beseeching him, that the Angel who conducted our forefathers through the wilderness into the promised Land, may graciously conduct you through all the difficulties and dangers of this mortal life: And, when, like Joshua full of days and full of honour, you are gathered to your Fathers, may you be admitted into the Heavenly Paradise to partake of the water of life, and the tree of immortality.

Done and Signed by order of the Hebrew Congregation in NewPort, Rhode Island August 17th 1790.1

Moses Seixas, Warden

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1 Moses Seixas’s Letter to the President of the United States, George Washington (August 17, 1790), accessed January 1, 2015, http://www.gwirf.org/the-letter-in-history/view-the-letter-seixas/text-ms .

George Washington’s Letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, August 1790

Gentlemen:

While I received with much satisfaction your address replete with expressions of esteem, I rejoice in the opportunity of assuring you that I shall always retain grateful remembrance of the cordial welcome I experienced on my visit to Newport from all classes of citizens.

The reflection on the days of difficulty and danger which are past is rendered the more sweet from a consciousness that they are succeeded by days of uncommon prosperity and security.

If we have wisdom to make the best use of the advantages with which we are now favored, we cannot fail, under the just administration of a good government, to become a great and happy people.

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 were 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.

It would be inconsistent with the frankness of my character not to avow that I am pleased with your favorable opinion of my administration and fervent wishes for my felicity.

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 fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.

May the father of all mercies scatter light, and not darkness, upon our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in His own due time and way everlastingly happy.2

G. Washington

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2 Washington’s Letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island (August 1790), available at the George Washington Institute for Religious Freedom website, accessed January 1, 2015, http://www.gwirf.org/the-letter-in-history

Setting the Scene

The Origins of American Religious Liberty

Gordon S. Wood

Gordon S. Wood received the 1993 Pulitzer Prize in history for his book The Radicalism of the American Revolution, and he is also the author of The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787. Wood is the Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at Brown University.

By the time President George Washington wrote his famous 1790 Letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, America’s religious world had been radically transformed. The citizens of the United States of America, wrote Washington to the Touro Synagogue, have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy—a policy worthy of imitation. It was not just that all possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship—other liberal-minded nations in the late eighteenth century were no longer interfering with people’s consciences. The United States had moved beyond that. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, Washington wrote, as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.1 Not only did the United States give no sanction to bigotry and no assistance to persecution; it possessed no established church and celebrated complete religious freedom.

Washington was exaggerating, for in 1790 it was only the national government that had forsaken all religious tests and qualifications. A majority of the states still had an established church, and many of them continued to discriminate against some religious denominations.2 Nevertheless, Washington had captured an essential truth. The American Revolution had broken many of the intimate ties that had traditionally existed between religion and government, especially with the Anglican Church, and had turned religion into a voluntary affair, a matter of individual free choice. And contrary to the experience of eighteenth-century Europe, where rationalism had tended to erode allegiance to religion, in America religion did not decline with the spread of enlightenment and liberty.

For Americans, the end of religious establishments and the separation of church and state did not lead to religious indifference or religious apathy. Indeed, nowhere in Christendom did religion become so alive, nowhere did it become so popular, and nowhere did it become so powerful. Although American Protestantism was fractured into dozens of what were called denominations, all fiercely competing with one another, it nonetheless flourished. America soon became the most enthusiastically Christian nation in the world—without any support from the state. As de Tocqueville was soon to observe, religion gained in authority precisely because of its separation from governmental power.

How did such an unusual religious culture develop? What historical circumstances created it?

At the time of the first colonial settlements two centuries earlier, American religion was very different. Most of the colonists who migrated to the New World in the seventeenth century brought with them the traditional attitudes of Europeans. Religion was all-encompassing, and despite the advances of science in the seventeenth century, it was still the major means by which people ordered and explained the world. Early migrants, like most Europeans at the time, assumed that the well-being of the state depended upon religious uniformity. They assumed that a single orthodox religious truth explained the world and that it was the responsibility of the government to enforce that truth. As an early charter of the colony of Virginia put it, the king’s principal care in all parts of his realm was true religion, and reverence to God, and the same colony’s early laws were declared to be established against what Crimes soever, whether against the divine Majesty of God, or our sovereign, and Liege Lord, King James.3

Most settlers could scarcely conceive of any real separation of church and state; religion and government were two parts of one whole whose ends were the same—the glory of God for the commonwealth. Religion was so important to the welfare of the public that the state necessarily had a major responsibility to support it in every possible way—from gathering tithes and paying the clergy to punishing heretics and dissenters.

It is true that the Puritans who came to Massachusetts Bay in 1630 were fleeing persecution and the liturgy and ceremonies decreed by the bishop of London, Archbishop William Laud, and the hierarchical Anglican Church of England. But they were not seeking religious toleration or liberty in any modern sense. They simply wanted to practice the orthodox religious truth as they saw it, and once in control of the churches of Massachusetts Bay, they established just as much religious uniformity in the New World as Laud had demanded in the Old World. They required that all inhabitants attend Puritan churches and quickly stamped out dissent by either exiling or, in some rare cases, hanging the offenders. Because the church structure they favored was based on congregations, and thus ideally suited to the localizing tendencies of American life, the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay were remarkably successful at establishing their religion; indeed, the Congregational religious establishment they formed in Massachusetts lasted until 1833, making it America’s longest-lived state-supported religious association.

Elsewhere, however, circumstances in the New World conspired to transform traditional European religious establishments. Such changes can be most clearly seen in Virginia, which was first settled in 1607. There the English colonists planned an overseas branch of the hierarchical Church of England that would be based, as the English church was, on landed endowments and maintained by rents from tenants. But in the New World, conditions were the exact opposite of those of the Old World: land was plentiful and labor scarce, so the church inevitably took on a new form. Moreover, the endowments of land granted to the Virginia parishes failed to attract tenants, for few colonists wished to till the church’s land and pay rent when there was so much land they might own outright.

The consequence was that the church in colonial Virginia failed to gain the stable source of wealth that gave the Church of England its strength and independence from local popular control. The clergy in Virginia soon found themselves dependent on annual grants from the parish community. No archbishops or bishops came to America, and therefore the elaborate hierarchy of the Church of England was not duplicated in the New World. In the absence of bishops and archbishops, local parish priests came to resemble the Congregational ministers of Puritan New England—both were dependent on the local populace for their support. This initial decentralization, this devolution of authority to the local lay populace, was crucially important in the development of American religious life.

Traditional assumptions were also challenged by the presence of several religious sects within the same community. The colony of Maryland, for example, was settled by refugee English Catholics. But since they never constituted a majority of Maryland’s colonists, the Catholic proprietors of Maryland, the Calvert family, felt pressed to issue the colony’s famous Maryland Toleration Act in 1649. The act stated that in order to ensure public tranquility—and for that reason alone—all Christians who accepted the Trinity were granted the right to practice their religion freely.

This was not a modern document. It said nothing about separation of church and state or about the freedom of individual conscience. It was simply a limited, pragmatic instrument designed to meet the exigencies of maintaining order in a community where several religions existed. The act tolerated only those groups that it