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

Chapter 1. “Jews, Turks . . . and Anti-Christians”: Alien Encounters with Puritan Hebraism

18 chapter one “JeWS, TUrKS . . . anD anTi-chriSTianS” Alien Encounters with Puritan Hebraism  New england Puritans could never make up their minds about whether or how actual Jews were important. right up until the end of the seventeenth century the arrival and temporary settlement of at least a dozen Jews in, respectively, Massachusetts, connecticut, and rhode island eluded the focused attention of the same new englanders who, whether they fancied themselves latter-day israelites or sought figural guidance from the hebrew bible on their new World exile, consistently invoked the history of the Jews. Jews constituted one of several minority groups whose presence, though hardly welcomed or legally tolerated by Puritans, was an inevitable if lamentable result of new england’s transatlantic exposure. although some few of their immediate descendants would develop a keener interest in the Jews who entered their territory during the eighteenth century, the earliest generations of new england Puritans were too preoccupied by the presence of other more threatening and numerous aliens, not to mention their own theological and societal dilemmas, to notice Jews, let alone apply a standard treatment toward them. The Puritans’ interest in Jewish history, on the other hand, allowed them to express their often contradictory attitudes toward all types of outsiders. in large part because the scriptural Jews who were the subject of so much self-reflective Puritan discourse could be understood according to context to be either God’s chosen People or perpetually exiled and despised strangers, actual Jews—and a host of other religious, cultural, and racial outsiders—would encounter a range of treatments at the hands of their Puritan “hosts.” The Jews as a separately constituted people with a distinct tribal past Alien Encounters with Puritan Hebraism 19 who were also the scriptural recipients of God’s love and wrath figured prominently in Puritan discourse. Their collective history, not only through biblical times but during the long centuries of the Diaspora that had followed from the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 c.e., fascinated the Puritans, many of whom not only were seeking to establish a society on the model of ancient israel’s adherence to religious principles but also saw themselves as exiles in their own right venturing on what Perry Miller famously referred to as an “errand into the wilderness.” if new england was not itself the Promised land, the journey to it and away from a newly “desacralized england,” as one historian points out, resembled the journey taken by the children of israel as they made their exodus from egypt.1 over the last five decades, a succession of scholarly formulations has proposed, challenged, overturned, and revised the idea, most forcefully asserted by Sacvan bercovitch, that the Puritans sought “the worldly protection, power, and privilege [God] had once granted the hebrews.”2 Whether they were drawing comparisons between themselves and the ancient Jews or dismissing the relevance of such comparisons, new englanders wrote or spoke about the Jews in their sermons, diaries, and legal discourse with significant frequency, in myriad ways, and for a broad range of purposes. Their writing about Jews offers insight into how Puritans attempted to cope with life on the transatlantic frontier while adhering to biblical precept. Puritan hebraism, in new england especially, offered its practitioners a range of metaphors which they might employ in order to overcome the apparent discrepancies between “spiritual and temporal , faith and civic life.”3 While no such discrepancies existed in Judaism itself, since the hebrew bible itself did not allow for a sharp distinction between “practice and faith,”4 the calvinistic hebraism of new england’s first settlers offered no easy resolution to such dilemmas. Despite their latter-day reputation as aspirant old Testament prophets and crusaders for the restoration of early church purity, seventeenth-century practitioners of what came to be known as “the new england Way” often lacked the ability to articulate, let alone enforce, unequivocal laws of exclusion. The facts of life on the western fringe of the british atlantic were not conducive to hermetic endeavors of any sort, and insofar as the Puritansthemselvesconstitutedafamouslyvociferousandfactiousassemblage of sectarians and spiritual misfits, their own religious doctrines and 20 chaPTer one practices bred a social and cultural instability that opened the door, albeit inadvertently, to the arrival of aliens. The contradictions inherent in the Puritan theology, which, as one historian writes, insisted that “man had no power of his own,” and yet at...