The Declaration Of Independence, Faith, And Antisemitism

Dispatch Faith:  Is Antisemitism Un-American?, by Jack Miller (Founder, Jack Miller Center) & Wilfred M. McClay (Hillsdale; Author, Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story):

[Are] antisemitic attacks un-American? We should be very careful in using the word “un-American.” It has a history of being misused, and sometimes used in dishonest ways. As Americans, we rightfully prize our freedom, and being a free society means that we give a wide berth to all sorts of opinions and differences.

But our freedom does presuppose something important: a shared respect for the fundamental values that are basic to the American way of life. Those are the values and the vision conveyed in our Declaration of Independence, the belief that all men are created equal and have a natural right to their life, their liberty, and their pursuit of happiness.

It is vital to recognize the deep Jewish roots of those ideas. Go to any church in America, sit down and pick up the Bible, and what is the first book that you come to? The first book, of course, is Genesis, followed by Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—the first five books of the Jewish Torah, followed by the rest of the Hebrew Bible (or Tanakh). These books were part of the Old Testament that the settlers who built America carried with them when they came to our shores, the texts from which our Founders drew their inspiration for the principles behind our political tradition. As one of us has previously written with Pete Peterson [Pepperdine], the Hebrew Bible shaped foundational principles including the separation of powers, our sense of justice, and the exalted vision of human dignity at the heart of our nationhood. ...

[I]t is important to insist that antisemitism is un-American.

It is not enough to just say that such criminal acts violate our laws. They offend our fundamental beliefs about the freedom and dignity of the individual person, ideals that America pioneered at its founding and that the nations of Europe and most of the civilized world claim to honor.

For Americans, nothing expresses the distinctively American view of the matter better than George Washington’s letter to the Hebrew congregation at Newport, Rhode Island, in 1790. It’s a beautiful letter and one that should make every American proud to read. ... 

Washington enunciated general principles that should apply to all men and women because of their inherent natural rights. He was also writing as the first American president, specifically to a Jewish audience, making clear his recognition that Jews have a long history of having been subjected to bigotry and persecution—but that in the United States of America, this new country, things would be different. ...

May the children of the stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the goodwill of the other inhabitants; while everyone 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.

America has, indeed, been an incomparably wonderful land for Jewish people, a land in which they have been able to flourish and achieve according to their own abilities and their own hard work. It also is equally true that America owes a profound and incalculable debt to those Jews who helped foster principles upon which much of the American experiment in democratic self-government was erected. ...

The Founders adopted the Exodus story as a symbolic expression of America’s quest for liberty against the tyranny of worldly kings who counted themselves above the law. In that way, as in so many other ways, the American story and the Jewish story have been intertwined—and to negate one is to negate them both. We can’t let that happen if we are to continue as the land of the free.

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