WASHINGTON FOUNDED A REPUBLIC, NOT A NTION:

What is undisputed, however, are the powerful messages of religious freedom and equality under the law from the Jewish congregation's letter and Washington's swift response. The letter dated August 17 states: "Deprived as we heretofore have been of the invaluable rights of free Citizens, we now (with a deep sense of gratitude to the Almighty disposer of all events) behold a Government, erected by the Majesty of the People -- a Government, which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance -- but generously affording to All liberty of conscience, and immunities of Citizenship." The letter implicitly asks Washington to affirm that the views of the promise of the new nation held by Seixas and the congregation were correct.

Washington did indeed affirm this in a letter replying to the congregation dated one day later. And in that letter, Washington promised even more than the religious liberties the Jewish congregation had asked for: that Jews would be full citizens of the new republic. Echoing some of Seixas's phrasing, Washington replied, "For happily the Government of the United States . . . gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance." Washington was quick to add, though, that the U.S. Constitution goes beyond mere religious toleration and explicitly grants religious freedom and full citizenship to people of every creed. "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," he wrote in the letter to the synagogue.

Washington then made an allusion to the passage of Micah 4:4 of the Hebrew Scriptures, or the Old Testament, which reads, "but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid." Washington stated emphatically to the Jewish congregation that in the new nation, "every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid."

Scholars of religious freedom have called Washington's letter to Seixas and the congregation a milestone in human rights. For the first time, members of religious minorities were granted full partnership in the nation they inhabited as a matter of policy, as stated by the nation's leader. The late political philosopher Harry V. Jaffa, longtime professor at Claremont McKenna College and distinguished fellow at the Claremont Institute, wrote that Washington's letter meant that Jews would be "full citizens for the first time, not merely in American history, but since the end of their own polity in the ancient world, more than two thousand years before."

Jaffa continued, "From no one else could such a statement about Jews have carried the authority it did carry, when it came from Washington. No one could repudiate these words, once they had come from Washington, without making himself contemptible."

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