An Eye-Opening Introduction to the Jewish Influence on America’s Founding

The Tikvah Fund’s new online course, Jewish Ideas and the American Founders, is a must-view and a must-hear. Its star—I use the word advisedly—is Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, well-known to readers for his enlightening contributions to Mosaic as well as to Commentary, the Wall Street Journal, First Things, and other publications. Meir Soloveichik serves as the rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel in New York and director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University.

For lovers of Jewish ideas and American political history, these eight one-hour videos constitute an eye-opening introduction to the Jewish influence on the American founding and the early republic, relayed through Rabbi Soloveichik’s erudite insights into the religious underpinnings of some of America’s basic political ideas. The course does not overreach into the exaggerated, apologetic, and untrue claim that America is simply an outgrowth of biblical ideas. Instead, this telling helps us see how Jewish teachings, grounded in the Hebrew Bible, and the age’s best Enlightenment sensibilities together helped create and guide the development of the young republic.

Rabbi Soloveichik conveys this central lesson through stories about and reflections on specific instances of Jewish involvement at key moments in early American history. Who knew, for example, that at the 1788 parade in Philadelphia celebrating the adoption of the Constitution, a special kosher table was set out for the city’s Jewish inhabitants, with “a full supply of soused salmon, bread and crackers, almonds, and raisins”? Sensing a teachable moment, Rabbi Soloveichik notes jocularly that way back when, Jews were devouring the colonial equivalent of bagels and lox. But then he draws out the larger point: what this incident and others like it show is that, from the beginning, religious tolerance was an American principle—and, with exceptions, American practice.