Connecting the Covenants: Judaism and the Search for Christian Identity in Eighteenth-Century England (Jewish Culture and Contexts) - Hardcover

Ruderman, David B.

 
9780812240160: Connecting the Covenants: Judaism and the Search for Christian Identity in Eighteenth-Century England (Jewish Culture and Contexts)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0812240162 ISBN 13: 9780812240160
Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

The first few decades of the eighteenth century witnessed an important moment in Jewish-Christian relations, as influential Christian scholars increasingly looked to Jewish texts to reveal the truths of their own faith. To what extent could postbiblical writings help them better understand the New Testament? And who would best be able to explicate these connections?

Connecting the Covenants focuses on two separate but entwined stories, the first centering around the colorful character of Moses Marcus. The English-born son of wealthy parents and the grandson of the famous autobiographical author Glikl of Hameln, Marcus was a prominent Jew educated in the Ashkenazic yeshivah at Hamburg. On New Year's Day, 1723, Marcus was baptized as a Christian, later publishing a justification of his conversion and a vindication of his newly discovered faith in a small book in London. A trophy convert, he was promoted by figures at the highest levels of the Anglican Church as a cultural mediator between Judaism and Christianity. His modest successes in the world of the elite clerical establishment were followed, however, by conspicuous failures, both intellectual and material.

The second story that David Ruderman tells emerges against the background of Marcus's professional decline. In the end, the prize convert proved to be a theologian of limited ability, far outstripped in sophistication and openness to rabbinic learning by a circle of Enlightenment Protestant scholars. It was not the Jew who had abjured Judaism who was willing or able to apply the Mishnah and Talmud to Christian exegesis, but figures such as William Whiston, Anthony Collins, William Wotton, and the Dutch scholar William Surenhusius who seized upon the ways to connect the covenants.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David B. Ruderman is Joseph Meyerhoff Professor of Modern Jewish History and Ella Darivoff Director of the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of many books including Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe and Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key: Anglo-Jewry's Construction of Modern Jewish Thought, winner of the Koret Jewish Book Award in History.

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Introduction:

The subject of this book lies at the interstices of Jewish and Christian history during the first decades of the eighteenth century. I attempt to reconstruct a fascinating moment in the reevaluation of postbiblical Judaism among a circle of Christian writers, many of them clerics, primarily living in England. Historians of Christianity have treated this subject only tangentially and cursorily while it has generally been ignored or passed over in silence by those who study Jewish history. As an historian whose primary interest is Jewish culture, I hope to recover its significance for Jewish as well as for Christian history.

The history of Jewish civilization in this era has been told and retold around certain prominent themes, often as discrete trajectories disconnected from each other. Recent scholarship has underscored the prolonged sense of crisis within the Jewish community precipitated by the messianic movement of Shabbetai Zevi in the late seventeenth century and the heresies that emerged in its path throughout the eighteenth century, on the one hand, as well as the shock waves generated by Benedict Spinoza's assault on Judaism and Christianity within the community of former conversos in Amsterdam and beyond, on the other hand. Some have pointed to a perceived diminution of interest in Jewish culture and literature among Christian scholars by the beginning of the eighteenth century, that was replaced by a more critical and hostile posture towards Judaism. Still others have focused on the concentration of large numbers of Jews living in Poland-Lithuania and in the Ottoman Empire and their relative isolation from cultural developments within Western European civilization as a whole.

Most recently, several Jewish historians have underscored the importance of the cultural aspirations of a small group of Jewish intellectuals primarily living in central Europe at the beginning of the eighteenth century, even labeling them as early maskilim. In using this term to distinguish them from advocates of the later political and pedagogic movement known as the Haskalah appearing at the end of the century, they hope to locate the actual origins of the Jewish enlightenment in Western and Eastern Europe. Rather than actually clarifying this loosely knit group's relationship to later enlightenment trends, they have primarily reinforced, to my mind, the sense of cultural ambiguity this murky period presents Jewish historians and the need to see it more clearly in its own terms rather than as a mere prelude to later more definable cultural movements.

The subject of this book is quite different from all of these intellectual agendas. I wish to understand more clearly the preoccupation of certain Christian thinkers with Judaism as a critical religious and cultural factor and its ramifications for both the history of Judaism and Christianity and their on-going relations. Their discourses about Judaism took place in England and in English for the most part, although similar discussions can be located in Holland and elsewhere on the continent in the first half of the eighteenth century. To a great extent, they represented a direct continuation of discussions of Judaism that had taken place among several prominent seventeenth-century scholars, although, as we shall argue, their more forceful emphasis and the language and context in which they emerged were different. In a manner not unlike the previous century, these extended conversations in which Judaism, its ancient history and classic texts, played so central a role, rarely involved Jewish interlocutors. When Christian thinkers required the expertise of Jewish languages and literature, they sometimes consulted former Jews or relied increasingly on a growing number of Christian scholars who had superficially or even thoroughly mastered Jewish texts. Jews accordingly remained on the margins of this activity, although never totally ignored by Christian contemporaries nor totally oblivious to the discussions and the numerous publications about their own history and cultural legacy that featured so prominently within the larger public discourse of their society. Paradoxically, Christians often preferred to engage with Jewish ideas and texts rather than with actual Jews themselves.

My focus is on two separate stories that ultimately are interconnected. The first is about a colorful character known as Moses Marcus, a prominent young Jewish man baptized in the Anglican Church on New Year's Day, 1723. Marcus was also known by the Hebrew name of Moses ben Mordechai Hamburger, the son of highly affluent parents and the grandson of the famous autobiographical author Glikl of Hameln. His high profile immediately caught my attention among the biographies of other similar converts of his era. Marcus was surely no ordinary candidate for Church membership and undoubtedly represented a prize of some consequence to the missionaries who had succeeded in convincing him to repudiate his grandmother's legacy. Marcus subsequently published a justification of his conversion and a strong vindication of his newly discovered faith in a small English book published in London in 1724. It was later enlarged and edited in a Dutch translation and published in Holland.

Reading Marcus's book from cover to cover convinced me that this modest undertaking constituted more than a conventional narrative of a convert's dismissal of his ancestral faith and an emotional embrace of Christianity. It represented, to my knowledge, the first contemporary critical response to a much weightier volume composed by David Nieto, the dominant Jewish intellectual of London in the early eighteenth century and the rabbi of the Bevis Marks synagogue. Nieto had written an extensive and learned defense of the rabbis and the oral law in a work called Ha-Kuzari ha-Sheni, hu Mateh Dan, published in London in 1714. I had previously studied Nieto and his famous work for an earlier book of mine where I suggested how Nieto had absorbed much of the theological and scientific ambiance of his immediate surroundings and used this knowledge in defense of the Jewish tradition. That Marcus had dared to challenge directly this vaunted spokesman of traditional Judaism suggested a greater significance to Marcus's work than I had initially surmised.

Was the apparent disagreement between a famous sephardic rabbi and a youthful neophyte from London recently educated in the ashkenazic yeshivah of Hamburg ultimately part of a larger story worth telling? Nieto's spirited justification of the rabbis and the sanctity of the oral law have usually been linked to a larger rabbinic defense of traditional Judaism and its leadership emerging in the late seventeenth-century and continuing well throughout the eighteenth. As we have mentioned, rabbinic authority was felt to be in "crisis" because of the well publicized assaults against its sanctity and legitimacy from such renegades as Uriel da Costa and Benedict Spinoza, because of the growing indifference to religious norms and practices on the part of a larger community of conversos in Amsterdam, Hamburg, and London, and because of the radical Sabbateans who had renounced the rabbinic establishment and its control over Jewish life in the name of their reputed messianic redeemer.

Marcus's critique of Nieto's work, however, bears none of the markings of Spinozism, Crypto-Judaism, or Sabbatianism; it is framed in an entirely different context. On the surface, it appears to be nothing more than a conventional Christian rejection of rabbinic Judaism, offering the rival claim that the true biblical religion sprouted from Christian soil, as reflected in the teachings of the New Testament and the Church Fathers, and not from that of the Pharisees and rabbis and their allegedly stringent legal interpretations. But Marcus's essay represents more than the standard trope of...

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Verlag
University of Pennsylvania Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2007
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812240162
ISBN 13 
9780812240160
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
152
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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