Connecting the Covenants: Judaism and the Search for Christian Identity in Eighteenth-Century England (review)

In this elegantly succinct book David B. Ruderman intertwines two stories about relations between Jews and Christians in early-eighteenth-century England. The first of these is a little-known but fascinating microhistory: the life of Moses Marcus, the son of affluent members of the Jewish community who converted to Anglicanism in 1723 and thereafter awkwardly straddled these two theological and cultural worlds. Ruderman uses this narrative as a window into his wider topic: the history and significance of early-eighteenth-century Christian Hebraism. Challenging the widespread view that Hebraist scholarship plummeted in intellectual status after its seventeenth-century heyday, he argues that this scholarly specialization retained its vitality, revealing much about the complexity, flux, and enduring interdependence of the religious identity of both Jews and Christians at the cusp of the modern era.

Ruderman explores the life of Marcus with verve and insight, revealing his published conversion narrative to be not simply a routine example of this familiar genre but also a modestly original critique of the defense of rabbinic authority recently articulated by David Nieto, the leading rabbi in London at this time. Working in tandem with Christian theologians such as Humphrey Prideaux and Johann Carpzov, Marcus combined these alliances with an element of defensiveness toward Judaism, particularly in his 1729 critique of William Whiston’s claims that the Jews had “corrupted” the scriptural text. Marcus’s cultural and religious identity was certainly complicated, but it is not clear to what extent it is warranted to regard him as mired in an ongoing “inner conflict” (p. 46). At a more mundane level, Marcus was simply a hack, making whatever use he could of the skills he had learned at the Hamburg yeshivah to make a living as a translator and writer.

This book is more concerned, however, with Christian identity. Ruderman emphasizes the ways in which Christian scholars such as William Wotton, Anthony Collins, and Willem Surenhusius (the Dutch translator of the Mishnah into Latin) eclipsed the efforts of Marcus in boldly stressing the importance of rabbinic learning for the elucidation of Christianity. Collins’s dabblings in rabbinic and Hebraist scholarship were playfully provocative, however—aiming, in the spirit of so much early Enlightenment mischief-making, to undermine Christian certainties rather than to reground them. Surenhusius’s translation project was certainly taken seriously by many theologians in England. However, their attempts to use this to reinforce the Hebraic underpinnings of Christian revelation tended to re-rehearse familiar seventeenth-century debates and did so in an environment in which this form of textual exegesis was increasingly threatened by the challenges of deism and rationalism.

Ruderman valuably and convincingly reminds us that Christian Hebraism was by no means dead in early-eighteenth-century England. However, when set in a wider context, it seems undeniable that it was a far more marginal project than it had been in the previous century. The extract from Wotton’s Miscellaneous Discourses (1718) that is included as an appendix to this volume reminds us of this: the seventeenth-century giants such as Joseph Scaliger and John Selden who are discussed here enjoyed far greater cultural status than did Wotton’s own Hebraist contemporaries. The importance of Judaism for Christian self-understanding was not at a high-water mark in this period, compared to both earlier and later times: more profoundly at stake in the exegetical battles of the Enlightenment era were wider issues of the stability of any form of textual truth. In presenting figures such as Marcus as “agents of interfaith communication” (p. 98) and his book as a study of “Jewish-Christian relations” (p. 97), Ruderman offers a thoughtful but somewhat anachronistic conceptual frame that may occlude the most interesting feature of the story he tells so well. In an era in which the modern notion of identity was still not yet fully...