Why American Jews Celebrate the Fourth of July

 

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottown, PEI] Guardian

On July 4, Americans will celebrate the country’s 245^th birthday. The United States is far from perfect, as everyone knows. It tolerated slavery until 1865 and destroyed, both physically and culturally, many Native American peoples as it expanded across the continent from Atlantic to Pacific.

Many Americans, in particular African Americans and women, were denied the vote into the twentieth century.

However, it created a civic culture that would regard Jews as equal citizens. Outside of Israel, America would become the most welcoming home to Jews of any nation in the world.

The 1776 Declaration of Independence signaled to the world that a nation was coming into existence predicated upon the natural and inalienable rights of mankind, rights that could not be taken away by the state.

The United States has never had a national church and the government is prohibited from establishing or favouring any religion over another. The First Amendment guarantees religious liberty to people of all faiths, while the Constitution proclaims that “no religious test shall ever be required” as a qualification for public office.

This meant Jews were free to dissent from the religious views of the majority without fear of persecution, rights almost unheard of elsewhere in the world at the time. 

The country’s first president put this in writing. George Washington’s letter of August 18,1790 to Moses Seixas, of the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, is celebrated as one of the definitive statements of religious freedom under the new U.S. Constitution.

“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,” Washington assured him.

“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 everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

Washington’s assurance, written sixteen months after he became president, made clear that he would not permit the power of the new government to become an instrument of religious intolerance. 

The French author and diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville, during his tour of the United States in 1831-32, observed that Americans had established a civil society that was diverse, tolerant, and deeply religious, a combination that rarely appeared in Europe or other parts of the world.

“Among us, I had seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom almost always move in contrary directions,” he wrote in his two-volume Democracy in America, published between 1835 and 1840. “Here I found them united intimately with on another: they reigned together on the same soil.”

Also, thanks to the impact of Protestantism, Americans were intimately familiar with the Bible. The earliest Puritan settlers established a “covenant” with one another modeled on its covenantal theology.

The inscription on the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, an iconic symbol of American independence, is taken from Leviticus 25:10: “Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.” A carved image of Moses dominates a frieze at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Therefore Jews in America never experienced systematic persecution and were welcomed as equal citizens of a self-governing republic. Thus, without renouncing their religion, they began to achieve integration.

Given the history of anti-Semitism elsewhere, Jews were also allied with African Americans in the fight for Black economic and political  rights, which had been denied so long and so flagrantly.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the oldest and largest civil rights organization, was founded in 1909 by several Black leaders, most notably W.E.B. Du Bois, and some liberal whites, a disproportionate number of whom were Jewish.

As the movement gained momentum in the 1950s, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph and Roy Wilkins, some of its lobbying was coordinated by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, whose offices were at the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.

Today, in a far more conflicted America, African Americans and Jews remain the two ethnic groups that most support the Democratic Party. This remains a legacy of that past.