The Little-Known Story Behind the Oldest Surviving Synagogue in America

On the first night of Hanukkah in 1763, members of the Congregation Jeshuat Israel gathered to celebrate the opening of their synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island.

Two hundred and sixty-one years later, the Touro Synagogue still stands where Tuoro and Division Streets meet, making it the oldest synagogue building still standing in North America—a symbol of religious pluralism and liberty that has persisted through the centuries.

The stately Palladian building was designed by Peter Harrison, a British sea captain turned American architect. Its story begins with that of the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, an experiment in religious tolerance since its establishment in 1636.

“To the Jew, Newport has always been a cherished name,” said Leon Hühner, then the curator of the American Jewish Historical Society, in a 1908 speech. “Here it was that civil and religious liberty were first firmly established by that illustrious champion of the brotherhood of man, Roger Williams.”

Williams was a clergyman who brought his family from England to New England in 1630 to pursue his nonconformist religious ideas away from the control of the Anglican Church.

Massachusetts and its Puritan government, he found, was hardly better. So he left the colony in 1636 for land he had purchased on the Narragansett Bay from the Narragansett people. In a place he called Providence, Williams could finally put his radical belief in religious freedom and the separation of church and state into practice.

Attracted by its reputation for religious tolerance, Jews from Europe began to settle in Newport, a coastal city in Williams’ colony, around 1658. The population increased as trade between Portugal, the West Indies and New England flourished into the 18th century.

In the early years, the small but cohesive Jewish population mostly conducted its worship in private homes. After a century in Newport, though, the congregation had grown large enough to warrant a synagogue. Construction began in 1759, with funding from other congregations in New York, wealthy Sephardic Jewish merchants from the Iberian Peninsula and Jewish communities in the West Indies.

The opening ceremony on the night of December 2, 1763, was a large affair. Jewish and non-Jewish religious leaders from across New England gathered, including Ezra Stiles, a Congregationalist minister who later became president of Yale College.

In the synagogue’s early years, prominent rabbis came from Jerusalem, Hebron, Izmir and Poland to visit. “Nowhere in colonial times came so many rabbis from the most out of the way portions of the globe as to Newport,” Hühner said.

During the Revolutionary War, British troops occupied Newport. Much of the city was destroyed, and many citizens, including most of Congregation Jeshuat Israel, fled. The synagogue stopped holding services and instead housed a military hospital and meeting hall. Rabbi Isaac Touro— the synagogue’s eventual namesake and a British Loyalist—stayed behind and kept watch over the building.

When the war was over and independence was won, parts of the congregation moved back, and the synagogue resumed services.

But the fight for religious tolerance in Rhode Island wasn’t over. Ever devoted to religious diversity, it was the last state to ratify the Constitution, holding out until the end of May 1790 to ensure that the government would ensure the free practice of faith.

Just a few months later, newly inaugurated President George Washington visited Newport during a tour of New England. The warden of the synagogue, Moses Seixas, wrote Washington a letter of congratulations “for all these blessings of civil and religious liberty which we enjoy under an equal, benign administration.”

Washington replied, articulating his strong belief in religious pluralism. “Everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid,” he wrote, paraphrasing the Old Testament.

No matter the faith in question, Washington told the congregants of Touro Synagogue, the government’s role was simply to give “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”

Eli Wizevich | | READ MORE

Eli Wizevich is a history correspondent for Smithsonian. He studied history at the University of Chicago and previously wrote for the El Paso Times.