When American Poets Fought Over Judaism

In the 19th century, a poetic debate took place about theology and history. The contestants were two literary geniuses: the man who was then the most famous poet in America, and perhaps the most famous female poet in Jewish history. The tale, even for those uninterested in verse, contains deep lessons about the Jewish past in the United States—and its future.

In 1852, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow arrived in Newport, Rhode Island, and visited the Touro synagogue, the oldest Jewish edifice in America, built by Sephardic Jews before the Revolution. In 1790, George Washington had toured the town and corresponded with Moses Seixas, leader of the Jewish community. Seixas famously described the newly established government as one that “gives to bigotry no sanction,” and Washington responded by adopting the very same phrase, forever associating Newport’s Jews with religious liberty.

Yet at the time, Judaism in Newport was dying. Seixas’s letters reveal that he was desperately struggling to maintain traditional services; he lacked anyone remotely qualified to read from the Torah, and the one shofar for the High Holidays was badly damaged. It was only two decades after Washington’s famous visit that the remaining Jews of Newport left for New York. Longfellow thus found the synagogue locked and empty.