In 1790, the new American republic was home to some 2,000 Jews, out of a total population of 2.5 million. That year, President Washington visited Newport, Rhode Island, where he received a letter from the members of the local synagogue. “Deprived as we heretofore have been of the invaluable rights of free Citizens,” it read, “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.” John Berlau describes the president’s response, which came the next day:
[I]n 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. . . . 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.
Washington then made an allusion to the passage of Micah 4:4 in the Hebrew Scriptures . . . 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 fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
Scholars of religious freedom have called Washington’s letter to . . . 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 Jaffa . . . 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 2,000 years before.”
Jews, however, were not the only religious minority to whom Washington would provide much-needed aid and comfort. In Great Britain and most of her American colonies, Catholics couldn’t hold public office or serve on juries. And in George Washington’s Virginia, Catholics couldn’t even pray publicly during the colonial days. But to Catholics, as to Jews, Washington personified the Constitution’s promise of religious freedom through his words and deeds.
Read more on National Review: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/george-washington-champion-religious-freedom/