Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key: Anglo-Jewry's Construction of Modern Jewish Thought (review)

Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key: Anglo-Jewry's Construction of Modern Jewish Thought by David B. Ruderman. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000. Pp. xv + 310. {39.50 cloth.

The book's cover reproduces a 1789 print of the famous fight between the Anglo-Jewish Daniel Mendoza and the Gentile Humphrey. The picture shows a defeated Humphrey knocked down on one knee in a posture of weakness, while Mendoza is pressing forward, confident and controlled, leaving a distance for his opponent's surrender. The inscription on the print concludes with an analogy: "the Christian pugilist proving himself as inferior to the Jewish Hero, as Dr. Priestley when oppos'd to the Rabbi, David Levi." Only 35 years after the repeal of the "Jew Bill" in 1753 and almost 70 years until what is considered "emancipation" in 1857 with the seating of Lord Rothschild in parliament without having to take a Christian oath, this representation of Jewish strength and self-assurance is as striking as the parallel between the Jewish Joe Louis and the indefatigable "one man Jewish antidefamation league" (57), David Levi. Where is the fearful Jew, weak and dependent on Gentile protection? Jews fought back, literally and figuratively, refusing to accept a subordi-nate position in British society. And they fought back effectively.

The central figure, perhaps hero, of Ruderman's study is David Levi (1742-1801). Not actually a rabbi but well trained in Hebrew and rabbinics, Levi battled the famous radical and scientist Joseph Priestley who encouraged Jews to convert to Unitarian Christianity. Defending traditional Judaism and attacking forthrightly the Christian interpretation of the Hebrew Bible (the "Old Testament"), Levi has not figured prominently in histories and has received attention mostly in Anglo-Jewish histories (Todd Endelman, David Katz, and Richard Popkin have written on Levi). Typical of Levi's marginalization is that there is not a word about Levi, a largely self-taught artisan (shoemaker, hatter, printer), in E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class. Arguably Jews were marginal because of their small numbers, but Jews, Jewishness, and Judaism played a not insignificant role in the British cultural imagination. They, along with Afro-Britons who also settled largely in London, presented Anglo-Saxon Britain with a challenge for multicultural acceptance. For the "imagined community" of Great Britain the Jews—and Levi—were not marginal.

Levi defended traditional Judaism against not just radicals and Dissenters—Paine, Richard Brothers, and Priestley—who could have been opportune targets and scapegoats to gain majority favor, but also powerful Anglicans (Bishop Robert Lowth, Benjamin Blayney, Archbishop William Newcome, Nathaniel Halhed, M.P., Anselm Bayly, Humphrey Prideaux). The terms of the theological controversies will be unfamiliar to most non-specialists but Ruderman explains clearly what was at stake in the authority of the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible, the legitimacy of the "pointing" of the Hebrew text to provide vowels and grammatical structure, and the challenges to Jewish modes of interpretation by Benjamin Kennicott and the Hutchinsonians. I would guess that many literary scholars know Lowth for his appreciation of Hebrew poetry and the "Romantic" effect that appreciation produced on English poetry, but fewer will be as aware of Lowth's aggressively anti-Jewish theology that underpins his translation of Isaiah. Christian theologians constructing defenses of Christianity against the threats from deists and other radical critics of religion tried to strengthen the authority of Christian doctrine by reinterpreting the Jewish origins of the religion. Kennicott and the Hutchinsonians, each in their different ways, argued that certain perceived weaknesses in the Christian position were in fact caused by an Old Testament that was flawed by illegitimate and arbitrary Jewish textual criticism. Kennicott challenged the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible—the text that is authoritative for Jews— with other versions of holy scripture, while the Hutchinsonians, with their inventive if unscholarly etymologies, concentrated their fire on...