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.