To Bigotry
No Sanction

The most radical sentence in the history of belonging.

In the summer of 1790, the President of the United States stopped in Newport, Rhode Island. A small congregation — Jews whose families had crossed an ocean to escape the dungeons and expulsions of the Old World — sent its warden, Moses Seixas, to greet him. Seixas wrote with the caution of a people accustomed to living at the pleasure of kings. He thanked God for a government that gave to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.¹

Washington took the phrase and answered it with the most radical sentence in the history of belonging. He told them that the new nation would no longer speak of toleration — as if liberty were a favor handed down by a majority to a minority that lived on sufferance. In America, he wrote, rights are inherent natural rights: they belong to the citizen by birthright, not by permission. No group here would owe its freedom to the good mood of another.²

This is the American promise in its purest form, and it is older than almost everything we argue about today. It is not the promise that everyone will be liked. It is the promise that no American holds his citizenship as a revocable gift — that the moment we begin ranking citizens by class, demanding that some prove their worthiness while others are presumed to belong, we have stopped being the country Washington described and started becoming the one his countrymen had fled.

Not an age’s default, but a choice.

It is tempting to assume the Newport promise was simply the spirit of the age — that the Enlightenment was in the air, and any new republic would have breathed it. That assumption is false, and the proof is that another new republic, in the very same years, with the very same Enlightenment texts open on the table, reached for the opposite answer.

In December 1789 — eight months before Washington wrote to Newport — the French National Assembly debated whether Jews could be citizens of the new France. The case for admitting them was made by Count Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre, a liberal nobleman and a genuine friend of emancipation. His was the generous side of the debate. And this is how the generous side put its offer.

Read the French offer carefully, because the trap is in the symmetry. The Jew could have everything — on one condition: that he cease to be part of a people. It is repugnant, Clermont-Tonnerre added, to have in the state a nation within the nation. This was the best the French Enlightenment could do — not its bigotry but its liberalism, its most progressive offer. Napoleon would sharpen the same logic a few years later, interrogating whether Jewish loyalty to France could survive loyalty to their own people — a test no other citizens were asked to pass.³

Now set Newport beside it. Washington did not offer a bargain. He retired the entire vocabulary of conditional belonging — It is now no more that toleration is spoken of — and replaced it with inherent right. Where France said become a citizen by ceasing to be a people, America said you are already a people, and you are citizens, and you owe nothing for the privilege.

France took the conditional road, and the argument requires no causal chain from the bargain to the catastrophe that ended it — the catastrophe was Germany’s crime, and no clause of 1789 made it inevitable. What the record shows is the bargain’s own logic playing out. A century after emancipation, the Dreyfus affair condemned as a Jew an officer of the Republic who had kept every term of the bargain. And in October 1940 the Vichy government — on its own initiative, not on German orders — enacted the Statut des Juifs, formally reversing the emancipation itself: the offer of 1789, withdrawn by statute, on French soil, by French hands.³ Conditional acceptance protected no one, because a condition can always be revised, and a belonging that must be earned can always be revoked. That is the alternative the American promise was invented to escape. It was rare when it was made, it is still rare in the world, and it is ours to keep or to lose.

The bargain did not die in Paris. It survives wherever belonging is offered to the Jew at the price of his peoplehood, and it is offered still — no longer by a National Assembly, but by rooms: professional, academic, cultural, the places where standing is granted and withheld. The terms have been updated exactly once. Where Clermont-Tonnerre asked the Jew to shed his nation to enter the nation, the modern offer asks him to disavow the Jewish people’s national home — to present himself at the door divested of Zion, as his ancestors were asked to present themselves divested of peoplehood. The structure is unchanged: everything as an individual, nothing as a member of a people; admission priced in self-erasure; and a condition that, being a condition, can always be revised.

It must be said plainly why this is the old bargain and not a new argument about a foreign state. What is being demanded as an entrance fee is not an opinion the Jew happens to hold; it is among the oldest things he has. For two thousand years the return to Zion has been carried in the daily liturgy; the seder has closed with next year in Jerusalem since the Middle Ages; the glass is broken at weddings in Jerusalem’s memory; Jews the world over have faced Jerusalem to pray — the ark of the Newport synagogue that received Washington’s letter faces Jerusalem. And the attachment is not an heirloom: four of five American Jews today call caring about Israel an essential or important part of what being Jewish means to them.⁴ To demand its renunciation is not to solicit a view. It is to ask the Jew for his self — the exact currency of 1789.

The line between that demand and legitimate argument is bright, and this essay defends both sides of it. The conduct of Israel’s government may be debated, criticized, condemned — by Jews and by anyone; no state stands above judgment. What crosses the line is the litmus test: the demand that a Jew disavow the Jewish national home as the condition of his standing in a profession, a movement, a campus, a room. That is Napoleon’s question again — loyalty to your people, or admission among us — a test no other Americans are asked to pass. Washington answered it before it could be asked here. He named the children of the stock of Abraham as a people and welcomed them as a people, owing nothing at the door. The French bargain was refused on this soil at the founding. The refusal is due again.

The target is never really the target.

It is easy, and increasingly common, to hear the defense of a targeted minority as special pleading — one more group asking for one more exception. People who are not themselves targeted may reasonably ask why this should be their fight.

The answer is that the targeting is never really about the target. Movements that organize politics against a single group — that make one people the explanation for what has gone wrong — are advancing a theory of how a society should be ordered: by blood, by class, by rank, by who is presumed guilty and who is presumed innocent. The group in the crosshairs is the proximate target. The real target is the principle of equal citizenship itself — the idea that a person is judged by his own conduct and not by the category he was born into.

A society that accepts the logic of collective guilt against any group has already accepted the machinery that can be turned against any other. The canary in the mine is not asking the miners for sympathy. It is telling them something about the air they are all breathing. This essay does not ask Americans to care about one community out of charity. It asks them to defend the rule that makes them all secure — the same rule Washington pledged in 1790, and the same rule every demagogue since has tried to erase.

The Newport letter, on this argument, does not belong to the community it was addressed to; it belongs to every American whom its principle made an American. That claim has a witness. In October 1986, barely a month after becoming the first American of Italian descent to sit on the Supreme Court, Justice Antonin Scalia rose before the National Italian American Foundation and told his own community — Italians, Catholics, once counted as outsiders themselves — that the proof of their belonging was a letter written to somebody else: Washington’s letter to the Jews of Newport, which he held up as “a model of Americanism.” It had not been written to Italians. It did not need to be.

He was identifying the document that had made his own community Americans in the first place — the same document that had made every American what he is.⁵

Tested, betrayed, and vindicated — in public.

An essay built on the founding promise must be honest about the times the promise was broken — not despite its argument, but as its strongest proof. A principle that had never been tested could be dismissed as a slogan. The American principle was tested in public.

In December 1862, in the middle of the Civil War, General Ulysses S. Grant issued General Orders No. 11, expelling “Jews, as a class” from the territory under his command — the most sweeping official act of bigotry of its kind in the nineteenth-century United States.⁶ It was a betrayal of everything Newport stood for. And here is what makes it an American story rather than a European one: it did not stand. Within weeks a Kentucky merchant named Cesar Kaskel carried the news to Washington, and President Lincoln revoked the order at once.

Lincoln’s words are not a footnote to the founding promise. They are the founding promise, spoken in its hour of need. The principle that condemning a class wrongs the good with the bad is the exact principle Washington set down in Newport — and the speed of the revocation is the measure of how real it was.⁷

Eighty years later, the promise failed again — for longer, and at greater scale. In February 1942, by Executive Order 9066, the United States removed and incarcerated some 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry — about two-thirds of them American citizens — not for anything any of them had done, but for the category they were born into.⁸ It was Order No. 11 at the scale of a nation: collective guilt, enacted in law, against a people who had nothing to do with the Newport letter. And the standard that answered it was the Newport standard, applied without alteration. When the United States finally judged its own act, it did not invent a new principle; it measured the internment against the old one and confessed, in the founding vocabulary, exactly where the line had been crossed.

Without individual review — the commission’s charge is Lincoln’s sentence made a federal finding: a class had been condemned, and the good wronged with the bad. The commission concluded the policy rested not on military necessity but on “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership,” and in 1988 Congress wrote that language into the Civil Liberties Act: a formal apology and redress to every surviving internee, signed by President Reagan with the words “we gather here today to right a grave wrong.” The confession took forty-six years, and its lateness is part of the honest record. But mark what the episode proves about the promise. A principle first pledged to a Jewish congregation in 1790 was the instrument by which the Republic judged and repaired a wrong done to Japanese Americans in 1942 — because the principle never belonged to its first addressees. The protection runs to the person, whoever the person is; and the machinery of collective guilt, whomever it is built against, is answerable to the same standard every time.

The pattern recurs. There were episodes of exclusion, of quotas, of doors shut to refugees who should have been let in. The honest accounting includes them. The test of the founding standard is not that none of these failures occurred — they did, and they still do — but that the standard remained available as the ground on which they could be named, fought, and, at last, reversed. It held in 1862 in weeks, because a president could countermand a general; it held against the internment only after forty-six years, because a confession takes longer than a countermand. But both corrections came from the state that had done the wrong — and that raises a harder question. What happens when the offender holds no commission — when no president can revoke him, and no order can reach him? Sixty years after Grant, the country found out.

The bigot no order could revoke — answered anyway.

The private citizen the country found was the most formidable it could have produced. In 1920, Henry Ford — then the wealthiest American alive, and a folk-hero of industry — began publishing a weekly series in his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, called “The International Jew.” Drawing on the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion, it accused American Jews of orchestrating every misfortune in the country, and the paper reached a circulation in the hundreds of thousands at its peak.⁹ Until Hitler, Ford was the most prominent antisemite in the Western world. No general’s order could revoke him; no president could countermand him. He was a private citizen exercising the rights of a private citizen, and the question of what could be done about him was, in effect, the question of whether the Newport standard depended on having a Washington or a Lincoln personally in office.

It did not. In January 1921 — at the height of Ford’s power, before any lawsuit — more than a hundred prominent Americans signed a public manifesto called The Perils of Racial Prejudice. The sitting President, Woodrow Wilson, signed it. The former President William Howard Taft signed it. The incoming President, Warren G. Harding, signed it. Clarence Darrow signed it. William Jennings Bryan signed it. Robert Frost signed it. Ida Tarbell signed it. So did the presidents of Princeton, Cornell, and Syracuse. They called themselves “citizens of Gentile birth and Christian faith,” and they did not name Ford — no manifesto in 1921 was going to name the wealthiest private citizen in America by name — but no reader missed the target.¹⁰ A month earlier, at its annual convention, the Federal Council of Churches had issued a parallel condemnation of the Independent’s campaign.

This is the founding promise translated into duty. A sitting President, a former President, an incoming President, the most famous defense attorney of the age, the most famous orator of the age, and the poet Robert Frost put their names to the same sentence. It is the duty of citizens who are not Jews. The answer to the question some Americans still ask — why is this my fight? — was given out loud, in public, more than a century before the question was asked of us. The same Wilson who signed it had also ordered federal segregation across his administration, with consequences for Black Americans that lasted generations.¹¹ That is why the principle matters more than the person — the standard binds even the hand that holds it.

Ford’s apology came six years later, after Aaron Sapiro sued for libel and Louis Marshall, president of the American Jewish Committee, drafted the language Ford was made to sign on June 30, 1927.¹² The apology was negotiated. The booklets continued to circulate in Germany. None of it was the moral verdict; the verdict had been delivered six years earlier by leaders who had no legal weapon and no obligation beyond the duty they had named.

This is the through-line. Here, the bigot had to act against the nation’s stated creed — in war and in peace, when the state was the offender and when the offender was the most powerful private citizen alive. The standard outlived Washington and Lincoln because it did not, in the end, depend on them. It was kept by Presidents who used their voices, judges who lent their names, clergymen who broke silence from the pulpit, and citizens who refused to let bigotry pass uncontradicted in public. The signatures of 1921 had no legal force; they had only the force of who signed them and what they said. That was enough. Elsewhere, too often, the bigot was the creed.

The promise, defended on the world stage.

The promise has also been defended abroad, against charges built to circumvent it. The twentieth century left a documented case of a charge against the Jewish people that was engineered rather than discovered. The formula that Zionism is racism was not the conclusion of any inquiry; it was a device. Scholars trace it to the Soviet Union, which introduced the equation of Zionism with racism during the 1965 negotiations over the international convention against racial discrimination — as a way to deflect international criticism of its own persecution of Soviet Jews.¹³ A decade of state propaganda later, the device was institutionalized: in 1975 a United Nations majority declared the formula to be international law in Resolution 3379. It had the votes. It did not have the evidence.

When the resolution reached the floor of the General Assembly, the American ambassador, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, rose and refused it in the name of the country he represented.

Moynihan did not frame his stand as a favor to anyone. He framed it as the defense of words — the vocabulary of inherent rights, given to the modern world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — against those who would destroy them and leave nothing in their place.¹⁴ The resolution was repealed sixteen years later. The principle outlasted the lie. That is the American role at its best: not to ask for protection, but to stand for the rule that protects.

But mark the afterlife of the device, because it is the bridge to the present. The resolution was repealed in 1991; the formula was not. A slogan manufactured in a ministry to shield a persecutor, passed by acclamation, and formally dead for a generation is today recited — as a self-evident moral datum — by people who have never heard of the ministry that built it. That is how a manufactured charge survives: it outlives its makers, sheds its provenance, and presents itself to each new generation as a discovery.

The oldest hatred, in its newest dress.

Everything to this point could be read as commemoration — a history of a promise made, broken, and kept, safely concluded. It cannot be read that way, because the promise is being tested now, on the same terms, against the same people it was first pledged to. The record of the present is as documentable as the record of 1862, and this essay holds it to the same standard of evidence.

The ledger of the present

Begin with what is counted. In 2024, the FBI recorded 1,938 anti-Jewish hate-crime incidents — the highest number since the Bureau began collecting the data in 1991. Jews are roughly two percent of the American population; they were the target of nearly seventy percent of all religion-based hate crimes.¹⁵ In 2025, the ADL’s annual audit — the longest-running count of its kind — recorded 6,274 antisemitic incidents, an average of seventeen a day: the third-highest year since tracking began in 1979, and, by the measure that matters most, the worst. Physical assaults reached the highest level ever recorded; assaults with deadly weapons rose by more than a third; and for the first time since 2019, American Jews were murdered in antisemitic attacks on American soil — two young embassy aides shot dead outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington in May, and a woman fatally wounded when a man firebombed a Boulder, Colorado march for the hostages in June.¹⁶ And beneath the violence, a finding that would have been unprintable a generation ago: asked about the attacks, nearly one American in four called them “understandable.”¹⁷

Lincoln revoked an order in weeks. The signatories of 1921 answered a newspaper in months. The question the numbers put to this generation is not whether the machinery of collective condemnation can return. It has returned. The question is what form it has taken — and whether Americans will recognize it wearing new clothes.

The bargain, updated: anti-Zionism as the successor form

The form is the one this essay has already traced twice — once in Paris in 1789, once in the General Assembly in 1975 — and it must be named with the same care in both directions. The conduct of Israel’s government may be debated, criticized, condemned; that is argument, and argument is protected here for everyone. What has returned is something else: anti-Zionism — the position that holds not that a policy is wrong but that the Jewish national home is illegitimate as such; that of all the peoples of the earth, the Jews alone may not have one. Natan Sharansky, who learned the device firsthand as a Soviet refusenik and prisoner, gave the diagnostic its simplest form — the three Ds. When Israel is demonized beyond any resemblance to fact; when it is held to double standards applied to no other nation; when its very existence is delegitimized — the argument has left the realm of politics and entered the oldest hatred, and the same test is written into the working definition of antisemitism adopted by dozens of democratic governments, including our own.¹⁸

Watch what this position does when it reaches the American Jew, because that is where it becomes the French bargain verbatim. It arrives as a condition: disavow, and you may enter. The litmus test — administered in professional guilds, academic departments, cultural bodies, activist coalitions, the rooms where standing is granted and withheld — offers the Jew everything as an individual and nothing as a member of a people, exactly as Clermont-Tonnerre offered it, with the terms updated exactly once: where 1789 demanded he shed his nation, the present demands he shed Zion, which two thousand years of liturgy — and the Jerusalem-facing ark of the Newport synagogue itself — attest is not an opinion he holds but among the oldest things he has. And it carries the inversion that has marked the manufactured charge since 1975: the crime the Jewish people suffered, handed back to them as the accusation.

Between the demand at the door of the seminar room and the slogan shouted by the man with the gun outside the museum there lies a real and important distance — most who repeat the formula would recoil at the deed. But the direction of travel runs one way. A doctrine that declares one people’s home uniquely criminal will reliably find, at its edge, men who conclude that the people are criminal too; the killers of 2025 did not invent their vocabulary, they inherited it — and were praised for the deed, by name, in the movement’s own channels.¹⁶

The deeper quarrel: a worldview against the founding

It remains to ask why this form flourishes now, in these rooms — and the answer returns the essay to its beginning. This essay judges creeds and conduct, never a class of persons; what follows is an examination of tenets, not a census of the people who hold them, and it convicts no one by association. But the tenets can be read, because they are published. The worldview in which the litmus test lives sorts humanity into oppressor and oppressed classes, fixed largely at birth; it assigns guilt and innocence by category rather than by conduct; it ranks the standing of speakers by the identity of the speaker; it treats the individual as a specimen of his group. Set those tenets beside the founding commitments this essay has traced — rights inherent in the person, never granted to the group; the individual judged by his own conduct, never by his class; no ranking of citizens into the presumed-innocent and the presumed-guilty — and the observation is not that the two systems disagree. It is that each is the point-by-point negation of the other. A creed of collective guilt cannot coexist with a republic founded on individual right; one of them must yield.

Once that is seen, the position of the Jews in the present moment explains itself, and the essay’s third section is vindicated in the unhappiest way. A worldview that assigns guilt by category will always find the Jews early — a small, ancient, conspicuous people, prosperous enough to be cast as oppressor, foreign enough to be cast as suspect — just as every previous system of collective judgment found them early, from the Assembly’s condition to the General’s order to the industrialist’s newspaper. The Jews are the proximate target. The founding order is the object. And honesty requires the mirror to be held up in the other direction, because the negation does not come from one camp alone. The creed of blood and soil — the “replacement” mythology that sent a gunman into a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 to commit the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history — rejects the proposition from the opposite side: not guilt by class but belonging by blood, the exact doctrine Washington’s letter retired.¹⁹ The two camps agree on nothing except the target and the method: both judge the Jew as a class, and both, in doing so, declare war on the sentence that made every American an American. Antisemitism is the symptom common to both. The disease common to both is the rejection of the American invention.

That is the present test, stated whole. The country that refused the French bargain at its founding, that revoked the General’s order in weeks, that answered its mightiest industrialist with a citizens’ manifesto, that confessed the internment in its own founding vocabulary, and that rose alone in the General Assembly to refuse the manufactured lie — that country is being asked the old question again, in a new dress, by movements that have already answered it against her. The record of this essay is the record of how Americans have answered before: not by inventing a new principle, but by holding the old one — and holding it out loud. The refusal is due again. It has always been due from all of us.