Address by Judge Jed S. Rakoff

On August 18, 2019, my friend and long-ago law partner, Judge Jed S. Rakoff, gave an address at the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island at the 72nd Annual Reading of George Washington’s Letter to the Jewish Congregation in Newport, RI.  I found the address of considerable current as well as historical interest, and asked Judge Rakoff for his permission to reproduce it here. He graciously agreed and it appears below. A link to George Washington’s letter to the Congregation, and the letter from Mose Seixas, an official of the Congregation, to which he was replying, is here.

Address of Judge Jed S. Rakoff

At the outset, I want to express how deeply I appreciate the honor of being invited to give this talk. Even at a distance of 229 years, the exchange of letters between Warden Seixas and President Washington in August 1790 remains profoundly moving. It expresses so beautifully how the children of Israel, after centuries of persecution, had finally found a genuine welcome in this newborn nation, the United States of America.

When you consider the historical context, the exchange becomes, if anything, even more remarkable. Just three months earlier, in May 1790, Rhode Island, a bastion of rural antipathy to federal government, had finally, under pressure from its neighbors, ratified the federal Constitution. It was the last of the 13 states to do so. Prior to then, the new President and beloved hero, George Washington, had boycotted Rhode Island, a situation that, in turn, put Newport’s little Jewish congregation in an awkward spot. In May 1790 the Jewish congregation in New York proposed that, in light of Rhode Island’s ratification, the Newport congregation join the New York congregation in sending congratulations to the new President. But, you will be utterly surprised to learn, the New York and Newport congregations did not always see eye to eye. The leader of the Newport congregation, Moses Seixas, wrote to the New York congregation, stating: “We are of the opinion that, as we are so small in number, it would be treating the Legislature and other large Bodies in this State with a great degree of indelicacy for us to address the President of the United States previous to any of them [doing so].” In other words, we Jews of Newport have to act with great circumspection, for we cannot afford to offend any reigning power.

But in short succession, a series of events modified this view. First, in June 1790 Rhode Island became the ninth state to approve what is now the First Amendment, beginning with the wonderful pronouncement that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” True, it was not until more than a year later that the necessary 10th state ratified the First Amendment, and for decades thereafter several of the states, most notably Massachusetts, still designated one or another Protestant sect as the established state-sponsored religion of that state. But in June 1790, Rhode Island, with its own history of religious toleration, had firmly declared its support for freedom of religion for the nation as a whole.

Next, also in June 1790, the Jewish congregation of New York, along with the Jewish congregations of Philadelphia, Richmond and Charleston, went ahead and sent congratulations to President Washington, who responded in a most cordial and friendly manner (as he had to an even earlier letter from the Jewish congregation in Savannah).

Finally, the lawmakers of Rhode Island broke down and invited Washington to visit, and he accepted (not least because he saw it as an opportunity to convince Rhode Island to ratify the rest of the Bill of Rights). 

Thus it was that on August 17, 1790, George Washington arrived in Newport and was greeted by a committee of city officials and prominent clergy, including the now-emboldened Moses Seixas, who presented Washington with the letter so beautifully read here earlier today.

 – A quick diversion regarding the name Seixas.  When I was a young boy growing up in Philadelphia, I went three afternoons a week to Hebrew school and a fourth afternoon to the inevitable violin lesson; and my path on all four occasions took me right past a playground, where a number of boys my age were always busy playing either football, basketball, or baseball, depending on the season. The difference was that they were all tall, athletic, and Christian. I eyed them with a combination of chagrin and envy.

But then, in 1953, I finally found a Jewish sports hero with whom I could identify. Vic Seixas, a native of Philadelphia, won the Wimbledon singles tennis championship that year, followed by the U.S. singles tennis championship in 1954. At the time, the surname Seixas was unfamiliar to me; at first I thought it might be Spanish and Catholic. But my parents told me Vic Seixas was a Sephardic Jew, and they were right. And while a few years later he was replaced in my affections by the one and only Sandy Koufax, I will always be grateful to Vic Seixas for allowing me to stand tall when passing the playground, even when carrying my violin.

 – But back to Moses Seixas. I think the most remarkable thing about his letter to George Washington is that it announces that in this brave new world of the United States, Jews will be, not simply tolerated (as they had begged to be back in Europe), but free and equal, under a government that Seixas says in his letter is “generously affording to all liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.”

Seixas’s letter immediately brought forth from Washington the now-famous response, undated but sent on August 21, 1790, that you just heard so marvelously read by Senator Reed. As a number of people have remarked, it has sometimes been overlooked how good a politician George Washington could be. Picking right up on Seixas’s theme, and even using some of Seixas’s own language, he noted that in the United States “All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.” But then, making explicit what in Seixas’s letter was implicit, Washington added, “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.” In short, in the United States, Jews were never to be second-class citizens, dependent on others for their security and livelihood.

Washington then goes on to express the hope that the Jews of the United States will “continue to … enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants.” This was, how shall we say, a bit optimistic. Despite having ratified the First Amendment, Rhode Island, for one, did not even allow Jews to vote in state elections until 1842. More generally, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the scourge of antisemitism was never absent from much of mainstream America, with Jews regularly excluded from everything from country clubs to business boardrooms. It was one thing to let a Jew onto the U.S. Supreme Court, but quite something else to let Jews into your law firm, let alone your neighborhood.

Extreme expressions of verbal antisemitism probably reached their peak in the 1920s and 1930s, with the tirades of Father Coughlin, not to mention Henry Ford. But even after World War II, according to repeated polls, a considerable percentage of Americans still regarded Jews as communist sympathizers who, nevertheless, secretly controlled Wall Street – a pretty good trick to say the least. 

Still, by contrast with the situation in Europe, there were few outright murders of Jews as Jews in the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries (the lynching of Leo Frank in 1915 being a possible exception). And throughout the late 20th century, polls showed an overall decline in antisemitism in the U.S. Thus, for awhile, there was every reason to believe that the prediction that Washington had made for the Jews in his letter — that “every one shall sit in safety under his own Vine and Fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid” – would come true.

But is it still true? There may be cause to worry. Almost exactly two years ago, in August 2017, neo-Nazi marchers, some of them carrying Nazi flags, descended on Charlottesville chanting Nazi slogans like “Jews will not replace us.” While their common theme was a particularly virulent form of white supremacism directed at virtually everyone other than themselves, some of the neo-Nazi demonstrators, carrying semi-automatic rifles, surrounded a local synagogue and posted messages online threatening to burn the temple  down. Finally, a confessed Hitler admirer named James Alex Fields, Jr. intentionally drove his car into a crowd of counter-demonstrators, killing a young woman and seriously injuring 28 others.

To be sure, the victim of the Charlottesville murder, Heather Heyer, was not herself Jewish. But then, just last October, an expressly antisemitic mass murderer entered the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing 11 members of the congregation and wounding several others – the single worst antisemitic incident in U.S. history. This was followed, just four months ago, by a synagogue shooting near San Diego that left one Jew dead and several others injured.

Needless to say, Jews have not been the only victims of the acts of domestic terrorism that have become all too common in our country. Black and Hispanic people, and others as well, have suffered much worse, as recent events in El Paso and Dayton so horribly attest. But that a violent hatred of Jews is once again rearing its ugly head in certain quarters is difficult to deny. Although in America, unlike many other places, it is mostly the work of small fringe groups of political extremists, it is apparent that they are increasing in both number and ferocity.

This is not the occasion to discuss what our society as a whole might do to better combat such hatred and violence (though thoughts of enhanced gun controls and increased hate-crime prosecutions keep running through my head). But what I do suggest is that we American Jews, so fortunate in so many ways, need to be more alert to these threats, both to others and to ourselves.

Please do not misunderstand. I don’t wish to seem an alarmist, and all of this must be put in perspective. Despite the recent increase in antisemitism in the U.S., we Jews owe the overwhelming majority of our fellow Americans a huge debt, both for according us what Washington called our “natural rights,” and for increasingly welcoming us into the American community without obliging us to abandon our own traditions and beliefs. As Washington envisaged in his letter, Americans have in so many ways become “a great and a happy people,” and Jewish Americans not least among them. But just as eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, so we cannot be sure that such happiness will continue if we do not acknowledge, and confront, the growing dangers we face. Unlike the Moses Seixas of May 1790, who feared to give offense, we must be more like the Moses Seixas of August 1790, who asserted our rights, as Americans and Jews, to lead our daily lives free of fear.