Thomas Jefferson: Critic of Judaism, Protector of the Jews https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/history-ideas/2016/02/thomas-jefferson-critic-of-judaism-protector-of-the-jews/

February 15, 2016 | Saul Jay Singer
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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.

Read more on Jewish Press: http://www.jewishpress.com/sections/features/features-on-jewish-world/thomas-jefferson-jewish-student-of-talmud/2016/02/10/0/