While the First Amendment guarantees freedom of religion in the United States and dimensions its meaning, the country’s expansive view of religious liberty is very much rooted in attitudes that predated, and shaped, the founding. One of the earliest documents exemplifying these attitudes, the Flushing Remonstrance, went on display in the New York Public Library yesterday. Fiona André writes:

The Flushing Remonstrance was sent by residents of that community (now the Queens borough of New York) to Peter Stuyvesant, the administrator of New Netherland.

In 17th-century Colonial America, Flushing stood out in the New World for its tolerance toward religious minorities. In 1645, the Flushing Charter, an agreement between the first English settlers and the Dutch West India Company, granted “liberty of conscience” according to the “custom and manner of Holland” to the new residents of Flushing. The religious openness attracted European immigrants fleeing persecution, including French Huguenots, Swedish Lutherans, and Portuguese Jews.

A 1656 ordinance issued by Stuyvesant banned all religious practices outside of the Dutch Reformed Church. Stuyvesant’s ordinance targeted Quaker worship, promising fines and evictions for anyone hosting a Quaker meetinghouse. As a result, dissent grew in the colony, and a group of 30 Flushing residents, eight of whom were among the eighteen English settlers who founded the town, wrote a letter strongly condemning Stuyvesant’s decision. Their Christian beliefs, read the letter, compelled them to stand up against the ordinance.

“The law of love, peace, and liberty in the states extending to Jews, Turks, and Egyptians, as they are considered sonnes of Adam, which is the glory of the outward state of Holland,” reads the letter.

It’s worth remarking that the signatories saw their commitment to tolerance as rooted in their own religious piety, rather than in secularism. About ten years later, Stuyvesant endeavored to keep Jews out of New Netherland. In the 20th century, Queens became the home of a large and vibrant Jewish population, and some 150,000 Jews currently reside in the borough.

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.