Rethinking American Jewish Emancipation: New Views on George Washington's Newport Letter

Abstract

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• Rethinking American Jewish Emancipation:New Views on George Washington's Newport Letter¹
• John M. Dixon (bio)

The idea that Jews overcame civil and political disabilities to achieve full citizenship status in the early United States is a central organizing principle of American Jewish historiography. Convention holds that North American Jews progressed steadily toward legal equality after first arriving in New Netherland in 1654. They incrementally earned de facto and de jure civil rights in Dutch, English, and British North America by lobbying authorities on both sides of the Atlantic, fighting court cases, and through their everyday practices. These rights allowed residency, a range of occupations, open religious worship, property ownership, and legal status in courts as witnesses and plaintiffs. Still, many colonial North American Jews were prohibited from holding public office and voting.² Political equality therefore arrived in North America only after the Revolution, with the federal Constitution of 1787, ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791, and various constitutional developments at the state level delivering full citizenship to most Jewish adult men in the United States by the 1830s. In standard American Jewish historiography, this achievement of civil and political rights functions as a major teleological outcome of the pre-1840 period.³

A well-established sequence of primary sources undergirds this conventional narrative of American Jewish emancipation.⁴ Starting with [End Page 731] mid–seventeenth-century documents such as the 1655 petition of Amsterdam Jewish leaders to the Dutch West India Company that prevented an expulsion of Jews from New Netherland and a successful 1657 Jewish request for burgher rights in New Amsterdam, the sequence runs through New York's 1777 state constitution to Maryland's 1826 "Jew Bill," or "Act to extend to the sect of people professing the Jewish religion, the same rights and privileges enjoyed by Christians."⁵ President George Washington's 1790 letter to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island stands out as the major highlight of the series and firmly attaches the history of American Jewish emancipation to that of the United States. A quotable founding-era declaration of religious freedom and Jewish inclusion, it contains what is surely the most famous sentence in early American Jewish history: "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."⁶

After going unquestioned for decades, this traditional understanding of American Jewish emancipation is finally coming under pressure as studies of comparative and Atlantic Jewish history challenge old nationalist assumptions and priorities. Jewish emancipation in the United States no longer seems patently exceptional.⁷ Indeed, David Sorkin's masterful 2019 survey, Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries, [End Page 732] indicates that early modern American and Western European patterns of Jewish emancipation were fundamentally alike because Jews around the Atlantic littoral achieved civil rights with relative ease as they resettled in the West and then struggled more intensely to acquire political rights.⁸ Meanwhile, newer scholarship on early American and Atlantic Jewish history has begun to reframe American Jewish emancipation as a hemispheric rather than a national phenomenon. This work reveals important differences between Western European and American emancipation that Sorkin's sweeping, five-century global analysis can only mention in passing. Specifically, it emphasizes that American Jewish emancipation took place in un-European slave societies, colonies, and newly formed nations, as well as that it intersected with contemporaneous contests over the civil and political rights of women, Catholics, and free people of African descent.⁹

A third principal insight to be gleaned from recent comparative and Atlantic scholarship is that early American Jews usually did not acquire rights from stable, self-contained, liberal, modern nation-states, but from entangled and unreliable imperial and early national polities.¹⁰ Washington's Newport letter takes on a new hue when examined in this light. [End Page 733] Rather than appearing as a fresh, forward-looking signal of the United States's rise as an inclusive, durable, liberal democracy, it calls to mind over 150 years of imperial warfare, impermanent charters of...