Claremont Institute Prof. Glenn Ellmers began a talk during a Hillsdale College conference on “Christianity in America” by citing the famous letter President George Washington wrote to the Jewish community of Newport, Rhode Island. (Ellmers’ talk was adapted and published in the December 2024 edition of Hillsdale’s Imprimis.)
Ellmers makes a reasoned case for the indispensable role of religion in the American Founding. Once out of fashion in academia, such people as Elmers and Eric Nelson of Harvard (of all places!) have made a good case that religion profoundly influenced the Founders and the constitutional thought that inspired them.
This pre-Sinai covenant did not mandate religious uniformity…. Rather, each country could set laws that governed their own religious practice.
Ellmers’ choice to begin the talk with Washington’s letter is apt. Written in a dignified, clear, and resonant language, Washington’s letter is of national and civilizational importance, marking an inflection point in the intertwined history of religion and politics.
There is far more in that letter’s significance than one talk can contain. Ellmers’ stress, in accordance with the conference’s title, was the role of Christianity. I would like to set out here something the professor did not explore: the unique contribution made by Judaism beyond Scripture. The valuing of that contribution of the rabbis by Christian political thinkers was indispensable to the great unfolding of our Republic.
The driving passion that puts fire into Ellmers’ well-considered words is a fear that plagued many Americans going into the 2025 elections:
The faith of America’s Christians and Jews has been mocked and increasingly threatened by an aggressively secular, even atheistic, ruling class.
We are in danger of losing the precious gift of religious freedom which took almost 2,000 years for the Christian West to put into practice.
The inadequate, pro forma response of the Obamaites (DBA the Biden Administration) to the orgiastic antisemitic violence of October 7 jarred many American Jews towards Ellmers’ position. It was not just the lukewarm support the last Administration gave to Israel in this existential crisis. The Amen! to Hamas’ sadism that echoed all over America’s campuses and through (say) 90 percent of the American Left shocked many American Jews, who have largely been left-of-center in their politics. On October 6, 2024, most of them would have dismissed Elmers’ concerns.
What a difference a day made. We saw that alternative to the welcoming religious freedom extended by Washington is vile and deadly.
We must know that what Washington did was not the foregone result of a fortuitous confluence of Christian universalism and Greek natural law thought. Those two streams had already converged centuries earlier in Aquinas’ and the Scholastics.
In the mind of that well-read Dominican, Athens and the Roman Church understanding of Jerusalem came together. Not only that, but Aquinas knew and respected the thought of the jurist and philosopher Rabbi Moses Maimonides and carried on a time-transcending conversation with Maimonides’ ideas at many places in his works.
Yet this did not result yet in even the hint of a new and tolerant law. For law was something either left to Caesar or, portrayed polemically as opposed to love. Jewish law was considered obsolete and graceless. Often, it was considered dangerous, leading to expulsions, confiscation of the Talmud, and to Torequemada’s Inquisition.
For all law’s shortcomings, no society emerged that could organize itself successfully without law. The imperial law of Rome was the standard for medieval thinkers. The state dictated the religion, and others might or might not be tolerated. The medieval philosophical synthesis of Christianity and Greek thought did not see this as problematic. To the contrary, many leaders thought that the political and economic disabilities their intolerant laws enforced upon Jews was a good thing. It provided evidence of divine rejection of Judaism and the victory of what they believed the one true faith.
With the end of the Middle Ages came the shattering of Western Christianity into Protestant and Catholic camps. Each camp struggled to be the universal and true faith; each accused the other of betraying the divine trust. Lacking any basis of resolution short of war to decide God’s will, violence followed — a century of merciless and bloody war between Catholic and Protestant, with a constant drumbeat of massacres and expulsions of Jews going on in the background.
What changed to point the world towards the religious liberty Washington so eloquently embraced in his letter to the Newport Jews? How could law become so central to our religious life?
It came from the re-engagement with the source from which Christianity emerged. The divine legislation that ruled the Jewish people defined them uniquely. That definition was derided in polemics as antithetical to the universal vision that all agree is God’s. But that line of thought rests on the premise that particularity contradicts universality.
Rabbinic thought did not seek to compel or convert the world to be Jewish. But it simultaneously taught that all humankind were addressed by God with law. All those who conduct themselves in accordance with that ancient Noahide covenant are assured, like Israel, of the World to Come. It is only when, after centuries, Christian thinkers began to look at Jewish thought as alive and offering something indispensable that the West began to move from official intolerance to the religious freedom embedded in our Constitution.
Look to an extraordinary priest, Johannes Reuchlin, who in Renaissance Italy studied Hebrew with Rabbi Ovadia Seforno, renowned among Jews as a warmly rational biblical commentator. Reuchlin admired Seforno and the world of humane religiosity that he found not only in the Hebrew Bible but in the rabbinic exegetic tradition. Reuchlin then championed the introduction of Hebrew studies into the universities of Europe. He also stood powerfully against persecution, intervening with the Holy Roman Emperor to halt his planned confiscation and burning of the Talmud.
The chill winds of the Counter Reformation froze the development of those Hebrew studies in the Catholic world of that day. Instead, the study of Jewish sources now emerged in the Protestant world and there, it was intertwined with politics.
The raging battle between Catholic and Protestant, split in a seemingly endless war over what Christianity was to be, exhausted Western Europe. It was clear that neither side of the battle could win decisively enough to remove the influence of the other and their heretical view of the one faith that could alone order the world under God.
An exhausted and dispirited Europe looked around for some idea that could form the basis of a lasting order that did not require the other side to be destroyed.
They found it through the group of Protestant scholars, led by the Hugo Grotius of Holland, who found the sought-for conceptual framework in Jewish law — the concept of the Seven Noahide Laws. The rabbinic tradition, recorded in the Talmud and other works of Jewish thought and law studied by Grotius and his fellow scholars, sees in the Genesis text a covenant established first between God and Adam and then later between God and Noah. Its seven laws were to order all the world by setting six general laws, forbidding profaning God’s oneness, cursing God, murder, stealing, sexual transgressions, and wanton cruelty to animals.
This covenant also mandated that all nations should establish their own system of courts both to enforce these few universal laws and to govern their distinctive national lives with laws of their own choice.
This pre-Sinai covenant did not mandate religious uniformity. Aside from these seven basic laws, no one mode of piety was mandated for the entire world. Rather, each country could set laws that governed their own religious practice.
It was on this divine constitution that Grotius founded the conception of international law that was expressed in the Treaties of Westphalia which ended the Thirty Years’ War. Catholic and Protestant could live in an international order together.
This thread was picked up and amplified in Britain. The supreme British legal scholar John Selden looked up to Grotius but exceeded him in his knowledge. Selden was among the Parliamentary leaders who forced through the Petition of Right in 1629, a landmark in the march towards self-government and constitutional liberty.
Selden opposed the view of law dominant in Europe at that time that law written in the model of imperial Rome was the way to go. Selden believed in liberty and knew that Roman law concentrated the power into the hands of an emperor. The people had no liberty when faced with the will of the emperor; no constitution protected the individual’s unalienable rights.
Selden saw in Jewish law a common source and a common inspiration for liberty-loving people. He saw that the Jewish people willingly chose their law, and that free commitment upheld them as a nation through centuries of exile and persecution. He saw the fight of the British for freedom against the encroachment of a king seeking unlimited power as the same struggle that the Jews carried on. He saw that Common Law, carried in the hearts of the English people, was a branch of the Law that was so beloved by the Jewish people and carried in their hearts. Law and love had to flow together. God means through His law to teach us how to be free.
Selden was revered in his day throughout the scholarly world. One of his students, Matthew Hale, carried forward Selden’s vision of Common Law and its liberty and wrote them down in classic law books which inspired both William Blackstone in Britain and the American Founders.
Eric Nelson and Ofir Haivry are among the several modern thinkers on law and politics who are restoring the forgotten role of Jewish law in inspiring religious freedom in the Christian West. The Christian law tradition, canon law, could not command the allegiance of Protestants, let alone Jews. In the bedrock of our law, the inviolable freedoms of the citizen sovereign, the particularity of people comes to the fore. We are free to find our connection to the commonality within a broad legal order.
In Washington’s words to Newport’s Jews:
Happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.
These moving and deep words were a response in kind to a letter presented to Washington by the warden of the Newport synagogue. It is clear that the Jewish writer was expressing his belief, so consonant with the teachings of the prophets and the sense of religious liberty that is larger than the particular piety of any one group of the faithful:
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: deeming every one, of whatever Nation, tongue, or language, equal parts of the great governmental Machine:
This so ample and extensive Federal Union whose basis is Philanthropy, Mutual Confidence and Publick Virtue, we cannot but acknowledge to be the work of the Great God, who ruleth in the Armies Of Heaven and among the Inhabitants of the Earth, doing whatever seemeth him good.
As a Jew, I rejoice together with American Christians — and all who seek God — in the blessings of this country. I take pride even as Ellmers does in the unique and irreplaceable contribution of my religion to the shared blessing of our constitutional republic. In the peace and prosperity of our nation, may we lead in every way towards a world in which ordered liberty under God establishes true and lasting peace for all.
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