In September 1654, twenty-three Jewish refugees staggered ashore in New Amsterdam in the New World–blown off course, stripped of nearly everything, and immediately detained over an unpaid fare. Nothing about their arrival suggested they carried anything of merit.
But they actually carried an immeasurable value: an unbreakable promise made to Abraham nearly four thousand years earlier.
One hundred thirty-six years later, in a small seaport in Rhode Island, the first President of the United States would deliver the words that put that promise into force–and, in doing so, quietly guarantee the astonishing ascendancy of the nation he led.
How did twenty-three Jewish refugees end up in a Dutch colonial jail?
They had not intended to come to North America at all.
Earlier fleeing the Portuguese reconquest of Dutch Brazil, a small band of Jewish families joined a ragtag fleet of sixteen ships bound for Holland. One vessel ran into a punishing sequence of setbacks on the stormy Atlantic–driven off course, separated from the fleet, then captured, ransomed, and released by privateers in the Caribbean.
Lost at sea and out of options, the survivors abandoned any hope of Europe and cast about for a semi-safe harbor.
Somehow, they found Manhattan. They could not pay the captain for the final leg of the voyage. Goods were seized and auctioned; members of the party were held against the debt.
It was not an auspicious beginning. It got worse.
An “abominable religion”
As the new arrivals tried to establish themselves, Governor Peter Stuyvesant protested directly to the Dutch West India Company, denouncing the twenty-three as members of “a deceitful race” practicing what he called an “abominable religion.”
The Governor formally asked that they be expelled.
The Company overruled him. Several of its own shareholders in Europe were actually Jewish. The order permitted the group to remain and trade. But permission came with limits.
Public worship of the Sabbath and Holy Days was denied, and no synagogue could be built in New Amsterdam.
Then, in 1664, the town fell to the English and was promptly renamed New York.
In one of history’s more consequential accidents, the small Jewish community inherited a new status from His Majesty the King. With it came a measure of religious liberty that the Dutch had refused them.
Small groups of Jews continued to arrive quietly to the New World. They spread into the Delaware Valley and, notably, to Rhode Island, which was the first colony to champion freedom of religion outright.
In 1730, the tiny Shearith Israel congregation in New York consecrated the first synagogue building in North America. In 1763, an elaborate new synagogue opened in Newport; today it stands as a national historic site. That same year, another congregation began assembling in Philadelphia.
A community unlike any other
Historian Paul Johnson marked the moment plainly: “Thus was born American Jewry. It was, from the start, unlike any Jewry elsewhere.” This new identity organized itself around the synagogue in a way it had not elsewhere, in a way that would reshape Jewish life in the New World.
What happened? A people long subject to expulsion and seizure began, for the first time in centuries, to take root safely and without fear. A Jewish economic sector grew alongside the fledgling colonies in manufacturing, trade, law, and banking.
Then came the American Revolution.
Shared values in conflict
By 1776, Jewish immigrants had spent a century proving their worth in building the colonial economy. When war came, many enlisted in the Continental Army and rendered military service on behalf of their adopted country.
Haym Salomon, a Jewish financier from Poland, joined the radical Sons of Liberty. Arrested and punished by British authorities for supporting the rebellion, he escaped and went on to play a major role in arranging the financing and bonds that propped up a shaky Continental Congress and its perpetually unpaid army.
Throughout the war, the Jewish community in America never exceeded one-tenth of one percent of a colonial population of roughly three million. Their acts of support and sacrifice far outran their numbers. An estimated hundred Jews served under General George Washington.
Meanwhile, as the colonies moved toward independence, their leaders found appropriate inspiration in biblical imagery. Both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson proposed national symbols drawn from the Exodus picturing a new American Israel delivered from Egypt, led forward by the divine pillar of cloud and fire.
All of it set the stage for what happened in Newport.
A bold statement of hope
President Washington arrived in Newport on August 17, 1790, continuing a goodwill tour following Rhode Island’s ratification of the Constitution. As was the custom, officials and religious representatives prepared addresses of welcome.
Among them was Moses Seixas, warden of the Hebrew Congregation of Newport. His address was signed by order of the congregation on August 17 and carefully presented to the President the following morning.
Please read it carefully, because the most famous words in this exchange are his, not Washington’s.
“Deprived as we heretofore have been of the invaluable rights of free Citizens,” Seixas wrote, the congregation now looked with gratitude to “a Government which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”
That was not a description. It was a hope. One offered tentatively, by a man whose people had spent fifteen centuries learning not to assume.
A stunning and unique declaration
Washington wrote back within days. He did not soften Seixas’s phrase or hedge it. He took it up and returned it with a powerful and unique guarantee. The government of the United States, he affirmed, gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.
Then he went further:
“May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid. May the father of all mercies scatter light and not darkness in our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in his own due time and way everlastingly happy.”
These were words no Jewish community in the Western world had ever heard from a head of state.
Earlier that same year, Washington had written in a similar vein to an even smaller congregation in Savannah, Georgia. Their address reached him in June; his reply was openly printed in newspapers that summer. In it, he tied the fate of Jewish Americans directly to the destiny of the United States:
“May the same wonder-working Deity, who long since delivering the Hebrews from their Egyptian Oppressors planted them in the promised land–whose providential agency has lately been conspicuous in establishing these United States as an independent nation–still continue to water them with the dews of Heaven and to make the inhabitants of every denomination participate in the temporal and spiritual blessings of that people whose God is Jehovah.”
Who actually sets up kings and presidents?
Notice what the Commander-in-Chief did in both letters. He is not making a political gesture toward a voting bloc. There was no bloc. He is invoking a Sovereign God by one of His formal names, and crediting that God with the existence of the United States.
It reflects the same declaration that the prophet Daniel made of the God who “controls the course of world events; he removes kings and sets up other kings” (Daniel 2:21, New Living Translation).
Students of Scripture know what happens when the promises of that God are engaged. God can and does bless individual people and nations in many ways and through various means, including other blessings through the promises of Abraham. But this one was different.
One verse. Three clauses.
Millennia earlier, God made a formal promise to a man He would later call His friend — a promise that his descendants would become a great nation. That promise found its first fulfillment in ancient Israel, whose powerful influence on human civilization reverberates to this day.
But the promise to Abraham contained more than nationhood. Genesis 12:2–3 is a single sentence that reflects a deliberate choice with three clauses, and the second and third are the ones that matter here:
“I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (English Standard Version)
The people who God would raise up through Abraham included the tribe of Judah, a definable group whose observance of the seventh day Sabbath, the annual High Days, and other biblical tenets openly set them apart.
Despite the passage of millennia, the national identity of the Jews was preserved and never lost. Their direct historical connection to Abraham was celebrated and confirmed through the ages.
Understanding that promise as extending to Abraham’s physical descendants in America offers a striking and critical implication for that moment in August 1790. Prior to that, the Jewish people had endured centuries of trials and merciless persecution, cast out of nearly every home they attempted to make.
When Washington blessed them and publicly offered them standing as equals among peers, he did not extend mere political courtesy. Under the terms of that divine promise, he spiritually positioned the young republic to grow and prosper like no other nation in history. An unbreakable promise came to power.
The third element given to Abraham bears examination: “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” points forward to the Messiah, the Savior of all humanity. But it also describes exactly what America’s first President named: the temporal and spiritual blessings of that people whose God is Jehovah.
The spiritual blessings include the preservation of sacred Scriptures themselves–the living Word of God, with the Law and teachings that govern conduct.
The temporal blessings are more easily counted.
What did the blessing actually look like?
Less than a century after Newport, something extraordinary, even miraculously, happened. Just as the Industrial Revolution–a time that changed the course of human history and achievement–began to take hold in the United Kingdom and the United States, a seemingly unrelated act took place.
Ironically, it began as a catastrophe.
Historian Paul Johnson observed that in the nineteenth century, everywhere on earth except the United States, remaining a Jew carried a material cost. European Jews, and Russian Jews above all, came under intensifying restriction from the mid-1800s. As Johnson notes: “The object of the [Russian] government was the reduce the Jewish population as quickly and as drastically as possible.”
It got worse. The first modern pogroms erupted in Ukraine in 1881, accompanied by open calls to kill Jews, and metastasized into sweeping antisemitic law and violence across the empire. The following three decades produced what Johnson describes “a panic flight of Jews from Russia westwards.”
While atrocity and suffering was again afflicted on the Jews, this time a door was open in America. As Johnson documents, The horrific Russian edicts and Jewish flight through that door created “momentous effects, both for the Jews and for the world.”
A new intellectual backbone
Before 1880, Jews in America numbered only in the thousands. Over the next four decades, more than two million fled Europe and Russia and landed here — precisely as the Industrial Revolution was opening dramatic new opportunity in the United States. They transformed vast sections of New York City, and of Chicago, Indianapolis, and dozens of cities inland.
The most visible consequence, in Johnson’s assessment, was “the creation of a mass American urban Jewry.” Before long, more Jews lived in New York City than in Jerusalem. And they lived in freedom–free to create, to innovate, and to prosper alongside their fellow Americans.
“Immensely greater”
Mark Twain took the measure of it in 1899. If the statistics were right, he wrote, Jews made up about one percent of the human race — “a nebulous dim puff of star-dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way.” Properly, he continued, one ought hardly to hear of the Jew at all.
Instead, Twain argued, the Jew was as prominent on the planet as any other people, his commercial weight wildly out of proportion to his numbers, and his contributions to the world’s great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, and medicine equally so.
More than a century later, the pattern continued to hold.
Writing much later in the 21st century, New York Times columnist David Brooks noted that American Jews then made up about two percent of the U.S. population while accounting for roughly a fifth of Ivy League student bodies, a quarter of Kennedy Center honorees, better than a third of Academy Award–winning directors and of the philanthropists on a leading Business Week list, and more than half of Pulitzer Prize winners for nonfiction.
The effects of that promise, including the distinctly Judeo-Christian ethic that powered and governed so much of American development, remain plainly visible.
Has the tide turned?
There is a flip side to the blessing God spoke to Abraham. It appears in the very same sentence: “him who dishonors you I will curse.”
Here’s the emerging sobering contrast: in December 1790, Washington wrote to reply to a joint address from the Hebrew congregations of Philadelphia, New York, Charleston, and Richmond. The legendary President again extended the same assurance of equal rights and prospects for living in peace that he had given the Newport Jewish congregation.
Two hundred twenty-eight years later, a different picture was emerging in America.
On October 27, 2018, an assailant walked into the Tree of Life – Or L’Simcha synagogue in Pittsburgh and murdered eleven Jewish worshippers, wounding six others.
It was the deadliest attack on a Jewish community in American history–in the state whose Jewish congregation had received the first President’s written promise of safety.
A deliberate choice
Antisemitic incidents have risen sharply in the years since, in America and abroad, and the hostility does not confine itself to one political direction, either conservative or liberal.
To be certain, civil and thoughtful criticism of any government’s actions, including Israel’s, is legitimate for consideration. Scripture nowhere asks believers to whitewash grievous acts by any party.
But there is a difference between argument and contempt, and a further difference between contempt and violence. Discourse governed by civility and fact is not a concession. It is a powerful and meaningful defense. The result of this rise in American antisemitism? Today, a full 91% of American Jews say they feel less safe as a Jewish person in the United States due to violent attacks in 2025 that included the burning of Governor Josh Shapiro’s home in Pennsylvania, the firebombing of Jews in Boulder, CO, and the murders of two Israeli embassy staff members at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C.
So now, in view of the promises evident in Genesis, the question stands. Will America step back from acts of antisemitism and attacks on her spiritual brethren—or will ever-growing national and personal lawlessness activate the second clause of that ancient sentence?
One truth is clear. God remains Sovereign, controlling the course of world events, removing and installing human leaders as it serves His purpose. If you want to understand what God regards as important in the conduct of national affairs, review the 28th chapter of Deuteronomy. The consequences of turning from God are real.
On August 17, 1790, in a small Rhode Island seaport, America blessed her own future.
Two hundred thirty-six years later, in August 2026, here’s the critical question: is America—or any nation turning from God–preparing to forfeit the marvelous promises of God?
Next up: “After America-then what?”
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