>>18081533
>"In the year 1749, the first Masonic Lodge was established. Ninety percent of the members of this first lodge, fourteen all told, were Jews. And one knows that only so-called "prominent" individuals were accepted. Twenty years later, the second Masonic Lodge, "King David," was established. It is a fact that all of these members were Jews. In the meantime, the Jewish influence in Newport had reached such proportions that President George Washington decided to pay them a visit. Upon his appearance, both of the Masonic Lodges sent an emissary — a Jew named Moses Seixas (4) — to approach the President with a petition, in which the Jews of Newport stated: "If you will permit the children of Abraham to approach you with a request, to tell you that we honor you, and feel an alliance and then: "Until the present time the valuable rights of a free citizen have been withheld. However, now we see a new government coming into being based on the Majesty of the people, a government, not sanctioning any bigotry nor persecution of the Jew, rather, to concede the freedom of thought, which each shares, whatever Nation or Language, as a part of the great Government machine."

>Multiple relatives attended including Cyrus Leopold Sulzberger (1858 – 1932), who was married to Peixotto’s niece, Rachel Peixotto Hays, and was an early trustee of Temple Israel. Cyrus’s great-grandfather, Benjamin Seixas, brother of the famous rabbi and American Revolutionary Gershom Mendes Seixas, Moses Seixas's younger brother, of Congregation Shearith Israel, was one of the founders of the New York Stock Exchange. Cyrus’ brother Solomon E. Sulzberger (1840 – 1917) was president of the B’nai B’rith and president of Temple Israel. Cyrus would later attend the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1897. Cyrus’s son was New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger (1891 – 1968)