"A Jewish Choice": The Judaic Past and Present in the Poetry of George Herbert

"A Jewish Choice": The Judaic Past and Present in the Poetry of George Herbert by Ariane M. Balizet Oh all ye, who passe by, whose eyes and minde To worldly things are sharp, but to me blinde, To me, who took eyes that I might you finde: Was ever grief like mine? ("The Sacrifice," 11. 1-4)1 In "The Sacrifice," his vivid and mournful meditation on the Passion, George Herbert poses a provocative theological question to the Jews observing the Crucifixion. The speaker is Christ, and his opening characterization of the crowds observing his crucifixion recalls the stubborn, malicious, and greedy figure that dominated representations of Jews throughout medieval and early modern Europe. The crowds that "passe by" the spectacle are "blinde" to Jesus as their savior, but see clearly the "worldly things" they prefer to his sacrifice. Their foolish choice of material goods over Christ's salvation echoes throughout the poem's description ofJudas's betrayal and highlights the profound generosity of Jesus' grace. The poem's refrain — "Was ever grief like mine?" — was part of a liturgical convention that appeared throughout medieval and early modern lyrics.2 I propose, however, that within this familiar exhortation Herbert poses the question anew, in earnest, suggesting a clearer picture of the role of Jews in his religious poetry. The question that Christ, at the moment of the Crucifixion, poses to the crowd of Jews reflects Herbert's own conflicted position on typological readings of the Old Testament. Just as the English Church of the seventeenth century debated whether the New Testament replicated or replaced the Old Testament, "The Sacrifice" juxtaposes the climactic moment of sacrifice within the Gospels with the legacy of suffering from the Hebrew Bible. Thus Jesus inquires of the Jews, repeatedly, "Was ever grief like mine?" I want to explore the consequences of Herbert's engagement with Judaic tradition, and particularly the way in which he struggles to understand Christian identity in terms of continuity between the Old The Judaic Past and Present in Herbert47 Testament Israelites, the Jews represented in the Gospels, and the imaginedJews of seventeenth-centuryEngland. Recent scholarship on Judaism in the literature of the seventeenth century has revealed the volatile discourse surrounding the Old Testament and its relationship to Christian worship before and during the Civil War. I am indebted in particular to the work of Achsah Guibbory, who has shown the ways in which several seventeenth-century poets straddled conflicting "puritan" and "ceremonialist" attitudes towards the Hebrew Bible. In examining Robert Herrick's Hesperides, Guibbory suggests that within the divisive atmosphere of the English Church of the seventeenth century, typology was "capable of different emphases": While typology assumes both similarity and difference between type and anti-type, Christian typological interpretations can emphasize either the differences and discontinuities between the earlier Jewish and the later Christian, or the continuities between them. In the latter case, the Jewish is not so much abrogated and cast aside as "converted" to Christian uses.3 Here, puritan and ceremonialist categories of thought, respectively, show Herrick (and, I will argue, Herbert) to be primarily concerned with the latter sense of "converting" Judaic tradition to Christian practice, at the same time revealing a patent anxiety about the artifice of poetry and its devotional effects. Guibbory clearly illustrates both Herrick and Herbert's familiarity with and extensive debt to the Hebrew bible in terms of the conflict of Christian ritual and practice of their time.4 Other scholars have strengthened this connection and pointed specifically to Herbert as a poet particularly invested in the Hebrew Bible. In Torah and Law in "Paradise Lost," Jason Rosenblatt compares Herbert to Milton: More than any other great Christian poet of the seventeenth century — more even than George Herbert, who imagines in his poem "Decay" a sweet familiarity of discourse in Genesis between human beings and their heavenly father — Milton reveals ... a generosity of spirit toward the Hebrew Bible, its God, its law, and its covenant.5 48Ariane M. Balizet I would like to extend the "generosity of spirit" Rosenblatt affords Milton to Herbert by suggesting that Jews were a constitutive element of spiritual and poetic identity in Herbert's theology. Herbert's poetry...