Touro Synagogue

Jewish families had lived and worshipped in Newport, Rhode Island since the middle of the seventeenth century, drawn in part by the colony's unusually broad tolerance for religious dissenters, before the community completed a permanent synagogue building in 1763. The building, designed by the colonial architect Peter Harrison in a restrained Georgian style, is the oldest surviving synagogue structure in the United States, though not the oldest congregation.

The synagogue's best known moment came almost three decades after its dedication, in 1790, when President George Washington visited Newport and received a welcoming letter from Moses Seixas, warden of the congregation, expressing hope the new federal government would extend liberty of conscience to Jews as fully as to any other citizens. Washington's reply, addressed to what he called the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, promised that the government of the United States gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, a phrase since become one of the most quoted American statements on religious liberty, still read aloud there on the anniversary of the visit.

That promise was tested by circumstance more than by any single later event. Newport's Jewish population declined sharply after the Revolutionary War as the city's mercantile fortunes shifted elsewhere, and the synagogue went through long periods without a resident congregation substantial enough to maintain regular services, preserved chiefly by bequest.

Today the synagogue is home to Congregation Jeshuat Israel, holds services regularly, and is administered as a National Historic Site, a colonial era building whose most famous words were never its own but a president's answer to it.

Peter Harrison, who designed Touro Synagogue, had never built a synagogue before and had likely never set foot inside one. Born in England in 1716, he sailed as a merchant captain before settling in Newport in 1740, then returned to England for training in a private architectural studio, where he assembled a personal library of Palladian pattern books, works by James Gibbs, Batty Langley, Isaac Ware and William Kent, that made him, by most accounts, colonial America's first professionally trained architect.

For the synagogue's exterior Harrison drew on that library freely, giving Newport a restrained Georgian facade in Palladian proportion, brick walls under a slate hipped roof, indistinguishable at a glance from a New England meetinghouse. The interior required something his books did not supply. Never having designed an ark, a bimah or a women's gallery, Harrison worked from instructions given by the congregation itself, translating Sephardic liturgical requirements, an ark facing Jerusalem, a raised central reading platform, into a room finished with Ionic and Corinthian detailing borrowed from his usual sources.

Touro was one commission among several that made Harrison Newport's most consequential builder. He had already designed the Redwood Library in 1748, introducing Doric porticoes new to the colonies, and later added the Brick Market in 1762. None of that standing protected him during the Revolution. A committed Loyalist working as a customs collector in New Haven, Harrison was driven from public life by neighbors who considered him a traitor, and in 1775, the year he died, a mob dragged his furniture, papers and architectural library onto his lawn and burned them there, destroying the library that had helped build Newport's synagogue in the first place.