George Washington’s letter of August 1790 (sixteen months after he became president) responding to a letter from Moses Seixas, Warden of the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, is rightly celebrated as one of the definitive statements of religious freedom under the new US Constitution. Washington’s assertion that “the Government of the United States… gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance” made clear that our nation’s first president would not permit the power of the new government to become an instrument of religious intolerance.
And to a Jew like myself, the exchange of letters between Warden Seixas and President Washington, even at a distance of 229 years, remains profoundly moving. It expresses so beautifully how the children of Israel, after centuries of persecution, had finally found a genuine welcome in this newborn nation, the United States of America.
The events immediately preceding this exchange did not augur such a positive result. Only three months earlier, in May 1790, Rhode Island, a bastion of rural antipathy to federal government, had finally ratified the federal Constitution—the last of the thirteen states to do so—but only under intense economic pressure from its neighboring states. Prior to ratification, the new president and beloved hero, George Washington, had boycotted Rhode Island, a situation that, in turn, put Newport’s little Jewish congregation in an awkward spot.
In May 1790, the Jewish congregation in New York proposed that, in light of Rhode Island’s ratification, the Newport congregation join the New York congregation in sending congratulations to the new president. But the New York and Newport congregations did not always see eye to eye. The leader of the Newport congregation, Moses Seixas, wrote to the New York congregation, saying: “[We] are of the opinion, that as we are so small in number, it would be treating the Legislature and other large Bodies in this State, with a great degree of indelicacy, for us to address the President of the United States, previous to any of them [doing so].” In other words, we Jews of Newport have to act with great circumspection, for we cannot afford to offend any reigning power.
But in short succession, a series of events modified this view. First, in June 1790, Rhode Island became the ninth state to approve what is now the First Amendment, which begins with the wonderful pronouncement that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” True, it was more than a year later that the necessary tenth state ratified the First Amendment, and for decades after several of the states, most notably Massachusetts, still designated one or another Protestant sect as the established state-sponsored religion. But in June 1790, Rhode Island, with its own history of religious toleration, had firmly declared its support for freedom of religion for the nation as a whole.