New Israel / New England: Jews and Puritans in Early America

Chapter 5. “An Openness to Candour”: Scholarly Ecumenicism in Pre-Revolutionary Newport

161 chapter five “an oPenneSS To canDoUr” Scholarly Ecumenicism in Pre-Revolutionary Newport  Isaac Touro, the hazzan of Yeshuat israel, was not the only member of newport’s clergy to deliver a Thanksgiving sermon on november 28, 1765.1 Two short blocks from the new synagogue, ezra Stiles addressed newport’s Second congregational church on the same occasion. born in 1727 in north haven, connecticut, Stiles had served as a minister in newport since 1753, settling there after completing his studies and then serving as a tutor at Yale. Stiles’s strident pronouncement on the nature of religious liberty, freedom, and political power suggested that its author, like his townspeople and like isaac Touro, was wrestling with a newly dawning cultural reality: in the wake of mid-century religious revival and economic tumult, spiritual affinities were becoming increasingly politicized . While the Jews of newport were in no way responsible for such an outcome, Stiles’s long-standing interest in their affairs and the relationships that he developed with one Jew in particular would be a spur to his education in discursive cultural politics, an education which, according to one twentieth-century biographer, would help to make him “one of the most learned men in america.”2 The ten short years between Touro’s and Stiles’sThanksgivingsermonsandthecomingoftheamericanrevolution brought about a transformational intermingling of religious and political affairs, and newport’s Jewish community would prove to be an agent of that change, particularly in and through its relationship with ezra Stiles. Within two decades of his arrival in newport, Stiles would become one of the most steadfast and articulate ministerial proponents of the american revolutionary cause, but in the remarks he delivered in his 1765 Thanksgivingsermonhespokehisunstintingapprovalofandappreciation 162 chaPTer FiVe fortheblessingsoflifeinthebritishempire.likeTouro,Stilesemphasized God’s sovereignty over all the affairs of men. The public thanksgiving had been declared by rhode island’s governor, and had specified the colony’s debt to King George iii, among others, but Stiles reminded his auditors that “a perfect Government” could only be found in God’s nature. “The sacred Scriptures,” he observed, “refer to the Dominion of God as a wise, good and perfect being.”3 a public thanksgiving might afford a proper opportunity for clergy and laity to acknowledge the advantages of good and just human government, but such acknowledgments could be articulated and justified only under the rubric of God’s “controll” and “Supreme Wisdom.”4 in 1765, newporters were becoming aware of political events and changes, but they still imagined and described a world in which God, through the medium of his various religious institutions, reigned entirely supreme. Touro, Stiles, and a host of other religious leaders in newport would certainly have disagreed with one another as to the exact nature of divinity, and within ten years they would also part ways politically. in 1765, what they shared, however, was their mutual linguistic disorientation in the face of change, as Jews and christians alike vainly sought for the proper terms by which they might translate their religiosity within an increasingly politicizing realm. Stiles’s entire career, as one recent historian has put it, demarcated the “changing relationship among religion, learning, and politics that reshaped revolutionary new england.”5 as a font of religious pluralism with no equivalent anywhere else in new england and, indeed, in british north america outside perhaps of new York, newport provided an environment that, while not exactly ecumenical , supported a wide range of viewpoints on religious matters. as Jews and christians encountered one another in revolutionary-era newport, they engendered one more discursive legacy of new england hebraism. in their actual interactions, as well as in what they spoke and wrote about one another, the newporters inadvertently fashioned a newly politicized body of expression. The Jewish presence in the town afforded an unprecedented occasion for the immediate descendants of new england Puritans to witness a living Judaism at firsthand. That this ecumenical encounter coincided with the coming of the american revolution and its myriad political and social upheavals both enriched and imposed limitations upon the resulting discourse. Judaism was no longer an abstraction, and Jews were Scholarly Ecumenicism in Pre-Revolutionary Newport 163 no longer mere figments of the gentile imagination. on the contrary, their physical presence and their public deployment of an apparently exotic religious tradition in a modern, new World setting necessitated the expansion of a heretofore hypothetical christian paradigm. newport’satmosphereofreligiouspluralismbetween1765and1775did not ensure common cause...