Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims’ American Jewish Holiday

A month after the Continental Congress had drafted the Declaration of Independence, one of that document’s architects, Benjamin Franklin, sketched out a brief description of his design for the Great Seal of the new nation. Franklin wanted the Great Seal of the United States to feature, “Moses in the Dress of a High Priest standing on the Shore, and Extending his Hand Over the Sea, Thereby Causing the Same to Overwhelm Pharaoh.” He wrote that the seal should depict “Rays From a Pillar of Fire in the Clouds Reaching to Moses, to Express That He Acts by Command of the Deity.”

Of course, Franklin’s design was not the one that was chosen. Rather, the heraldry that was selected to adorn our currency and other official government documents was William Barton and Charles Thomson’s spooky all-seeing eye, with its incomplete pyramid, and its dignified eagle reassuringly holding olive branches in one talon but arrows in another. Barton and Thompson’s final version is a hodgepodge of seemingly occult and Masonic imagery that has acted as a boon to the fervency of creative-minded conspiracy theorists for the better part of two-and-a-half centuries. The official Great Seal of the United States of America may have made its first prominent appearance in 1784 at the negotiations that led to the ratification of the Treaty of Paris, but Franklin’s Exodus-inspired seal proposed eight years before is a telling artifact of a more revealing history.

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