However, despite his views regarding the “defects” in Judaism, Jefferson never wavered in his commitment to civil and religious freedom and toleration for Jews. His most notable achievement in this regard was, arguably, his 1779 Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom in Virginia (which was adopted in 1785):
No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess…their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise…affect their civil capacities.
Moreover, putting his belief in the equality of American Jews into practice, President Jefferson appointed Reuben Etting to serve as U.S. marshal for Maryland (1801). Etting (1762 – 1848) thereby became the first Jew to hold federal public office – a quarter century before Jews gained civic equality in Maryland through the famous Maryland Jew Bill.
Jefferson believed Jews were overly engaged in religious study and needed to focus instead on secular learning so that “they will become equal object of respect and favor.” As Arthur Hertzberg notes in The Jews in America (1989):
Jefferson was thus expressing the view of the mainstream of the Enlightenment, that all men could attain equal place in society, but the “entrance fee” was that they should adopt the ways and the outlook of the “enlightened.” Jefferson did not consider that a Yiddish-speaking Jew who knew the Talmud was equal in usefulness to society with a classically trained thinker like himself.
Interestingly, as to the Talmud, Jefferson wrote to John Adams: “Ethics was so little understood among the Jews, that in their whole compilation called the Talmud, there is only one treatise on moral subjects…”
However, despite this wholly absurd and demonstrably incorrect statement, and notwithstanding Jefferson’s negative view of Talmudic study, there exists compelling – and, under the circumstances, ironic – evidence that, as the ultimate Renaissance man, he himself studied Talmud.
After the Library of Congress was burned down by the British during the War of 1812, Jefferson offered his entire eclectic collection of books, some 6,487 volumes which he had spent over 50 years accumulating, as a replacement, for which Congress appropriated $23,950. One of those books was Bava Kamma, Masechet Nezikin (Leyden, 1637), containing the Hebrew text, its Latin translation, and a commentary by the prominent Dutch Hebraist Constantin L’Empereur, in which Jefferson inscribed his initials at pages 65 and 145.
Finally, some recent research into Jefferson’s Y chromosome has found that it belongs to K2, a very rare lineage in Europe but common in the Middle East, raising the possibility that the president had Sephardic ancestors.
Michael Hammer, a University of Arizona geneticist, compared the Jefferson Y chromosome with others in his database and found close matches with four other persons, including a perfect match with the Y chromosome of a Moroccan Jew and matches that differed by two mutations from another Moroccan Jew, a Kurdish Jew, and an Egyptian.
Jefferson was not a particular friend of the Jews, and he certainly wasn’t an admirer of Judaism, but his passionate and influential advocacy of equal rights for all, including specifically freedom of religion, had an enormously positive impact upon Jewish rights in America. He almost certainly studied Talmud and, though by no means determinative, some genetic evidence does exist to support the proposition that he was descended from Sephardic Jews.
