Examining the lives of some lesser-known but highly colorful American Jewish figures from the republic’s first decades, Jonathan Sarna notes a number who found different ways of criticizing the existing social, religious, and political order. Among them was Isaac Gomez, Jr., of a prominent New York Jewish family, who prudently kept his true views private:

[Gomez’s] Selections of a Father for the Use of His Children: In Prose and Verse (1820), an anthology “calculated to promote a taste for reading and to improve the mind in useful learning,” was the very model of propriety and . . . was highly praised by John Adams. . . .

In private, however, Gomez was much more critical—at least of the religious world that surrounded him. His unpublished manuscript, God is One and His Name One: Quotations from Scripture etc. to Prove God to be One And the Truth of the Jewish Faith, lovingly handwritten for the benefit of his only son, Moses Emanuel (1804-1878), was explicitly designed to buttress the views of a small Jewish minority seeking to maintain its distinctive religious identity amid a sea of Protestants eager to convert them. Inwardly and within the protective bosom of his own family, Gomez revealed his true feelings about the merits of his neighbors’ beliefs.

His purpose, he disclosed in his preface, was nothing less than “to shew, and to know, that we are the chosen people of God . . . as well as that God is one without addition or subtraction . . . that there never was nor never will be but One God.” This was, of course, an utterly subversive idea in the face of overwhelming Christian trinitarianism, and Gomez, whose ancestors had been crypto-Jews in Portugal, explicitly warned his son to keep the critique to himself: not “to be a religious disputant” and not to share the volume with anyone else, “never part with it, either by lending or otherwise.”

Yesterday, Israel’s Channel 12 reported that Israeli representatives have been involved in secret talks, brokered by the United Arab Emirates, with their Syrian counterparts about the potential establishment of diplomatic relations between their countries. Even more surprisingly, on Wednesday an Israeli reporter spoke with a senior official from Syria’s information ministry, Ali al-Rifai. The prospect of a member of the Syrian government, or even a private citizen, giving an on-the-record interview to an Israeli journalist was simply unthinkable under the old regime. What’s more, his message was that Damascus seeks peace with other countries in the region, Israel included.

These developments alone should make Israelis sanguine about Donald Trump’s overtures to Syria’s new rulers. Yet the interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa’s jihadist resumé, his connections with Turkey and Qatar, and brutal attacks on minorities by forces aligned with, or part of, his regime remain reasons for skepticism. While recognizing these concerns, Noah Rothman nonetheless makes the case for optimism:

The old Syrian regime was an incubator and exporter of terrorism, as well as an Iranian vassal state. The Assad regime trained, funded, and introduced terrorists into Iraq intent on killing American soldiers. It hosted Iranian terrorist proxies as well as the Russian military and its mercenary cutouts. It was contemptuous of U.S.-backed proscriptions on the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield, necessitating American military intervention—an unavoidable outcome, clearly, given Barack Obama’s desperate efforts to avoid it. It incubated Islamic State as a counterweight against the Western-oriented rebel groups vying to tear that regime down, going so far as to purchase its own oil from the nascent Islamist group.

The Assad regime was an enemy of the United States. The Sharaa regime could yet be a friend to America. . . . Insofar as geopolitics is a zero-sum game, taking Syria off the board for Russia and Iran and adding it to the collection of Western assets would be a triumph. At the very least, it’s worth a shot. Trump deserves credit for taking it.