JEWS AS A CHANGING PEOPLE OF THE TALMUD: AN AMERICAN EXPLORATION

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Gerd Korman
JEWS AS A CHANGING PEOPLE OF THE TALMUD: AN AMERICAN EXPLORATION

Even as John Cotton used the traditional concept of the "Land of
Promise" to justify the first Puritan settlement in New England on
lands inhabited by New World Indians, other Protestants signaled a
change in that New Testament "promise" by inventing the "Promised
Land." In time, English settlers and their Anglo-American descendants
associated themselves with the new phrase. It was a way to celebrate
material achievement, exceptional spiritual election, and thus an association
by which they could continue to conquer and rule the Indian as
a primitive alien in his own land. Indeed, together with other white
Christians who joined the American colonial and revolutionary enterprise
they identified with what appeared to them to be a God-directed
freshness. This "freshness" made their individual and collective lives in
the United States as special as the New World itself.1 As individuals,
Jews in the new United States also participated in this enthusiasm. They
were convinced that in the new land Christians were different. In 1806,
Myer Moses in South Carolina, who was "so proud of being a sojourner
in this promised land," invoked New Jerusalem in an address to the
Charleston Hebrew Orphan Society. From the time of the Declaration
of Independence, "the Almighty gave to the Jews what had long been
promised to them, namely, a second Jerusalem!"2
But these Jews had remained part of that persecuted collective with
the millennial-old designation of Am HaTorah, which can be translated
to mean People of the Talmud; its untranslated Hebrew Bible did not
contain the Christian concepts or expressions of "promise."3 How
should we think of them? Not as "American Jews," "Jewish Americans,"
"Jewish People," nor for that matter as the "People of the Book," a
designation usually meaning the earliest Jews of the three monotheistic
religious people of the Bible. How should we think about them as a
changing people of the Talmud?

Conventional accounts by United States historians usually report
that Jews and Christians, in their theoretical hostility and in their neighborly
practices, in their attitude towards each other, were different
here than in Europe. But in the nineteenth and early twentieth century
there appear to have persisted European-like traditions about Jews,
their heritable characteristics, and their Talmud-derived patrimony of
collectivity.4 These are not easy to detect. When writing about Jews in
America the vocabulary of choice was and remains to be "Biblical,"
"Post–Biblical," "Patristic," "The People of the Book," or for that matter,
"rabbinical," or "orthodox," "liberal," or "reform." Among scholars
"Talmud" in this context is conspicuous by its silence.5
My project has two parts. The first part demonstrates that Jews
were in fact a changing people of the Talmud. Even though I make
some references to it, discussion of that large subject awaits further
investigation. The second part of the project is to identify and evaluate
reputations of Jews as a People of the Talmud. An aspect of that work
is the primary concern of this article.

In beginning the exploration of a Talmud-focused reputation in
the American Promised Land, I have turned to a select group of articulate
nineteenth century Anglo-American Christian rationalists: Thomas
Jefferson and John Adams, writing in the early years of the century,
Ralph Waldo Emerson at mid-century, and Goldwin Smith and Andrew
Dixon White, two scholars, educators, and publicists at work in the
closing decades of the century. In their perception of nineteenth century
Jews, these patricians reflected a theoretical engagement that harbored
European-like associations between Jews and Talmudic worlds
of times past and present. To be sure, their New Testament framed
approach also incorporated deeply rooted attitudes towards the figure
of Jesus and Old Testament Jews. But readily available evidence suggests
that in the nineteenth century American constructions of what
has been called the "mythical" Jew, the Talmudic canon may well deserve
joint billing with the Bible.6

It is well-known, especially to readers of this journal, that nineteenth
century America was different than Europe, even different than the
United Kingdom and Holland, where a Calvinist infused Protestantism
had also helped to fashion different associations with Jews and their
Talmudic connections.7 But some brief references to Europe's past are
instructive here. Even as political racism was becoming a force for mobilizing
public opinion, articulate publicists, who remained excitable
by the Talmud and its rabbinical disseminators, sustained associations
between all Jews and the Talmud. Logically, in the nineteenth century
racial attitudes may have been incompatible with rigorous religious
doctrines, but in practice it was different. In these decades material
and political changes were creating new and influential opportunities
for Jews in Western and West Central Europe. Then, coalitions of
Christian groups and post-Christian liberal and radical movements
were engaged with the political cultures and popular biological determinants
of their own place and time: they organized around specific
myths and objectives.

A dramatic case in point was the infamous Damascus Affair of
1840 involving a ritual murder accusation that attracted worldwide attention.
Old polemics against the Talmudic world continued to hold a
special place in hostile imaginations. The accusation that Jewish "holy
books and specifically the Talmud," reports Jonathan Fraenkel, "sanctioned
ritual murder, was perceived by the Jewish spokesmen from the
first as the most dangerous aspect of the Damascus case."8 These were
entangled with commonly held attitudes about presumed inherited
traits among Jews. One presumptions was "the universally accepted fact
that Jews had a peculiar smell," that even baptism could not remove.9
Another perspective was comparable to notions about the place of Bildung
in the genuine German character or the role of the frontier in
the shaping of the American character: the Talmud experience shaped
Jewish character.10

Invariably, biology intruded in public affairs. In Berlin, the Jewish
Community Council discovered that fact in 1881, when it fought a
newspaper that had indicted the Talmud. It "cited the German law
which forbade slander of all religious communities." The state prosecutor,
however, found a way out. He "refused to indict," reports master
historian George Mosse: "First, the Talmud was not a religious code
of law . . . but merely of historical interest. Second . . . in attacking the
Talmud the paper had not attacked the Jews as a religious community
. . . but only as a race and a Volk." Another telling example comes from
Uri Tal's work. It illustrates what happened in a germ-conscious Germany
afraid of contagion and of the incoming Ostjude. The fear had
led to new Prussian rules for border control points and westward rail
traffic terminating in Hamburg. In 1893, within the year of the devastating
cholera epidemic in the old Hansa city, a large group of non-
Orthodox rabbis in Germany publicly declared that "the Talmud and
Oral Law were binding only to the extent that it could stand up to
modern rational criticism and . . . insisted that the oral law had no normative
authority over written law." Nevertheless, the Berliner Presse of
February 18, 1893, a widely read liberal newspaper, insisted that "even
modern Judaism had not yet liberated itself from the authority of the
oral law, and that as long as the Jews continued to teach these traditions,
it would be impossible for them to integrate completely into
German Society: 'As long as the Talmud will continue to exist and [to
be] studied, as it is in Jewish schools, for example . . . the tendentious
exploitation of its contents will not cease.'"11

Finally, it is also important to point out in what spirit John Maynard
Keynes made those kinds of connections in 1930. The illustration
comes from a review essay by his current biographer, Robert Sidelsky.
He first recalls a pre-World War I passage from Werner Sombart, the
historical economist who helped to popularize among yet another generation
of publicists and scholars the quite old shibboleth: the "Talmud
encouraged Jews to accumulate money through usury—making money
from the loan of money." In a line of secular thought about religion
and economic enterprise, involving the likes of Hess, Marx, and Weber,
Sombart had designated that concept as the "root idea of capitalism."
In Keynes's time the stereotype was so widespread that he wrote: "Perhaps
it is not an accident that the race which did the most to bring the
promise of immortality into the heart and essence of our religion has
also done most for the principle of compound interest and particularly
loves this most purposive of human institutions." Later, reports Sidelsky,
Keynes "apologized for having been thinking along 'purely conventional
lines.'"12

Race-conscious Christians in the United States had a fear of strangers
in general and concern about Jews in particular. These fears combined
with commonly held convictions about biologically determined
human characteristics. Furthermore, Americans had apprehensions towards
collectives considered threatening. Though the separation of
church and state, in state after state, was becoming a practical fact for
Jews and other enfranchised citizens in the antebellum republic, and
even though, outside of the South, the trot of individualism and free
market economics was turning into an unrestrained gallop, the federal
union was still too fragile a creature for the republic's emerging national
culture to be unafraid of congealed collectives, such as Indian
tribes, the constant threat of mobilized rebellious African slaves, or
worse, entire sections in open revolt against the Union.
To be sure, from colonial beginnings, many, but not all, New England
Puritans believed there was a connection between the conversion
of all Jews and the triumph of a Christianized Israel. In 1669, in the
tradition of English Protestants employing Jewish exegesists in their
reading of Biblical texts, Boston's young Puritan, Increase Mather,
wrote his well-known apocalyptically oriented conversion treatises
about the Mysterie of Israel. There he expressed sensitivity to "Judaizing"
influences even as he spoke of "Talmudic Jews," and their "Jewish Rabbies,"
[sic] some of whom he cited for achieving textual clarity in his
own work.13 The here and now preoccupations were not, however, as
in Europe, with the People of the Talmud.

One was with threatening tribal native Americans. Especially in
times of stress and war Anglo-American discourse constructed Indians
into lethal enemies; it was marked by "children of the devil," "degradation,"
"extinction," and in time, "extermination." It is helpful to recall
that when war with Indian tribes had become a fact of New England
life, Increase Mather's illustrious son, Cotton Mather, wrote these lines
about his peoples' Indian voices. "The voices of Indians are these: they
are very lying wretches, and they are very lazy wretches and they are
out of measure indulgent into their children; there is no family government
among them." Framing his perceptions in constructs his colonial
contemporaries had fashioned, many amidst apocalyptic expectations,
he knew that his own people had been punished. "We have shamefully
Indianized in all those abominable things. Now, the judgments of God
have employed Indian's hatchets to wound us, no doubt, by these our
Indian vices."14

The bio-cultural obsession of the day was not, as in Europe, with
being "Judaized"; it was with real and imagined overlapping threats, to
the federal system and to the emerging American civic culture. Indians,
and Mormons, who appeared for the first time in antebellum years,
challenged legally constituted authority within the states and territories
of the republic. Each was distrusted, for each with force might well
create and maintain "a state within a state," something beyond "dependent
nations" or autonomous nationalities. So the federal government
used its own soldiers to enforce reservation policies on Indians and
legal prescriptions on Mormons. When an entire region tried to establish
a new state, the worst did happen: civil war, the cataclysmic event
of the nineteen hundreds.

By the end of the century much had changed in the years following
the military elimination of the Indian menace, the coercion of the Mormons,
the suppression of the Southern rebellion, and the emancipation
of millions of African American slaves. But at the time when mass migration
poured out of the Talmudic Kingdom and headed for the
United States, the American Reservation and the Russian Pale continued
to have common features.

More revealing still, about the persistence of deadly bio-cultural
driven obsessions in the Promised Land, were explosions occurring
when emancipated African Americans strove as free individuals to migrate
within America, and move through markets, occupations, and
into its citizenship. With each passing day the developing segregation
system looked like the one then emerging in South Africa. The worst
explosion was a lynching campaign in the Lower South which lasted
from the 1880s until World War I. It gave rise to a new organized
spectator sport, sometimes mobilizing over a thousand unmasked light
skinned citizens for one public murder of a darker skinned American
citizen. Self-appointed guardians of an idealized white Anglo-American
society in the Deep South used the terrifying crusade to institutionalize
new arrangements. They did it, they said, in order to defend a modern
civilization against threatening black primitives, like those other resident
primitives they and their Northern compatriots had all but
penned up in patrolled reservations.15

As for Jews in that different American nineteenth century, most of
them conducted their lives within a fractured and splintered Talmudic
tradition and Halakhic standard. They were changing, even rebelling,
drawn and pulled by the force of economic and political opportunity,
enlightened rationalism, and republican assimilation; some, and increasingly
many more, reflected the cutting edge of that change in the
direction of what would later be designated secular Jewry. But as in
other migrating populations of those years, cutting edge attitudes towards
collective identities and its nomenclatures usually did not embrace
the majority of Jewish newcomers and their children: They had
varying standards of religious observance and there were enormous
variations in their knowledge of classical Jewish sources. With these,
and bio-cultural convictions of their own, Jews remained in their erratic
orbits around their once hallowed canon.16 That is to say, their religious
culture was like a "river full of debris," to use David D. Hall's
simile about New England Puritans who had migrated from England:
all caught up in a "muddied, multilayered process by which culture was
transmitted, one that functioned to preserve and pass along many bits
and pieces of past systems of belief."17 Jews as individuals and Jews as
corporate groups had also moved from their place in time and space,
from their Sitz-im-Leben in Talmudic Judaism. Across generations, and
in their masses, they began as different kinds of Talmudic Jews and
went through different periods to become diverse post-Talmudic Jews.
This led them to quite different futures, to all sorts of religious and
ethnic Jews, of the kind so common in our day, in Israel and in the
rest of the world.18 But, during the nineteenth and early twentieth century,
their journeys and moves through the ranks of society did not
eclipse their commitments to the Talmud and the Halakha as much as
it fractured and splintered it.

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams fully appreciated these Jewish commitments.
At a time when both aging giants were living in a republic
that had made a sharp evangelical Protestant right turn away from the
anti-clericalism of their revolutionary years,19 Jefferson quoted approvingly
to Adams passages from William Enfield's summary of Johann
Jakob Brucker's Historia Critica Philosophiae. One of the longer quotations
stressed, not the life of Biblical Jewry but Bruckner's and Enfield's
misrepresentation of the state of moral philosophy to be found in the
Talmud. Enfield had best speak for himself since his formulation succinctly
expressed the usual thinking on the subject among English
Deists and French enlightened rationalists.20 He cast his conclusion in
terms of "the Jews in the Middle age," that is from a time between the
classical world and the modern one. Jewish books of "Morals chiefly
consisted in a minute enumeration of duties. From the law of Moses
were deduced 613 precepts, which were divided into two classes, affirmative
and negative, 248 in the former, and 365 in the latter. It may
serve to give the reader some idea of the low state of moral philosophy
among the Jews of the Middle age, to add, that of the 248 affirmative
precepts, only 3 were considered obligatory upon women; and that in
order to obtain salvation, it was judged sufficient to fulfill any one
single law in the hour of death; the observance of the rest being
deemed necessary, only to increase the felicity of the future life. What
a wretched depravity of sentiment and manner must have prevailed
before such corrupt maxims could have obtained credit! It is impossible,"
he concluded, "to collect from these writings a consistent series
of moral Doctrine." No wonder the enlightened Jefferson in 1803 had
informed Benjamin Rush that all Jews "need reformation . . . in an eminent
degree."21

In their exchanges the unreconstructed anticlerical republicans
from Virginia and Massachusetts revealed the nature of their interest
in the classical sources governing the People of the Talmud. Steeped
in Greek and Roman sources, and eager to remain conversant with the
non-Jewish English, French, and German literature of the European
and American Enlightenment of their own day, they differed about
the value of the ancient Hebrews' contribution to progressive religious
thought. Some years earlier, Adams had written "I will insist that the
Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. . . .
The Jews . . . preserve[d] and propagate[d] to all mankind the doctrine
of a supreme, intelligent, wise, almighty sovereign of the universe,
which I believe to be the great essential principle of all morality and
consequently of all civilization."22

Both shared the instrumental approach of most European critics
to classical Jewish texts, about which, by their own admission, Jefferson
and Adams also knew next to nothing. But as those critics did, they
too comprehended that the classic Talmudic corpus of Judaica provided
the constitutional web of Jewish conduct for the few thousand
Jews in their midst, the tens of thousands in the English, French, and
German parts of Western Europe, and the hundreds of thousands east
of the Oder and in the Near East. In that respect there was little to
distinguish between them and Henry St. John Bolingbroke, Voltaire,
or for that matter Joseph Priestley, who had died in 1803.23
It was the publication of one of Jefferson's letters to Priestley that
had stimulated Adams to press Jefferson for the exchange of views
about Jews in the first place. Although they had misgivings about some
of his Christian beliefs and intellectual presumptions—especially
Adams, whose connections to Priestley had been quite different than
those of Jefferson's close ties—both presidents held him in high regard.
Priestley, the famous English political thinker and scientist, was part of
a group that Adams had met and valued while posted to London from
1785 to 1787. "Unitarianism and Biblical Criticism were the great Characteristics
of them all. All were learned, scientific, and moral. . . . All
professed Friendship for America, and these were almost all, who pretended
to any such Thing." During the French Revolution Priestley was
driven to the United States by an angry Birmingham mob and remained
in Pennsylvania until his death.24

But there was another side to Priestley that the two friends commented
upon but did not explore. In England, in 1786 and 1787, in a
storm of controversy, and again in 1794 in the United States, Priestley
had published his Letters to the Jews. The well-advertised pamphlets were
part of his campaign to convert Jews to his kind of persuasion. As had
the earlier critics, Priestley, a Unitarian minister, also pressed a Scripture-
based Christian intellectual polemic without examining Jewish life
on its own terms.25 He could easily have done so. In London of those
years, when "an impressive fiscal military state," "an articulate and powerful
middle class," and a vibrant Dutch-like consumer economy was
changing the nature of English nationalism, it was easy enough to find
knowledgeable Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews in their institutional setting
and with their familial, religious, and commercial connections to
Holland and Germany. He had available all sorts of contemporary descriptions
of London Jewish life written by resident and touring Jews
or Christians. Some publications were indictments and misleading,
such as those which continued to designate the officiating rabbi in a
synagogue as a high priest; it was a designation with a remarkable vitality
in the nineteenth century. Other accounts were accurate and sympathetic.
Of course, Priestley, as well as the two former presidents, could
have turned to the German-language works of Moses Mendelssohn.
These, issued between 1756 and 1787, included his published rational
defense of Judaism against enlightened attacks and conversion efforts.
When diplomats Adams and Jefferson were in London and in Paris,
Mendelssohn had become well-known among Europe's philosophes.26
Finally, Priestley could have taken much more seriously than he
did the published counter-attacks by David Levi. To be sure, Levi,
an Anglo-Jewish London-born "failed shoemaker and sometime hat
dresser," was not comparable to a Mendelssohn. But Levi had become
accomplished in his self-appointed task to study Jewish tradition and
defend it against "gentile calumnies." In 1783, he had published A Succinct
Account, of the Rites, and Ceremonies, of the Jews, a large work that
included a summary of the ancient Mishna, which had attracted English
Protestants since the seventeenth century. And a few years later, he
brought out "a quite extraordinary and very large three volume work
on the Hebrew language, consisting of a Hebrew grammar, a Hebrew
English dictionary comprising all of the vocabulary of the Old Testament,
and an English-Hebrew phrase book."27

In examining Priestley's references to Scripture and conversion polemics
addressed to Jews, Levi used his Jewish knowledge with the firm
conviction that it was as valid, if not more so, than Priestley's New
Testament driven Protestant interpretations of Scripture and non-
Jewish classical sources. Indeed, in that same spirit Levi also turned to
the Talmudic corpus of Jewish truth and knowledge when he cited
parts of it in his published critique of Tom Paine's reading of the Old
Testament. So, no matter how strongly he insisted on basing his arguments
on Scripture, Priestley knew Levi was writing from within the
People of the Talmud whose sources, to Priestley, were invariably suspect.
He dismissed Levi's arguments and sources out of hand.28
Some of Priestley's other contemporaries also found fault with his
Letters to the Jews. One was an imaginary Solomon de A. R. who wrote
him a public letter. "There is a degree of candor and benevolence (real
or affected you best know) running through your Letters, which could
not avoid being extremely pleasing were it not for that air of superciliousness
and superiority, with which the whole is contaminated. The
persons to whom you address yourself, appear in your Letters to be
little better than contemptible children, or idiots, incapable of attending
to solid manly arguments, and therefore to be amused with gewgaws
and trifles."29

Adams too was critical, but for reasons having to do with Priestley's
acceptance of all sorts of Christian beliefs: Jesus had a divine mission,
had created miracles, had been resurrected, and would "come again to
raise the dead and judge the world." For these beliefs Adams could
find no rational explanation nor textual evidence in his reading of
Scripture. "I shall never be a Disciple of Priestley. He is as absurd inconsistent,
credulous and incomprehensible as Athanasius. Read his
Letter to the Jews in this Volume. Could a rational Creature write it?
Aye! such rational creatures as . . . Condocet[sic] . . . John Taylor in
Politicks . . . and French Prophets in Theology."30

Jefferson was more restrained, and actually examined Levi's response
to Priestley. "It is a curious and tough work. His style is inelegant
and incorrect, harsh and petulent to his adversary, and his reasoning
flimsy enough." But, he acknowledged, Levi had introduced him
to some Jewish doctrines which were new to Jefferson and he now
summarized for Adams Levi's passages about Jewish monotheism and
about Jesus. "He alledges[sic] that the Jews alone preserve the doctrine
of the unity of god. . . . He agrees than an anointed prince was prophecied
and promised: but denies that the character and history of Jesus
has any analogy with that of the person promised." Jefferson faulted
Levi's methodology. "For example, he takes passages from Scripture
from their context (which would give them a very different meaning)
strings them together, and makes them point towards what object he
pleases; he interprets them figuratively, typically, analytically, hyperbolically;
he calls in the aid of emendation, transposition, ellipsis, metonymy,
and every other figure of rhetoric . . . and finally avails himself of
all his advantage over his adversaries by his superior knowledge of
Hebrew, speaking in the very language of divine communication, while
they can only fumble on with conflicting and disputed translations."
However, Jefferson, taking the measure of both, gave Levi his due even
as he protected Priestley. "Such is this war of giants. And how can such
pigmies as you and I decide between them. For myself I confess that
my head is not formed tantas componere lites," quoting for Adams a
line from Virgil ("It is not for me to settle for you such great arguments")
as he closed his letter in the spirit that Adams had last written
to him about philosophy, politics, and metaphysics: "And as you began
your Mar. 2. with a declaration that you were about to write me the
most frivolous letter I had ever read, so I will close mine by saying I
have written you a full match for it."31

Jefferson and Adams had a sense of the Judaic corpus they would
have to master in order to properly compare and evaluate Jews and
Judaism in thought and action. Here is Jefferson:32 "To compare the
morals of the old, with those of the new testament, would require an
attentive study of the former, a search thro' all its books for its precepts,
and through all its history for its practices, and the principles
they prove. As commentaries too on these, the philosophy of the
Hebrews must be enquired into, their Mishna, their Gemara, Cabala,
Jezirah, Sohar, Cosri, and their Talmud must be examined and understood,
in order to do them full justice."

And here his friend Adams:33 "If I had Eyes and Nerves I would go
through both Testaments and mark all that I understand. To examine
the Mishna Gemara Cabbala Jezirah, Sohar Cosri and Talmud of the
Hebrew would require the life of Methuselah, and after all, his 969
Years would be wasted to very little purpose. The Daemon of Hierarchial
despotism has been at Work, both with the Mishna and Gemara.
In 1238 a French Jew, made a discovery to the Pope . . . of the heresies
of the Talmud. The Pope sent 35 Articles of Error, to the Archbishops
of France, requiring them to seize the books of the Jews, and burn all
that contained any Errors. He wrote in the same terms to the Kings
of France, England Arragon, Castile Leon, Navarre and Portugal. In
consequence of this Order 20 Cartloads of Hebrew Books were burnt
in France: and how many times 20 Cartloads were destroyed in the
other Kingdoms? The Talmud of Babylon and that of Jerusalem were
composed 120 to 500 Years after the destruction of Jerusalem. If [John]
Lightfoot derived Light from what escaped from . . . [the Pope's] fury
in explaining many passages in the New Testament by comparing the
Expressions of the Mishna, with those of the Apostles and Evangelists,
how many proofs of the Corruptions of Christianity might we find in
the Passages burnt?"

But it is important to reiterate that the context of these and related
passages about the People of the Talmud were enthusiastic private
speculations by aging giants of the American Enlightenment—Adams
designated his as "School Boy criticisms and crude Philosophy, problematic
History and heretical Divinity"—about the pagan religious inspirations
and values they associated with New Testament passages attributed
to Jesus. In their case that enthusiasm was driven by an eagerness
to demonstrate what Adams had identified as the "Corruptions of
Christianity." The speculation is that the best of Christianity is not
uniquely dependent on Jews; for their comparative reading had also
revealed that rational religion was inherent in the natural religion of
pagan writers.34

Modern historians writing about Jews in antebellum America have not
followed a lead in Isaac Mayer Wise's recollection about English missionary
inspired anti-Semitism: "the Talmud and, incidentally, the Jews
and Judaism were attacked . . . erelong . . . every pastor and every insignificant
little preacher, every common jester, and every political rogue
rained blows upon the Talmud and the Jews . . . and all this called forth
not one word of protest from any source."35

There were some among middle and late nineteenth century "enlightened"
Christians who expressed their respective versions of aging
views about the Talmud and its people. Witness the elusive Ralph
Waldo Emerson. To be sure, the evidence that he also perceived Jews
as a People of the Talmud is more circumstantial, if only because in
the few passages he did write about Jews he did not explicitly refer to
the Judaica corpus in the manner of Jefferson and Adams. But he too
did not write in isolation from his surroundings. His Jewish contemporaries
in New England, or in Italy and the United Kingdom, where he
visited, may have "figured peripherally" in his daily affairs. But that was
by his choice and surely did not preclude this intellectual giant from
knowing that the Jews of his written passages were in fact the changing
People of the Talmud. In his lifetime expressions of and protests
against Talmud phobia popped up in some books and news stories
published in the United States. By the end of August, 1840, American
cities on the eastern seaboard witnessed Jewish protest meetings about
the Damascus Affair; resolutions were sent to the White House. And,
after the Affair, an English-language Jewish press emerged in England
and in the United States which in Boston or London, with some effort
on Emerson's part, was available to him. It is also not unimportant to
note that until the 1850s most, if not all, of the thirty-seven Jewish
congregations in the United States were religiously orthodox; three of
those were in Boston, including one, when Boston's Jewry was tiny,
that was comprised of Polish Jews from Poznan.36
Besides, there were instructions from his literary world. In 1822
William Croswell, who seems to have shared Christian missionary sentiments
towards Jews, wrote a poem entitled "The Synagogue," which,
in 1842, was the only poem in Rufus Griswold's Poems and Poetry in
America that dealt with contemporary Jewry. Its lines, connected to the
Pharasees, nevertheless included: "I saw them in their synagogue/As
in their ancient day . . . " and called attention to "holy Sabbath eve,"
"Phylacteries," "fringes," and "mighty scroll." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
whose approach to the Talmud and the Hebrew language was
quite different from that of Croswell and Emerson, used "Talmud,"
"Targum," and "Kabala" in his "Tales of a Wayside Inn."37
And then there was Henry Holt Milman. Starting in 1832, Emerson
had available the work of this classicist who published the first of a
number of editions of his three volume history of the Jews. The first
edition is listed in the bibliography of Emerson's library, as recorded
by the Concord Antiquarian Society. Some of Milman's passages are
noteworthy for identifying the kind of English-language knowledge
available to mid-century American men of letters. In comparison to
Jefferson and John Adams, Milman's passages reflected a greater
awareness of the Judaica corpus and, on its own terms. I quote at
length from the 1866 edition:

The influence of the Talmud on European superstitions, opinion, and even
literature remains to be traced; to the Jew the Talmud became the magic circle
within which the national mind patiently laboured for ages in performing the
bidding of the ancient and mighty exchangers, who drew the sacred line beyond
which it might not venture to pass. . . . [As result of persecution it] became
more dear to the Jew, who was little inclined to unfold its lore to the
blind prejudiced Christians unable to comprehend; and unworthy of being
enlightened by its wisdom. . . . [It would] require a perfect mastery of Rabbinical
Hebrew in its gradual development and expansion, as well as calm and
subtle and penetrating, I would almost say, considering the subjects often in
discussion, a reverential judgment—the gift of a few men, of still fewer who
are likely to devote their minds to what after all might prove but a barren
study. So alone should we know what the Jews have been, what they may be,
and fully understand their writing and their later history. A religious mind
would be above all indispensable, but the combination of religious zeal with
respect for the religion of others is the last and tardiest growth in the inexhaustible
soil of Christian virtue.

By citing reputable scholars, who had taken pains to distinguish between
the Halakha on the one hand and the Midrash and Agada on
the other, Milman made certain that readers such as Emerson would
not be misled by the kinds of misrepresentations presented by the likes
of Enfield.38

Students of Emerson have placed him in all sorts of contexts. Baritz
represents one main line of thought: "Steadily elevating law, system,
and some fundamental word—the Bible or the United States Constitution—
above any person, American thinkers had characteristically
sought ways by which to return to a Hebraic God who was pure idea,
pure 'I Am,' and who had told the prophet Samuel to tell the Jews to
beware of Kings. Americans had characteristically sought to purge the
flesh and personification from their world views, and in so doing they
rejected the continuity of the generations of men." Within that stream
Emerson came to declare humans divine and, in a flight of transcendence,
predicted if each "would be true to his own divinity each would
attain the kingdom of the just."39

Robert J. Lowenberg has another context and within it he detected
serious "Jew hatred." Emerson's goal as a poet is "what [Harold] Bloom
claims it is—divinity. . . . So what god . . . [does], Emerson competes
. . . with. . . . Emerson sought to enthrone the god who is 'One Man' in
place of the God who is One, in place of the God of the Jews." But
according to Lowenberg, Emerson was after much more: "Emerson
hoped to bring about the suppression of God, in addition to that of
Torah and Israel. . . . [His] revision of Judaism is radical and thorough.
It begins with revision of God. Naturally the Church and all that comes
after it, and not just Torah and Israel, are superseded." The poet ". . .
becomes the new suffering servant."40

That reading may stand alone, in part because of Emerson's Lamarckian-
like passages about the transforming power of the Anglo-
American republic. He wrote: "in this continent—asylum of all nations—
the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles, and Cossacks, and
all the European tribes . . . will construct a new race, a new religion, a
new state, a new literature." Emerson's positions were also influenced
by racial attitudes among publishing biologists and anthropologists. So,
for example, that asylum passage is implicitly qualified by later passages
on race. It works "immortally to keep its own," but it is also resisted by
such other forces as "Civilization," a "reagent" eating away "the old
traits," but not for all. Emerson wrote: "Race is a controlling influence
in the Jew, who for two millenniums, under every climate, has preserved
the same character and employments. Race in the negro is of
appalling importance. . . . But the Briton of today is a very different
person from long ago. Each religious sect has its own physiognomy.
The Methodist have acquired a face; the Quakers a face; the nuns, a
face. Trades and professions carve their own lines on face and form."41
Lowenberg's interpretation, however, does also suggest, when it
comes to Jews and their Judaism, Emerson thought of Jews not only as
the People of the Book but also as the primitive People of the Talmud.
Lowenberg claims that "Emerson routinely identified Jews as usurers
and low-minded people." He certainly had Jews on his mind when,
from time to time, he made entries in his journal. In 1832, he noted:
"And God had his scaffoldings. The Jewish Law answered its temporary
purpose & was then set aside. Christianity is completing its purpose as
an aid to educate man. And Evil is a scaffolding on which universal
good is reared. God shall be all in all." A year before the Damascus
Affair and before beards had become stylish for New Englanders, after
a visit to a Boston gallery where he saw one or more of Washington
Allston's "A Sketch of a Polish Jew," Emerson, without losing his critical
distance, noted that "the Polish Jews are an offense to me; they
degrade and animalize. As soon as a beard becomes any thing but an
accident, we have not a man but a Turk or a Jew, a satyr, dandy, a goat.
So we paint angels & Jesus & Apollo (with) [sic] beardless; and the
Greek & the Mohawk leave them to Mufties and Monks." To be sure,
Emerson was a sharp critic of Allston's work—it had included many
beards in portraits representing Biblical scenes—because he considered
the apocalyptically oriented Allston too much a prisoner of traditional
Christian European culture. But the reaction to Polish Jews—"they degrade
and animalize"—was Emerson, not on Allston nor on the beard
worn by the face in the portraits; it was Emerson on the People of the
Talmud. Allston's title for the portraits had triggered the response.42
Like John Adams, Emerson had recognized the significance of
Hebraic monotheism in the Second Commandment but was pressed
to move beyond Adams and that commandment: "In taking this PM
farewell looks at the sybils & prophets of Michel Angelo, I fancied that
they all looked not free but necessitated; ridden by a superior Will, by
an Idea which they could not shake off. It sits in their life. The heads
of Raphael look freer certainly, but this Obedience of Michel's figures
contrasts strangely with the living forms of this age. These old giants
are still under the grasp of that terrific Jewish idea before which ages
were driven like sifted snow which all the literatures of the world,—
Latin, Spanish, Italian, French, English, tingle with, but we sleek dapper
men have quite got free of the old reverence, have heard new facts
on metaphysics, & are not quite ready to join any new church. We are
travelers, & not responsible."

On May 17, 1840, by which time news about the Damascus Affair
had started to appear on the pages of some of America's leading newspapers—
it had been receiving important coverage in England, France,
and Germany for two months—he noted, without explanation: "It
seems as if the Jews harp has sounded long enough." (He never did
explicitly comment on Damascus.) A decade later, perhaps in a string
of thought that still connected him to Priestley's kind of Unitarian conversion
efforts, he envisioned the end of the People of the Talmud,
although he did not put it that way. "Tis said that the age ends with
the poet or successful man, who knots up into himself the genius or
idea of his nation; and, that when the Jews have at last flowered perfectly
into Jesus, there is the end of the nation."

Emerson certainly continued to think of Jews as "base"; for years
later in the midst of Reconstruction, comes this passage: "You complain
that the negroes are a base class. Who makes & keeps (them so.)
the jew or the negro base, who but you, who exclude them from the
rights which others enjoy?" And in 1864, embedded in a passage reacting
to the turmoil of Civil War, he revealed some familiarity with rabbinical
commentaries on the Hebrew's Bible: "American Nationality is
now within the Republican Party, hence its security. In like manner,
(the cause) in view of the nationalities of the world, the battle of humanity
is now in the American Union, & hence the weakness of English
& European opposition. Napoleon's words that in 25 years, the
United States would dictate the policies of the world, was a little early;
but the sense was just, with a Jewish interpre(ta)tion of the 'forty
days' & seventy weeks. It is true, that if we escape bravely from the
present war America will be the controlling power."43

In order to make the obscure less opaque among nineteenth century
influential Anglo-Americans writing in the Christian rationalist tradition,
I turn to Goldwin Smith and Andrew Dixon White. The first expressed
himself most explicitly about the People of the Talmud; the
second was also explicit but, in addition, was well connected to leaders
of the small but growing number of Jews who identified with Reform
Jewry. Together, though for different reasons, they all accepted this
proposition: an inherent part of the changing People of the Talmud
was pious, or religiously observant enough to consider the Talmud and
its rabbinical interpreters as exclusive sources of truth and knowledge.
Therefore, this Jewry, a primitive medieval orthodoxy, was in conflict
with modern life.

This perspective of the critics occurred against a background being
littered by neo-Lamarckians. They could not but stamp new science—
germ theory oriented biology—on all sorts of bio-cultural beliefs rooted
in traditional notions about familial transmission of acquired characteristics.
Some fifty years before the publication of Origin of the Species,
J. B. Antoine de Lamarck, a French evolutionist, had taken a concept
about the inheritance of acquired characteristics, "so universally accepted
from the ancients to the nineteenth century . . . " that there was
"no need for . . . [him] to enlarge upon it." He simply made it part of
a larger complex explanatory model of evolution. His "paradigm was
highly persuasive to the lay person, who held most of the beliefs of
which it was composed. This is the reason," writes Ernst Mayr, the
distinguished historian of biological thought, "why some of the Lamarckian
ideas continued to be accepted so widely for almost a hundred
years . . . " after the publication of Darwin's Origin. Indeed, the
concept of newly acquired characters "was so universally accepted . . .
that when Lamarckians had a revival toward the end of the nineteenth
century, most of those who had never read Lamarck in the original
assumed that Lamarckism simply meant a belief in the inheritance of
acquired characters."

There were all sorts of implications. By this light a species' capacity
to hold its critical environment constant sustained its capacity to inherit
its acquired characteristics. Such assumptions did not have to lead
to pessimistic expectations. In line with the optimism of enlightenment
thought, Lamarck had believed that "no race was eternally locked into
its present characteristics." Others too took an optimistic, even a radically
optimistic, reading of the days to come—the revolutions of capitalism,
liberalism, and democracy will transform the environment which
in turn will fashion a person with new desirable heritable characteristics.
But, even though Lamarck had thought that "idleness, carelessness,
and lack of success were not racial qualities . . . " he did recognize
them as characteristics acquired as "the result of the habit of submitting
to authority from early youth." So, amidst growing fears in the
struggle for survival—those who deemed themselves superior peoples
felt themselves seriously challenged by those they considered as inferior,
dangerous, and degenerate—Lamarckians focused on persistent
training environments for the young.44

Indeed, as in the case of Sigmund Freud, who rejected much of
the racial attitudes so popular among his fellow physicians, the writings
of Jews among them revealed the influence of neo-Lamarckism especially
well. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's insightful observations about
Freud illuminates the landscape. He has suggested that "Freud's Jewishness
may . . . also have played a role in his Lamarckian predilections"
in the sense that "its subjective dimension, the feeling harbored and
expressed by committed and alienated modern Jews alike, of the enormous
weight, the gravitational pull, of the Jewish past, whether it be
felt as an anchor or a burden." Yerushalmi argued: "Deconstructed
into Jewish terms what is Lamarckism if not the powerful feeling that,
for better or worse, one cannot really cease being Jewish, and this not
merely because of current anti-Semitism or discrimination, and certainly
not because of the Chain of Tradition, but because one's fate in
being Jewish was determined long ago by the Fathers, and that often
what one feels most deeply and obscurely is a trilling wire in the
blood." Freud, in writing about the Land of Israel, put the point this
way: "and we hail from there . . . our forebears lived there for perhaps
a whole millennium . . . and it is impossible to say what heritage from
this land we have taken into our blood and nerves."45

Euro-American physicians among Freud's contemporaries no
longer assumed the Jewish male menstruated, but they still attributed
to Jewish men and women all sorts of other peculiar characteristics and
habits, in part because they ignored contrary evidence being published
by Jewish colleagues.46 Experts continued to construct Jews as being
impervious to the different climates and lifestyles in which the world's
Jews lived. Racial immunity or "a hereditary aversion to liquor" protected
them from alcoholism; they also had not succumbed to plague
and pestilence "to the same extent" as had non-Jews. In similar fashion,
but usually determined by the current events of their practice, doctors
often made all sorts of assumptions about the Jewish stranger or neighbor
next door, widely believing all sorts of things: they were not as
susceptible as Gentiles to typhus, tuberculosis, cholera, measles, scarlet
fever, diphtheria, or croup; in proportions significantly higher than
non-Jews, Jews did suffer from diabetes, lung and bronchial problems,
hemorrhoids, cancer (" . . . but neither penile nor uterine, due to male
circumcision . . . "), conjunctivitis, trachoma, and color blindness. In
Germany's biomedical culture, social construction of disease and illness
led to the general conclusion that Jews, though as individuals belonging
to the white race, collectively constituted a separate race—
pure, bifurcated, mixed, or racially separate by virtue of its unique religious
community.47

Goldwin Smith was brought to Cornell by President White to join the
faculty as a nonresident Professor of English and Constitutional History.
He stayed for three years before moving on to Toronto. Smith
had been Oxford University's Regius Professor of History for eight
years and had established a significant reputation as a liberal publicist
opposed to religious orthodoxies, especially to those of the Jews. He
wrote about them based on sources associated with the genre of European
anti-Semitic writings during the last third of the nineteenth century.
In Canada, he continued his teachings and writing, and also his
occasional correspondence with White.48

In the late 1870s and early 1880s, Goldwin Smith, who had long
believed Jews prevented England from conducting an independent foreign
policy towards countries with large Jewish populations, liked to
distinguish between "liberal" Jews and "genuine" Jews. The relatively
few liberal Jews in enlightened countries "have virtually ceased to be
Jews. . . . So rapid is the progress of [their Judaic] disintegration . . . as
to render it probable that in a few generations Judaism will cease to
exist [there]." "One can hardly imagine," he wrote in 1878 in Nineteenth
Century, "that anything palpably primeval and tribal would long resist
the sun of modern civilization, when a wise and tolerant policy once
allowed that sun freely to shine upon it."49 Genuine Jews, in their migrating
masses out of Eastern Europe, frightened him. That bright sun
could not penetrate and therefore would not disintegrate what he, in
American slang, called that Jewish "hard shell type." Genuine Jews were
not like Unitarians or Methodists, people having "merely a religious
belief" that in no way affected their "secular relations" with other citizens:
"Judaism is a distinction of race, the religion being identified with
the race as is the case in the whole group of primeval and tribal relations."
For Smith the genuine Jew was a person "with a special deity of
his own race. The rest of mankind are to him not merely people holding
a different creed, but aliens in blood." By 1881, he declared: "Israel
is not a sect, but a vast relic of primeval tribalism, with its tribal mark,
its tribal separation, and its tribal God. The affinity of Judaism is not
to nonconformity but to caste."

Goldwin Smith, perceived by contemporaries on both sides of the
Atlantic as a modern, liberal, tolerant political activist and distinguished
academic, represented himself as a general critic of all religious
orthodoxies. In the kind of scholarly fashion he shared with
Heinrich von Treitschke, the popular Prussian historian to whom he
was often favorably compared, Smith was eager to expose the source
of that Judaic primeval tribalism which so effectively shielded itself
from the disintegrating rays of the modern sun.

He buttressed his arguments with Biblical texts, especially passages
about rituals of circumcision and injunctions against intermarriage. He
described Jews in their ancient historical setting as a "community of
husband men" who, even as they had demonstrated their capacity for
intolerance, had produced "a great religion," and "memorably contributed
to the progress of humanity." From there he extended his remarks
to post-Biblical Jewry and well beyond. He knew there was a connection
between Biblical days and a much later Jewish priesthood. When rabbis
wielded the "civil sword" they rejected a posture of tolerance towards
those whose expressions and deeds differed from the priesthood: The
works of Maimonides were burned. Excommunication choked freedom
of thought. And in the Poland of his time, Goldwin Smith reported
"bigotry capable of anything is to be found among the zealots of the
Jewish race."

In fact, Smith often relied on information he obtained from James
Laister, an English correspondent whom he paid for his services as an
informant about the Talmud, about which Goldwin Smith apparently
knew nothing. Laister, a Methodist minister, who aired his own views
in Modern Thought, usually stressed the significance of the Talmud in
linking Biblical Jewry to the present. He followed Christian arguments
that had been advanced since at least the thirteenth century: "the Jews,
whom we are now discussing have not given us the Bible, they have
given us the Talmud . . . " which he insisted was the "modern application
of Mosaic Laws in hostility to gentiles."50 With Smith, he saw Jews
as people standing in the way of progressive civilization. Modern "genuine
Jews" were not scriptural Jews at all. "Russian Jews are Talmudic."
51 Laister, himself actually ignorant about the content of the Talmud,
was eager to push this campaign with Goldwin Smith. In the
spring of 1882 he found a Talmud expert he could trust and use for
their mutual needs, a Jewish convert to Christianity. "I am going to tell
him . . . that what is most needed is direct evidence that the teaching
of the Talmud is actually operative now. We know it is," he wrote
Smith, "but we want proof. We are met at present in two ways, first it
is not in the Talmud, or else it means something different . . . W eknow
nothing of the Talmud," he acknowledged, "it is a sealed book to all
but a few Jews." Certainly, Laister and Smith knew nothing: the newly
found Talmud expert seemed astonished at their ignorance when he
realized, reported Laister, that Laister had no appreciation of the relation
between the Talmud and Jewish conduct. The convert said: "It is
true that to most Jews the Talmud itself is a sealed book, but its sayings,
its proverbs, its maxims have eaten themselves into the daily life and
conversation of the race. The Book is not read, but its spirit is everywhere."
Laister must have been astonished for other reasons as well.
He reported on newly acquired information about the details of ritual
circumcision and about something all "genuine Jews" wear: "a scarf fit
with tassels ('fringe') . . . under the waistcoat (not to be confounded
with the scarf worn at worship)"; it is "called the 'four corners'—Arba
Can Foth." He also felt compelled to apologize to Smith for misleading
him about one of the newly acquired details Laister had obtained. "I
made a mistake when I told you that Jewesses wore wigs to conceal
premature baldness. It is a fact that they fade very early, but the wig is
explained in this way. When she marries (in orthodox countries) she is
shorn of her hair the next morning, and ever afterwards wears a head
covering peculiar to—that is to say it differs in different countries."
In England and America "where the Jews are semi-gentiles as regards
exteriors" a simple wig so as "not to look singular . . . generally . . . is
worn only by foreigners of whom there are now a great number in
London."52

Goldwin Smith integrated this type of knowledge within the neo-
Lamarckian thought that framed so many responses to the mass migration
of Jews out of the Old Polish Kingdom, that is from Russia, Austria-
Hungary, and from the Prussian Duchy of Poznan. They were primeval
tribal people, dangerous because Smith believed in the
inheritance of acquired characteristics. That belief was ambiguous
enough to allow him to capriciously identify habits, instincts, occupations,
or some other characteristics he found harmful as Jewish, because
the hard shell protected Jewish particularity from the progressive
forces of evolution and enlightenment. In 1881 one English contemporary
applied the general analysis this way: "The fact that during a long
period . . . [Jews] were absolutely driven into money-dealing as their
sole business, seems to have developed a heredity faculty of accumulation."
53 Laister argued from remote causes. Whatever he found abhorrent
in the conduct of Jews in the Old Polish Kingdom was a "logical
outcome of their religious teaching and social training." He had identified
a critical sustaining mechanism for that conduct by pointing to
the institutionalized practices of training the young of each generation.
Goldwin Smith agreed, in his way. The Jews "have now been so long a
wandering race, 'preferring to earn their living with their heads,' that
the tendency is ingrained, and cannot be altered by anything that
Christendom can do." The condition was part of a general phenomenon.
"The same thing would probably have befallen the Greeks had
they, like the Jews been permanently converted into a race without a
home. For such habits, whether formed by an individual or a race,
humanity is not responsible, nor can it prevent them from bearing
their natural fruits." And there was this fact to consider: "Judaism is
Legalism, of which the Talmud is the most signal embodiment. . . . In
the competition of this world's goods it is pretty clear that the legalist
will be apt to have the advantage and at the same time that his conduct
will often appear not right to those whose highest monitor is not the
law." Thus, the professor of political science and history could reach
this general conclusion: "in whatever camp the Jew is found he will be
apt for some time, unless the doctrine of heredity is utterly false, to
retain the habits formed during the eighteen centuries of itinerant existence,
without a country and under circumstances which rendered cunning,
suppleness, and intrigue almost as necessary weapons of self defense
in his case as the sword and the lance were in the case of the
feudal soldier."54 Jewish migration out of the East was dangerous. It
was one thing for Smith, and those who concurred, that "men of Jewish
descent who have put off tribalism altogether" are to be welcomed as
citizens in the fullest sense of the term, and that the welcoming society
should "rejoice in any good gifts, peculiar to their stock, which they
may bring to the common store."55 It was quite another to ignore deep
bonds between "liberal" Jews and the masses of hard-shelled "genuine"
Jews streaming west. "The common people know nothing about Lessing
and Nathan Der Wise; and if they did," Smith explained, "they
might say with truth that the character of Nathan Der Wise is as fictitious
as that of the Eastern sages of Voltaire."

Smith looked for ways to protect liberal political economies and
their progressive civilizations from this specter of the Middle Ages.
General principles of Manchesterian economics required his opposition
to restraints on migration within the Euro-American world, but
this Jewish migration coming out of the Old Polish Kingdom required
special treatment demanded by a "case of absolute necessity." The
"land of every nation is its own," explained Smith. "The right of self
defense is not confined to those who are called upon to resist an armed
invader. It might be exercised with equal propriety, though in a different
way, by a nation the character and commercial life of which were
threatened by a great irruption of Polish Jews. The Americans think
themselves perfectly at liberty to lay restrictions on the immigration of
the Chinese, though the Chinaman with his labourer's shovel is nothing
like so formidable an invader as the Jew."56

Before turning to Andrew Dixon White, it is useful to suggest that
some of Smith's positions may have served as White's unspoken notions
for his own discussion of Russian Jewry and its migration. For
one, Smith's misrepresentations of the Talmud are not all that different
from Enfield's and, by extension, from views Jefferson helped promulgate
in private. For another, Smith shared with White a republican
animus toward all clerics. This reached back to the post-Christian paganism
of the Enlightenment, especially to the Deists who attacked the
ancient Hebrews of the Old Testament and the Jews of the eighteenth
century.

Finally, it is helpful to recall that White moved comfortably in circles
that included Henry Adams, whose "Jewish passages," which are
usually associated with status and race, also need to be connected to
specific attacks on Jews who lived in orbits of Talmudic prescriptions.
Between his "Virgin" and his "Dynamo" the great American medievalist
exhibited classic metaphors he and his contemporaries understood
only too well. Two well-known examples will suffice. In the early twentieth
century in the famed Education, he did not have to explain why he
was starting his autobiography with Israel's Temple, the circumcision
ritual, and his "uncle the high priest, under the name of Israel Cohen,"
any more than why he was claiming that his sense of place in post-Civil
War America was threatened by Polish Jews "still reeking of the Ghetto,
snarling a weird Yiddish." They were, it was well known, medieval, living
in a traditional framework of conduct and beliefs derived from the
Talmud.57 In 1906 he wrote his brother Brooks, "God tried drowning
out the world once, but it did no kind of good, and there are said to
be four-hundred-and fifty thousand Jews now doing Kosher in New
York alone. God himself owned failure."58 Surely then, there are good
reasons for suggesting that Smith's views can be understood as containing
some of the preconditions for White's attitude about Talmudic
Judaism. Its practitioners did not occupy a place in his race-conscious
imagination that the likes of Indians and Filipinos did. But in general,
these views of his were all part of the progressive vision's pessimistic
side.59

White spoke with an American Protestant anticlerical voice. He
was certain that Anglo-Americans and Germans had developed the
Christian civilization that was moving humanity ever closer to the kingdom
of heaven on earth. Translated into practical terms, that outlook
justified for White territorial conquest and the removal and containment
of dark skinned pagans. As a young man, in 1853, he had supported
continental expansion to the south and west because it made
inevitable the spread of republican Christianity. In 1902, when American
soldiers occupied the Philippines, he wrote President Theodore
Roosevelt: "I consider the destruction of a whole Indian tribe or a
whole island full of low class half-breed Malays and other savages as of
infinitely less account than the blotting out of a single God-fearing,
hardworking, American pioneer family."60 For the nonpagan population,
White turned to the "correct" kind of education that antebellum
white Protestant middle class reformers had urged as appropriate for
laundering the political minds of unwashed men who were becoming
voting citizens of the republic. As president of Cornell University he
had insisted that the nation's elite have university training that made
them appreciate the importance of Christian values and military training.
Both were essential for staying the course and protecting the republic
against unruly and misled urban mobs. White had espoused
emancipation and integrated schools for the freed slaves and their fellow
citizens. But by the 1890s he, as did so many northern influential
whites, had come to see "some beautiful relations" within slavery which
were forever lost. Rapid, dramatic transformation of millions of blacks
into full and equal participants of the republic was obviously beyond
reach. They and the nation would have to wait. Instead of depending
on the popular oral traditions within African American life, which in
fact linked blacks to their pasts in Africa and in slavery, he wanted for
them an Americanizing education patterned after the white Protestants
in New England. For that reason, he insisted upon literacy as a condition
of extending suffrage rights to blacks.61

Immigrants also threatened the republic because crowds of "illiterate
peasants, freshly raked in from Irish bogs or Bohemian mines, or
Italian robber nests" undermined urban politics and the very security
of America's cities. White knew what he wanted, and it surely was not
the "slobbering anxiety of pseudo-philanthropists": the new challenges
required tough-minded trainers. "It was as . . . if a man who finds his
child bitten by a rabid dog would not cut out the affected part and
cauterize it instantly, but should wash the wound with rose water and
coddle the dog with a warm kennel and beefsteaks and insist on giving
the cur his liberty."62

In 1893 he had the opportunity to have his say about Jews coming
out of the East. He had become America's Minister to Russia and in
May had received his State Department's cable, asking questions about
Jews as potential immigrants. "Representations have been [made] here
that Russian Government is about to enforce edict . . . which will res

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Keep in mind that William Blake also fought the usurious Talmudics as they wrecked France... --CSR

-----------

Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law

E. P. Thompson (Author)

Review
Almost every page offers fresh evidence not merely of his vast overflowing erudition, but of his wit, his humanity, his soaring historical imagination. -- The Guardian

The union of knowledge with imagination and conviction is the mark of this book, as it seems to have been of Thompson's life. The book also communicates the excitement of the scholar-explorer in his quest. . . A splendid conclusion to a life of great scholarship. -- New York Times Book Review
Product Description
Witness Against the Beast is a groundbreaking interdisciplinary study in which the renowned social historian E. P. Thompson contends that most of the assumptions scholars have made about William Blake are misleading and unfounded. Brilliantly reexamining Blake's cultural milieu and intellectual background, Thompson detects in Blake's poetry a repeated call to resist the usury and commercialism of the "Antichrist" embodied by contemporary society--to "witness against the beast."

A meeting with the last of the Muggletonians: Witness against the beast: William Blake and the Moral Law
- by E P Thompson, Cambridge

ZACHARY LEADER
Sunday, 5 December 1993

THAT William Blake was self-taught 'terrified' T S Eliot. Here, alarmingly, was a major poet who was 'not compelled to acquire any other education in literature than that he wanted it'. Hence Blake's free way with tradition, as in the annotation to a crowded design for The Last Judgement:

The Ladies will be pleased to see that I have represented the Furies by Three Men and not by three Women. It is not because I think the Ancients wrong but they will be pleased to remember that mine is Vision and not Fable. The Spectator may suppose them Clergymen in the Pulpit Scourging Sin instead of Forgiving it.

Such breezy iconoclasm is set in rich context in Witness Against the Beast, E P Thompson's much- projected posthumous study of Blake, and its tone is carefully pondered. Blake is teasing in The Last Judgement note, which is relatively late (it was written around 1810). Late Blake can be wilful, cranky, impatient; so that, as Thompson admits, 'a symbol can mean whatever he decided it means at any moment'. Thompson admires late Blake, but not as much as he admires the Blake of the 1790s, of the Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (which is convenient for the non-specialist reader: the reader as interested in Thompson as in Blake); he's also prepared, when the occasion warrants, to call Blake obscure, dogmatic, divided. These are rare and welcome virtues in a 'Blakean', especially one who so proudly identifies with his subject.

Dissent, in several senses, is the key to that identification. Blake's tradition, Thompson argues, was neither that of the Eliotic polite culture, nor of an occult 'perennial philosophy' (Kathleen Raine's 'tradition'). Blake was of sturdy, English, Dissenting stock - as was Thompson. Blake's 'tradition' was not that of Enlightened or Rationalist Dissent - of Paley, Priestley, Wedgwood or the Godwin circle - it was older, more consistently oppositional, lacking 'the least complicity with the kingdom of the Beast'.

By 'Beast', Blake and Thompson, like their 17th-century forbears - Ranters, Anabaptists, Muggletonians - mean 'Antichrist', a compound of oppressive tendencies in Church and State. The terms 'Beast' and 'Antichrist' are 'antinomian' - literally, 'against the law'. They come from a specific and radical strain of English Dissent, one characterised by heretical hostility to authority, anticlericalism, justification by faith or grace (as opposed to deeds, which is why Christopher Hill calls antinomianism 'Calvinism's lower- class alter ego'), and stress on Christ's loving forgiveness. In Blake's words, from the late, unpublished The Everlasting Gospel (c. 1818):

The Moral Virtues in great fear

Formed the Cross & Nails & Spear,

And the Accuser standing by

Cried out, 'Crucify] Crucify]'

Thompson argues for the 'ubiquity and centrality' of antinomian trends in Blake's thinking and art. He also identifies Blake's brand of antinomianism as Muggletonian, from the sect founded in 1652 by Lodowick Muggleton and John Reeve. The beliefs of this sect were 'logical and powerful in their symbolic operations', and have only been thought 'ridiculous' because of the sect's name and class, that of 'poor enthusiasts' and 'losers' rather than established scholars or successful evangelists. Thompson's exposition of these beliefs is detailed but for the most part clear, patient, and studded with lively comparisons - as in talk of 'anti-Jacobin narks'.

The Muggletonian Church was still active not only in Blake's day but well into the present century. For years Thompson sought - and even announced - a direct link between it and Blake. In the event, all he produces is a 'possible' Muggletonian great-uncle (on Blake's mother's side). Miraculously, though, along the way he meets a figure straight out of Scott or Fenimore Cooper: 'the last Muggletonian' - a modest, courteous fruit farmer from Kent. This farmer contacted Thompson in the late 1970s, conversed with him about Muggletonian practice and doctrine 'with a clarity (and indeed coherence) which reproduced their 17th-century origin', and offered Thompson direct access to the Muggletonian 'archives' - 80 apple-boxes of church papers, correspondence, and publications stretching back to the 17th century. Thompson touchingly notes that the farmer 'frequently said: 'We believe' - and yet one could not point to another believer'.

As Thompson himself insists, the antinomian inheritance is no 'key to Blake'. What it provides is a structure of thought, a tone, a cluster of tenets and symbols which Blake 'then employed (along with others) much as a painter sets the paints on his palette to work'. The book concludes with a deft unravelling of Muggletonian and other influences in detailed readings of two well-known Songs of Experience - 'London' and 'The Human Abstract'. Though Blake's writing can seem peculiar, as these readings show, 'it comes out of a tradition. It has a confidence, an assured reference, very different from the speculations of an eccentric or a solitary.' This tradition, especially when tempered in creative conflict with Jacobinism and Deism, 'made it impossible for Blake to fall into the courses of apostasy' - like Wordsworth, say, or Coleridge.

In other words, Blake kept the faith, which is partly why Thompson so admires him. But the affinities between Blake's radicalism and Thompson's radicalism go only so far. Part of Blake's Muggletonian inheritance was its quietism: Muggletonians refused not only to proselytise but to worship in public. Thompson liked to think of himself as a Muggletonian, but his radicalism was neither 'obscure' (as in Blake's 'what is obscure to an idiot is not worth my care') nor quiet. In Blake's shoes, even with the 'Beast' at his heels, Thompson would have been more outspoken, less disguised, more like Paine or Thelwall or the Hunts - as he was, for example, in the polemical journalism collected in Writing by Candlelight (1980) or his work with European Nuclear Disarmament. Blake was a great poet and artist,

and a thoroughly consistent witness against the Beast, but he was hardly the most influential English radical of his age - a title that many claim for E P Thompson himself.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-enter ... 65613.html







Shabetai, Karen.
The Question of Blake's Hostility Toward the Jews
ELH - Volume 63, Number 1, Spring 1996, pp. 139-152

The Johns Hopkins University Press

When (William) Blake mocks Judaism by invoking a stereotype about the Jewish proboscis--"I always thought Jesus Christ was a Snubby or I should not have worship'd him, if I had thought he had been one of those long spindle nosed rascals"--he was writing in what he thought was the privacy of a notebook. Blake's most hostile remarks about Jews, in fact, appear where the public presumably was not to be invited. In his works intended for the public, he is more subtle, or at least more obscure, which might explain how Blake's seeming anti-Semitism has managed to fly under critical radar. My own initial sense of Blake and Jews leaned toward an indulgence of Blake, or rationalization of his "lapses." Most of Blake's references to Judaism, including most of his more virulent anti-Jewish remarks, are directed not at Judaism but at other targets such as deism and organized religion. Further, the intolerant attitude implied in Blake's treatment of Judaism is offset by what Northrop Frye calls the "visionary tolerance" of Blake's claim that all religions are one, though what Frye doesn't remark is that by the time of Jerusalem that "One Religion" is called "the Religion of Jesus." Other critics point to his more generous moments in works like Jerusalem in which he invites the Jews to convert...

And "To see a world in a grain of sand...."  ---CSR

William Blake - Auguries of Innocence

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage.

A dove-house fill'd with doves and pigeons
Shudders hell thro' all its regions.
A dog starv'd at his master's gate
Predicts the ruin of the state.

A horse misused upon the road
Calls to heaven for human blood.
Each outcry of the hunted hare
A fibre from the brain does tear.

A skylark wounded in the wing,
A cherubim does cease to sing.
The game-cock clipt and arm'd for fight
Does the rising sun affright.

Every wolf's and lion's howl
Raises from hell a human soul.

The wild deer, wand'ring here and there,
Keeps the human soul from care.
The lamb misus'd breeds public strife,
And yet forgives the butcher's knife.

The bat that flits at close of eve
Has left the brain that won't believe.
The owl that calls upon the night
Speaks the unbeliever's fright.

He who shall hurt the little wren
Shall never be belov'd by men.
He who the ox to wrath has mov'd
Shall never be by woman lov'd.

The wanton boy that kills the fly
Shall feel the spider's enmity.
He who torments the chafer's sprite
Weaves a bower in endless night.

The caterpillar on the leaf
Repeats to thee thy mother's grief.
Kill not the moth nor butterfly,
For the last judgement draweth nigh.

He who shall train the horse to war
Shall never pass the polar bar.
The beggar's dog and widow's cat,
Feed them and thou wilt grow fat.

The gnat that sings his summer's song
Poison gets from slander's tongue.
The poison of the snake and newt
Is the sweat of envy's foot.

The poison of the honey bee
Is the artist's jealousy.

The prince's robes and beggar's rags
Are toadstools on the miser's bags.
A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.

It is right it should be so;
Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know,
Thro' the world we safely go.

Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.

The babe is more than swaddling bands;
Every farmer understands.
Every tear from every eye
Becomes a babe in eternity;

This is caught by females bright,
And return'd to its own delight.
The bleat, the bark, bellow, and roar,
Are waves that beat on heaven's shore.

The babe that weeps the rod beneath
Writes revenge in realms of death.
The beggar's rags, fluttering in air,
Does to rags the heavens tear.

The soldier, arm'd with sword and gun,
Palsied strikes the summer's sun.
The poor man's farthing is worth more
Than all the gold on Afric's shore.

One mite wrung from the lab'rer's hands
Shall buy and sell the miser's lands;
Or, if protected from on high,
Does that whole nation sell and buy.

He who mocks the infant's faith
Shall be mock'd in age and death.
He who shall teach the child to doubt
The rotting grave shall ne'er get out.

He who respects the infant's faith
Triumphs over hell and death.
The child's toys and the old man's reasons
Are the fruits of the two seasons.

The questioner, who sits so sly,
Shall never know how to reply.
He who replies to words of doubt
Doth put the light of knowledge out.

The strongest poison ever known
Came from Caesar's laurel crown.
Nought can deform the human race
Like to the armour's iron brace.

When gold and gems adorn the plow,
To peaceful arts shall envy bow.
A riddle, or the cricket's cry,
Is to doubt a fit reply.

The emmet's inch and eagle's mile
Make lame philosophy to smile.
He who doubts from what he sees
Will ne'er believe, do what you please.

If the sun and moon should doubt,
They'd immediately go out.
To be in a passion you good may do,
But no good if a passion is in you.

The whore and gambler, by the state
Licensed, build that nation's fate.
The harlot's cry from street to street
Shall weave old England's winding-sheet.

The winner's shout, the loser's curse,
Dance before dead England's hearse.

Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born,
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.

We are led to believe a lie
When we see not thro' the eye,
Which was born in a night to perish in a night,
When the soul slept in beams of light.

God appears, and God is light,
To those poor souls who dwell in night;
But does a human form display
To those who dwell in realms of day.

William Blake & the Jews: The Bibliography

compiled by Ralph Dumain

Blake, the Jews, & Jewish Philosophers

Bogan, James J. "Apocalypse Now: William Blake and the Conversion of the Jews," English Language Notes, vol. 19, no. 2, December 1981, pp. 116-120. (Abstract/review)

Galchinsky, Michael. "Blake's 'firm perswasions': The Judaic and the Jew." Paper delivered at the MLA, 1990 Session on "Romanticism and Anti-Semitism." (Abstract/review)

Gould, Thomas. "Four Levels of Reality, in Plato, Spinoza, and Blake," Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, vol. 8, no. 1, Spring 1969, pp. 20-50. (Abstract/review)

Holt, Ted. "Blake's 'Elohim' and the Hutchinsonian Fire: Anti-Newtonianism and Christian Hebraism in the Work of William Blake," Romanticism: The Journal of Romantic Culture and Criticism vol. 9, no. 1, 2003, pp. 20-36. (Abstract/review)

Schuchard, Marsha Keith. "William Blake and the Jewish Swedenborgians," in The Jews and British Romanticism: Politics, Religion, Culture, edited by Sheila A. Spector (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 61-86. (Abstract/review)

Shabetai, Karen. "The Question of Blake's Hostility Toward the Jews," ELH, vol. 63, no. 1, Spring 1996, pp. 139-152. (Abstract/review)

Tannenbaum, Leslie. '"What Are Those Golden Builders Doing?": Mendelssohn, Blake, and the (Un)Building of Jerusalem', in British Romanticism and the Jews: History, Culture, Literature, edited by Sheila A. Spector (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 79-90. (Abstract/review)

Whitson, Roger. 'Jerusalem and "the Jew:" Biopolitics Between Blake and Spinoza', Romanticism on the Net, Issue 40, November 2005. URL: http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2005/v/ ... 462ar.html. (Abstract/review)

Yoder, R. Paul. "Blake and the Book of Numbers: Joshua the Giant Killer and the Tears of Balaam," in The Jews and British Romanticism: Politics, Religion, Culture, edited by Sheila A. Spector (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 87-102. (Abstract/review)

Blake & Kabbalah

Karr, Don. Review of Sheila Spector's "Wonders Divine": The Development of Blake's Kabbalistic Myth and "Glorious Incomprehensible": The Development of Blake's Kabbalistic Language, Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2001, Esoterica, V, 2003, p. 223.

Spector, Sheila A. "Glorious Incomprehensible": The Development of Blake's Kabbalistic Language. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2001. (Abstract/review)

Spector, Sheila A. Wonders Divine: The Development of Blake's Kabbalistic Myth. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2001.

Romanticism & the Jews

Page, Judith. Imperfect Sympathies: Jews and Judaism in British Romantic Literature and Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Contents.

Spector, Sheila A., ed. British Romanticism and the Jews: History, Culture, Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Contents. Google books: text online.

Spector, Sheila A., ed. The Jews and British Romanticism: Politics, Religion, Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Contents.

Selected Background Studies

Rix, Robert. "William Blake and the Radical Swedenborgians," Esoterica, V, 2003, pp. 95-137. (Abstract/review)

Schuchard, Marsha Keith. "Why Mrs. Blake Cried: Swedenborg, Blake, and the Sexual Basis of Spiritual Vision," Esoterica, II, 2000, pp. 45-93. Printable version.

Scope note: This bibliography lists all known scholarly studies in English of Blake's treatment of the Jews as a people, the nature of Jewishness, and Judaism as a religion insofar as it implicates Blake's attitude to Jews. Also included here are comparative studies of Blake and Jewish intellectuals (especially Spinoza and Mendlessohn) which illuminate the philosophical and ideological issues. There are numerous studies of Blake's relationship to aspects of the Jewish religion—the Old Testament, Kabbalah, etc. These are excluded here unless they concern Blake's characterization of the Jewish people and Jewishness as an ideological trope. I have made an exception in including two books by Sheila Spector on Blake and the Kabbalah (and one review of these books), because she has also compiled anthologies on Romanticism and the Jews. The annotated version of this bibliography includes my abstracts and comments on these individual works,as well as an exanded version of this note. It will be obvious that Blake's treatment of the Jews raises touchy ideological issues, but the place of Judaism, Jewish mysticism, and Jews in the complex of Blake's overall esoteric schema has to be kept in mind while evaluating his potentially offensive expressions.

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Miltonic Evil as Gnostic Cabala
Philip Beitchman



   
William Blake's "Milton"

Satan's Truth

Some of the most blatant heresy, dualism and/or unorthodoxy in Milton occurs, of course, in the irreverent, though very 'charming' discourse of Satan in Paradise Lost, which, at least until the early nineteenth century mysterious (re)discovery, translation (from Latin) and publication of Milton's antinomian theological treatise, Christian Doctrine, could be regarded - in spite of Blake's (and Shelley's) contrary notions - as representing, for the poet, the positions he opposed. However, since the dissemination of this 'theology' in print it has seemed likely that some of Satan's views, and not the least essential, were in fact Milton's own. Especially disturbing was an Arian (denying the divinity of Christ, who is regarded as merely the highest in the order of created matter) drift of the treatise, reminiscent of Satan's resentful defiance of Jesus, for him, someone simply who was better armed and prepared for the 'War in Heaven'. This resemblance between Doctrine and Poem, led the eminent Miltonist Maurice Kelley to even qualifying Paradise Lost as 'an Arian document'.[1] Christian Doctrine turns out to be a prodigiously antinomian tract. Basic here is the notion, reminiscent of the mood at once of Cabala and Spinoza's 'scientific' theology, that scripture is an unreliable and inconsistent guide, full of paradoxes and contradictions, and that it is up to each reader to use his own judgment in deciding which passages and interpretations would be authoritative, based rather on an internal, unwritten scripture, conveyed by the Holy Spirit, intrinsically less corruptible than any writing can possibly be.[2]Milton thereby implies that no priest or intermediary is necessary or desirable for an individual to come to an informed decision as to what he will regard as his own 'Christian Doctrine.' This doctrine never seems more individualized, or pertinent to Renaissance ChristianHebraism and Cabala, than when Milton suggests that Jews are more Christian than Catholics are since it makes more sense to believe Christ was not divine at all than to think, with Rome, that he was coeval with the Deity! [3]

Underlying the Miltonic cosmogony would be a shattering, if logical notion that any deity we could conceive of, pray to, or who could affect us would be a radically compromised one. Jesus, followed by the Angels, fallen and unfallen, in this system, would represent this aspect of the lesser divine in Milton, one that could relate to corrupted humanity. A real God, as conceived of by Milton in Christian Doctrine, at once the concluding theological-political statement of his official career and the grounding one for the epistemology and teleology of the great sacred epics, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, that were to follow, would guard a quality of eternal and profound inscrutability, mystery and distance. Such a deity, reminiscent of Spinoza's, as well as being in tune with Gnostic-Lurianic notions, has withdrawn from the realm of existence, or was never really involved in it, leaving man "to his own desires and devices and to the ceaseless promptings of Satan." (334).

When, however, Milton considers the Manichean-dualistic 'abyss' into which these notions can lead he tends to fall back on a kind of intuitionist fideism, piling up the Gnostic evidence in citation after citation only to 'deny' it all with what I think is an unconvincing Tertullian fideism: "Although in these quotations and in many others from both Testaments God openly confesses that it is he who incites the sinner, hardens his heart, blinds him and drives him into error, it must not be concluded that he is the originator even of the very smallest sin, for he is supremely holy." (332) Such reassurances were, in fact, insufficient for a dismayed British reviewer complaining pertinently, in 1826, when the work was first published, that Milton's apparent acceptance of the inextricability of existence and evil "...leaves the grand aboriginal
   Milton as a young man

difficulty untouched; namely the existence of the perverse will, and the mischievous propensity in such persons as David and Absalom." [4] More cautiously than Maurice Kelley, who leant to Milton's great epics the full antinomian force of Christian Doctrine, but nevertheless coming down on the side of a 'demonic' or at least heretical Milton, William B. Hunter Jr. affirms: "If, that is, Milton were an Arian as many have argued, he is just as certainly of the devil's party as he depicts that party in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. Blake and Shelley were right about Milton's views in a deeper sense than has hitherto been realized." [5]

Constantinos Patrides defends against this assault on Milton's Christian orthodoxy on two fronts; first of all by questioning, in theological terms, the attribution of Arianism to the position of Milton's treatise, which he defines otherwise as a more familiar 'subordinationism' (making Christ a lower order of divinity rather than a higher earthly creation); and, secondly, by insisting on an epistemological dichotomy between two orders of truth, that is a poetic as distinct from a theological one.[6] It's interesting that for the sake of this latter argument Patrides seems ready to 'float the signifier', in a style so thoroughly consistent with what the structuralist religious historian, Michel de Certeau, has called 'mystics', or 'mystic discourse',[7] involving ineluctably a notion of language as merely a temporary, ephemeral and unreliable home for a numinous, but vagabond and nomadic Being. In effect, Patrides is relying, in this separation of Milton's poetic from his theological (and, ostensibly other) words, on a sophisticated, pluralistic attitude toward language, that in fact was the more-or-less hidden and occult subtext of those very heterodoxies of the nineteenth century he insists had nothing much to do with Milton![8]

Coincidentally Milton's famous plea for toleration, and corresponding stand against censorship, in the prose tract, Areopagitica, alluded to a hermetic myth that recounts a primordial separation of truth from any absolute identification with any of its embodiments:

Truth, indeed came once into the world with her Divine Master, and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on: but when He ascended, and His Aposteles after Him were laid asleep, then straight arose a wicked race of deceivers, who, as that story goes of the Egyptian Typhon with his conspirators, how they dealt with the good Osiris, took the virgin Truth, hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces, and scattered them to the four winds. From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris, went up and down gathering up limb by limb, still as they could find them. We have not found them all, Lords and Commons, nor ever shall do, till her Master's second coming.[9]

It is significant that the occult-Hermetic myth in the above is treated as a 'typology' that anticipates Christianity, as also commonly was suggested for Cabala, so frequently disseminated under the rationale of conversion; and as for Cabala, for which no Torah we can know is the Torah, so for Milton's Hermetic-Christianity, no single sign would be, enduringly, the signified. Interestingly, Milton chooses this occult myth of a truth that, within history, can only be sought, never found, to corroborate a position that he thought would obviously be less convincing on the basis of scripture alone; in much the same manner, for example, H.C. Agrippa found allusions to Cabala helpful in establishing a basis for positions (toleration, feminism, relativism), where literal scripture was insufficient. As for Sir Thomas Browne, the appeal is made to the heterodoxies regressively but for progressive purposes, as if to substantiate that which is most contemporary and advanced no evidence could be stronger than something taken from supposedly the oldest, pre- or para-Christian provenance.

In Milton's bold hermetic metaphor, Truth and Words are seen as, in human history, in a dialectical, impermanent and temporary relation; since no single text can be trusted indefinitely, the subject is thrown back on his own experience and judgment, and must remain open
   
   


William Blake's "Elohim and Adam"    

to a plurality of interpretations, commentaries and further explorations. However repelled Milton may have been by the aberrations of seventeenth century Jewish Cabala, incarnated in the mass-following and catastrophic apostasy (conversion under threat of death to Islam) of the 'false messiah', Sabbatai Zevi, news of which may have been communicated to him directly,[10] I think he would have found support, corroboration, maybe even inspiration in the more traditional cabalistic notion, according to which no single written word, not even scripture itself, can be totally trusted.

Milton understood, however, that action, often urgently required by the teleological subordination of means to ends, must be based on a kind of 'suspension of disbelief'; nevertheless, here, the very excellence of the poet I think has opened him, especially in our century, to accusations of dogmatism, moralism and arrogance. What has been often thought of as the self-righteousness, vindictiveness, sadism[11] and complacency of the kind of discourse that Milton attributes to God and his agents, for example, have disturbed many,[12] who have been lured by the poet's eloquence into believing they were meant to embody the exact intentions and will of the divine, rather than being merely a version of it in words, meant only as an approximation. Many also have been disturbed by Satan's mastery over language; and indeed it seems that no one in Paradise Lost can speak more charmingly, persuasively and compellingly. However, consistent with Milton's baroque (style-alternating) epistemology unquestionably certain elements of truth would be present in Satan's discourse, as well as certain elements of falsehood in God's. As in The Zohar, for Milton the devil must be somehow honored and recognized.[13] That left, instinctive, dark side of the human is all the more dangerous and influential for being totally neglected, which is not to say that the poet would ever have followed it, at least explicitly, into the Sabbatian temptation of embracing evil or 'seeing it through to the end'; and Milton seems to reject such a literal, exponential escalation of 'the powers of darkness' clearly in Paradise Regained, wherein Christ-in-the-wildness eschews Satan's offers from a vast range of demonic options that range, subtly. from earthly comfort, consolation and pleasure to spiritual glory[14] and messianic notoriety.

Although an attempt, like Denis Saurat's discredited one,[15] to link Milton definitely and directly to primary cabalistic texts, such as The Zohar, seems unrealizable, I think that, once the serious Hebraism of the poet is established, and given the Cabala-tinged quality of Hebrew studies in the Renaissance, especially that aspect of which was aimed at Christian students, there is no doubt that Milton knew about Cabala, that it must have had some impact, conscious or unconscious, direct or indirect, upon him, the problem being only how much, and at what points in his life and work. To the circumstances connected with the study of the Hebrew language should be added also a profound homology between the evolution of Cabala in the seventeenth century and the 'apocalypse now' direction taken by the English Puritan Revolution, with which it was coextensive. It seems reasonable to suppose that the conclusions that Milton seems to have drawn regarding adventures like that of Sabbatai's, as well as toward the messianic-revolutionary-utopianism of Diggers, Ranters and "The Fifth Monarchists,"[16] which was so much a part of his own political and cultural context, and that he gave voice to in the Paradises, Lost and Regained and Samson Agonistes, were related to his disillusion in and with England.

The Part of Evil

A strange aspect that has not I think been sufficiently acknowledged and accounted for is the sheer dimension of Milton's attention, in Paradise Lost, to the problematic of evil; and here I think the heterodoxies of the Renaissance supply an important explanatory context, source and inspiration.

I don't think it's enough to simply say, for instance, as some mischievous poets and radical critics have, that since Satan is the mainstay of the first two, supposedly best of the books of Paradise Lost, that he is the epic hero, which puts Milton in the 'devil's party', whether he admits it or not. We need to recognize also that Satan, his cohorts, friends, lovers (Eve, notably, who he has no trouble seducing, she who already has fallen into a Narcissus-type love with her own image in the Edenic lake)[17] and relatives are very much in control of most of the rest of the epic. Everything, indeed, that starts up in Heaven or on Earth is in response to demonic initiatives; while the rationale that these are in the service of divine ends might compare in lameness to the effrontery of a similar apology for modern fascism, AIDS, and Rwanda-level decimations!

Additionally, in the central and very weird 'War in Heaven' episodes, as told and retold in Paradise Lost [centered, however, in Book VI], inescapably it is the demonic forces that, as courageous underdogs, must garner much of our sympathy. Such literal and titanic cosmic struggles of the forces of Good-and-Evil, Light-and-Darkness seem to be related more likely to a tradition of Dualism, reaching back, through Cabala, Hermeticism and Gnosticism, to Zoroastrian Manicheism, than to the more abstract unities and plenitudes of the Judeo-Christian style. Milton's source for this controversial episode is, indeed, the chapter of scripture, The Apocalypse or Revelation of St. John, that has been most often cited by religious dissidents, mystics, occultists and Christian cabalists. D.H. Lawrence mentions, in his fascinating little book on the subject that the entry of the Apocalypse into the canon was opposed by the eastern Fathers in the early days of Christianity, ostensibly because they were suspicious of a certain undercurrent, elan vital, or 'dragon' of paganism beneath the veneer of John of Patmos' neutralizing, emasculating text. For Lawrence the War in Heaven is exactly that place where the violent instinct of pagan inspiration, which granted its gods no exemption from a savage 'all-too-human rule of desire for satisfaction, victory and control, boils closest to its Christian surface:
   

 
William Blake, "Fall of the Angel"    

'And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.'

This fragment is really the pivot of the Apocalypse. It looks like late pagan myth suggested from various Greek, Egyptian, and Babylonian myths. Probably the first apocalyptist added it to the original pagan manuscript, many years before the birth of Christ.[18]

Even a modern critic who distances himself from Saurat's claims of Milton's cabalism, J.H. Adamson, will see occult traditions surfacing in these particular passages.[19] Equally provocative of wonder is the very noise and urgency with which Milton has to reassure us (directly, or through God, the Son or angels such as Raphael or Michael, 'explaining things' for Adam-and-us, or even through Satan's occasionally rueful regrets at his 'permanent exile' from the light) that everything is still under control of the 'highest'. Curious also is the amount of space, time and sheer majestic, charming and cunning eloquence Milton allows to Satan's heresies, unorthodoxies, temptations, justifications and imaginations. A 'free spirit' of the time cannot account for this, since the twenty-year lifting of censorship that allowed so much unprecedented radical rebellion, dissidence, provocation and just plain anomaly to appear, especially in the popular pamphlet form, is finished by the time Milton is composing such enormities. Milton has, additionally, barely and enigmatically (no one was more involved in the death of Charles I than he, except perhaps the executioner) escaped with his life under the restoration, another factor that might have led him to disguise his own views as Satan's. At any event, this Age of Restoration is once more a time when religious dissidents tended rather to be silenced, or, more characteristically, to silence themselves. Milton, however, in his Paradises, lost and regained, is allowing Satan to speak, act, enjoin, cajole, and manifest himself and his ideology to an extent and a degree that is totally unprecedented.

Following Lucifer

The Italian Renaissance Lucifers of Marino and Tasso which played a part in Milton's daring invention, were flatter, more transparently dramatic or aesthetic creations in comparison. This 'eccentricity' of the Miltonic Lucifer is back-and-foregrounded very well by Mario Praz. [20] The immediate models for Milton's Lucifer were Tasso and Giambattista Marino, both evidently quite familiar to the poet. Tasso's Satan, as presented in Jerusalem Liberated "...keeps his terrifying medieval mask, like that of a Japanese warrior." (53), as of a stock figure and stereotype, which, in the next century, Marino renders sad, pathetic and humanly sympathetic, adding also an aspect of beauty. Milton, according to Praz, certainly knew also Crashaw's translation into English of the first canto of Marino's posthumously published Strage degli Innocenti [Massacre of the Innocents], of 1632. There is a whole world, however, separating Marino's baroque and neo-pagan sensibility, for which Christianity is the merest veneer and pretext for games with language and rhetoric (as in 'marinism') from Milton's 'high seriousness'. Where Marino allows us 'sympathy for the devil' it is Milton who compounds this affect with a dimension of moral grandeur and 'infernal' sublimity that changed Satan, in literature at least, for all time. Milton's 'hero' then pushes on, according to Praz, to 'canonization' as the arch-rebel and resistor for the Gothic novel of such as Monk Lewis and Ann Radcliffe, then prominently into the Romantic texts of such as Blake, Byron, Schiller, Goethe, straight into the perverse demonism of Baudelaire ("Fleurs du Mal"), the Symbolists and certainly Lautréamont ("Maldoror"). It requires no great insight to see 'satanic juices' still pumping madly in such 'underground' classics as Burroughs' Naked Lunch, Hugh Selby Jr.'s Last Exit to Brooklyn, Alexander Trocchi's Cain's Book, not to mention some more above-the-surface ones like Meyer Levin's Compulsion, Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song (as well as through his acolyte's, the mournful Jack Abbott's In the Belly of the Beast, which turned out to be as legitimate a metaphor for the society at large as any section of it behind bars).

In consideration of the provocative and limitless iconoclasm of Christian Doctrine, from which I think a reasonable case can be made that Milton meant what Satan said, it might even be legitimate to 'transvalue' Paradise Lost so as to conceive of God as the Royal Villain (Charles I), his son, Jesus, as heir to the mantle of oppressor (Charles II), with Satan as the arch-rebel and resistor, combined type of the Puritan Revolutionary (Milton himself for the eloquence; Cromwell for the action), and the lesser devils as varieties of Levelers, Ranters, Fifth Monarchists and other 'heretic' fellow travelers on the road beyond Apocalypse to New Jerusalem, where they might even meet up with Sabbatians. As to where, finally, this Nietzschean-gnostic fantasy of a reading would place Adam and Eve, their eventual progeny, as well as other intermediate beings like Angels and suchlike, that would be, consistent with Milton's antinomian 'doctrine', up to each of us to decide, in terms of where we'd (like to) see ourselves.

What seems almost as appalling to me is that, considering the great volume of the commentary on Milton, this Satanic 'excess' of the poet has never really been frankly recognized and confronted, maybe because it was too blatant to believe! Even in his most extravagant demonism, Christopher Marlowe, whose specialty was the condignly evil protagonist, could never have gone so far. Marlowe, as well as his students and followers in this 'demonic' style, Shakespeare and Kyd, and later, Webster, Shirley and Turner, were limited by the regime of the dramatic genre of tragedy, whereby order is disturbed only temporarily. This astounding innovation and escalation in the matter of evil in comparison to the manifold avatars and subtleties of the Machiavellian or Senecan protagonist of English Renaissance Theater should be measured against the daring of the poet in choosing the massive, permanent and respected epic form as opposed to (what was regarded) as the more incidental and transitory dramatic one. Finally shocking is Milton's choice of subject matter, none other than the most essential episode, Genesis, of our culture's most honored text, the Bible. Furthermore here he focused on the invasion of this 'paradise' by the very principle and personage of evil, allowing that evil every conceivable opportunity, eloquence, argument and quality, and this near the pristine center of creation's awesome beginning and purpose, indissolubly intermixed, through earth, apple and tree with the components of human composition.

Even if we try to allow for some space, modest as it might turn out to be, for the 'good' or at least non-or-not-yet totally satanic, in this epic, I think we can easily run into difficulty. Most glaring of all might be the question of Adam's choice: If indeed, theoretically he follows Eve in committing the sin of disobedience, and assuming, as Milton obviously wants us to, that She succumbed voluntarily, then what option really remained for Adam? Was his sin that of an incipient feminism, being unwilling to assert male authority in granting Eve's wish to be apart from him just before that fateful noon, especially since he initially didn't think it was such a good idea and had to be persuaded into it? Was man's fall, and that of the whole human race, as trivial as letting a woman decide to go out for a walk by herself? Or, later, was he to refuse to 'bite', thereby condemning her to isolation and perdition, insuring for himself a virtuous, if complacent immortality? Since he couldn't be expected to do without companionship, sexual-and-otherwise, especially through no fault of his own, God would be obliged to fashion, from another rib, a suitable replacement, whom presumably he would supervise more closely. An important motivation for Milton's Eve, and one that doesn't exist in scripture, was jealousy of Adam's future mate:

I shall be no more,

And Adam, wedded to another Eve

Shall live with her enjoying, I extinct

A death to think. (IX, 827-30)

For Saurat this constituted proof of a direct influence of Cabala on Milton, since Eve's jealousy is mentioned in The Zohar (as is Satan's sexual desire for Eve, another 'passionate' element intimated by Milton that does not exist in scripture). Of Saurat's 'wild' surmises this one has weathered rather well; H. Fletcher, our major specialist in Milton's Hebraism thinks the Zohar-Milton connection possible, if not likely, but found another Hebrew, ostensibly non-Cabala, source for this motif,[21] a position which Werblowsky seconds.[22] The main drift, however, of Saurat's powerful argument, that of an occult, mystical, heterodox and 'inadmissible' provenance for Milton's inspirations, waters he 'drank from', in common with some other major English poets, like Blake, Shelley and Wordsworth, survives, I think, such fine distinctions as Fletcher, Werblowsky and many others so ably introduce. That the motifs of Eve's cunningly jealous sexuality, Satan's compelling lubricity, and Divine Incest might not all derive from the Zohar, as de Pauly's 'forgeries'[23] had inclined Saurat to think, but from an older, even non-cabalistic, midrashim or other texts and traditions would in no way abstract Milton from the 'occult tradition' in which Saurat situates him.

Additionally, apocryphal, gnostic, talmudic and cabalistic versions of the 'creation of woman', which Milton certainly know about, however seriously he took them, suggest that a Lilith, made like Adam of earth, was his first mate put away, as a matter of fact for insubordination. [24] Sedition, clearly, is a feminine characteristic, rendering any substitution of one woman for another nugatory. Clearly he had only the choice, as in the world, between two evils and he tried, as we like to think we would, to choose the lesser.

 
==============================================
Bibliography

Adamson, J. F. "Milton's Version of the War in Heaven." JEGP LVII (October, 1958): 690-703.

Beitchman, Philip. Alchemy of the Word, Cabala of the Renaissance. (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998).

Certeau, Michel de. The Mystic Fable. Trans. Michael B. Smith. Vol. 1. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

Fixler, Michael. Milton and the Kingdoms of God. (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1964).

Fletcher, Harris Francis. The Intellectual Development of John Milton. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956. 2 vol.

Milton's Rabbinical Readings. (N.Y.: Gordian, 1967). Orig. published in 1930

Milton's Semitic Studies. (N.Y.: Gordian, 1966). Orig. published in 1926.

Frye, Roland Mushat. God, Man and Satan: Patterns of Christian Thought and Life in Paradise Lost, Pilgrim's Progress, and the Great Theologians. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960).

Hunter, William B. Jr. "The Heresies of Satan." The Upright Heart and Pure. Ed. A.P. Fiore. (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1967).

____,Visitation Unimplor'd: Milton and the Authorship of 'De Doctrina Christiana'. (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998).

Kelley, Maurice. This Great Argument: A Study of Milton's 'De Doctrina Christiana' as a Gloss upon 'Paradise Lost'. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941).

Lawrence, D.H. Apocalypse. (New York: Penguin, 1966). Orig. published in 1931.

Martz, Louis L. The Paradise Within. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964).

Milton, John. Areopagitica, and Other Prose Works.(London: Dent-Everyman, 1927).

Christian Doctrine. Vol. VI, Complete Prose Works of John Milton. Ed. Maurice Kelley, trans. John Carey. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973).

The Poetical Works of John Milton. Ed. Helen Darbshire. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958).

Patrides, Constantinos. Milton and the Christian Tradition. (N.Y and London.: Oxford University Press, 1969).

Pauly, Jean de, trans. Zohar, le livre de la splendour. (Paris: E. Leroux, 1906-11). 6 vol.

Praz, Mario The Romantic Agony. Trans. Angus Davidson. (London: Oxford, 1987).

Reuchlin, Johannes. On the Art of the Kabbalah. Trans. Martin and Sarah Goodman. Intr. (1983, Abaris Books) Lloyd Jones. Intr. Moshe Idel. (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1993). Originally published as De Arte cabalistica, 1517.

Saurat, Denis. Literature and the Occult Tradition. Trans. Dorothy Bolton. Fort Washington, N.Y.: Kennicut Press, 1966. Originally published, 1930.

Milton, Man and Thinker.( London: Archon, 1964). First published 1925

Werblowsky, R. Zvi. "Milton and the Conjectura Cabbalistica." Journal of the Warburg Institute XVIII (1955): 90-113.

The Zohar. Ed. Joshua Abelson. Trans. Maurice Simon and Harry Sperling. 5 vols. (London and N.Y.: Soncino Press, 1933). Rpt. 1984.

1 Patrides, p. 15, citing Maurice Kelley's This Great Argument: A Study of Milton's 'De Doctrina Christiana' as a Gloss upon 'Paradise Lost'. See also R.M. Frye [God, Man and Satan, 75-76] who militantly opposes this interpretation, simply because, in his own judgment, it just could not be! A recent book by William Hunter, Visitation Unimplored attempts to 'distance' Milton more from the 'authorship' of Christian Doctrine than he had ever been before, calling it, for instance a 'composite ms.' [146] My position, however, I believe would come well within the parameters of Hunter's conclusions, which were that Christian Doctrine should no longer be taken as a totally reliable statement of Milton's ideas, so that notions about his 'heresy' need to be supported also by other elements in the poet's work. Hunter's ideas, announced much earlier in articles and conferences, were challenged very vigorously also, for instance in Studies in English Literature (Vol. 32, Winter 1992) in articles by Barbara Lewalski, Christopher Hill and the eminent editor of Christian Doctrine, Maurice Kelley.

2 Kelley, "Introduction" to Christian Doctrine, 44.

3 Christian Doctrine, 455.

4 Christian Doctrine, 336n. 26, cited by Kelley.

5 "The Heresies of Satan," 32-33; see n. 1 above, since Hunter has reversed himself on the question of Christian Doctrine.

6 Patrides, 22-23.

7 Cf. The Mystic Fable.

8 Maurice Kelley, as a matter of fact, disparages Patrides' competence as a theologian in his "Reply to Hunter", SEL, 160. See n. 1 above.

9 Areopagitica, 30.

10 Through Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society, who

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had written to Spinoza about the Sabbatian episode, who visited Milton while he was composing Paradise Regained. See Alchemy of the Word, 282-83, and also Michael Fixler's Milton and the Kingdoms of God.

11 This Tertullian mood, according to which a good portion of heavenly bliss is constituted by the joy seeing the torments of the damned below has been captured by one of our modern writers who had been the most persecuted by the 'moral majorities' of his time: "Brilliant glorious eternal heaven above: and brilliant torture-lake away below...They could not be happy in heaven unless they knew their enemies were unhappy in hell." [D.H. Lawrence, Apocalypse, 76.]

12 Louis L. Martz, for instance, citing a tradition of critical disillusionment, will consider that Books XI and XII of Paradise Lost, where the 'divine word' is at its most unilateral, represent a drastic decline in the humanity, interest and inspiration of the epic. Significant for Martz is the fact that the epic was published originally in ten books, the last two having been added later by Milton. [The Paradise Within, 141-48.]

13 See, for instance, my Alchemy of the Word, 15, for citation from The Zohar, where Job's punishment is regarded as a result of the insufficient attention he gave to the powers of evil.

14 The Pope, or Antichrist, as the English Puritans called him, already would represent a yielding to this temptation; as, a fortiori, anyone who sought the office, glory and status of the messiah (a position, if it is one, which would be rather designated, than looked-for anyway!).

15 Milton, Man and Thinker (1925) and Literature and the Occult Tradition (1930); Saurat's 'theses' have been almost unanimously disapproved of.

16 The Fifth Monarchists, who were especially influential in the Puritan Army, were looking forward to, in fact, the imminent realization of God's kingdom-on-earth, supposedly the fifth-and-

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final-one after the four 'fallen' ones of history.

17 Eve seems to me rather to glory in the miraculous efficacy of her sin, productive, indeed, of all human life on earth, rather than, in a more soberly repentant felix culpa mode, to have reluctantly admitted its ineluctability, accepting its consequences; instead she exults: "That I, who first brought Death on all, am graced/ The source of life..." [XI, 168-9]

18 Apocalypse, 85-86.

19 "The War in Heaven: Milton's Version of the Merkabah."

20 "The Metamorphoses of Satan," in The Romantic Agony: 53-91.

21 Milton's Semitic Studies, 132-38.

22 "Milton and the Conjectura Cabbalistica," 99.

23 De Pauly made the first comprehensive translation of The Zohar into any vernacular (French), but not very reliably, for he was not above a little invention ('forgeries' is Werblowsky's angry word for it, in article cited in n. 22).

24 See Alchemy of the Word, 260ff. where I remark the casual introduction by John Lightfoot, one of the great names in semitic scholarship of the seventeenth century, of the Lilith legend, unlikely I think to have escaped the attention of so comprehensive a student of the arcane as Milton, one also so interested in gender and marital issues. The Lilith story was a subject that would have come up anyway in texts that touch on Cabala, if only to deny one or another annoying (feminism, demonism) aspect of it. One version, for instance, has Adam cohabiting with Lilith, for an extended period after the expulsion, during which time he was separated from Eve. Adam's progeny, a result of his intercourse with Lilith would have been a race of demons, still among us. One can see limned here, of course, more than the rudiments for a gnostic explication of the problem posed by the evident ineluctability of evil, a prospect that Reuchlin, for instance, is too much of a Christian to let the cabalist in him entertain for more than a moment: "...not that the other children were not in human form, they were men too, but except


for Abel, all the rest seemed more like a crop of devils than men, such was their malice and wickedness. I must add that he did not actually produce demons and changelings as some of the vulgar and irreverent have falsely claimed..." [On the Art of the Kaballah, 75].

http://www.esoteric.msu.edu/Beitchman.html

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Influence of the Cabala on Milton:
http://books.google.com/books?id=zD6xVr ... &q&f=false

chapter 1
Introduction: Milton and the Jews: "A Project never so seasonable, and necessary, as now!"
Douglas A. Brooks

Next he refers to Ezra Pound's notorious "'disgust' with Milton's 'asinine
bigotry, his beastly hebraism, [and] the coarseness of his mentality.'"7 Lastly,
Mohamed offers up Samuel Johnson's depiction of Samson as "the tragedy
which ignorance has admired, and bigotry applauded.

http://assets.cambridge.org/97805218/88 ... xcerpt.pdf

=========================

Milton and the Jews

Three fine essays by Achsah Guibbory, Elizabeth Sauer, and Nicholas von Maltzahn are the most historical. Guibbory surveys the prose for comments on Jews, which yields mostly negative attitudes, and a fascinating silence on the controversial question of the day, whether to readmit the Jews to England. Milton indicts the English for behaving like Jews as they cry out for a king, although he simultaneously identifies with the Hebrew prophets, creating an "evolving sense of the relation of Israelite and English history" (19). Guibbory concludes that "it was unlikely that he would have welcomed the Jews" (34). Sauer focuses on how millenarian mil·le·nar·i·an  expectations shaped efforts at the readmission and (of course) conversion of the Jews, reading texts by Fifth Monarchists, Quakers, and the Jewish scholar Menasseh Ben Israel Manoel Dias Soeiro (1604–November 20, 1657), better known by his Hebrew name Menasseh Ben Israel (also, Menasheh ben Yossef ben Yisrael, also known with the Hebrew acronym, MB"Y , who came to England to argue for readmission. This is important context for Milton's claims in Areopagitica and elsewhere that England is a chosen nation, and for Milton's subsequent disillusionment with its backsliding. In von Maltzahn's study of the instrumental stakes of anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism, readmission appears largely driven by economics and the desire to convert Jews. That Milton lived off money-lending--"a usurious usurious adj. referring to the interest on a debt which exceeds the maximum interest rate allowed by law. (See: usury)  Citt, brought up in a usurer's household and himself a usurer" (72)--suggests the complexity of Milton's position, as seen from biography. Milton emerges as relatively moderate in his millenarianism and supersessionism (the argument that the Law is superseded), which suggests a philo-Semitism that von Maltzahn also locates in the Poems of 1673.

Douglas Trevor gathers references to Solomon, in the prose and Paradise Lost, to form a neat study of Milton on education. This is the essay most engaged with the Bible, a fact that points to what is generally not covered. Milton and the Jews is not heavy in biblical exegesis, source study, Judaic studies, or Christian Hebraism. As Douglas Brooks notes in his introduction, such issues, particularly Milton's Hebrew, have dominated previous criticism, and so this book goes elsewhere. The recent scholarship of Jason Rosenblatt and Jeffrey Shoulson is nevertheless much cited, which indicates that this volume is still relying on their learned work, even as it is lacking some of the textual criticism that would seem essential to understanding Milton's relationship to Jews.

The latter four essays work out symbolic understandings, and tend toward New Historicism (to be descriptive not derogatory). Benedict Robinson and Rachel Trubowitz investigate related questions of how Jews fit into early modern conceptions of the wide world. Robinson shows how, for Milton, Jews were in many ways linked with Islam, and with the larger Oriental world that included ancient Egypt. Racialized conceptions of these Others leak back onto a Restoration England that has chosen "a captain back for Egypt." Trubowitz shows Milton surprisingly connecting Jews with the Chinese, both groups sharing an idealized past, as well as a natural slavishness. Orientalism here is entangled in the ambivalent associations of Judaism and Hebraism, Old and New Worlds, and Jesuit and Stuart scholarship. Linda Tredennick examines how Jews function metaphorically in Christian identity, as a reading of Milton's allegory of Sin considers the Jew to be the supplement in the Reformation's semiotic economy. Jewishness especially haunts Milton's identity, as Matthew Biberman's essay on T. S. Eliot and the reception shows. This is a provocative piece, which directly shapes the relationship between Milton and Jews. Going back to an admiring Wordsworth, we find a Milton received "as the Christian who collapsed into the Jew" (111). The Jewish Milton, however, undergoes erasure, by anti-Semitic as well as Jewish critics, Biberman says, until the current reception finds him "a reified anti-Semite" (120). This volume certainly destabilizes such reification , if it exists, as well as providing many reasons for continuing to think of Milton as a most Jewish writer.

ABRAHAM STOLL

University of San Diego

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Milton+an ... 0190809921