Jewish America: The Visible Domain

"Material girl" Madonna changes her name to Esther and tattoos a Hebrew name for God on her upper arm. George W. Bush, in the wake of 9/11, calls for a "crusade" against terrorism, to salvage democracy from "evildoers." Corporate executives and consumers use the language of the sacred to describe products, from the "holy water" of Coca-Cola to the "sacrosanct" McDonald's french fry. Advocates of genetic engineering insist that "cloning and the reprogramming of DNA is the first serious step in becoming one with God" (qtd in Chidester 65). What these snapshots of the American mass public sphere capture is its peculiar blend of modernity and tradition, of secularism and religiosity, of the material and the spiritual. They register how thoroughly infused with religious discourses and practices are the modern emblems of American progress—of democracy, capitalism, and science.

Yet, until recently, many Americanists overlooked this mélange of modernity and religion in American culture. "We are rich in studies that foreground gender, race, and, to a lesser extent, ethnicity and class," wrote Jenny Franchot in 1995, "But where is religion? . . . Do we want to continue believing that philosophical critiques of Western Christendom and of Western liberalism have invalidated religion as a subject of serious inquiry?" (834). While intellectual historians, scholars of religion, and anthropologists have produced rich studies of America's religious traditions, Franchot charged, Americanist literary and cultural critics pushed religion into an "invisible domain." Our dominant critical narratives all too often equated modernization with secularization, charting, from the Colonial era to the present, America's gradual withdrawal from religion. At the same time, our emphasis on gender, race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality as determinants of identity often eclipsed religion as a vital and persistent category of self and community construction in America.

Retelling American history as a complex web of inter-permutations between Protestant and Jewish thought, the two studies of intellectual history here reviewed join a host of other recent books—on religion in relation to race, nation, and ethnicity; on religion in American popular culture; on the contribution of Jewish thought to mainstream American culture ¹ —that collectively push religion into the critical purview. God's Sacred Tongue: Hebrew and the American Imagination (2004) and Jews and the American Soul: Human Nature in the Twentieth Century (2004) urge us to think of the US as a multireligious, as well as a multicultural, society. They encourage us to consider the influence of Jewish ideas on phenomena usually ascribed to the US's Protestant origins, such as the American rhetoric of national election or America's "therapeutic culture." They help us, moreover, to locate the exchange between Protestant and Jewish religious thought at the heart of domains we usually think of as secular, such as psychology, diplomacy, popular TV, or academic research. In so doing, they provide an opportunity to consider how the field alters as religion becomes progressively visible in American studies.

Shalom Goldman's God's Sacred Tongue spans four centuries to tell the story of American Protestant intelligentsia's engagement—at times obsession—with the Hebrew language, bible, and people. The stage for this engagement, he shows, was set well before the Puritan migration. The Reformation and Renaissance in Europe brought a resurgence of Christian interest in the study of Hebrew as God's original language, with which the natural order was created and in which it is revealed. This idea crossed the Atlantic as early as with the Mayflower (with Hebraists William Bradford and William Brewster). In America, it gained unprecedented momentum. The "secrets" that Hebrew was believed to harbor (and that the Jews were thought to conceal) were soon tethered to the mystery of the land itself and of its people. Early settlers combined their belief in the primacy of Hebrew with the "Jewish-Indian theory" (finding linguistic evidence that Native Americans were descendents of the Ten Lost Tribes) to define their own collective origins and to fortify their self-concept as the chosen people in "God's American Israel." Little wonder, then, that Hebrew entered the curriculum of all ten colleges established before the American Revolution (much...