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In 2002, Snopes received the following email containing a quote that was supposedly spoken or written by former U.S. President George Washington: Anti-Semitic screeds are nothing new; neither, unfortunately, is the practice of attempting to legitimize them by attributing them to the pens and tongues of respected figures. After all, if as esteemed a person as George Washington — the Father of Our Country, the first president of the United States of America, the man who could not tell a lie — said that Jews were a dangerous scourge who should be hunted down as pests, there must be something to it. At the very least, the apocryphal attribution lends an unwarranted credibility to those who would repeat it for their own racist purposes. This quote is a recasting of something Washington did say, providing just enough of an aura of authenticity to sound believable. What Washington actually wrote referenced currency speculators who sought to profit by taking advantage of soldiers and others during the Revolutionary War: Washington’s private life and writings reveal no evidence of anti-Semitism, and his public attitude towards religious tolerance was well expressed on a 1790 goodwill visit he paid to Newport, Rhode Island, during his first term as president. When a goodwill address was presented to him by the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Washington responded by penning the first presidential declaration of the free and equal status of Jewish-American citizens:
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