How would the American founders have responded to the creation of Israel?

This question will not resonate with critics of Israel on the far left, since for them the founders exemplify precisely the “settler colonialism” they see as Israel’s taproot.

For others, however, answering this question—as best a counterfactual can be answered—can provide a valuable lens through which to judge recent criticisms of Israel and America’s close connection with the Jewish state. Many of the founders—an admittedly loose term that will be used here as coextensive with leaders in political life from the 1770s until the early 1800s—would have supported the formation of Israel in roughly the sense envisaged by the United Nations’ Resolution 181 of November 1947, for at least three reasons.

The first is the manner in which the creation of Israel reflected key aspects of America’s own founding. The second is the significance of the pro-Jewish views circulating among many founders as a result of the considerable Jewish support for the revolutionary cause. The third relates to the especially strong personal support three major founders—Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and John Quincy Adams—extended to Judaism. The latter two even explicitly endorsed the reconstitution of a Jewish state in the Holy Land. 

Lastly, against the claim that the founders’ general prioritization of immediate national interest in foreign affairs would have ill-disposed them to support the creation of a state in the far recesses of the globe stands the example of Hamilton’s energetic commitment to assisting regimes and movements around the world that instantiate political and moral values consistent with America’s aims. Hamilton would likely have endorsed Israel’s foundation on this basis alone, and his endorsement would have influenced many others. 

To be sure, the positions highlighted here were not held by all founders. Nevertheless, they were sufficiently broadly held to refute the charge that endorsing Israel’s creation would have fallen outside the scope of founding-era commitments. 

Three ideas embraced by many if not all founders are of especial importance. First, the founders conceived of government as an institution primarily charged with defending rights and saw a state as fully legitimate only if it serves effectively to protect those rights. A rights-protecting regime also requires economic viability, as economic weakness exacerbates social conflict and imperils the long-term security of rights. The widespread concern about economic decline occurring under the Articles of Confederation is evidence of this view. 

Second, structuring a government was something to be done only after careful reflection on history. As Hamilton wrote, “experience”—that is, history—is “the least fallible guide of human opinions.”

Third, a significant number of founders held that religion should be integrated into the fabric of law and society, specifically at a regional or local level. They held that the people are entitled to create a religious state, with “religion” understood either in a general sense or as one specific denomination—as long as the substance of that religion was conducive to recognizing and protecting the rights of all, with the state ensuring everyone’s freedom of religious belief and practice. 

Such a state must be a politically representative one and exercise authority only over a geographically compact community. These conditions, they believed, would produce a government more responsive to the concerns of all the citizenry. 

Christianity, of course, was seen as especially conducive to the protection of individual rights, including the right of religious liberty. Thus Christianity was something the state could protect and promote by law without compelling individuals in ways that would violate individual conscience. 

The pamphlet Worcestriensis, for example—which was written anonymously in 1776 in Massachusetts and remained influential in New England for decades—supports at once the establishment of a specific faith and the support by law of religious liberty. Even in the presence of extensive denominational diversity, this work suggests, establishment works best in compact areas due to the ease with which citizens can petition government should abuses occur, as well as the reality that living amidst difference tends to form habits that bolster support for the legal protections of religious liberty for all within the community. And indeed, in most New England states the religious establishment was at the town level. 

The Constitution expressly sought to avoid any measure that could undermine state-level solicitude toward religion. All ratifiers of the Constitution knew that six states in 1789 had official religious establishments that accorded Christianity, or even a particular denomination, privileged status, often in the form of direct financial support to that faith and no other. 

As President Thomas Jefferson—himself in many ways a strict separationist—stated in his second inaugural address, “religious exercises are under the direction and discipline of state or church” (emphasis added). To be sure, Jefferson would have wanted New England states to shed their religious establishments on their own. But many founders saw a state-level affiliation of faith and government as a form of morally acceptable statecraft or as a genuine and positive benefit. 

Israel’s founding embodied these points central to many in the founding generation and therefore would likely have won their support. First, Israel was created, in the Resolution of 1947, to protect rights, especially, of course, the rights of Jews from all around the world. Moreover, the resolution guaranteed to Israel access to the port of Aqaba and thus a direct trading route (bypassing the volatile Suez Canal) to India and the Far East. This would help to ensure Israel’s economic viability, which in turn would help it to avoid the economic stagnation that could stir up violations of rights. 

As expressed in the U.N. resolution, the rights of Palestinians would be protected by the partition of Israel and Palestine. The partition resolution contained detailed safeguards to ensure the rights of minorities in both new states. Further, the original plan included the idea of a continuing economic union between Israel and Palestine: a free-trade zone between the two, a goal designed in part to enhance the economic vitality of the new Palestinian state, allowing it to better protect the rights of its own religious minorities. 

In sum, Israel’s creation was part of a statecraft “package” that had as its central purpose the protection of rights, just as the founders believed to be indispensable for political legitimacy. 

The creation of Israel was also born of careful reflection. That the rights of Jews would most reliably be protected through an explicitly Jewish state was a conclusion drawn from concerted historical examination; it was the fruit of extended “experience,” a criterion the founders fully embraced. 

Theodor Herzl, the originator of the conceptual blueprint for what would after his death become Israel, saw in Christian- and Muslim-majority countries a history of only tenuous defenses of the rights of Jews, and “enlightened” modern states, such as post-revolutionary France, hardly afforded better protections. This deep attention to history informed the Jewish Agency’s advocacy at the U.N. for the creation of the Jewish state. Israel’s origin thus reflects the learning from experience that was championed by so many founders. 

But what of its establishment as a Jewish state? Would the endorsement by many founders of a conjunction between religion and government hold true for a state founded on Judaism? 

To answer this one must ask: Did the founders view Judaism as encouraging its adherents to uphold individual rights? And is Israel’s union of religion and government instantiated in a proper institutional context? 

The answer to the first question seems clear. In fact, the founding generation was deeply inspired by Jewish ideals in its own pursuit of a regime that would protect rights. 

“The Hebrew Bible lies at the center of the American imagination, and it is one of the central inspirations for the founders,” Rabbi Meir Soloveichik remarks. In an online lecture for the Tikvah Fund—“Jewish Ideas and the American Founders”—he documents how throughout the American Revolution the patriots identified with ancient Israel in their quest for God-given freedom. 

One manifestation of this identification was the concept of a covenant between the world’s Creator and mankind to provide freedom from oppression. “The Declaration of Independence in its own way is a covenant,” according to Soloveichik: a pledge to God that Americans will abide by His will that all men live in the freedom of the rights with which He has endowed them. It is a pledge, as the inscription on the Liberty Bell reiterates, to fulfill the Levitical admonition to “Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land Unto All the Inhabitants thereof.” 

After the Declaration of Independence was approved, at the behest of Benjamin Franklin a small group of signers formed a committee to decide what the Great Seal of the United States should depict. The first suggestion, from Franklin himself, was that the seal show Moses and Pharaoh at the Red Sea, with the motto, “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.” 

As Soloveichik records, when Franklin was later asked what stories best emphasized or embodied what the patriots were doing, he replied that the first place his mind went to was Exodus.

Judaism was, for many founders, a religion that stirred men to the hard work of protecting God-given natural rights. But why then did many states in the early republic deny Jews the right to hold public office? Isn’t this evidence that some saw Judaism as inconsistent with the preservation of liberty? 

Here four brief observations are in order. First, anti-Jewish sentiment did exist in various communities unswayed by the thought of the leading founders. Second, laws against Jewish officeholding were often unenforced, as in Massachusetts, when in 1805 Judah Hays was illegally elected, and illegally served, as the fireward of Boston. Third, restrictions on Jewish officeholding eventually came to be eliminated with little public controversy in most states. Fourth, in Maryland, the state where the question of Jewish elective public service became most politically contentious, the debate turned mostly on the concerns Trinitarian Christians had with Unitarian Christians (who were fully enfranchised), not on concerns with Jews and Judaism. As Eric Eisner shows in a 2020 article for the Journal of Religious History, “‘Suffer Not the Evil One’: Unitarianism and the 1826 Maryland Jew Bill,” Trinitarians in Maryland were concerned about the growth of Unitarianism, and because Unitarians supported Jewish officeholding the issue threatened to become a political victory for Unitarianism that would aid its continued rise. These four considerations show how respect for Judaism could coexist with lingering restrictions on Jewish officeholding. 

As for the institutional context of Israel’s conjunction between faith and government, it is important to note that the state of Israel is quite small—something its critics often overlook. This creates a close connection between the government and the governed. Israel’s population is also very compact, which makes possible a neighborly concern by all for a shared common land. And the state of Israel legally protects the freedom of religious belief and practice and the liberty of exit for all people. In fact, it goes further than did the New England establishments that required would-be officeholders to swear an oath professing Christianity. The Israeli constitution does not impose a profession of Jewish faith on officeholders. Israel, therefore, models in many ways the local-level religious establishments so many founders endorsed. 

Given these parallels, it’s fair to surmise that when the U.S. delegation to the United Nations, with the full support of President Harry Truman, voted for the resolution to create Israel, it endorsed a country whose structure and basic values were consistent with key principles espoused during our founding era. 

To this first set of arguments can be added the founders’ appreciation for Jewish support of the revolutionary cause. As Soloveichik argues, the founding fathers were in a real sense sustained by eminent Jewish leaders, whose tangible financial support was desperately needed—and roundly applauded. 

One Jewish leader who was widely respected at the time was Haym Salomon, one of the great financiers of the Revolution. As Soloveichik recounts, Salomon’s financial acumen was indispensable for supplying the Continental Army. Salomon supported the war effort and the new republic by procuring over $700,000 in late-eighteenth-century dollars. The support Salomon tendered reinforced philo-Semitic sentiments among those who knew of the desperate plight of the Continental Army and the impecunity of the early republic’s finances. This is one more reason why many founders would support Israel’s creation: a debt of honor for the support of eminent men of the House of Judah.

One founder was so explicit in his support of the American Jewish community that a recent historian has argued that he might even have been Jewish—or at least a denizen of a Jewish mental “world.” In The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Porwancher documents how as a lawyer Hamilton “ardently” defended many Jewish clients, and in one case provided “the most fervent rebuke of antisemitism to be found in the annals of the American founders.” 

Porwancher references Hamilton’s retort to an opposing counsel’s ad hominem attack, before a jury, on his client’s Jewish faith. Hamilton, in sharp reply, declared, “Has [this lawyer] forgotten, what this race once were, when, under the immediate government of God himself, they were selected as the witnesses of his miracles, and charged with the spirit of prophecy?”

This case, Porwancher argues, makes “readily apparent” that the attacking lawyer’s charge against Jews “touched Hamilton personally.” He concludes that Hamilton possessed an abiding hatred of anti-Semitism and a deep respect for the Jewish people. 

Two other leading figures of the early American republic expressed explicit support for the return of Jews to their ancestral homeland. In 1819, John Adams wrote in a letter to the prominent American Jewish leader Mordechai Manuel Noah: “I really wish the Jews again [to have] in Judea an independent nation.” This sentiment was echoed by his son, John Quincy Adams, who in a letter of his own to Noah stated his support for the “rebuilding of Judea as an independent nation.” This was likely a view the Adamses had long maintained. Given the significance of the Adams family, this represents another dispositional tendency of the founding and early republic favorable to the creation of the state of Israel. 

Yet given the inclination of the founders to resist overseas involvements and to prioritize efforts that they viewed as strictly necessary for America’s national interests, wouldn’t most founders—no matter their personal views on the creation of Israel—have resisted recognizing in standing foreign policy the emergence of a nation so far removed from America’s shores?

Here one must look once more to the towering (though not uncontroversial) figure of Alexander Hamilton. Carson Halloway, in his Heritage Foundation paper “Alexander Hamilton and American Foreign Policy,” has done tremendous work on Hamilton’s thinking on foreign affairs. Of special importance are Hamilton’s advocacy for military assistance to advance the cause of freedom and natural rights overseas and his support for the use of economic strength to combat grave injustices occurring in foreign lands.

In a series of essays Hamilton published in the summer of 1793 under the pseudonym Pacificus, he argues that a nation can justifiably intervene to support a foreign people’s clearly stated desire for freedom from tyranny. Hamilton writes, “When a nation has actually come to a resolution to throw off a yoke, under which it may have groaned, and to assert its liberties,” it is “justifiable” and even “meritorious” for another country to give “assistance to the one which has been oppressed and is in the act of liberating itself.” 

As the Napoleonic Wars continued, Hamilton augmented his rather abstractly stated arguments in the Pacificus essays with concrete policies advocating U.S. intervention in European affairs with the goal of undermining the revolutionary radicals in France. To this end, he held that the United States should shift from complete neutrality to greater economic connection with Britain to buoy British efforts against France’s revolutionary regime. 

From these positions one can infer that merely to recognize in international law the creation of a state as far from the American heartland as Israel would raise no special problems. To Hamilton and those in his generation who shared his views, what would have mattered was the consistency of any new founding with America’s own. Given the similarity in values of the American and Israeli foundings, formal legal recognition of Israel likely would have been unobjectionable.

I have spoken admittedly loosely about “founders” in light of my limited purpose: to engage contemporary critiques of Israel by assessing, to the degree possible, how some of the leading thinkers in America’s formative years would have viewed the creation of the state of Israel. No greater precision is needed for this limited objective: it seems clear that a great many of the American founders would have disagreed, and disagreed strongly, with the claim that support for Israel as a Jewish state is, to any appreciable degree, un-American.