ABSTRACT
The first Jews arrived in America at New Amsterdam in 1654. In the colonial period the Jewish community grew slowly to reach perhaps a little over 2,000 at the time of President George Washington's visit to Newport, Rhode Island in 1790: the occasion for the exchange of letters printed here. Public worship by Jews in America began in the late seventeenth century and the Newport community, based on a group of merchants and their families, dedicated a synagogue in 1763. They were a successful and homogeneous Sephardic community, that is, of Iberian descent, who underlined their sense of equal citizenship in the new republic and to whom, in response, Washington stressed the natural right of liberty of conscience transcending mere toleration of religious diversity.
