This July 4, American Jews did something I have never seen on such a scale. Nearly every Jewish organization and countless individual Jews posted the same document at the same moment: George Washington’s 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, R.I.

The CEO of the Conference of Presidents based his Independence Day op-ed on it. Dozens of Jewish leaders, from the Orthodox Union to the Jewish Federations to Hebrew Union College, signed an open letter for America’s 250th anniversary that invoked it. My own organization, the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation, posted it. Scroll through any Jewish feed this month, and there it is, again and again: Washington’s pledge that the United States would give “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”

I have quoted that letter myself. But when an entire community converges on a single 230-year-old text simultaneously, the text is doing work beyond celebration. It is being read as reassurance. And a community reaches for reassurance only when something feels unsettled.

We should be honest about what that something is. The American Jewish Committee’s latest survey found that 91% of American Jews say they feel less safe after instances of major violence in 2025: the arson at Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s residence during Passover, the murders of a young couple outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C.; and the firebombing of a hostage march in Boulder, Colo., that killed one woman and injured a dozen others, including a Holocaust survivor.

More than half of American Jews report changing their behavior out of fear, hiding a Star of David, avoiding an event, saying less. And the Anti-Defamation League recorded 2025 as the first year since 2019 in which Jews were murdered on American soil for being Jews. Incident totals that would have staggered us a decade ago are now described as a floor.

So, the Washington posts are not really about 1790. They are about 2026. They represent a community quietly checking whether the deed to the house is still in its name.

Look closely at what we have been posting about, and a pattern emerges. Washington’s letter. Information on Haym Salomon, the Jewish broker who financed the Revolution and died penniless because the young republic never repaid him. Comments on the Liberty Bell, cast with a verse from Leviticus: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land.”

Every one of these is an artifact of the founding. Every one of them is a receipt. We were here at the beginning. We paid for this. We bled for it. We have it in writing, from the first president himself.

I understand the impulse. But we should recognize it for what it is, because Jewish history has seen it before. The instinct to prove belonging through service, sacrifice and documentation is very old, and it has never once been the thing that actually protected us. The Jews of Germany had their Haym Salomons by the thousand, their war heroes and their patriots. The receipts saved no one.

America is not Weimar Germany, and the differences are structural and profound. But the psychological move, the belief that a thick enough file of contributions purchases safety, is precisely what history refutes. Safety was never bought with loans to the Continental Congress. It is secured, or lost, by the strength of the constitutional order.

Which brings us back to George Washington, because the anxious reading of his letter has it exactly backwards.

Washington did not tell the Jews of Newport that they had earned their place. Read the letter again. He said the opposite: “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.”

Natural. Not granted, not purchased, not conditional on good behavior or distinguished service. The U.S. government, “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.”

This language was first used by a Jew, Moses Seixas, warden of the Newport congregation, in his address of welcome. Washington took a Jewish community’s words and returned them with the full weight of the presidency behind them. He was not issuing Jews a certificate of worthiness. He was declaring that worthiness was never in question.

That is the letter’s actual radicalism, and it is the answer to this moment. The cure for our fear is not a better case file; it is not more proof that we belong. Assembling proof concedes the premise that belonging is on trial. It is not, and we should stop acting as if it were.

None of this diminishes what Jews and America have built together, and here the record deserves to be stated plainly, not as evidence but as fact. Again and again, when America needed words to describe itself, the words were Jewish.

The Liberty Bell speaks Leviticus. The most famous line in Washington’s letter was Jewish before it was presidential. When the nation built the Statue of Liberty, it carved into the pedestal the words of Emma Lazarus, a Jewish poet: “Give me your tired, your poor.” Irving Berlin arrived here as a five-year-old fleeing pogroms and gave his new country “God Bless America.” A people does not write inscriptions on a house it merely rents.

Beyond the words came the work. Jews did not simply prosper in America; they helped build it. They served in every American war from the Revolution onward, and many never came home. They arrived with nothing and built American medicine, law, science and industry.

Jonas Salk helped end polio. Rabbis participated in the Selma marches, part of the long struggle to fulfill America’s promise.

America, in turn, gave the Jewish people something no diaspora had ever offered: not toleration but ownership, the ability to be fully Jewish and fully American without surrendering either. This was never a landlord indulging a tenant. It was two partners building a house together, and the house is better because both were on the job.

Partners do not reread the lease every time the wind rattles the windows. They maintain the building. That means, in practice, exactly what Washington’s letter implies: strengthening the institutions that keep rights inherent rather than indulged. When we defend that structure, for ourselves and for every other community that lives under its protection, we are not asking America for shelter. We are holding up our end.

And notice what American Jews actually did when the fear arrived. They did not become less Jewish. They became more so. Synagogues filled. Torah classes grew. Students who had rarely crossed the threshold of a Hillel or a Chabad House claimed a community and a history they had never fully owned.

For many young Jews, Oct. 7 was not the end of an identity. It was the beginning of one. Frightened tenants pack their bags. Builders renovate.

Washington closed his letter with the prophet Micah: “May everyone sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

That was never a promise made to Jews alone. It is a description of America when America works. There is fear in our community this Independence Day, and the fear is not irrational. But fear tells us what to repair, not who we are. We are not guests here, checking whether the invitation still stands. We are among the builders of the house.

At 250, that is the message worth posting.

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