What Political Leaders Can Learn From George Washington About Anti-Semitism

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Anti-Semitism is the most successful ideology of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

There is a long pedigree of anti-Jewish hatred which transcends history, religion, geography, and political ideology. Hatred of the Jews is the one peculiar thing that seems to unite Fascists and Communists, Christians and Muslims, and even the far-right and elite progressives in contemporary politics.

Since October 7, there has been a sharp spike in anti-semitism in the media, on social media, on campuses, and even in many mainstream political parties driven by the horrors transpiring in Gaza and Lebanon.

My assessment is that the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) has violated the laws of armed conflict in the way that it has prosecuted its war in Gaza and Lebanon. The IDF has not always engaged in military actions that were necessary, proportionate, and discriminatory. Dropping 2000lb bombs on civilian infrastructure, even if infested with Hamas combatants, yields unacceptable civilian casualties.

Furthermore, the Netanyahu Government has deployed genocidal rhetoric about blotting out the “Amalekites,” is using the conflict to prolong its own precarious political existence, and will probably use the conflict as a casus belli to annex the West Bank and partition Gaza. The Netanyahu Government has an existential reason for perpetuating the conflict and will be given a blank cheque by the new Trump Administration.

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One might retort that Hamas is a terrorist organization, it does not abide by the Geneva Conventions, and the October 7 attack was an act of depraved barbarism against Israeli and international civilians, so Israel is justified in its extreme response because it faces an extreme threat. Perhaps, but it misses the point; in the West, we kill our enemies lawfully and retain the moral high ground to prove that our civilization is better than our adversaries. If Israel believes that it must fight Middle Eastern foes according to medieval Muslim rules, then so be it, but then it forfeits its right to be called a Western nation committed to an international rules-based order.

My point is that even if one accepts such a critique of the IDF and Netanyahu government, what I want to stress that it does not justify either (1) regarding all Jews as committed to a Zionist xenophobic project, and (2) the imputation of guilt to all Jews for the alleged crimes of the Netanyahu Government irrespective of their own personal beliefs.

The hatred of Jews for being Jews is an ancient prejudice that finds strange bed-fellows among right-wing conspiracy theorists (remember “Jewish space lasers”) and the Rainbow Stalinists (who can forget “Queers for Hamas”).

Even Australia, the land of the fair-go for everyone, and generally allergic to religious sectarianism, has seen a surge in anti-Semitic protests and an arson attack on synagogues. Sadly, Australia’s left-wing political leaders at the federal and state level have fumbled over words to condemn the insidious acts as they remain fearful of upsetting their far-left base who are rather giddy about the spate of anti-Semitic incidents.

Here, I would like to point our leaders to a letter that the first US president, George Washington, wrote to the Rhode Island Hebrew Congregation at Newport, thanking them for their warm congratulatory letter for his election as President upon his visit to the city of Newport.

To give some context, Rhode Island was founded as a colony in 1636 by the Baptist preacher Roger Williams for the explicit purpose of creating a safe haven for religious dissenters. In sharp juxtaposition to neighboring states, Rhode Island’s 1663 charter provided a robust defense of religious liberty. In 1677, a group of Sephardim Jews arrived from Europe, seeking refuge from pogroms and discrimination by Protestant and Catholic countries. The Jewish community itself soon disbanded, but it set a precedent for the absolute nature of religious freedom in Rhode Island, and the island received more Jewish immigrants in the 1740s and thereafter. Though interrupted by the American Revolution, Jewish communities began to grow again shortly after and would thrive in the nineteenth century.

When Washington visited Newport in 1790, after Rhode Island ratified the new US constitution, the Hebrew Congregation wrote him a letter suffused with biblical imagery, noting how the Jews had suffered many villainies from the governments of other nations, and praised Washington’s administration for “generously affording to all liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship,” and offered praise to God “for all of the blessings of civil and religious liberty” that the Jews of Rhode Island now enjoyed under the Constitution.

On his return to New York, Washington wrote to the Hebrew Congregation in language also immersed in biblical imagery, and set forth a vision of religious liberty undoubtedly influenced by Thomas Jefferson’s notion of natural rights, and Alexander Hamilton’s well-known Judeophilia.

Washington wrote:

The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship 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. For 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.

It would be inconsistent with the frankness of my character not to avow that I am pleased with your favorable opinion of my Administration, and fervent wishes for my felicity. 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 figtree, 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.

One need not defend everything the Netanyahu Government does nor endorse the targeting strategies of the IDF in order avoid association with anti-Semitism. However, at a time when Jews around the world experience the imputation of a guilt that is not theirs and find themselves again the target of ancient prejudices, it would be much better if our contemporary political leaders spoke to Jewish communities like George Washington. Such would be infinitely better than the word salads of political leaders attempting to offer paltry and pathetic condemnations of violence while obviously more fearful of appearing too sympathetic to their Jewish citizenry.

I am not Jewish. I am an Anglican priest. However, when my children turn thirteen, I always put them through the same ritual. No, not a confirmation class, nor catechism, and obviously not a bar/bat mitzvah. Rather, we visit the Melbourne Holocaust Museum.

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The reason for the visit is that the first lesson of adulthood I want to instil into them is … the reality of evil! The visit is always a harrowing affair, to see pictorial evidence and listen to aural testimonies of the evils committed against even Jewish children is confronting for young adolescents. But I want them to see the naked wickedness committed by so-called Christian nations against the very people who shared the same flesh as Jesus of Nazareth.

Sadly, over the centuries the Jewish people have been “oppressed and afflicted” and been “led like a lamb to the slaughter” to use the language of Isaiah 53. The harrowing tale of anti-Semitism in the twentieth century is a sober reminder of our need to evaluate our own propensity to engage in hatred without reason and evil without end when stirred by our own sense of self-righteousness.

Alas, the surge in anti-Semitic actions, the political left’s mixture of apathy and appetite for it, proves that the lesson needs to be learned in every generation.