Three days before the Republic marks its 250th birthday, the United States Supreme Court agreed to answer a question that would have troubled the sleep of American Jews as far back as colonial Newport and Charleston: whether a government of the United States may instruct an observant Jew that he cannot pray as his faith commands.

The case is Grand v. City of University Heights. Daniel Grand, an Orthodox Jew in a Cleveland suburb, wished to gather a minyan in his home on the Sabbath — the quorum of ten men that Jewish law requires before the holiest prayers may be spoken aloud. His synagogue lay beyond walking distance, and the Sabbath forbids him the automobile. The home minyan, then, was not a preference to be indulged. It was the only door left open.

The City shut it. Within hours of one neighbor’s complaint, before any hearing, before any inquiry, the municipality issued a cease-and-desist order that pronounced his prayer group an illegal “place of religious assembly” and a “shul or synagogue.” Grand canceled the gathering. Then the mayor, not content with the order, stood before a public meeting and invited Grand’s neighbors to watch the house and report any activity “consistent with” worship. A neighbor obliged, training cameras upon the home. The police cruised past. When Grand at last sought the protection of a federal court, the Sixth Circuit declined to say whether any of this was lawful. He had come too soon, it held; he must first exhaust the very administrative machinery that had been turned against him, and await a “final determination,” before the Constitution might be troubled on his behalf.

To those who labor in this vineyard, the case did not fall from the sky. It is the latest entry in a ledger nearly as old as the country itself — the running account of what happens when a law drafted with the majority in mind is laid upon a people who keep a different calendar.

American Jewish history begins not with a grievance but with a wager. The Jews who stepped ashore at New Amsterdam in 1654, and at Newport and Savannah and Charleston in the generations after, staked everything on a proposition that every prior chapter of the Diaspora had taught them to distrust: that here, and only here, a man might be wholly a Jew and wholly a citizen at once, owing no apology to either.

The founders honored the wager in language of startling generosity. Washington, writing to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport in 1790, pledged a nation that would give bigotry no sanction and persecution no assistance — a sentence no sovereign had ever before addressed to a Jewish........

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