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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Presidential Quotes about Jews and Israel – Part 1

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By: Dr. Yvette Alt Miller

American presidents have long appreciated Jews and the Jewish state. Here are some inspiring quotes from presidents expressing their appreciation for their Jewish citizens and for the Land of Israel

 

  1. Pres. George Washington, Letter to Touro Synagogue, Aug. 18, 1790:

For happily the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protections should demean themselves as good citizens… May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants, while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.

 

  1. Pres. John Adams, Letter to Francis Adrian Van der Kemp, Feb. 18, 1809:
Pres. George Washington, Letter to Touro Synagogue, Aug. 18, 1790

I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist and believed in blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing nations. If I were an atheist of the other sect, who believe, or pretend to believe, that all is ordered by chance, I should believe that chance had ordered the Jews to preserve and propagate to all mankind the doctrine of a supreme, intelligent, wise, Almighty Sovereign of the universe, which I believe to be the great essential principle of all morality, and consequently of all civilization.

 

  1. Pres. Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Mordecai Manuel Noah, May 28, 1818:
[The Jewish people] by its sufferings has furnished a remarkable proof of the universal spirit of religious intolerance inherent in every sect, disclaimed by all while feeble, and practiced by all when in power. Our laws have applied the only antidote to this vice, protecting our religious, as they do our civil rights, by putting all on an equal footing.

 

  1. Pres. John Tyler, in one of the first speeches he made after taking office, 1841:

The Hebrews, persecuted and downtrodden in other regions, takes up his abode among us with none to make him afraid. He may boast…of his descent from the patriarchs of old–of his wise men in council and strong men in battle. He may even turn his eye to Judea, resting with strong confidence on the promise that is made him of the restoration to the Holy Land, and he may worship the God of his fathers after the manner that worship was conducted by Aaron and his successors in the priesthood, and the aegis of the Government is over him to defend and protect him.

 

  1. Letter sent by Pres. Abraham Lincoln to Sec. of War Edwin M. Stanton, Nov. 4, 1862, breaking with tradition by appointing Jewish quartermasters to the US Army:

I believe we have not yet appointed a Hebrew…

 

  1. Pres. Abraham Lincoln, responding to a visitor who proposed restoring a Jewish homeland in the Land of Israel, 1863:

I myself have a regard for the Jews… My chiropodist is a Jew, and he has so many times ‘put me on my feet’ that I would have no objection to giving his countrymen ‘a leg up’.

 

  1. Pres. Grover Cleveland (after he’d left office) responding to the 1903 aftermath of the Kishinev Pogroms:

Every American human sentiment has been shocked by a late attack on the Jews of Russia–an attack murderous, atrocious and in every way revolting. As members of the family of mankind, and as citizens of a free nation, we are here to give voice to the feeling that should stir…every American worthy of the name. There is something intensely horrible in the wholesale murder of unoffending, defense-less men, women and children…

 

  1. Pres. Benjamin Harrison, Annual Message to Congress, December 9, 1891:

The Hebrew is never a beggar; he always kept the law–lives by toil–often under severe and oppressive civil restrictions, is also true that no race, sect or class has more fully cared for its own.

 

  1. Pres. William McKinley, letter to Simon Wolf, 1897:

No better class of citizens than the Jewish exists in our country, many of whom have been and are my personal friends

 

  1. Pres. Theodore Roosevelt, quoted in his autobiography (1913):

While I was Police Commissioner (in New York City), an anti-Semitic preacher from Berlin…came over to New York to preach a crusade against the Jews. Many of the New York Jews were much excited and asked me to prevent him from speaking and not to give him police protection. This, I told them was impossible; and if possible would have been undesirable because it would have made him a martyr. The proper thing to do was to make him ridiculous. Accordingly I detailed or his protection a Jew sergeant and a score or two of Jew policemen. He made his harangue against the Jews under the active protection of some forty policemen, every one of them a Jew.

(To be continued next week)

                                                (Aish.com)

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