What Made America Different
Part 1 of my series, Reclaiming the Covenant
This is the first chapter of my series, soon to be a book, “Reclaiming the Covenant: America’s Remarkable 250 Years and Assuring It Continues.” It will be finished and published ahead of July 4 (iy”H.)
In the summer of 1790, George Washington wrote a letter to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport, Rhode Island. It was the kind of courtesy letter a new president writes to well-wishers who have sent their congratulations. It ran to four short paragraphs. It has been quoted many times in the two centuries since, usually for its famous line about giving “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”
What is interesting is that this was not Washington’s formulation. Washington was replying to the letter of congratulations by the leader of the congregation. Moses Seixas, who used that exact language in his letter. Washington confirmed and adopted this as a key component of the character of the new United States.
But Washington added more that was not in Seixas’ letter, a section that is far more important as a theme of what makes the United States different from all other nations.
Washington wrote, “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.”
Washington is not saying that America tolerates Jews. He is saying that the very concept of toleration — the idea that a majority graciously permits a minority to exist — is inapplicable to America at all. Toleration implies a tolerator: someone who holds the power to permit or revoke. This letter says that Jews are full members, on the same terms as everyone else, bound by the same covenant and protected by the same rights. Seixas said this as well in a different way, writing that the US is “deeming every one, of whatever Nation, tongue, or language, equal parts of the great governmental Machine.” But Washington added the idea that the United States would not merely “tolerate” any citizens.
Washington went on to say that equal rights “requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”
For 1790, this is astonishing.
To understand why, look at what was happening to Jews everywhere else in the world at exactly that moment. In France, the Revolution had just emancipated Jews — but emancipation was a grant, a decision by the French majority to extend membership to people who had not previously possessed it. Napoleon would later convene a Grand Sanhedrin of Jewish leaders to ask them formally whether Jews could be loyal Frenchmen — whether, in other words, they could pass the audition for membership in a nation whose membership was defined by French identity.
In Russia, Jews were confined to the Pale of Settlement, permitted to live only in designated territories, subject to laws that applied to them and not to others.
In England, things were better. Jews enjoyed civil liberties like the freedom to worship — but they were not equal citizens. Jews could not sit in Parliament, could not hold most public offices, and could not take degrees at Oxford or Cambridge, because the oaths required for those positions were explicitly Christian, and a Jew could not swear them in good conscience. Jews in England were tolerated in precisely the sense Washington was rejecting.
Across Europe, the Jewish Question — die Judenfrage — was a serious intellectual and political problem, debated across the entire ideological spectrum. Everyone agreed there was a Jewish Question. They disagreed only on the answer.
Washington’s letter dissolved the question before answering it. In a nation where membership is defined by covenant acceptance rather than ethnic or religious identity, “what do we do with the Jews?” has no coherent meaning. The Jews who accept the covenant are exactly the same as every other citizen.
The United States was the first nation since the destruction of the Temple where there was no Jewish question.
Article VI of the Constitution states explicitly that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”
This was the American difference. On a structural level, America had made a founding move that no prior nation had made: it defined membership not by what you were but by what you accepted. The covenant came first, and the community was constituted by accepting it. Your ethnicity and religion and national origin were irrelevant to your membership.
It was not implemented perfectly for a very long time at the state level, and we all know that slavery still existed until the Civil War, but the covenant was unique. Even other nations that had similar covenantal language still based citizenship on ethnicity, not acceptance of the covenant itself.
The American Dream was not written in 1776. It was not a founding document or a presidential proclamation. It accumulated — generation by generation, figure by figure — as Americans worked out what the covenant’s logic actually required. Each generation discovered a new dimension of what membership, open to all, defined by acceptance rather than origin, made possible and demanded.
Washington established the principle: membership is inherent, not granted. Lincoln made it non-negotiable. The Civil War was not, at its moral core, a war about states’ rights or economic systems. It was a war about whether the covenant’s terms were real or merely rhetorical — whether “all men are created equal” was a statement of fact the nation was obligated to honor or a pleasant sentiment it could indefinitely defer. The Gettysburg Address reframed the entire enterprise: this was “a new birth of freedom,” not a restoration of the old order, because the old order had breached the covenant from its first day. Lincoln’s contribution to the Dream was to establish that the covenant corrects itself — that the breach creates an enforcement obligation, and that enforcement, however costly, is not optional.
