Although he had a low opinion of the Jewish religion, the third president of the United States was passionately committed to religious freedom, and on multiple occasions spoke up for the rights of Jews. He even endeavored to study the Talmud, as Saul Jay Singer writes:

Jefferson . . . had limited contact with Jews; and his knowledge of them was essentially limited to what he had learned from studying the Bible. Nonetheless, he manifested extreme sensitivity to the Jewish condition.

In a famous letter to Joseph Marx, a prominent Jewish merchant who helped to found Richmond’s first synagogue, he . . . stated his belief that the reading of the King James Bible in public schools was a “cruel addition to the wrongs” that Jews had historically suffered “by imposing on them a course of theological reading which their consciences do not permit them to pursue.” . . .

[H]owever, Jefferson simultaneously held Judaism itself in low regard. . . . [He] was deeply troubled that the Jewish God was “a being of terrific character, cruel, vindictive, capricious, and unjust.”

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. . . . One of those books was [an edition of the talmudic tractate] Bava Kamma (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.

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.