Milton and the Jews (review)

Edited by the late Douglas Brooks, Milton and the Jews works to articulate the impact of Jews and Jewish thinking on John Milton's work and to examine the often complex ways in which Milton uses Judaic and Old Testament tropes. This collection productively moves beyond earlier attempts to survey the boundaries of Milton's Hebraic scholarship as well as the question of whether Milton was philo- or anti-Semitic—a necessarily vexed issue during a period when the philo-Semitic movement to readmit Jews to England was rooted in the conviction that their conversion would hasten the end times.

Against the familiar idea that Milton used Jewish imagery to associate his nation in a positive sense with the biblical Israel, Achsah Guibbory argues in "England, Israel, and the Jews in Milton's Prose, 1649-1660" that in his antiprelatical tracts Milton emphasizes Christianity's difference rather than similarity to the biblical Jews. Where so many others have emphasized the Reformation's adoption of the Old Testament, Guibbory underscores the Reformation's association of Catholicism with Jewish ceremonial law, a charge that was similarly brought against High Church Protestants like Laud. In "Milton's Peculiar Nation," Elizabeth Sauer gives a powerful reading of how Milton's mapping of England onto Israel changes through the revolutionary and restoration periods. She reads Paradise Lost as an epic about the failure of the English Israel. In "Milton and Solomonic Education," Douglas Trevor explores Milton's complex relationship with the figure of Solomon. Milton shares the assumption of the day that Solomon authored proverbs, a book whose reflections on appropriateness of different kinds of knowledge are, in Trevor's reading, essential to Raphael's instruction of Adam and to Milton's pedagogy in Of Education.

Milton's association with philo-semites has been much emphasized, but in "Making Use of the Jews: Milton and Philo-Semitism," Nicholas von Maltzahn gives the fascinating portrait of Milton's brother-in-law, Richard Powell, a monarchist who proposed creating a ghetto for London Jews so that they might be taxed by the crown as they had before their expulsion in 1290. Yet von Maltzahn makes the dubious claim that, "Of those who welcomed Menasseh Ben Israel's mission to achieve the admission of Jews, so many were Milton's friends that he seems likely to have been welcoming too" (62). Oddly, von Maltzahn systematically unpacks his own argument by emphasizing what many have pointed out—that Milton's association with "philo-semites" does not seem to have produced a similar sentiment. More persuasive are his suggestions that we find Milton's philo-semitism in his treatment of Old Testament texts in Samson and in his translations of Psalms.

In "T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and the Milton Controversy," Matthew Biberman revisits "the temptation of Athens" scene in Paradise Regained—a passage whose apparent rejection of classical learning has conventionally been read as a kind of Miltonic apostasy against his own life's work. Biberman re-reads the Son's claim, "That rather Greece from us these arts derived," not as a rejection of all learning, but as a claim that he possesses all essential learning needed to govern the Gentiles. Biberman's most important contribution is his chronicle of the Milton controversy, in which he traces the de-Judizing of Milton by scholars who wanted to counter the Milton-Jew connection that had reached a zenith in the work of Denis Saurat. Frances Fletcher, for example, contains Milton's Hebraism by offering it as simply one more example of Milton's breadth as a scholar. George Conklin and Robert Adams, on the other hand, reject the idea that Milton would have delved into esoteric Judaic readings. Biberman concludes that a largely Jewish group of contemporary Miltonists have completed "this project of erasing Milton's hypothetical Jewish identity" (119) in large part "out of respect for the specialized skills of rabbis, and also to invest professors of Jewish studies with cultural capital" (120). I find this surprising, particularly in regard to works by...