On Aug. 18, 1790, President George Washington sent a letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, R.I., now known as Touro Synagogue. The most celebrated phrase in the letter states that the government of the United States “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”
But we are celebrating the wrong phrase.
The previous sentence in that letter contains one of the most sweeping and original assertions made by the Founders. Washington told the Newport congregation: “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.”
We tend to think of tolerance as an ideal. Washington said that this was a category error. Tolerance implies that one group holds rights by default and extends permission to another.
That model, familiar from every European society Jews ever inhabited, was incompatible with what America had built. Jewish rights in the new republic required no majority permission, because those rights were inherent. They were structural features of the republic itself, not gifts from the dominant culture.
Washington told the congregation that the equality of Jews and all peoples was built into the foundation of the nation, not an afterthought.
Where did that foundation come from?
The standard account of the American founding cites the likes of John Locke, Montesquieu and the traditions of English common law. As important as they were, the founders themselves often pointed to something older. They quoted the Hebrew Bible in their pamphlets and sermons more than any other text.
When Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were each asked, independently, to propose a seal for the new nation, both reached for the same image: the Israelites crossing the sea, liberated from bondage, moving toward a promised land governed by law rather than by blood.
Franklin and Jefferson had little else in common theologically, but they agreed on the model. It was 3,000 years old.
The Hebrew covenant at Sinai had done something unprecedented in the ancient world. It created a people through acceptance of shared obligation rather than shared ancestry alone. Membership in the covenant community was defined by what you accepted, not what you were born into.
This principle was so radical that Hebrew scripture marked it explicitly: Ruth, a Moabite woman with no Israelite blood, chose the covenant with the words, “Your people shall be my people,” and became the great-grandmother of Israel’s greatest king, David. The law preceded the nation; the covenant preceded the community.
America’s founders replicated that structure. The republic they built defined citizenship by acceptance of shared obligation—the Constitution, the rule of law, the civic commitments of self-government—and made those obligations open to anyone willing to take them on, regardless of origin. That is how Washington could write to the Jews of Newport with complete structural confidence. Their belonging required no indulgence, because the covenant model on which America was built had never recognized indulgence as a category.
The contrast with France makes Washington’s letter even more striking. The French Revolution emancipated Jews the following year, in 1791, but revolutionary assembly member Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre’s formula expressed the logic of French Emancipation: “Everything to Jews as individuals, nothing to Jews as a nation.”
That is, rights were extended to the Jews on the condition that Jews dissolve their collective identity and become Frenchmen first. Sixteen years later, Napoleon convened his assembly of Jewish notables, dubbed “the Sanhedrin,” demanding that French Jews answer a series of pointed questions, such as: Did Jewish law permit intermarriage with Christians? Did Jews consider Frenchmen their brothers? Could Jews serve in the military?
The entire exercise was a loyalty test. Jews had to demonstrate their fitness for citizenship before it could be confirmed. Napoleon later issued his “infamous decree” of 1808, imposing special commercial restrictions on Jews that applied to no other group in France, treating them as a suspect class requiring supervision.
In France, rights were extended by the state’s generosity and could be conditioned or withdrawn. As noted above, Washington said something structurally different: that Jewish rights required no majority’s permission, because they were inherent features of the republic itself.
The American record, of course, was imperfect. The covenantal promise of membership through accepted obligation coexisted for nearly a century with slavery, and full legal equality for black Americans was not secured until the 1960s. This was not a problem with the founding vision of America, but with its implementation.
Martin Luther King’s speeches were so effective because he articulated the difference between the America as designed by the Founding Fathers and the one he lived in. In his “I Have a Dream” speech, he framed the Declaration of Independence’s declaration that all men are created equal as a “promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.” A nation built on ethnic identity has no internal mechanism for ensuring true equality; a nation built on covenant can always be called back to its own principles.
Today, the American covenant is under serious pressure from two directions simultaneously.
The left has been replacing the covenant’s universal terms with group identity. The relevant question, in this framework, is not what you accept but what you are: your race, your gender and your position in a hierarchy of historical grievance. From the right, ethnonationalism defines the nation by ancestry and culture rather than by shared obligation. In both models, the covenant is conditional, depending on which group you belong to.
Both abandon America’s founding logic. Both make Jewish belonging in America contingent in ways that Washington explicitly said it never could be.
July 4 marks 250 years since the founders declared that the covenant model—the Hebraic concept of membership through accepted obligation—would be the organizing principle of American life. This anniversary deserves more than celebration. It deserves a rededication to understanding what was actually built and why it was worth building.
Washington’s letter to the Jews of Newport is not primarily a document about Jewish history. It is a document about the architecture of the American republic, a republic whose foundation, as the founders understood and the letter makes plain, bears the fingerprints of Sinai.
