Table Of ContentTHE BROKEN STAFF
THE
BROKEN STAFF
Judaism through
Christian Eyes
FRANK E. MANUEL
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
Copyright © 1992 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 32
This book is printed on acid-free paper, and its binding materials
have been chosen for strength and durability.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Manuel, Frank Edward.
The broken staff : Judaism through Christian eyes / Frank E. Manuel,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-674-08370-9 (alk. paper)
ι. Judaism (Christian theology)—History of doctrines.
2. Judaism—Relations—Christianity. 3. Christianity and other
religions—Judaism. 4. Hebraists, Christian. I. Title.
BT93.M35 1992
26i.2'6'o94—dc20
91-28520
CIP
Preface
READERS ACQUAINTED with my other histories might well ask:
"Is Saul also among the prophets?" But unrepentant secularist
though I am, as I reflect on my past I discern an enduring preoccu-
pation with what William James called the religious propensity of
mankind. Whether I was writing on Utopian thought in the western
world, theories of mythology, shapes of philosophical history, the faith
of scientific men of genius, my inquiries always bordered on the many
guises and disguises of the religious predicament. In preparing the
present work I have drawn into an uneasy relationship my knowledge
of the intellectual experience of Western Christendom and the He-
braic studies of my youth.
Parts of this book have been presented orally and in radically dif-
ferent form at the Folger Library in Washington, New York Univer-
sity (the Schweitzer and Leo Gershoy Lectures), Harvard University
(a Center for Jewish Studies symposium on the seventeenth century),
Tel Aviv University, a Brandeis University faculty seminar in the His-
tory of Ideas, and the 1676th Stated Meeting of the American Acad-
emy of Arts and Sciences. The address delivered at the Academy was
printed in its Bulletin, April 1987. An article entitled "Israel in the
Enlightenment" appeared in the Winter 1982 issue of Daedalus.
For the period since the invention of printing, the collection of
Judaica in the Houghton Library, Harvard University, for which a
chronological index has been printed (delivering me from the temp-
tation to commit bibliographic redundancy), was my basic resource.
The typescript catalogue of the Lee M. Friedman Collection in
vi · Preface
Houghton was a point of departure, and this book owes much to that
indefatigable gatherer of Christian publications on all aspects of Ju-
daism. In King William Ill's gift of books to King's Chapel, incorpo-
rated into the collection of the Boston Athenaeum, a number of rari-
ties related to my subject have turned up. The Athenaeum has been
my working library for more than forty years, and I have come to
consider the members of its staff my friends. I first crossed the thresh-
old of Harvard's Widener in 1926; the Andover-Harvard Theological
Library is a more recently acquired taste.
I am grateful to the friends and colleagues who have been generous
with advice and assistance. Over the years Mordechai Feingold dis-
cussed with me many phases of this book, Benjamin Ravid coated his
criticisms with wit, Seymour Slive reviewed my selection of illustra-
tions. My former student Gregg Stern kept a vigilant eye out for new
literature and saved me from grievous errors of transliteration from
Hebrew and Aramaic. Lastly I thank my wife, Fritzie, who, not ham-
pered by false modesty, readily admits that her services have been
invaluable.
Frank E. Manuel
Boston
Contents
1 A Gateway to the City of Books 1
2 Reknitting the Severed Connection 13
Traces of Medieval Christian Hebraists 15
Iberia: The Facade of Coexistence 23
The End of a Thousand-Year Estrangement 29
The Italian Printing House, Chrysalis of Hebraica 32
3 Rival Interpreters in the Renaissance
and Reformation 37
Pico della Mirandola and His Jewish Mentors 37
Johannes Reuchlin in Defense of the Talmud 44
Martin Luther, Sebastian Münster, and John Calvin 46
French Hebraists in a Time of Troubles 51
Rabbinic Transmitters and Christian Receptors 56
4 The Flowering of Christian Hebraism 66
The Third Culture 66
Scholars and Popularizers 76
The Buxtorfs of Basel 82
Amsterdam, the New Jerusalem 92
Bartolocci among the Neophytes 98
The Broad Expanse of Judaica 101
5 Seventeenth-Century Uses of
Historical Judaism 108
Conversion, the Apostolic Mission 108
Anatomy of the Republic of the Hebrews 115
viii · Contents
Biblical Exegesis 128
Latterday Christian Cabbala 141
Judeophobia 149
Eschatology 154
6 Transition to the Enlightenment 162
A Brazen Reappraisal 164
Conformities of Judaism with Paganism
Ancient and Modern 168
Judaism Supererogatory 172
7 Assault of the English Deists 175
Uniqueness of Judaic Monotheism Denied 176
The Universality of Natural Religious Sentiment 179
Prophecy and Miracles Reconsidered 181
The Barbarous Hebrews 185
Bolingbroke's Lordly Contempt 186
Thomas Morgan, the Moral Philosopher 188
Dissolving the Bond 190
8 The French Philosophes: An Ambiguous Record 192
Voltaire's Obsession 193
Baron d'Holbach's Synagogue 201
Diderot: A Patchwork Philosophy of the Jews 208
Rousseau on the Tenacity of Mosaic Law 213
Montesquieu's Spirit of Judaism 215
9 Catholic Vindications of Israel 222
Residual Judeophobia in Italy and Spain 222
Academic Dissertations on Jewish Antiquities 225
The Biblical Encyclopedism of Dom Augustin Calmet 228
Abbé Guénée, Secretary of the Jews 234
Abbé Bergier: Restoring the Judaic Pillars of Christianity 238
Abbé Grégoire on the Regeneration of the Jews 245
The Revolutionary Dispensation 247
10 The German Janus 249
Juden in the Leipzig Lexicon 250
Michaelis' Ethnology of the Ancient Hebrews 252
Contents · ix
The Spirit of Sacred Hebrew Poetry: Lowth and Herder 263
Birth of the Judenfrage 272
Dohm's Final Solution 275
The Predicament of Moses Mendelssohn 278
The Euthanasia of Judaism 285
The Flawed Legacy of the Enlightenment 290
11 The Aftermath of Liberation 293
Judeophohia and Antisemitism: The Dark Backdrop 294
The Science of Judaism 296
The Higher Criticism 301
The Origins of Christianity 302
The Semites of Renan and Gobineau 306
David Strauss and the Lives of Jesus 311
The Dead Sea Scrolls 315
In Search of a Common Ground 318
Illustrations 325
Notes 349
Index 355
