The Touro Synagogue, Newport

Some buildings prove a community existed. This one proves something more specific: that a Jewish community in colonial America built to last, worshipped in a form its members could recognise, and was, within a generation of the building's completion, addressed directly by the first President of the United States on the subject of its own security. The synagogue still stands on Touro Street in Newport, Rhode Island. It still holds services. That combination - continuous use in the original structure, plus a documentary record naming the building and the men who worshipped in it - is what makes it evidence rather than legend.

The congregation that built it, Jeshuat Israel, traced itself to Jewish families who had settled in Newport from the mid-seventeenth century, many with roots in the Sephardi communities of Amsterdam, London and the Caribbean, following paths that led back to Spain and Portugal before the expulsions. Newport in the eighteenth century was an unusually tolerant port town by the standards of the American colonies, and the congregation grew large enough, and secure enough, to commission a purpose-built synagogue rather than continue meeting in a private house.

What the building shows

Inside, the synagogue follows a Sephardi liturgical plan: a raised central bimah facing the ark, seating arranged around the perimeter rather than in rows facing forward, and a women's gallery above, supported on columns carved so that no two are said to be identical - a detail congregation members have long pointed to, though it is a matter of observation on site rather than a documented instruction from the builders. The interior brings together English Georgian architectural fashion with the functional requirements of a Sephardi congregation, worked out by builders and craftsmen working in colonial Rhode Island. The result is not a copy of a European synagogue transplanted whole. It is a colonial American building doing a specifically Jewish job, in the same architectural language as the churches and public buildings of its own town and moment.

The synagogue also holds, and has long held, a Torah scroll and ritual objects associated with the congregation's early history, along with later additions as the community's needs grew. Precise dating and provenance of individual objects in the collection is a matter for the congregation's own records and for scholars who have examined them directly, rather than something to assert casually here; what is not in dispute is that a working Sephardi congregation has used this specific room, continuously, since the colonial period, with only a gap during the Revolutionary War when Newport's Jewish population scattered under wartime pressure and occupation.

The letter written to this address

In August 1790 President Washington visited Newport, and the warden of the congregation, Moses Seixas, wrote to him on the congregation's behalf, welcoming him and voicing the hope that the new government would extend liberty of conscience to all citizens regardless of faith. Washington's reply, sent shortly afterward, is addressed to "the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island" and answers Seixas's letter closely, including its language, most famously the assurance that the government of the United States "gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance", and that it requires only that those who live under its protection "demean themselves as good citizens". The letter is not an abstract statement of principle issued from nowhere. It is correspondence, addressed to a named congregation at a named building, replying point by point to a letter that building's members had sent him.

The exchange is a documented instance of a sitting head of state committing, in writing and to a Jewish community by name, to a principle of equal citizenship rather than mere toleration - toleration being something granted by a ruler who could in principle withdraw it, equal citizenship being a right the letter treats as already possessed. Scholars and the congregation itself have long debated how far Washington's language reflected settled constitutional doctrine already agreed among the founders, and how far it was Washington's own framing of a principle still being worked out in practice. What is not disputed is the letter's authenticity, its addressees, and the fact that it answers a real letter from a real congregation at this synagogue, a text preserved and held today in American manuscript collections and reproduced, read aloud, and referred back to by the congregation ever since.