God's Sacred Tongue: Hebrew and the American Imagination (review)

Shalom Goldman's God's Sacred Tongue describes a bifurcated, often disturbing history of American Hebrew studies. Christian fascination and even apparent love for the Hebrew language and the "Old Testament" were matched by a disdain if not hatred for Jews from the 1600s into the mid-twentieth century. The result is an often disquieting story, not so much for its pathologies as for the passions about Hebrew that also pushed remarkably few Christians past a self-defeating casual antisemitism, to say nothing of the ways it reinforced American anti-Jewish sentiment.

If God's Sacred Tongue bears a slightly disjointed quality, its fitfulness derives at least in part from the location of Hebrew study within American Christian culture. Goldman is all but forced to jump among disparate episodes and events at Harvard and Yale in the colonial period and then pursue relatively unknown figures such as Edward Robinson, Isaac Nordheimer, Professor George Bush (indeed, no relation), and Selah Merrill in the nineteenth century because American Christian interest in Hebrew proved so episodic.

24Still, God's Sacred Tongue makes its difficulties fascinating reading. Goldman limpidly conveys the sadness of Judah Monis's forty-year career at Harvard. Despite his conversion to Christianity, Monis remained an instructor at Harvard, not a professor. His "colleagues did not take his teaching or scholarship seriously, and his students often mocked him" (36). Ezra Stiles's unending intellectual curiosity and Jonathan Edwards's sheer brilliance at least raised the intellectual plane. Stiles could not resist Christological claims for the Zohar but remained utterly fascinated by Biblical Hebrew and the Newport hazans he eagerly consulted and genuinely liked. Edwards, as befits his reputation, found principally intellectual issues in Hebrew, but his rural solitude scarcely prompted the personal contact with Jews that Stiles enjoyed.

The nineteenth century exemplified what Goldman terms "American Christian Hebraism" at high tide, and its anomalies bespoke the quixotic interests that propelled Christian concern for Hebrew studies. Elias Boudinot's apocalyptic and millennialist fascinations sparked his interest in the "Ten Lost Tribes" and Jews, and it is not clear that Boudinot had an independent interest in Jews, Hebrew, or the Hebrew Bible. The Mormon founder, Joseph Smith, hired Daniel Peixotto and Joshua Seixas to operate a "Hebrew School" in Kirtland, Ohio. But Smith's "creative, if unscientific, approach to the language" stemmed in part from his novel approach to "translating" the Scriptures, which mixed his new-found knowledge of Hebrew with divine revelation (195). One wishes Goldman had explored Smith's method more thoroughly, even if the benefit might have accrued more to Mormon than Jewish history.

Goldman writes fascinating chapters on George Bush, Hebrew professor at New York University, Selah Merrill, sometime U.S. consul in Jerusalem, the archaeologist Edward Robinson and his mentor Moses Stuart of Andover Theological Seminary, and William Rainey Harper, founder of the University of Chicago. Harper's contribution is especially notable and well described. Harper's emphasis on language and its ancient expression in texts and civilization lives today through the University of Chicago's well justified claim as a world center for Middle East archaeology and textual study. But Harper's vision of a university and society based on biblical values, whether Jewish or Christian (and Goldman makes clear that they were overwhelmingly Christian), enjoyed no dominance even in Harper's heyday.

One might have wished that Goldman had substituted a longer critical analysis of post-1980 evangelical approaches to Jews and Judaism for the otherwise fine chapters on Reinhold Niebuhr and Edmund Wilson. The intellectual contrast to figures like Bush, Merrill, and Robinson jars, and Goldman's successful efforts to place Niebuhr and Wilson in their larger intellectual context, including the context of vibrant twentieth-century Jewish studies, ironically floats these chapters free from their predecessors. Rather than the tantalizing epilogue with which Goldman ends God's Sacred Tongue, the effort by Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and other Christian evangelicals to appropriate Judaism...