by Thomas L. Krannawitter
What George Washington’s promise to the Jews in Newport still means for America.
I am not Jewish. Many of the people dearest to me are. Two of my most important intellectual mentors were Jewish; their teacher was Jewish. I have close friends and trusted business partners who are Jewish. So I do not regard the rise of antisemitism in the United States as some distant or abstract problem, nor as somebody else’s burden to bear. I care about it personally, morally, and politically.
And it is, unfortunately, a timely subject.
A Timely Danger
Antisemitism is again on the rise in the United States. Some of it comes in old forms we know too well: crude bigotry, conspiracy theories, hatred based on stereotypes, open admiration for enemies of Jews, and recycled poison peddled by alt-right influencers.
Some comes draped in progressive rhetoric: anti-oppression slogans, fashionable ideological categories, and furious activism that insists it is merely attacking Zionism, the state of Israel, or power and privilege, while in practice singling out Jews for hostility, intimidation, exclusion, and fear.
These streams are not identical. They differ in language, style, and self-understanding. Yet they converge in one practical effect: Jews are reminded, once again, that they are especially vulnerable.
What, then, is the proper American answer?
My answer is this: If we are serious about protecting our fellow citizens who are Jewish, we should recover the political principles of the American Founding. The United States, when it is true to those principles, is a safe haven for Jews—not because it is a Jewish state, nor because it grants special status to Jews, but because it recognizes the equal natural rights of all persons and protects the equal individual rights of all citizens under equal laws.
What Sort of Haven?
That claim requires careful statement. America is not and never will be a Zionist state. Properly speaking, it is not a Jewish state in any sense. Jewish orthodoxy is not the source of legitimacy for our Constitution or the government it creates.
Yet the United States has been, at its best, a place of profound importance for Jews, a country in which Jews can live in safety, worship freely, associate freely, raise families, earn a living, build communities, and contribute to public life without asking permission from a ruling church, a suspicious monarch, a hostile mob, or secret police.
That distinction matters, for it points to the deeper political truth at the heart of the American experiment.
No Such Thing as “Jewish Rights”
According to its own founding principles, the United States does not recognize “Jewish rights.” Nor does it recognize women’s rights, gay rights, trans rights, racial rights, the rights of the poor, farmers’ rights, or any other species of group rights.
The language of our regime is philosophically deeper, more universal, and nobler than that. The Founding speaks of inherent individual rights—natural rights—belonging to human beings as such. The purpose of government is not to manufacture rights for select groups, nor to distribute perks and privileges among competing identities, but to secure the liberty that every citizen possesses by nature.
This is why the Declaration of Independence remains the moral key to the American political order. It teaches that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that governments are instituted among men for the purpose of securing those rights. Those propositions are not merely ceremonial phrases for patriotic occasions. They are the standard by which we judge whether a regime is morally legitimate, whether laws deserve allegiance, and whether citizens should expect equal protection.
If those principles are true, then the Jew in America stands on the same moral and political ground as every other citizen. He does not need a separate charter. He does not need a class-based exemption or a group-based indulgence. He needs only what every citizen has a right to demand: equal justice and equal protection under equal law.
Washington and the Hebrews
No public document of the Founding states this more beautifully or more directly than George Washington’s letter of August 1790 to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island.
That letter deserves to be read and studied carefully, not merely cited in passing. It is not an afterthought or a courtesy note. It is one of the clearest and noblest public statements ever made by an American statesman about the meaning of religious liberty, equal citizenship, and the place of Jews within the American experiment in republican self-government.
Washington was replying to Moses Seixas and other members of the Newport congregation, who had greeted the President by celebrating the blessings of civil and religious liberty and expressing their high hopes for the new government and Washington’s administration.
No Mere Toleration
Washington’s response is remarkable for many reasons, but above all because of the principle it announces. He clarifies that the American way is not mere toleration in the old European sense. He does not imply that Jews are being permitted, by gentile generosity, to dwell quietly so long as they remain submissive and grateful. He explicitly rejects that whole framework.
“It is now no more,” Washington writes, “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.”
That sentence marks a moral and political revolution.
The Jew in America is not tolerated as some alien body. He is not merely endured. He is not granted a special dispensation. He enjoys the exercise of his inherent and equal natural rights. In other words, his security rests not on condescension, but on justice.
More than that, this principle of religious liberty is the moral source of the Constitution’s ban on religious tests for office in Article VI and the First Amendment’s prohibition against Congress making a law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
Washington continues: “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.”
Again, the principle is unmistakable. Government does not sort citizens into favored and disfavored confessions. It does not lend its force to ancient prejudices. It does not assist persecution. It asks only what republican government may properly ask of all citizens: that they obey constitutional laws, respect the equal rights of others, and conduct themselves as good, responsible citizens.
“All Possess Alike”
Then comes the line that ought to be engraved in the political memory of the nation. Washington says that “all possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.” All possess alike. Not Christians only. Not Jews by special exception. Not some tribes and sects by negotiated accommodation. All.
This is the true American teaching.
The rights that matter most are not group rights, but individual natural rights and legislated civil rights of citizenship rooted in them. If America is just, then Jews are secure here not because they are Jews, but because they are human beings and citizens.
And precisely for that reason, Jews may be secure here as Jews—free to worship as they please, to build synagogues and schools, to enter professions, to start businesses, to sustain families, to associate freely with friends, and to live openly in accordance with conscience.
Under His Own Vine and Fig Tree
Washington closes by invoking the biblical image that each shall “sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.” That line is often quoted sentimentally. But it should be understood politically. It means more than a pleasant private life. It means lawful security.
It means a regime in which one may enjoy the fruits of one’s labor, keep one’s property, worship God according to conscience, and inhabit civil society without fear of official oppression or popular violence. It means that the ordinary blessings of life are shielded by just laws.
For many Jews, this was and remains no small thing.
The history of the Jewish people is filled with lessons about how precarious safety can be. Regimes change. Public passions turn. The rights of minorities are reinterpreted, narrowed, and sometimes revoked. A tolerated people may become a suspected people; a useful people may become a hated people; neighbors may become informants, persecutors, or cowards.
The old world taught these lessons repeatedly. That is one reason America, from the earliest days of the republic, appeared to many Jews as something exceptional: not perfect, not pure, not free from all prejudice, but founded on principles that, if taken seriously, made Jewish safety more secure than it had been in most places and under most governments.
Why This Still Matters
This is not merely retrospective idealization. Washington’s Newport letter really does reveal something new in the modern world. Here is the chief magistrate of a sovereign nation—in his official capacity as President of the United States—addressing a Jewish congregation not as a tolerated remnant, but as fellow citizens possessing the same liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship as all other citizens, including Washington himself.
It is difficult to overstate the dignity of that gesture or the principle contained within it. And it is why Jewish Americans, in their own interest, should help recover the moral and political authority of the principles of the American Founding.
To say this is not to deny Jewish peoplehood, Jewish religious tradition, or the distinctiveness of Jewish history. Nor is it to deny the legitimacy of Israel as the Jewish state. It is simply to say that in the United States, the best protection for Jews is not the progressive multiplication of identities, grievances, and special claims for politically preferred victims.
Against Identity Politics
That path does not strengthen citizenship; it weakens it. It does not secure equal justice; it fragments justice into competing demands for recognition, power, and entitlements.
Once the language of natural rights is replaced by the language of group power and grievance claims, Jews become just another identity, another constituency to be managed, courted, disciplined, or sacrificed. And history suggests that this is not a reassuring condition for Jews to live in—or for anyone else.
By contrast, the Founders’ language is more universal and more secure. If natural rights are inherent in persons, if government exists for the purpose of securing those rights, and if all citizens stand equal before the law, then the Jew in America need not plead for exceptional treatment. He stands with every other citizen on the solid ground of justice.
That is also why the rise of antisemitism among tribal progressives and conspiracy-minded conservatives should alarm anyone who cares about the United States itself as a regime. The alt-right traffics in old lies about blood, nation, rootlessness, finance, and power. Progressivism dissolves citizenship into categories of oppressor and oppressed, then treats Jews as uniquely suspect whenever they fail to fit the ideological script assigned to them.
These movements undermine the principle of equal citizenship and therefore threaten the political conditions under which Jews, and others, are most secure.
The proper answer is not panic, nor more tribalism, nor a merely tactical defense mounted within the terms of identity politics. The proper answer is to recover the standard of the Declaration of Independence and the statesmanship of Washington.
If all men are created equal, then Jews are equal by nature, not by permission. If rights are unalienable, then neither lawmakers nor bureaucrats can take them away from anyone. If government exists to secure rights, then America fails in its purpose whenever the rights of Jews are violated, or Jews are intimidated and left to fear for their place among their fellow citizens.
America Called to Account
To say that America can be a safe haven for Jews is not to flatter America. It is to call America to account.
We have often fallen short of our own good principles. Antisemitism has never been entirely absent from our history. We have had our cowardice, our vulgarities, our evasions, and our injustices. But the answer to those failures is not to repudiate the self-evident truths of the American Founding. It is to recover them, insist upon them, and demand nothing less.
The Declaration provides the moral standard. Washington’s letter shows what that standard means in practice.
I return, then, to where I began.
I am not Jewish. But I care very much whether Jews in America are safe. I care because people I love and respect are Jewish. I care because I know what Jewish teachers and friends have contributed to my own life, and how much I owe them. I care because the rise of antisemitism is ugly in itself. And I care because the treatment of Jews is one of the clearest tests of whether a nation actually believes in justice or merely speaks that language when convenient.
I want an America that embraces its own good and true principles. I want an America that remembers the self-evident truths enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. I want an America that gives to bigotry no sanction and to persecution no assistance. I want an America in which Jewish citizens and neighbors enjoy not special privileges, but equal rights; not conditional toleration, but full citizenship; not anxious permission, but lawful security.
In such an America, our Jewish friends and neighbors—along with all other citizens—may indeed, in Washington’s words, sit in safety under their own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make them afraid.
