4
If the support of powerful gentiles like the Grand Duke of Baden and Kaiser Wilhelm II helped Theodor Herzl launch the Zionist movement in Europe, Christian Zionist initiatives sprang up in the English-speaking world without any help from the Jews. Early Puritan leaders like John Cotton, who emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1633, hoped to see “willing people among the gentiles” bring the Jews back to their ancestral home.[1] Five years before Herzl met William Hechler, some of the most powerful people in the United States sent a petition to President Benjamin Harrison asking him to use his diplomatic influence to further the project of a Jewish state.[2] Five years before Herzl published his pamphlet, at a time when leading Jewish families like the Rothschilds and the Warburgs had no interest in such an absurd idea, powerful Christian leaders like J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, among others, were on the record in support of a Jewish home in Palestine.[3]
Historically, the Anglo-American world had not always been so sympathetic to Jewish causes. Medieval England had if anything been more hostile to the Jews than medieval Spain; in 1290, King Edward I capped a century of intensifying persecution by expelling the three thousand or so Jews who lived in England at that time. The Edict of Expulsion would stand until the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, and Jews were forbidden to set foot in England or Wales without special permission.[4]
A century later, Geoffrey Chaucer’s masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, opens a window into the murderous prejudice against Jews that was widespread at the time. In one of the stories, a fatherless seven-year-old boy memorized a hymn to the Virgin Mary in his choir school. The boy was so struck with the beauty of the music and so eager to honor the Mother of God that he would sing the hymn in his clear and carrying voice on the way to and from school. Unfortunately, his route passed through what the poet calls the town’s “filthie Jewerye,” or Jewish Quarter. As paraphrased into modern English, this is what happened next:
Our waspish first foe, Satan, builds his nest
Inside the heart that beats in Jewish breast.
He asked the Jews: “O Hebrew folk, alas
Is this the kind of thing you call OK,
That such a boy will walk his merry way
And fill your ears with some vile Christian song
That teaches what your laws consider wrong?”
From this time forth the Jews began to plan
From out the world this guiltless boy to chase.
They hired a desperate, homicidal man
That in an alley had a hidden place
And as the child passed by with heedless pace
The cursed Jew grabbed him tight and held him fast,
The throat he cut, the corpse in pit he cast.
The boy’s distraught mother searched for her son throughout the town. At last she came to the Jewish Quarter, where they denied all knowledge of what had happened. But, the tale continues, after she had asked for help in vain, she sat down and began to cry for her son—and from the pit in which he had been cast, his clear voice was heard singing a hymn to the Virgin. Thanks to this miracle, the murder was discovered (the phrase “Murder will out” comes to us from this poem), and the nasty, murdering Jews got what they deserved: they were dragged by wild horses and then hung.[5]
This is how medieval England saw the Jews. Duplicitous, scheming, filled with hate—the Jews in the poem live by usury and guile. English hatred and fear of Jews didn’t end with Chaucer. Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice reveals a picture of Jews that is not very far from Chaucer’s. Shylock seethes with resentment against the Christians who have oppressed and wronged him. Bitterness has eaten away the better part of his humanity, and he finds his joy in the suffering of the Christians he hates.
One hundred eighty-five years after King James I saw a 1605 performance of The Merchant of Venice, George Washington sent a letter to the small Jewish congregation in the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island. In it, he declared that the Jews of the United States were full and equal citizens by right: “All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”[6]
This was revolutionary. Jews did not need to swear a special oath, renounce Jewish personal law in their dealings with one another, or do anything else to be accepted as active members of the American commonwealth. Washington’s sentiments in this letter are even more remarkable because they were uncontroversial in the America of that day; he was reflecting the common sentiment of his compatriots at that time about how their federal government should be organized. (Americans were more conservative when it came to state governments. Some states maintained religious establishments until the 1830s; North Carolina only dropped its religious test for officeholders in 1868.)[7]
Clearly, something fundamental had changed in the English-speaking world since the days of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare. How and why did that happen? How did Jews go from being the enemy within to being fellow citizens worthy of trust and respect?
Four related sets of changes combined to create a new, more favorable view of the Jews in the English-speaking world. First, the British Reformation led to a reappraisal of the religious position of the Jews. Second, the English-speaking world embraced a historical and cultural vision that linked the fate of the Jews with the fate of the English speakers. Third, the English-speaking world moved away from the medieval “total society” toward a vision of a pluralistic society in which different faiths could coexist side by side. Finally, fears of capitalism and the disruptive forces of free markets gradually faded as the English-speaking world came to harness these forces as the engines of its own rapid development. As a result of these independent but related sets of changes, the English and the Scots came to see Jews in a more favorable light both at home and in their colonies overseas, and because American society was more profoundly affected by these forces, the different view of the Jewish people went further, struck deeper roots, and has lasted longer in the United States than elsewhere.
The British Reformation and the Jews
Like so many of the revolutions in sentiment that have changed human relations through the ages, the Anglo-American “new look” at the Jews had its origin in religion and went on to affect secular ideas and institutions. Specifically, the changes unleashed by the Reformation led to a revolutionary upheaval in the theological appraisal of Jewish-Christian relations, and those changes would reverberate in secular politics and social thought. The original Protestant Reformers gave little thought and (especially in Martin Luther’s case) little sympathy to the Jews, but the changes the Reformers set in motion had many religious and secular consequences they didn’t anticipate, and some of those had to do with the position of Jews in predominantly Christian societies.
In England and Scotland the change began with something very simple, but very profound: the translation of the Bible into English and the distribution of cheap editions to ordinary people all over the land who could, and did, read the book for themselves. In the Middle Ages, the Bible was not available in the language of ordinary people, and before the invention of printing, books of any kind were expensive and rare. All over Europe the appearance of Bible editions in local languages sparked generations of controversy and war. But in the British Isles, as readers spent more time with their Bibles, English and Scottish Christians came to take a second look at the Jewish people.
During the Middle Ages Christianity fanned the flames of antisemitism across Europe. Medieval Christians generally believed that the exile of the Jews was their just punishment for rejecting and crucifying the Savior sent by God. The Jews were cursed, and the consequences of the curse were both exile and blindness. People this wicked could be capable of anything; Jews were often objects of both fear and hate to their neighbors.
Additionally, before the Reformation, when the celebration of the Mass was the liturgical centerpiece of worship, the service each week revolved around the re-creation of the death of Christ in the sacrifice of the Eucharist. Each week the prayers repeated the story of Jesus’s passion, crucifixion, and death; each week the congregation was asked to remember the cruel mistreatment of an innocent man by a vicious and depraved Jewish mob. Holy Week, the most intense and theatrical observances of the Christian year, often revolved around re-readings and reenactments of those terrible events. “Let him be crucified! Let him be crucified!” a crowd of actors representing the Jews of Jesus’s day,[*1] sometimes dressed up as contemporary Jews, would shout. “His blood be on us and on our children!”[8]
Rituals like the Stations of the Cross commemorated Jesus’s suffering and death. Priests would lead groups of the devout to each station, at which point they would preach passionately about the evils Christ suffered, the mockery and scorn his pain attracted from the crowds lining his route, and the innocence and meekness with which the Lamb of God accepted his torment.
Nothing in the rest of the Bible received the kind of attention the Passion Narratives (as the accounts of Jesus’s death in the four gospels are called) did, and those narratives, deprived of any context or explanation, helped strengthen popular dislike and suspicion of the Jews.
For those who wanted to hear more about the Bible stories, most of what they would hear came from the other sections of the four gospels, as the priests gave sermons about different episodes in Jesus’s life. Many of these involved theological and social disputes with different Jewish religious factions of the time: the Pharisees and the Sadducees were well-known to Christians as the chief opponents and enemies of their Lord.
This situation changed dramatically at the time of the Reformation. With the translated Bibles, biblical study was no longer something that demanded advanced theological training, abundant leisure, and access to rare and expensive hand-copied texts. As the idea spread that God speaks directly through this book, and that he speaks to anybody who chose to read it with a humble heart, the Bible became the intellectual and emotional center of millions of lives. Reading the Bible in this way opened an avenue of escape and discovery for common people. In your day job you were at the mercy of your husband, your master, your landlord. When you were reading the Bible and reflecting on its meaning, you were speaking directly with the ruler of the universe. And in those moments of spiritual communion with the Almighty, you were the equal of any king, any priest, any bishop in the world.
As millions still do, those readers read the whole Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, over and over again during the course of their lives. (By age fourteen the future President Harry Truman had read the family Bible cover to cover three times.)[9] These readers were in closer touch with the Jewish scriptures than any group of Christians since the beginning of the Church. The Jewish scriptures are, for one thing, much longer than the Christian ones.[*2] In my own copy of the King James Version, the four-hundred-year-old translation that most American Christians used until the middle of the last century, the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament take up 813 pages from Genesis to Malachi. The twenty-seven books of the New Testament from Matthew to Revelation are only one third as long: the Old Testament is 75 percent of the Christian Bible.
Christians who make a habit of reading the Bible regularly often therefore spend more time with the old Jewish scriptures than with the new Christian ones. The Passion Narratives, the angry disputes with the Sadducees and Pharisees, and the persecution of the early Christians by Jewish authorities were still in the Bible, but there were also stories of Jewish heroes of faith, of prophets and patriarchs, kings and warriors.
The Old Testament as read by the Protestants wasn’t just longer than the New Testament; it was often more useful. The Old Testament had more to say about politics, government, and war than the New. Jesus was what Machiavelli called an “unarmed prophet,” and as he told Pontius Pilate, his Kingdom was “not of this earth.” He taught people how to approach God, how to love their neighbors, how to reorder their priorities, but he did not tell them how to organize their civic lives. Unlike Moses and Muhammad, who left detailed instructions for their followers about various political, civil, and even sanitary laws, Jesus had very little to say about the tax rate, the best organization of government, the civil law, and the rights and duties of magistrates. He does not say what makes for a just war, or how his followers should behave in a conflict. The gospels say not one word either in direct defense of slavery or against it. There is nothing there about inheritance law, nothing about the proper age of consent for marriage, nothing about how a country should choose its rulers.
Jesus may not have spoken on these subjects, but the Bible did—often in the Old Testament. There, God judged kings and nations, gave victory in battle, established principles of civil law, and generally supplied the guidance that nations need. The New Testament was produced by and for a small sectarian movement; the Old Testament is the library of a people. Christians like the Protestant Reformers who believe that the Bible is the source of all the wisdom humanity needs must spend much of their time searching the Jewish scriptures for examples and advice.
If most Jews in the New Testament, with the exception of Jesus and his followers, are not very sympathetic as literary characters, the Jews of the Old Testament are presented as heroes (and heroines) of faith. Abraham, Gideon, Moses, David, Nathan, Solomon, Hannah, Deborah, Samuel, Joshua, Samson, Elijah: the children of the Reformation grew up among these familiar presences. Protestants gave Old Testament names to their children and to this day ancient Hebrew names like Joshua, Sarah, Samuel, Josiah, Hannah, Jesse, and Ruth are as American as apple pie. For centuries, comic writers trying to evoke the spirit of backwoods America gave Old Testament names to their characters—Ichabod Crane of Sleepy Hollow, Li’l Abner of Dogpatch, Gomer Pyle of Mayberry.
To read the literature of England, Scotland, and America from the seventeenth century into our own day is to find the Old Testament at every turn. Many of the most familiar hymns were metrical adaptations of the Hebrew psalms. Poets from John Milton to W. H. Auden were fascinated by the rhythms and themes of the Jewish scriptures. For many people, the history and the place names and the landscape of the Holy Land were almost as familiar as the villages in which they lived. From Bethesda, Maryland, to Berea, Kentucky, their hometowns often bore Old Testament names. The Anglo-American imagination was saturated in the Bible. Joseph and his coat of many colors, Jacob’s ladder, the plagues of Egypt, Jonah and the whale, Daniel and the lion’s den, David and Goliath: there was scarcely a farmhouse or cabin in the United States where these stories weren’t among the most familiar of all—told by parents and grandparents, sounded out by children learning to read from the family Bible, turned into folk songs, echoing and reechoing in the mind from infancy to old age, generation on generation.
The Doctrine of the Jews
Familiarity with the Jewish scriptures and admiration for Jewish heroes was only the beginning. As Protestant theologians worked out the meaning of their new religious vision, many were drawn to a fundamental reconceptualization of the place of contemporary Jews in the divine plan.
Most of the early Church Fathers and the medieval theologians believed that when the Jews rejected Jesus’s claim to be the Messiah, the Jewish people lost their special place in God’s plan. The Church was the “new Israel,” and Christians as the new Jews were the inheritors of all the promises made to Abraham and the patriarchs and kings. God had no more business with Jews as Jews; they could become part of the new Israel by converting and being baptized, but otherwise they had no further part to play in the sacred story of God’s redemptive intervention in this world.
Technically, this idea is known as “supersessionism”: the Church and the Christians have superseded or replaced Israel and the Jews in the divine plan. Many Calvinists and Puritans, however, came to reject it, believing that the Jews of the present day, without Christ though they were, still had a part to play in God’s story. The Jews, they believed, may have turned their backs on God, but God is faithful when men are not and, in the end, the old Israel would once more be reconciled to its God. That reconciliation, they believed, would not just be spiritual; the Jews would return someday to the land that was promised to Abraham. In many circles, it became a mark of Calvinist doctrine to believe that Israel would be restored.
Against a thousand years of Catholic (and Eastern Orthodox) theology, the English Puritans insisted that the Old Testament had to be interpreted literally as well as figuratively, allegorically, and typologically. When God said to Abraham in verse 8 of chapter 17 of the book of Genesis, “And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession, and I will be their God,” Christians were obliged to interpret that as a literal promise of the actual Holy Land to real-world, physical Jews. It was no good talking about the symbolism, or saying that this was an allegory representing God’s promise of an eternal home in heaven to Christians; those interpretations might be and indeed were also true, but the plain, commonsense literal meaning of the text was not to be denied. Likewise, God’s promise of an eternal relationship with the Jewish people also had to be understood by Christians as still true today. The “New Covenant” that Jesus established with Christians went beyond but did not negate the “Old Covenant” that God had established with Abraham. God was faithful and His Word once given would never fail.
If the Jews were still in a covenantal relationship with God, it followed that the Jews of the contemporary world were still a people, a nation. They had a history and a future, and they remained a special object of divine care.
Many Protestants’ insistence on the literal meaning of the Old Testament combined with their close study of every page in the Word of God led them to another conclusion. What God says in chapter 12, verse 3 of Genesis to Abraham is also still true today: “And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed.”
When millions of Americans go into the voting booth today they bring with them a belief in this verse of the Bible. It doesn’t mean that they will always prioritize Israel over other concerns or that they will assume that God wants the United States to do whatever a given Israeli prime minister is proposing. Nor does it automatically free people from prejudice and keep antisemitic stereotypes at bay. Still, many Protestants feel and felt obliged to take those words seriously.
Not every verse in the Bible gets an equal amount of attention from evangelical Protestants. (Paul’s exhortations to remain single have never been popular, for example, among American evangelicals.) But the Abrahamic promises in Genesis became and remained prominent in the mind of American Protestantism because they are linked to what became a key concept in Protestant theology: the idea of a “covenant.”
Covenants are legal agreements between two parties. In Protestant theology (especially, though not only, in Calvinism) a series of covenants between God and humanity mark the basic stages in God’s work of redemption. God made covenants with Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and the Israelites at Sinai; with David, and through Jesus, he made the “New Covenant” that, Protestants taught, was the one toward which the others all pointed. These covenants come with commandments and are the basis of moral obligation. God’s promise to Abraham came with the commandment to circumcise his male children on the eighth day. The Sinai covenant involved the acceptance by the Israelites of the Ten Commandments and the other laws in the Torah. The New Covenant of the New Testament offered a better path to a relationship with God and offered it to the whole world rather than only to the Jews. The Protestants took all the covenants seriously, and generations of preachers highlighted the texts that described them and made sure that the people in the pews understood what covenants were and why they mattered.
Once the promises made to the Jews were accepted as still valid today, something else became clear: at some point in the future God would bring the Jews back to the Holy Land. There are many biblical prophecies to this effect; one example is found in the book of the prophet Isaiah, chapter 11, verses 11 and 12:
And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall set his hand again the second time to recover the remnant of his people, which shall be left, from Assyria, and from Egypt, and from Pathros, and from Cush, and from Elam, and from Shinar, and from Hamath, and from the islands of the sea. And he shall set up an ensign for the nations and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth.
The first exile of the Jewish people is the so-called Babylonian Captivity, said to date from 586 to 538 BCE. Protestant exegetes read this passage from Isaiah as explicitly predicting a second return from a second exile.[10] The second exile was the one that began when the Romans crushed the Jewish Revolt forty years after the crucifixion of Jesus; was Isaiah predicting that this exile, too, would have an end?
Nothing could have seemed more unlikely in the seventeenth century than that such an event would take place, but Protestant theologians felt that their understanding of the holy books required this interpretation, and there is a long tradition of Protestant predictions of an ultimate return of the Jews. In 1666, Increase Mather took to the pulpit of the First Church of Boston, the largest and oldest congregation in Massachusetts Bay Colony, and told his congregation that “the time will surely come, when the body of the twelve Tribes of Israel shall be brought out of their present condition of bondage and misery, into a glorious and wonderful state of salvation, not only spiritual but temporal.” They would “recover the Possession of their Promised Land.” Mather would go on to publish this theory in London in 1669 in The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation Explained and Applyed.[11]
The colonies did not have a publishing industry, and had to look to the mother country to publish and buy books. But the Puritan tradition of which Mather was a part flourished in seventeenth-century England as much as in New England. At the dawn of the century, theologian Thomas Brightman was writing of the Jews, “Shal they returne agayn to Jerusalem? There is nothing more sure: the Prophets plainly confirme it, and beat often upon it.” Lawyer, MP, and leading Puritan Henry Finch wrote in a 1621 volume called The Worlds Great Restauration, or, the Calling of the Iewes that the Jews would defeat Gog and Magog (which he interpreted as a prophecy referring to Islam) at the end of days and “sit as a Lady in…true Tsion.” He further emphasized to his readers, “Where Israel, Iudah, Tsion, Ierusalem, &c. are named in this argument [i.e., in the Bible], the Holy Ghost meaneth not the spirituall Israel, or Church of God collected of the Gentiles, no nor of the Iewes and Gentiles both (for each of these have their promises severally and apart) but Israel properly descended out of Iacobs loynes.” These views were very much in the Puritan mainstream.[12]
This kind of thinking endured intact in the American colonies long after ardor for Puritanism had died down almost completely in England. Similar predictions would flow from generations of American theologians and religious leaders. The most famous of them all, Jonathan Edwards, maintained that the Jews would even increase the amount of land under their rule beyond the Israel of biblical times: “And it is the more evident, that the Jews will return to their own land again, because they never have yet possessed one quarter of that land, which was so often promised them, from the Red Sea to the river Euphrates. (Ex. 23:31; Gen. 15:18; Deut. 11:24; Josh. 1:4).”[13]
For American divines it remained a point of dispute whether the Jews would convert to Christianity before or after their return to the Holy Land. Nevertheless, a sea change had taken place. In the new, Puritan understanding, the Jews were back in God’s plan, their covenant intact, with a role to play in the future under divine guidance. As the centuries wore on and the Ottoman Empire weakened in a way visible even from half a world away, divines in America from this intellectual lineage would continue to proclaim God’s plan in this regard with mounting excitement as this once unimaginably improbable event began to look possible.
These early American thinkers drew not only on the Old Testament for their beliefs but also on the Epistles of St. Paul. These letters by the most active of the early Christian evangelists are both the earliest Christian documents that survive (scholars believe that most of the epistles were written before any of the gospels assumed their final form) and the closest thing the Bible contains to a systematic exposition of Christian theology and ecclesiastical guidance. From the time of Martin Luther, whose meditations on Paul’s Epistle (letter) to the Romans led him to the key ideas on which he was to build his theology, Protestant laypeople and clergy combed these letters with the greatest possible attention for guidance on matters of faith and conduct.
Paul was a zealous Jew who led early efforts to persecute Christians until he had a vision of the risen Christ and embraced Christianity. Like Jesus, he would spend much time engaged in theological controversy with Jewish leaders (a story told at some length in the biblical book known as the Book of Acts). In the letters he wrote to various church communities of the day, he not only reflected on these controversies but also set out principles that in his view should guide the relations between Christians and Jews, principles that had apparently been neglected during the medieval period. As Protestants encountered Paul’s thoughts on the subject, many came to believe that the treatment of Jews was yet another area in which the Roman Catholic Church had gone wrong.[14]
Paul’s Epistle to the Romans is the longest and most theologically significant account of his thinking. In the eleventh chapter of the epistle, Paul examines the question of why the majority of the Jews, God’s Chosen People, had not accepted the Christian message, what God’s purpose was in this development, and what would happen in the future. First, Paul notes that it should not surprise Christians that only a minority of Jews had embraced the new teaching. Citing many Old Testament passages, he points out that over and over in Israel’s history the majority rejected God’s message and only a “saving remnant” remained faithful. But God was faithful even when humans failed. God stood by Israel even when Israel didn’t stand by God.
For Paul, as many Protestants understood him, this was a vital theological point. His doctrine of human salvation held that Jesus came to die for human beings because humans simply can’t do the right thing on their own. The failure of the Jews to remain faithful to God under their covenant wasn’t evidence of some uniquely pathological Jewish blindness or the result of a curse; it was simply one aspect of humanity’s larger problem. We all recognize that the moral law (however we might understand it) is correct and ought to be obeyed, yet none of us can live up to our own moral standards. If we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that we all fall short. But, and this is for many Christians the essence of Paul’s concept of religion, God loves us too much to leave us in this fix. From this perspective, the failure (as Christians understood it) of Israel to live up to the covenant of Moses begins to look less like an endpoint and more like a beginning. Israel’s inability to live up to the Old Covenant or to accept the New is only what must be expected, but human failure does not mean the failure of God’s plan. His plan for the Jews continues.
At some future date, as many Protestants interpreted him, Paul predicts, the Jews will be gathered to Christ and that moment, when it comes, will mark the culmination of world history. Noting that the failure of the Jews to embrace the gospel of Christ opened the door to the salvation of the gentiles, Paul speculates that the acceptance of the gospel by the Jews would mean even more: “For if the casting away of them [the unbelieving Jew] be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead?” (Romans 11:15).
Paul, as many Puritan theologians came to understand him, believed that the conversion of Jews was delayed to allow the gospel to be preached to the non-Jewish world, giving non-Jews the chance to embrace Christianity and find God. Rather than cursing and reviling the Jews for their failure to convert, non-Jewish Christians should thank God for his mercy in delaying the end times to allow people from all over the world to enter God’s kingdom. God sent a “partial hardening” to the non-Christian Jews (i.e., they accepted some of his plan but not all of it), Paul wrote, so that there might be space before the end of the world for the full complement of gentiles to be converted and saved (Romans 11:25).
To medieval Christians the survival of the Jews was simply a sign of God’s continuing wrath. The theologians who followed the Puritan reading of Paul came to a different conclusion. The unbelief of the Jews may have been a defiance of God’s will, but it was also part of God’s plan: “through their [the Jews’] fall salvation is come unto the Gentiles” (11:11). Additionally, the Jews were still a special people with a special role in world history. Their dramatic conversion would be part of the events at the end of the world that prepared for the return of Christ, the Last Judgment, and the establishment of God’s true kingdom.
This new view of the Jewish future entered the wider cultural consciousness of the English-speaking world. In the seventeenth century, in Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” the suitor says that if we had enough time, “And you should, if you please, refuse/Till the conversion of the Jews.” Isaac Newton mentioned the restoration of the Jews, in a volume he wrote on the book of Revelation.[15] In Paradise Regained, John Milton wrote:
Yet He at length, time to himself best known,
Remembering Abraham, by some wondrous call
May bring them back, repentant and sincere,
And at their passing cleave the Assyrian flood,
While to their native land with joy they haste,
As the Red Sea and Jordan once he cleft,
When to the Promised Land their fathers passed.
To his due time and providence I leave them.[16]
Another doctrinal shift further influenced Protestants toward a less hostile attitude toward the Jewish people and their faith. From Martin Luther on, Protestant theologians stressed the role of election, of God’s choice in the process of salvation. You didn’t earn salvation by doing good deeds (or lose it by doing bad ones); indeed, it was blasphemous to think so. You were saved because God chose to save you in spite of your sins. As Protestants thought through the implications of this idea, many reached the conclusion that the question of salvation was entirely about God’s predestination. The Jews weren’t rejecting Christianity because they were particularly evil or rebellious; rather, it was part of God’s plan to preserve the nation of Israel in unbelief until, in his own good time, he willed their conversion.
Seen in this light, persecuting the Jews was irrational, even blasphemous. You were protesting against the plan of the Divine Architect of the Universe. You were protesting against something that (per Paul) staved off your own destruction. Ultimately, you were protesting against omnipotent will.
These changes led to another very important shift in the attitude of many Anglo-American Christians toward the persistence among them of a Jewish minority. In the Middle Ages, Jews were seen as threats to Christianity. Their refusal to accept the truth of the Christian gospel or to worship Jesus as the Messiah was felt as an argument against the truth of Christianity: if Jesus’s own people, who knew their scriptures best, thought he was a fraud, did this mean that Christianity was false? This fear meant less to the new generations of Protestant believers. The continuing existence of the Jewish people from the standpoint of Protestant theology went from being evidence that Christianity might be mistaken to evidence that the Bible was true. The world had once been full of many nations larger and more powerful than the Jewish people; that the Jews, small and persecuted, should have survived was a sign that God is real and that he keeps his word. God promised Abraham that the Jews would survive, and the Jews, unlike the Hittites, the Babylonians, and the Assyrians, are still with us today. And when and if the Jews should return to the Holy Land, Americans were predisposed to see that return as yet another sign that the God of the Bible is real and that the Christian religion is therefore true. The existence of the Jews was evidence for the existence of God; any sign that the Jews were returning to Palestine would be seen as proof that God was acting in history.
As a result of their theological reflections, American scholars and preachers came to several conclusions about the Jews:
· Although they do not, in unbelief, have the salvation that comes alone through Christ, Jews remain under God’s special covenant and care.
· The Jews are a nation, not a religious minority or a racial group.
· To hate or persecute Jews is a crime against God, and it is a crime that almighty justice will avenge.
· The gift of the Holy Land to Abraham remains valid and the Bible prophesies that the Jews will someday return to it.
· It is a sign of God’s blessing on America if the American people understand these truths and build a special relationship with the Jewish people.
It was never the case that all Americans were Protestants or that all Protestant Americans accepted these ideas about the Jews. Nevertheless, these ideas influenced millions of Americans from the colonial era through the present day. The power of religion in American life rises and falls across the generations, but the salience of these ideas in American religion and in the broader culture remains. These views helped shape the American mind for centuries, and they are shaping it still, among secular people as well as among religious ones.
Historical and Theological Identification
If Protestants’ theology led many of them to take a different and more positive view of the continuing role of the Jews in God’s plans, a combination of theology and historical experience led them to a sense of connection and identification with Jews. In England and Scotland in particular a popular nationalism and identity arose which saw these countries as Chosen People standing in the same kind of relationship to God that the ancient Hebrews did: chosen by God and standing in a covenanted relationship with him. The failure of the Reformation to sweep Europe and the success of the Catholic Counter-Reformation meant that a solid majority of Europe remained faithful to the old religion. That left Protestants feeling exposed. Before the rise of Prussia in the mid-eighteenth century, England was the only Protestant great power, and from the time of the Spanish Armada (1588) through the Battle of Waterloo (1815) the English associated threats to their national security with great powers on the continent often in league with the pope.
The more radical Protestants in Britain and their American cousins felt themselves further embattled at home. Combating the backsliding, Catholicizing Stuart kings, the seventeenth-century dissidents saw themselves as a tiny minority of believers in a hostile world, utterly dependent on the power of God for their survival.
For Bible-reading people, the parallels with the situation of the ancient Hebrews were numerous and convincing. Like the Hebrews, they were the one faithful nation in a world of darkness. Like the Hebrews, they were surrounded by powerful enemies. And like the Hebrews, they could only survive by staying close to God.
One of the most powerful moments in the Hebrew scriptures comes in Exodus when the Hebrew people, newly rescued from slavery in Egypt, assemble before the presence of God on Mount Sinai, receive the Ten Commandments, and accept the Covenant that God has offered them. They will keep God’s laws and worship him only, and God will protect the people. This is the moment that makes the Hebrew people a nation; it was a moment that echoed in the thoughts of the early Protestants who also saw themselves under a covenant with God.
The most dramatic expression of this current of thought politically was found among the Scottish Covenanters. As the storm clouds that would lead to civil war gathered over England and Scotland, radical Calvinists in Scotland interpreted current events through a biblical lens and came to believe that God had called the Scots as a people to a special relationship, just as God extended protection to Israel in the Bible when the Jews obeyed the biblical laws. As religious and political tension mounted, Calvinists summoned the Scottish people to make a national covenant with God, and in 1638 swore the Scottish National Covenant, in which they pledged to God and one another their determination to preserve and live by the Reformed (Presbyterian) Church in Scotland. Their decision to abide by this covenant and protect it by force directly precipitated the so-called Bishops’ Wars and indirectly led to the English Civil Wars. The Scottish determination to stick by this covenant guided Scottish policy throughout the violent period that followed. It led various factions to split first with the king, then with the English Parliamentarians, then with each other. It encouraged popular uprisings and lonely martyrdoms alike. One of the last factions to adhere to it, the Cameronians, were almost an archetype of what would later become American religiosity: outlawed by their own government, they would meet and preach in fields, “worshipping defiantly with a Bible in one hand and a weapon in the other, and slaughtering the forces that were sent to suppress them.”[17]
The New England settlements also believed themselves to be under a covenant with God. Through their experience, so like that of the biblical Hebrews, of moving into a land inhabited by others and making it their own, they came to see themselves as a Chosen People, like the ancient Hebrews, called to covenant with God and given a new land to possess on condition that they fulfilled the covenant.[18] This provided them with both psychological reassurance that God would protect them in the strange, dangerous, and remote corner of the world to which he had called them, and perhaps also justification to salve their consciences about taking land from the natives.
During all the wars of the colonial era and the Revolution itself, many Americans saw themselves as a Chosen People in the wilderness, protected by and accountable to the God of the Bible. When they won victories, they gave thanks to God; when they suffered defeat they looked for the faults in their conduct that had led God to punish them. Whether fighting off Native American tribes, French forces, or, during the Revolution, the armies of King George, many Americans compared their situation to that of the ancient Hebrews; they prayed to Jehovah and looked to his mighty arm for protection.
While only a relatively small number of Americans went as far as to think of the United States as God’s “New Israel,” the idea that God would deal with America with something analogous to the care—and discipline—that he showed the Hebrew people in the Bible was widely accepted. The American colonists formed their view of history by studying the books of the Bible that recount the adventures of the Hebrew people under the judges and kings, seeking parallels in the careers of those ancient leaders to the events of their own time. From the first English settlement in the New World to the Revolution and beyond, the Americans were immersed in the images, the language, and the historical ideas of the Hebrew Bible. Of the over three thousand citations catalogued in the works of the Founding Fathers by Professor Donald Lutz, 34 percent are to the Bible, marking it by far the most cited single influence on their thought, and many of those citations reference the Jewish scriptures.[19] In 1776, both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson proposed designs for the Great Seal of the new nation that would appeal to the public: Franklin’s showed Moses dividing the Red Sea as Pharaoh (often presented at the time as synonymous with King George III) is drowned, while Jefferson’s showed the Israelites following the cloud and the pillar of fire through the desert.[20] (This was an appeal to popular sentiment on Jefferson’s part; privately he wrote that the God of the Old Testament was “cruel, vindictive, capricious, and unjust.”)[21]
The connection with Israel became a building block of American identity, and not just for free whites. Enslaved Blacks, as they turned to Christianity in large numbers during the waves of evangelical revivals in the generation after the American Revolution, saw themselves as God’s Israel in Egyptian bondage. They awaited a Moses who would lead them forth, and spoke longingly of the year of jubilee, the biblical promise of freedom for the slaves.
Such ideas about the ancient Hebrews did not automatically make Americans lovers of modern Jews, but they steadily undercut the negative ideas and stereotypes that they inherited from the medieval past. Their direct experience with Jews was small.[22] The first written record of a Jewish presence in Maryland, for example, comes in 1658 when a Jew by the name of Jacob Lumbrozo was tried for blasphemy; convicted, he was released as the result of an amnesty issued on the occasion of Richard Cromwell succeeding his father in power that same year.[23] Only about one thousand Jews lived in the thirteen colonies at the time of the Revolution.[24]
The Desacralization of the Social Order
A third set of changes brought about by the peculiar course of the Reformation in Britain and America ended by changing the core values of many people in both societies in ways that made it easier for Jewish individuals and organizations to find a comfortable place in the English-speaking world.
The medieval Christian world, as noted, was a holistic society that sought to bring all of society into harmony and unity under a set of basic values and rules grounded in the theology and the practice of the Roman Catholic Church. It was in many ways a beautiful vision, but it had no room for religious or social dissidents.
The Reformation did not at first challenge the medieval ideal of a united Christendom. Martin Luther and John Calvin wanted to correct the abuses they saw in the Catholic Church, but their goal was to set up a purified and reformed Christendom that would be just as holistic and united as the old one. Both Protestants and Catholics long struggled to unite Europe under one of the two competing faiths before reluctantly accepting the fact of division.
Even so, the ideal of the holistic society was dominant in most of the individual political units of the post-Reformation world. Europe as a whole might be divided, but Prussia was Lutheran, Spain was Catholic, Geneva was Calvinist, and Russia was Orthodox. The famous cuius regio principle from the Peace of Augsburg upheld the idea that the ruler of each state could choose the religion around which that particular country would be organized.
This meant that Europe was more religiously diverse than formerly, but each European kingdom, principality, and city-state held up an ideal of religious uniformity within its frontiers. The Jews still stuck out, however, and their presence was still seen by many, Protestant as well as Catholic, as containing moral, political, and economic threats to the social order.
But in England and Scotland, the lengthy and drawn-out process of the Reformation took a different turn. Protestant opinion continued to divide; the English, for example, read their King James Bibles in the hundreds of thousands, and they found that they could not agree on what the Bible meant. Should churches be governed by bishops? Should babies be baptized in infancy, or should baptism be for adults only? Was it necessary that Holy Communion be administered by an ordained priest, and what exactly happened to the bread and the wine during a Communion service? Were kings and lords appointed by God, or did the Bible teach that all people were equal? Was war against the law of God? Were stained glass windows and statues of saints useful reminders of divine truths, or did they tempt ignorant people to practice idolatry, worshipping an image rather than worshipping God alone?
All these questions and more divided British Protestants, and before long the differences were so deep and the passions aroused by the disputes so intense that more and more English and Scottish Christians began to leave the established churches in their respective kingdoms. The English Civil Wars of the 1640s and the upheavals of the next generation when England and Scotland executed one king, lived under a Lord Protector, overthrew a second monarch, invited three princes from overseas to come and reign over them, and ended by merging the two kingdoms of England and Scotland into the United Kingdom, saw the religious unity of the realms broken once and for all.
Communities of dissidents like the Presbyterians, the Baptists, the Quakers, the Congregationalists, and dozens of others broke off from the churches of England and Scotland for various reasons, until both countries were full of “nonconformists” who belonged to different religious sects or, as we now call them, denominations. Most Christians at the time thought this breakdown was terrible, and hoped that it was a temporary way station on the road back toward a unified, holistic Christian society. But as time went by, in Britain and much more in America, it became clear that this hope was an illusion. The religious differences between the denominations were too great for the restoration of a national church that everyone would belong to.
For some Christians, however, “denominationalism” wasn’t just a necessary evil. It was a positive good. For some of the more radical Protestants, the medieval ideal of a single church supported by and supporting the government was evil in and of itself. The union of church and state corrupted both. People would belong to a church not because they agreed with its doctrines and sought to work out their salvation in its fellowship, but because church membership was the road to political and economic power. Meanwhile, the government, with the powerful backing of the clergy, would soon become so powerful that civil liberty would be lost.
For these Protestants, the traditional, all-encompassing vision of a unified Christendom was losing its appeal. They believed that the civil authorities should run the secular government and leave each religious congregation free to manage its own affairs. The separation of church and state became an ideal, especially for groups like the Baptists who had known little except persecution and discrimination from governments aligned with religious establishments.
Along with the separation of church and state, another concept took root: the sinfulness of religious persecution. During the religious wars of the seventeenth century in Britain, every religious group underwent periods of persecution. The Anglicans persecuted the radical Protestants until the civil war broke out. Once the king was defeated and Cromwell was in power, the Anglicans could be stripped of their power and wealth unless they were careful. When Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, the triumphant Anglicans forced savage persecution laws through Parliament, and many nonconforming clergy and believers were deprived of their positions, fined, imprisoned, and worse.
As Reformed Protestants and their Baptist cousins endured persecution, they developed a new and radical religious idea: that persecution was not, as generations of popes, archbishops, and kings had taught, a religious duty. It was a terrible sin, and not just when Christians were the victims. Out of the fires of religious persecution came a belief among increasing numbers of Protestants that religious toleration, as well as the separation of church and state, was God’s will.
In 1644, Roger Williams, who had been expelled from Massachusetts by the Puritans on religious grounds and had just secured the charter for what would become the state of Rhode Island (then the colony of Providence Plantation), published The Bloudy Tenent, of Persecution, for Cause of Conscience. In it, he declared:
It is the will and command of God that since the coming of his Son the Lord Jesus, a permission of the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish or anti-Christian consciences or worships be granted to all men in all nations and countries….God requireth not a uniformity of religion to be enacted and enforced in any civil state….True civility and Christianity may flourish in a state or kingdom notwithstanding the permission of divers and contrary consciences either Jew or gentile.[25]
It will not surprise the reader to learn that all denominations were tolerated in Williams’s new colony, one of a growing number—mostly founded by groups that suffered persecution in England, such as the Quakers (Pennsylvania) or Catholics (Maryland)—that enshrined freedom of worship and of conscience into law.
By the eighteenth century, the United States was well on the way to a new kind of ideal for a Christian society. Each denomination would have its vision about how the church and family life ought to be structured. Society depended on the strength of these faith communities and associations and on their ability to form virtuous citizens who could provide the civil government with honest and public-spirited administration. But it was not the place of any one of these religious communities to remake the body politic in its own image. America would be a Christian republic in the dual senses that most of its citizens would be Christians and that the republic they built proceeded from their understanding of the kind of commonwealth Christians ought to build. However, the authorities of that republic had nothing to do with regulating the beliefs of the citizens. No special class of prelates would share in its tax revenues, no religious test would be required for any civil office whatever, and the republic would not favor one denomination or oppress another.
This idea of a nonreligious republic in a country of many independent religious societies could not have been more congenial to Jews. The synagogue became another denomination, and Jews who went to synagogue were one minority among many. In this kind of society, Jews no longer endangered the social compact simply by existing. As George Washington told the elders of Touro Synagogue, Jews who obeyed the general laws of the land stood on exactly the same footing with the government as any of their neighbors. The Jewish “denomination,” like the denominations of the Methodists, Presbyterians, and Unitarians, was free to regulate itself in its own way, and it was the duty of the government to treat this denomination as it treated all others.
Without really thinking about Jews, and certainly without trying to change Christian society in a way that would benefit Jews, American Christians had, for their own mix of theological and historical reasons, developed a social structure in which Jews could comfortably fit. And the Jews among them no longer looked so much like the agents of chaos and the destroyers of communal life; they were a religious minority in a nation of religious minorities, and the counsels of religion, humanity, and civil order favored letting them live in peace.
Capitalism and the Jews
The other great change that occurred in the English-speaking world between the time of Shakespeare and the time of George Washington was the transformation of society from a traditional agricultural economy with elements of capitalism embedded in it to a capitalist economy with some traditional features. By the end of the eighteenth century, capitalism was increasingly accepted in the English-speaking world as the ethical as well as the practical foundation of modern life. The shift had large consequences for attitudes toward Jews.
In the Middle Ages, Jews were seen as both a resource to be exploited (by hard-pressed rulers who could tax them at will and confiscate their wealth without a murmur from the wider community) and a force to be feared. Whether as merchants or as moneylenders they dealt in forces that the rest of society did not like, did not understand, and dimly suspected were undermining the foundations of social order.
The rise of capitalism in the English-speaking world led to new attitudes toward economic exchange and even, to some degree, banking. Elites in particular came to view old prejudices against free markets and finance as relics of the past. The Bank of England, a fiercely capitalist institution, became the epitome of establishment respectability, and the upper and middle classes entrusted their savings to interest-bearing government bonds. As finance and financial markets became integral to the life of the English-speaking political classes, and as non-Jews engaged in the financial markets became increasingly powerful and respectable, one more element of the medieval fear of the Jews began to be undermined. A spirit of commercial rivalry might lead to personal hostility between Jewish and Anglo-Saxon bankers, but it grew increasingly difficult to believe that the Rothschilds were doing anything different from the Barings and the Morgans. Dislike of the Jews and prejudice against them began slowly to soften as the logic of the religious and social changes in non-Jewish society gradually made themselves felt.
These changes, rooted in the shifting ideas and conditions of life in the Anglo-American world, helped prepare the ground both for rising social tolerance of the Jews and for the idea of a new Jewish state in Palestine. One more factor remained. As the English-speaking world reflected on its rising power and affluence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an optimistic philosophy of history took shape. That philosophy remains powerful in American life today; it regards the American story as part of a process of global enlightenment and transformation that will ultimately bring about the kind of global peace and brotherhood traditionally associated with the afterlife and the Kingdom of God. This sense of destiny would become a building block of American identity and this new liberal and enlightened form of civil religion was, as we shall see, if anything even more philo-Semitic and pro-Zionist than the old Protestant faith. Secular and liberal America, at least for a time, would be as ardently pro-Zionist as the older America had ever been.
Skip Notes
*1 Christian theologians today generally agree that any imputation of collective guilt either to the Jews of the first century or their descendants today cannot be justified on any reasonable reading of the biblical record.
*2 Another important factor: scholars were rediscovering Hebrew. By 1644, England’s Puritan Parliament was taking time out of the English Civil War to mandate that candidates for the ministry pass examinations in biblical Hebrew as well as Greek; at Harvard, the bastion of Puritan scholarship in the New World, Hebrew lessons were mandatory up until 1787. Barbara Tuchman, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour (New York University Press, 1956), 116; Peter Grose, Israel in the Mind of America (Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 5.