Table Of ContentShalom Goldman,
Editor
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The F i r s t T w o C e n t u r i e s
Brandeis University Press and Dartmouth College
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Published by University Press New England
Hanover and London
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Brandeis University Press and Danmouth College
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Published by University Press of New England, Hanover, NH 03 7
() 1993 by Trustees of Brandeis University and
Trustees of Danmouth College
All rights reserved
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Printed in the United States of America 4 3
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data appear at the end of the book
CIP
The research and writing of this book were supponed by the American Jewish
Archives, the William Barnet ll 19 34 Fund, the National Endowment for the
Humanities, the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for the Social Sciences at
Danmouth College, and the Touro National Heritage Trust.
To Deborah Erdman of UCLA and Gail Vernazza of Danmouth College many thanks
for their long-term encouragement and assistance. To my colleagues Kevin Reinhan
and Alan Tansman of Danmouth, and to Thomas Siegel of Harvard, many thanks for
suppon both intellectual and social. And to Jeanne West of University Press of New
England I owe a debt of gratitude for being there at the beginning and seeing it
through to the end.
Acknowledgments for previous publication:
"Ezra Stiles and the Jews: A Study in Ambivalence" by Arthur A. Chiel in A Bicentennial
Festschrift for /acob Rader Marcus, edited by B. W. Korn. American Jewish Historical Society,
Waltham, Mass., 1976. Reprinted with permission.
''Biblical Hebrew in Colonial America" by Shalom Goldman in American /ewish History 79:1
(Winter 1989-90). Reprinted with permission.
"The New England Puritans and the Jews" by Arthur Hertzberg in Israel and the Nations: Es
says Presented in Honor of Shmuel Ettinger. The Historical Society of Israel and the Zalman
Shazar Center for Jewish History, Jerusalem, 1987. Reprinted with permission.
"The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Indian Theory" by Richard H. Popkin in Menasseh Ben Israel
and His World. edited by Yosef Kaplan, Henry Mechoulan, and Richard H. Popkin. Brill's Studies
in Intellectual History, copyright 1989 by E. J. Brill, The Netherlands. Reprinted with permission.
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Contents
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Introduction Shalom Goldman
Xl
I. European Background
I
Christian Hebraism and the Jewish Christian
Polemic Ktziah Spanier
3
''Northernmost Israel'': England, the Old Testament,
and the Hebraic ''Veritas'' as Seen by Bede and
Roger Bacon Charles Stinson
14
Seventeenth-Century English Travellers to
Palestine Barbara Kreiger
43
II. The Legend of the Ten Lost Tribes
S9
The Ten Lost Tribes Cyrus Gordon 61
The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Indian
Theory Richard H. Popkin
70
The Hope of Israel in Early Modem Ethnography
and Eschatology Grant Underwood
91
III. American Puritan Hebraism
103
The New England Puritans and the
Jews Arthur Hertzberg
105
The Influence of Josephus on Cotton Mather's
Biblia Americana: A Study in
Ambiguity Louis H. Feldman
122
Ezra Stiles and the Jews: A Study in
Ambivalence Arthur A . Chiel
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IV. The Colonial American Jewish Community
and the Hebrew Language
169
New Amsterdam's Twenty-Three Jews-
Myth or Reality? Leo Hershkowitz 171
Hebrew and Liturgical Exercises in the Colonial
Period Nathan M. Kaganoff 184
The Use of Hebrew by American Jews During the
Colonial Period Jacob Kabakoff 19
I
V. Colonial American Hebraists
199
Biblical Hebrew in Colonial America:
The Case of Dartmouth Shalom Goldman
101
Classical and Hebraic Models of Moral Instruction
at Dartmouth College, 1770-1800 Matthew I. Wieneke 109
Professor Stephen Sewall and th~ Transformation of
Hebrew at Harvard Thomas/. Siegel
118
Notes on Contributors 147
Index 149
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A page from the exercise book of Governor William Bradford of the
Massachusetts Bay Colony (1652). Reproduced from Isidore S. Meyer, The
Hebrew Exercises of Governor William Bradford (Plymouth, Mass., 197 3) .
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Introduction
romance with the Hebrew language runs through the
fabric of American religious and cultural life. It began with the Pilgrims
and the founders of Harvard College, and it deeply influenced the found
ers of other of this nation's educational institutions. American notions
about Hebrew affected the growth and development of indigenous Amer
ican religious for1ns: the study of Hebrew and its influence as a language
of study, prayer, and scholarly discourse played a pivotal role in the de
velopment of American Jewish life. As the Republic grew and America
entered its second century, Hebraism helped to shape American ideas
about the Holy Land, ideas that would profoundly affect the American
relationship to the Middle East, and, in the mid-twentieth century,
would influence American thinking about the State of Israel.
This book is an exploration of early American Hebraism: the study
of the Hebrew language and the classical Hebrew texts by American
scholars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. More precisely,
the beginning of these ''first two centuries'' may be dated to 1638, when
instruction in Hebrew and other subjects began at Harvard. Eighteen
thirty-eight offers us an elegant closing date, for it was then that Isaac
Nordheimer, the first Jewish scholar of Hebrew to teach at an American
university, was appointed ''instructor in sacred literature'' at Union
Theological Seminary. The contributors to this volume are from a num
ber of disciplines (including history, religion, the classics, and literary
criticism) and their essays constitute a significant first step in the ex
ploration of a topic that has long been neglected in the scholarly liter
ature.
Colonial Hebraism had an impact on American life in the early years
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xii / Introduction
of the republic. Thus the historical reach of this introduction to Hebrew
and the Bible in America extends beyond the colonial era into the period
of America's great growth before the Civil War. Throughout this time
''Hebraic knowledge'' appealed to American elites, and the roster of
American Protestant Hebraists includes prominent scholars, political
figures, and diplomats.
The contributions to this volume indicate that an interest in the He
brew language runs through the fabric of American cultural and religious
life. In examining the American romance with Hebrew, we must look
to its European background. Both American Hebraism and its European
antecedents are in need of revaluation. As Frank Manuel noted recently:
'' 'The third culture,' the Hebrew, which alongside the Greek and the
Latin was once an ornament of the trilingual gentleman-scholar, de
serves a more prominent place in the history of Western thought than
has been accorded it.'' 1 In both Europe and America, Christian Hebraism
was an attempt to claim the heritage of Israel for Christianity. Other
American claims on that heritage were to follow.
America and European Christian Hebraism
It has long been recognized that the New England Puritans and their
intellectual heirs both imagined and described themselves with Hebraic
imagery. But it was not only the imagery of the Old Testament that fired
the Puritan imagination. It was the Hebrew word itself that served Pu
ritan divines in their search for self-definition. ''That most ancient lan
guage and sacred tongue'' became the ''object of desire'' of many a New
England scholar.
The study of American Christian Hebraism leads us back to the study
of Hebrew in Christian Europe. In the opening essay of this volume,
Ktziah Spanier points out that European Christian study of the Hebrew
language had long been an endeavor fraught with ambivalence and ten
sion, for ''apologetic and polemical objectives inspired much of tradi
tional Christian interest in the Hebrew language and Jewish literature.''
The same ambivalence would manifest itself in America. Christian He
braism sought to reveal the ''original meanings'' of Scripture, and, in
doing so, to ease the appropriation or incorporation of the Hebrew text
into the greater corpus of ''the two Testaments''-the Old and the New.
This endeavor was as old as the fourth century c.:e.., when St. Jerome
made his pilgrimage to Palestine to study at the feet of the rabbis. In
Medieval Europe the intricacies of the Hebrew language were of little
interest to scholars. The Catholic church saw itself as the ''New Israel,''
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