DITTO ZIONISM:

The warm letters exchanged in 1790 between George Washington and a Jewish congregation in Newport, R.I., bear eloquent testimony to America as a safe harbor for religious pluralism. "May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in the land continue to merit and enjoy the goodwill of the other inhabitants," Washington wrote. "While everyone shall sit safely under his own vine and fig-tree and there shall be none to make him afraid." The leadership of Jeshuat Israel did not withhold their gratitude: "We now . . . behold a Government which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance -- but generously affording to All liberty of conscience, and immunities of citizenship -- deeming everyone, of whatever nation, tongue, or language equal parts of the great governmental machine."

Washington, always conscious of the example he set as the first president of the United States, knew exactly what he was doing. It is hard to think of another major political leader at the time, in any other government in the world, expressing such a hopeful and inclusive message to his nation's Jewish inhabitants.

Not everyone in America, of course, shared this generous outlook toward the Jews; prejudice persisted, especially during new waves of immigration. Yet, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed during his 1830s tour, the United States established a civil society that was diverse, tolerant, and deeply religious -- a combination that rarely appeared in Europe or other parts of the world. "Among us, I had seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom almost always move in contrary directions," he wrote in Democracy in America. "Here I found them united intimately with on another: they reigned together on the same soil."

Unlike in Europe, Jews in America never experienced systematic persecution. They had no reason to isolate themselves or create distinct legal systems. They were welcomed as equal citizens of a self-governing republic. "Since all religious groups had virtually equal rights, there was no point in any constituting itself into a separate community," writes Paul Johnson in A History of the Jews. "All could participate in a common society." "Thus, for the first time, Jews, without in any way renouncing their religion, began to achieve integration."

Another reason for America's warm embrace of the Jewish people must not be overlooked: the influence of the Bible. The earliest Puritan settlers established a "covenant" with one another modeled on the covenantal theology of the Hebrew Bible. Explains Gabriel Sivan in The Bible and Civilization: "No Christian community in history identified more with the People of the Book than did the early settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who believed their own lives to be a literal reenactment of the Biblical drama of the Hebrew nation." Likewise, colonial ministers during the Revolution compared the battle for independence with the biblical story of Exodus: how the Jews escaped the slavery of an Egyptian tyrant and found freedom in the Promised Land. The inscription on the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, of course, is taken from Leviticus 25:10: "Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof."

Thanks to the impact of Protestantism, many Americans were intimately familiar with the Bible. Indeed, next to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the Bible became a third founding document for colonial Americans. According to the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of Great Britain, the "self-evident" truths of the Declaration -- that "all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights" -- were anything but self-evident. "They would have been unintelligible to Plato, to Aristotle, or to every hierarchical society the world has ever known," he wrote. "They are self-evident only to people, to Jews and Christians, who have internalized the Hebrew Bible."

American Christians of all denominations recognized in Judaism one of the great gifts to Western civilization: the concept of a moral law given to mankind by a divine Lawgiver. From their very beginnings as a nation -- like no one else in the ancient world -- the Jewish people sought to order their social, political, and religious life according to these norms. The Ten Commandments supplied the ethical bedrock not only for Judaism but also -- quite remarkably -- for Western civilization throughout the centuries.

The American Founders were acutely aware of this cultural inheritance and its importance to their new republic. They paid homage to it in countless ways, not least of which was in the physical architecture of their most important political institutions. It is almost impossible, for example, to ignore the carved image of Moses -- deliverer of the Ten Commandments to the Jewish people -- dominating the frieze atop the U.S. Supreme Court. As James Madison explained: "We have staked the whole of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government, upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God."

The unique contributions of the Jewish people to American political and cultural life may help explain the rise in anti-Semitism. Although white nationalism, draped in Christian symbolism, is a problem, the much greater threat comes from the secular Left. Political and cultural antagonism to Jews -- in politics, entertainment, and mainstream media -- is the product of a thoroughgoing materialism.

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