It is un-American to be antisemitic.

On America's 250th birthday today, it is imperative to remember that the United States was originally a Judeo-Christian country, not just a Christian one.

photo: Caleb Fisher/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Race Hochdorf, a Jewish author.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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I love America.

I was born here, as were my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents.

After my great-great-grandparents fled the chaos of Weimar Germany in the 1920s (before things turned really bad), four subsequent generations of Hochdorf’s went on to experience a nation that has been nothing but good to us. And every man in my family, in turn, has responded to this goodness by serving in every one of America’s major conflicts since World War II.

Coming from a military family and serving in the U.S. Army myself, it is hard to imagine not being patriotic. I do not think I could ever do it. As someone who identifies politically as a postliberal conservative, I have suggested in previous writing that America’s decline might be irreversible, but there is a difference between noticing this and wanting it to happen.

There’s something treacherous, gross even, about Americans who hate America or are ashamed of it.

This country — with its cowboy/pioneer mythos, stunning and diverse natural landscapes, large houses, Second Amendment, and colorful history of outlaws, astronauts, charlatans, poets, wild-eyed preachers, circus freaks, explorers, cannibals, and oil tycoons — is truly unlike any other country.

I celebrate that. How the hell could I not?

If ever I felt forced to permanently leave the U.S. — out of fear of my own life or fear of my family’s future, due to the same social contagion that infected Weimar Germany almost a hundred years ago — I would be heartbroken. It would be a severe and gut-wrenching loss. America historically has been very good to the Jews.

Which is why, frankly, I am worried — gonest to G-d worried. And I am not alone.

In America’s 250th year, there has been a disturbing rise in antisemitism in both the country’s politics and daily life. Since 2023, over 70 percent of religion-based crimes have been against Jews in synagogue environments (a 63-percent jump from 2022), and there has been a 140 percent increase in single-bias crimes (which include acts like assault, vandalism, and threats in public spaces).

What’s more, these crimes are typically being committed by Americans between the ages of 18 to 30 — young adults who have become convinced that the Jewish People are behind their economic and social struggles. This ties into the rise in antisemitism politically, which has occurred mainly on the Left but is also spreading rapidly on the Right.

Whilst the Left argues that American Jews who support Israel are “pro genocide” and root their hostility toward Israel in Marxist postcolonial theory, on the Right the charge is that to be Jewish is to be fundamentally un-American and even a threat to America due to “dual loyalty” to Israel.

The only “real Americans” then, according to this new antisemitic Right, are Christians, and the Jews should be counted among our nation’s other enemies. Such a narrative (though a favorite among “America First” podcasters whose careers ironically are propped up by Arab investment) reeks of historical illiteracy. Right-wing antisemites forget (which is to say, they ignore) how intertwined the story of the American founding is with diaspora Jewry.

Take, for example, the oft-forgotten founding father Haym Salomon: a Jew who immigrated from Poland to New York in 1775 and immediately became involved with the Sons of Liberty; an underground colonial resistance network engaged in acts of sabotage against occupying British forces in the decade leading up to the Revolutionary War.

But Salomon was not just a saboteur (or even primarily that). He was a highly effective financier, who between 1775 and 1783 succeeded in raising funds for the patriot cause amounting to approximately $650,000 (the equivalent of $20 million today).

In 1781, when the prospects of the Revolution were looking grim, Salomon had difficulty in convincing former donors to continue giving funds to the cause; so he donated his entire personal fortune to fund George Washington’s Yorktown campaign (and as a result, died penniless in 1785).

Washington’s Yorktown campaign then, in a stunning turn of events, went on to trap Cornwallis’s army and end the Revolutionary War in America’s favor; which means that — yes — without Jewish financing, an independent United States never would have been a reality. Instead, absent Jewish backing, members of the Continental Congress and officers in the Continental Army would have been hunted, apprehended, tried as traitors to the crown, and hanged.

For another example of how the American founding is intertwined with Jews and Judaism, we could look to the actions of and direct quotes from our most prominent founding fathers: George Washington, John Adams, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin.

In George Washington’s 1789 letter to the Hebrew Congregations of the City of Savannah, he wrote:

“May the same wonder-working deity who delivered the Hebrews from their Egyptian oppressors and planted them in the promised land, and whose providential agency has lately been conspicuous in establishing these United States, still continue to water the Jewish people with the dews of heaven and make the inhabitants of every denomination participate in the temporal and spiritual blessings of that people whose G-d is Jehovah.”

In John Adams’ 1808 letter to the Dutch minister F.A. Van der Kemp, he rebuked Voltaire’s antisemitism when he wrote:

“How is it possible that [Voltaire] should represent the Hebrews in such a contemptible light? They are the most glorious nation that ever inhabited this earth. The Romans and their empire were but a bauble in comparison to the Jews. They have given religion to three quarters of the globe and have influenced the affairs of mankind more — and more happily — than any other nation ancient or modern.”

In fact, John Adams prefigured Theodor Herzl’s Zionism 11 years later, when in 1819 he wrote a letter to Jewish playwright Mordechai Manuel Noah which said: “I really wish the Jews again to have in Judea an independent nation.”

James Madison admired the Jewish People so much that he studied Hebrew at Princeton from 1769 to 1771. Alexander Hamilton, too, attended a Hebrew school in the West Indies during his boyhood in the early 1760s (and may be another Jewish founding father, though this is still a matter of debate). Benjamin Franklin was so enamored by the stories found in the Torah, that he drew Moses dividing the Red Sea and wanted it to be the Great Seal of the United States.

But if the activities of Haym Salomon and the opinions of the “main” founding fathers are not enough, there is also the fact that the most quoted and referenced book of the Bible by the founders in their 15,000 letters and speeches was not any book in the New Testament (which was quoted only 30 percent of the time biblical references were made by them), but Deuteronomy from the Old Testament (quoted 70 percent of the time a biblical reference was made).

And it is interesting: Why would the founding fathers want to reference Deuteronomy so much? Especially more than the words of Jesus or of his apostles? Could it be that, as the founders were contemplating how to build a nation, they saw special significance in the Torah (which literally means “law”)?

Well, yes. That and the founders were not shy in stating their belief that their band of states were analogous to ancient Israel, and Britain likewise analogous to Pharaoh. For the signers of America’s Declaration of Independence, the Hebrew scriptures provided a robust moral and poetic vocabulary that allowed the colonies to compare their leaving England to Israel leaving Egypt.

And yes, to those Right-wing antisemites whose soft little ears cannot seem to bear it, all of this when taken together means that the United States was originally a Judeo-Christian country, not just a Christian one. We can view the founding of the United States not exactly as a “proto-Zionist” experiment, but certainly as an experiment in hybridization that occurred 172 years before the reestablishment of Israel in 1948.

Now, to be clear, even though the United States was originally a Judeo-Christian country, the founders still authored founding documents that (when closely read) betray a deistic ontology, and ancient Greco-Roman philosophers like Cicero and Cato the Younger were also a huge influence on their thinking.

But in two recent books, “The Hebrew Republic” by Eric Nelson and “Jewish Roots of American Liberty” by Wilfred McClay and Stuart Halpern, we discover that even with the confluence of Enlightenment deism, Christian unitarianism, and classical Greco-Roman thought together informing the philosophical foundation of the United States, Judaism still remained front and center as the primary source of inspiration.

Giving more background on this shift, Eric Nelson explains in “The Hebrew Republic” that 17th- and 18th-century readers increasingly treated the Five Books of Moses not merely as a source of religious or moral wisdom, but as a genuine political constitution. Rather than viewing the Hebrew Bible as an obsolete “Old Law” superseded by Christianity, they began to understand its commandments as civil laws issued by God in His capacity as the sovereign of the Israelites.

This reinterpretation also transformed the figure of Moses, who came to be seen as both a lawgiver and the founder of a political community (or politeia), in the classical Greek sense. The implications for political thought were profound. If an omniscient God had personally designed a commonwealth, then political thinkers could no longer rely only on ancient philosophy or the accumulated lessons of human history. Instead, they were compelled to study the Hebrew constitution as a perfect political model.

As a result, a central goal of political science became the attempt to approximate what European writers called the republica Hebraeorum, or Republic of the Hebrews. Thinkers compared this divinely designed commonwealth with both ancient and modern constitutions in order to identify the weaknesses of human political systems and determine how those systems might be improved.

But, as Nelson notes, these 17th- and 18th-century European and colonial readers faced a major problem when they attempted to derive new laws from scripture written in the ancient Levant roughly 3,700 years earlier. The Hebrew Bible offered only incomplete, imprecise, and sometimes apparently contradictory descriptions of how the Israelite political system actually functioned. Christian Hebraists therefore argued that the biblical text could not be fully understood on its own.

To reconstruct the Hebrew constitution, they turned to the expanding body of rabbinic literature available in the Christian West, including the Talmud, Midrash, and Aramaic targums. Scholars such as Henry Ainsworth maintained that these rabbinic authorities preserved essential information about how Mosaic law operated in the public and legal life of ancient Israel.

Without their explanations, many of the laws and rituals described in books such as Exodus and Leviticus would remain difficult to interpret, especially in relation to the practical administration of the Israelite commonwealth.

And so this July 4th, on America’s 250th anniversary, we as a people should commit ourselves to doing three things.

One, let’s honor our fallen soldiers who gave their lives and futures so that we could live in peace and enjoy futures for ourselves, and also honor their families who still grieve.

Two, let’s praise G-d for blessing us and never forsaking us, even when we so often forsake Him.

And three, let’s send a clear message to all the antisemites. Rather than this nation “not being the place for Jews, ”this nation is actually not the place for antisemites.

It is they, not American Jews, who are unworthy of liberty’s bounty. It is they who are the real blight on our great republic.

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