Hebrew and the Bible in America: The First Two Centuries (review)

Hebrew Studies 37 (1996) 214 Reviews Students of rabbinic literature are in Visotzky's debt for his careful studies of Midrash Mishle. This translation gracefully renders the work accessible to a larger readership. Richard S. Sarason Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute ofReligion Cincinnati, OH 45220 HEBREW AND THE BIBLE IN AMERICA: THE FIRST TWO CENTURIES. Shalom Goldman, ed. Brandeis Series in American Jewish History, Culture, and Life. Pp. xxx + 259. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1993. Cloth, $39.50. This book presents an eclectic collection of essays concerning the knowledge and use of Hebrew by both Jews and non-Jews in early American history. Some of its fifteen chapters are, inevitably, stronger than others. Five of the fifteen authors come from Dartmouth College, which means that developments connected with Eleazar Wheelock, founder of Dartmouth, receive more attention than a book with such a general title might otherwise indicate. The title could easily have substituted "New England" for "America," since most of the volume's significant persons and events pertain to this one region. There is quite a bit of repetition for a relatively short book. We hear more than once, for example, about how the story arose that native Americans were descended from the ten lost tribes of Israel, about why Ezra Stiles (a noted Congregationalist minister of the eighteenth century) developed extensive contacts with visiting rabbis, about why students at Harvard in 1653 protested the requirement to study Hebrew, about why Judah Monis, Hebrew instructor at Harvard from 1722 to 1761, was not overly successful in that assignment, and about how it came about that Sampson Simson, first Jewish graduate of Columbia College, was allowed in 1800 to deliver his graduation oration in Hebrew. Still, once distractions have been noticed, the book remains valuable, both for summarizing a great deal of information concerning the early Jewish presence in what would become the United States and for documenting the profound Hebraism of the American Puritan movement. Before coming to American subjects directly, the book's first section treats "European Background." The strongest essay in this part-and in some ways the most satisfying chapter in the book-treats the subject fur- Hebrew Studies 37 (1996) 215 Reviews thest removed from America. Charles Stinson's '''Northernmost Israel': England, the Old Testament, and the Hebraic 'Veritas' as Seen by Bede and Roger Bacon" is a compelling account of how early Christian use of the Hebrew Bible was transformed in The Ecclesiastical History of the AngloSaxon Peoples by the Venerable Bede (ca. 673-735). Where the Old Testament had furnished earlier Christian writers with a treasury of symbols . types, warnings. and analogies that were applied to either individual Christians or the church as a whole, Bede instead treated the history of Israel as a guide for understanding the history of the Christian AngloSaxons . In pUlling the Hebrew Scriptures to use in this way, Bede offered a genuinely historical appreciation for Jewish history, as well as a powerful interpretation of the meaning of his own times. That use of the Old Testament as the early stages of an ongoing history lent a forcefulness to Bede's biblical interpretations as well as unusual power to his history. Stinson closes his provocative essay by contrasting the pretentious. but insubstantial Hebraism of Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century with the dynamic Christian Hebraism of the English Reformation when there existed, in his words, "a very strong preaching-and-Hebraicizing movement reborn among a major group of English Christians-as if 'seeds' deeply planted by Bede had in some manner germinated and born fruit" (p. 35). The book's second section treats the legend of the Ten Lost Tribes that was given memorable treatment in 1650 through The Hope of Israel by Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel of Amsterdam. Richard H. Popkin's essay on "The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Indian Theory" details Menasseh's circumspect re-telling of the account from a Portuguese explorer who reported finding a group of South American Indians who spoke a form of Hebrew, but also the less than circumspect use that a variety of prominent American figures made of the story. Popkin is even more impressive, however, in...