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Humanities and Social Sciences Library > Collections & Reading Rooms > Dorot Jewish Division Jewes in America: Conquistadors, Knickerbockers, Pilgrims, and the Hope of IsraelExhibition Guide optimized for printing (pdf) Exhibition GuidePart of New York’s yearlong celebration of the 350th anniversary of the arrival, in the fall of 1654, of the first group of Jews in the city (and thus in the future United States), this exhibition traces the succession of Jewish interactions with four colonial powers in the Western hemisphere—the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and English. Jewes in America centers on that moment of arrival, smack in the middle of the “Century of Revolution,” and on the big ideas and strongly-held beliefs that influenced—and were influenced by—the tiny, tenuous, partly accidental settlement of these first Jews in New York. Between the first and second world wars, there were more than two million Jews in this city, close to one in three New Yorkers. This statistic, without parallel in either Jewish or New York history, was the result of the mass migration that began in the 1880s and ended just a generation later with the immigration acts of 1921 and 1924, which aimed at preventing the inundation of America by what the talk of the time termed dangerous and inferior races—especially Jews. In the Colonial and Federal periods explored in this exhibition, the actual number of Jews in New York and beyond was contrastingly minuscule. Nevertheless, the presence of Jews in America occupied a sizeable place in the American mind during these formative years. This is largely attributable to the multiple identity crises of early modernity. The upheavals of the time —theological, philosophical, political, and economic— forcefully posed such questions as: Who is a Christian? What does it mean to be Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English, or American? A consistent by-product of such questions was to heighten preoccupation with the identity and status of Jews. If this is a story that today seems remote or even bizarre at times, it is also one that raises issues —civil rights, multiculturalism, secularism, capitalism, identification with Israel—that are familiar and even integral to both the liberal and the conservative lines along which contemporary American identities bifurcate. Michael Terry, Dorot Chief Librarian, Dorot Jewish Division Support for this exhibition has been provided by a grant from The
Waber Foundation. Exhibition Acknowledgments: Hours: For more information on hours and current and upcoming exhibitions, programs, and services at The New York Public Library, call 212.869.8089 or visit the Library’s website at www.nypl.org Copyright c 2004 ConquistadorsHalf the world’s Jews lived in Spain, subordinated but in key scientific and economic roles. But the crusade to annex the peninsula’s last Moorish principalities left less and less room for a Jewish minority. In a century of coercion beginning 1391, most Spanish Jews converted, accepting their identity as “New Christians” with varying degrees of reservation. The Inquisition was introduced in 1381 to monitor the New Christians’ lingering loyalties—and to give anxious Old Christians a means to limit their integration. With the fall of the last Moorish holdout, Granada, early in 1492, Jews got a choice: convert or depart by July 31. The majority submitted. Most who did not went overland to Portugal. At the same time, Columbus, believing himself chosen to lead the ultimate crusade, to recapture the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and usher in the messianic age, prepared to set sail. He left Spain on August 3, intent on converting China and India and accumulating the wealth to pay for Armageddon. 1 Orient-bound, Columbus sensibly recruited a Jew for his crew. Luis de Torres, still wet from the requisite baptism, knew Hebrew, Aramaic, a little Arabic, Renaissance Europe’s “Oriental languages.” Arriving in Cuba, Columbus’s “China,” de Torres was put ashore on a mission from Queen Isabella to the Great Khan. When he returned days later, he had not found Beijing, but he had discovered communitarianism, free love and tobacco. On “Hispaña” (Hispaniola, now Haiti and the Dominican Republic, but, according to Columbus, Japan), the “interpreter” again hit it off with the Arawaks, shown here unarmed, unclothed, and characteristically welcoming, in this first illustrated edition of Columbus’s account. Returning on the Niña, de Torres obtained salaried government appointment as resident in China. Back in Cuba, he is recorded as rejoining his indigenous friends in Edenic embrace, and he can be considered the first European settler in the western hemisphere. 2 A unique illuminated copy of one of the great monuments of typography: the first Polyglot, presenting the ancient versions of a biblical text “synoptically,” i.e., side-by-side, in their various scripts. The compiler, a representative of the Late Renaissance ideal of accomplishment in the three “learned languages,” Latin, Greek and Hebrew, was a Genoese patrician and professor of Hebrew in Paris at François I’s fledgling Trilingual College (the Collège de France). But for all its rabbinic learning, his edition’s great fame rests on a four-page aside, occasioned by Psalm 19’s reference to “the ends of the earth,” where Giustiniani publishes the first-ever biographical study of Columbus. Divulging the terrible secret of his mysterious compatriot’s working class origins, he managed to prompt a furious feud with the Admiral’s son, Ferdinand, Duke of Veragua, and to launch the still-thriving arcane mini-discipline of Columbian studies. 3 Astronomy and astrology, fundamental to the medieval medical curriculum, was a Jewish specialty par excellence. Gersonides, papal physician at Avignon, designed a much-improved quadrant, known as “Jacob’s Ladder,” the basic tool of the Age of Discovery. His successors established a Provencal-Catalan-Balearic tradition of excellence that made a second “Jewish profession” of instrument making and cartography. Zacuto, astronomer-astrologer to the bishop of Salamanca, and, after 1492, to Portuguese kings John II and Manuel I, produced astronomical tables key to the success of da Gama and Columbus alike. The tables even saved Columbus on dry land: knowing that a lunar eclipse was imminent, he was able to subdue some quite hostile Jamaicans by pretending to make the moon disappear. Zacuto’s tables’ primary purpose was not navigational, however, but astrological. Accordingly, this copy is supplemented with a contemporary manuscript prognosticon, in the style familiar from the best known of the New Christian physician-astrologers, Nostradamus. Some entries here are specific, others a safe bet, and still others a little vague: 1511: Kings will die in Spain, the Levant and Italy. There will be shock and awe in Babylon—in Baghdad in the East; 1512: Famine and plague. Venice and Turkey at war; 1513: Solar eclipse. Plague and great famine. Upheavals in the Netherlands and among the New Christians. Death of the Doge of Genoa; 1514: The people will betray their masters. 4 In the age of forced conversions, Jewish scientists transmuted easily into New Christian scientists. Their names changed, often to those of baptismal sponsors, they became, as they wished to be, less easily identifiable. Anomalous in this regard are Gerard and his traveler-geographer son Cornelis de Jode, important cartographers and engravers in Antwerp, printing center of the Spanish Netherlands. The de Jodes, though, had little to hide: the family’s work, besides maps, is notable for devotional items, redolent of the flamboyant Catholicism with which the Church, remodeled at the Council Of Trent, chose to fight the Reformation. It was this confrontational stance that culminated in the 80-year revolt of the northern Netherlands, from 1568 until the recognition of the United Provinces as a Protestant republic by the Peace of Westphalia of 1648. On show in the Edna Barnes Salomon Room (third floor): the Library’s Hunt-Lenox Globe. Anonymous, unlocalized and undated, the state of knowledge it reflects, with its detailed depiction of South America and failure to feature North America at all, makes it one of just two known globes that must be dated as early as 1511 at the latest. 5 The Portuguese crown decided to capitalize on the influx of Spanish Jews by imposing a huge special poll tax. To encourage participation, the king decided to settle São Tomé, an equatorial island off the west coast of Africa, with the male children aged 2-10 of non-paying Jews. 2,000 boys were enslaved and dispatched to be raised there as Catholics. Dumped on the beach, many were immediately eaten by crocodiles. Within a year, only 600 remained alive, but additional slaves were brought from the African mainland. Within a generation, the rainforest had been cleared, and this small island had become the biggest sugar exporter in the world. With Portuguese colonization of Brazil in the early 16th century, the children of São Tomé, now the world’s experts on sugar cultivation, were brought in to replicate their experiment on an enormous scale. 6 Rebuffed in Portugal, Columbus visited Zacuto in Spain (1486), obtaining his commendation to Ferdinand and Isabella. A Spanish royal commission investigated and rejected the westward route, but Zacuto persisted and now a courtier took on Their Majesties. Santangel, grandson of forced converts—closely identified with other New Christians, whom he protected, and Jews, for whom he provided ships in 1492—had grown rich as government contractor and powerful as Ferdinand’s preferred advisor. Eventually, he persuaded Isabella to drop opposition to Columbus’s terms: the viceroyalty and 10% of the proceeds of all that he colonized. Obliged to finance the expedition, Santangel advanced 70% of his own to accompany 30% from a lender thought to be the philosopher of Judaism and financier of the siege of Granada, Isaac Abrabanel. Columbus’s second voyage (1493), with a crew this time of 1,500 not 87, was funded by the state—from property abandoned by the Jews it expelled. Columbus’s first word of his discoveries was sent ahead from the Azores in two copies, one addressed to Santangel and a duplicate to Gabriel Sanchez, treasurer of Aragon and another New Christian activist. The “Letter to Santangel” was printed, in the original Spanish, days after Columbus’s return. The Library’s copy, the only survivor, is the bibliophile’s ultimate Americanum. The “Letter to Sanchez” served as the basis for a Latin translation printed that year in Rome, Paris, Antwerp and Basel. 7 New Christian migration to Spain’s transatlantic colonies was prohibited as early as 1493, but freedom from arbitrary ruin by the Inquisition made the trip irresistible in the first years of empire and again after 1580, when Spain annexed Portugal. With enforcement sometimes lax and bribes always efficacious, Spaniards of Jewish descent relocated to the Caribbean, Peru (conquered 1533), and especially Mexico (conquered 1521)—in significant numbers. Regulations were tightened, and by the 17th century no one might leave for the colonies, or obtain a government job there, or feel at all secure from arrest by the Inquisition, without establishing limpieza de sangre—blood purity—for four generations, by listing parents, grandparents and great-grandparents to show no known Jewish ancestry. 8 New World inquisitors did not concern themselves with vestigial Aztec or Inca practices. Technically looking also for covert Protestants and Muslims, their real interest remained all Jews all the time. This representative auto of 1649 tried and convicted 109 individuals—108 for Judaizing, the other, a Frenchman, for Calvinism, advocating freedom of conscience, and failure to report a friend for practicing Judaism. Procesos (proceedings) often took years, yielding hundreds of pages of confessions extracted under torture and evidence gathered from secret witnesses. With enough procesos complete, an auto general (show-trial) was held, after which Madrid (or Lisbon) required a short list of names and (largely improbable) charges. Thus: Ines Pereira, 23, born in Ixmiquilpan, who said she was destined to give birth to Messiah; Duarte de Leon, 55, born in Portugal, conventionally-circumcised rabbi, who circumcised his sons, daughters and wife—by excising flesh from the left shoulder of each. 9 Even if founded to advance national cohesion, the Inquisition rapidly became the world’s greatest organized crime syndicate. Frankenstein’s monster, the inquisitors, answering neither to Crown nor Church, stole unimaginable sums in rigged sales of seized property. These friars’ sybaritic lifestyle depended on sustaining a climate of terror, and spectacle—subterranean torture chambers and the histrionics of the auto—was key. Minimum sentence was the embarrassment and ostracism of wearing the sambenito, for a fixed period or life. First-time offenders who repented of Judaizing were, in addition, frequently whipped: men and women stripped to the waist, mounted on a donkey, and paraded around town while receiving 200-400 lashes. The addition of five years in the Veracruz-Spain or Acapulco-Philippines galleys was tantamount to a death sentence. Repeat offenders and the impenitent were liable to be “relaxed,” i.e., handed over for public burning, dressed in a sambenito of more extravagant design. 10 Jews who moved to Portugal in 1492 found themselves trapped there just five years later, too valuable to be permitted to leave and converted by force at the insistence in Spain. The Portuguese Inquisition was established in 1536, but, relatively benign at first, it liked to send Judaizers out to populate Brazil. Spain annexed Portugal in 1580 and inquisitors set about rectifying a tradition of laxity with a vengeance, alleging Jewish observance everywhere—not least among their fellow clergy. A clique of New Christian priests, said to be promoting the cult of Queen Esther and intent on reviving animal sacrifices, was “exposed” in Coimbra. Among four men and three women burned in this auto is “Fernão Dias da Sylva, canon of Coimbra cathedral, heretic and liar. He feigned repentance, then retracted, before confessing he was a priest of the Law of Moses and kept the commandments.” Such episodes provided strong impetus to clandestine migration—be it to Amsterdam or America. 11 The “Spanish Shakespeare,” Lope de Vega’s plays are known for their unsympathetic, one-dimensional Jews. Brazil Restored was written in the months after Spain helped recover Bahia, capital of Portuguese Brazil, from a Dutch occupation that conventional wisdom blamed on a New Christian fifth column. Bernardo, the New Christian protagonist here, may not have such good lines as Shylock but, nevertheless, he is not without nuance. When he confides his treacherous plan, it sounds almost as if the Inquisition is the real guilty party: “Having very good reason to fear that the Holy Office planned to send out a particularly ferocious Inquisitorial Visitor, those of our nation living in Brazil who despise Christianity, so as to avoid arrest, ruin, trial, and humiliation, have written to Holland inviting them to make ready an armada. Things have already grown so bad for our families that people are beginning to wonder if maybe it’s true God has abandoned us. Well, now we have our answer: the fleet is ready to sail.” 12 By the 18th century, the Spanish Inquisition was running out of steam. Not so much murderous now as reactionary, it specialized in destroying dangerous books, such as Robinson Crusoe. For the late-blossoming Portuguese Inquisition, though, besides cultivating a minor preoccupation with sex, it was business as usual. This typical auto da fé features a bigamist, two sodomites, six fornicators, two witches, and 38 alleged Judaizers–22 women and 16 men–among them Miguel Nunes Sanches, soldier, sent back for trial in Lisbon from Arrayal do Paracatú, deep in the interior near modern Brasilia, where Brazil’s great gold rush was in full swing. Knickerbockers13 The Calvinist northern Netherlands revolted against Spanish sovereignty in 1568, declaring independence in 1581 but remaining at war until 1648. In 1621, the Dutch West India Company was formed, with a government monopoly on Atlantic trade encouraging investment in a corporation designed to establish new colonies around the Atlantic rim, or seize existing ones from Portugal, Spanish-controlled since 1580. The first venture, the capture of Bahia in 1624, ended in disaster eleven months later. Spain, fearing loss of all its American possessions, sent an armada, and the Dutch garrison of debauched mercenaries surrendered instantly. This fiasco was followed immediately by settlement of a new colony on the island of Manhattan. In 1630, the Company attempted another assault on Brazil, taking Olinda but not developing its foothold much until 1636, when it hired as governor Prince Maurits, 32 year-old cousin of the Stadholder, a successful soldier with marked humanistic leanings. 14 The 1640 revolution in Portugal ousted Spain and installed the legitimate heir, the Duke of Braganza, as John IV. Spain did not accept this outcome until 1668, and Portuguese survival became dependent on the Brazilian sugar trade, in which the New Christians were crucial, and on international allies, including the Dutch, also still at war with their former ruler, Spain. Liberal, artistic, ally of New Christians at home and Protestants abroad, John was anathema to the pro-Spanish inquisitors. By 1649, the inquisitors’ activities threatened to sever Portugal’s lifeline, for Dutch ships arriving from Brazil and the Netherlands were being boarded by the Holy Office, which helped itself to any cargo it deemed potentially “Jewish.” In this declaration, the king guarantees an immediate end to all this. But it was said of John IV that while he conquered a kingdom, he could never conquer the Estaos (the building in Lisbon that housed the Inquisition). 15 A glimpse of the amor intellectualis of “Maurits the Brazilian” for van Baerle, “the modern Virgil.” Founder of the Athenaeum Illustre (the future University of Amsterdam), van Baerle, a proponent of pietas universalis, was identified with the Socininan (Unitarian) movement. He provoked furious controversy with his approbation for Amsterdam rabbi Manasseh ben Israel’s book, De Creatione (1635), by expressing the view that “truth is not the monopoly of any one religion” and calling on Jews and Christians to “live as friends for God.” Maurits, hardly flawless but, even so, somewhat the perfect prince—the visionary governor and skillful general whose passions, nonetheless, are art and architecture, flora and fauna—has wiped out an immense Spanish-Portuguese armada off Itamaracá, and van Baerle has written him a congratulatory poem. Responding in Latin from the magnificent if immodestly named capital he has built at Recife, Maurits concludes modestly enough, “Let us confess that it was no man who did this thing, but the most powerful and glorious hand of God.” 16 “Get my family out of here” letter from a judge in Mauritstad to the famous poet and Stadholder’s secretary in the Hague: The Portuguese have scored a decisive victory in the interior and assault on the capital is expected momentarily. Jews are present in great numbers and, while they are the only people here who have invested in the colony, it is not as if they haven’t profited handsomely. Yes, it is they who have bailed out the administration in this hour of need [an advance of 100,000 florins saved the colony from having to surrender to the Portuguese insurgents as early as 1647], but is that enough reason to do as now proposed and protect them just like Protestants in the event of a collapse? 17 Maurits left Brazil in 1643 and was replaced with a High and Secret Council—made up of Company functionaries and local nonentities. Jewish and Catholic subjects were excluded from local government and these colonial Portuguese Catholics now began an insurgency. Portugal, needing Dutch goodwill to survive against Spain, could not overtly support the guerillas. But neither did the Dutch—though just then the closest thing in the world to a superpower—have the requisite will to support their own settlers. For ten years, the Company, obsessed with short-term profit, and the government, disgusted with Company greed, neglected their fast-eroding colony. Finally, the local Portuguese commander, Francisco Barreto, ostensibly acting on his own initiative, laid siege to Recife with his ragtag army and, in January, 1654, found the city’s councilors happy to accept the generous terms dictated by Portugal’s own precarious position. The manuscript shown is the exhaustive official report to the Company on the siege, capitulation, and arrangements for evacuation. 18 By the mid-18th century, the Inquisition, which now regarded one in three Portuguese as tainted with Jewishness, had destroyed the economic and social fabric of Brazil and of Portugal. But it took the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which flattened the city and killed 100,000, to let King Joseph shift real power to his Anglophile prime minister, Sebastião de Melo (the future Marquês de Pombal). In the apex of his legislative reform program, he finally outlawed the “malicious and seditious” distinction between Old and New Christians. An act of 1774 turned the tables, making mere invocation of this distinction punishable by public whipping, loss of position, and deportation to Angola. Five years later, Joseph was succeeded by his ultra-conservative daughter, Maria I; Pombal was exiled, the clock turned back, and the Portuguese Inquisition not finally abolished until 1821, Maria Christina of Spain following suit in 1834. 19 Olinda, second city of Brazil, was demolished by the Dutch, with only churches and convents left standing—if largely empty. The Dutch preferred to settle across the Pernambuco estuary at Recife, i.e., reef, a lagoon location, reminiscent of Venice and Amsterdam. Maurits’s administration saw construction here of Mauritstad (“Mauritopolis”), a magnificent city of parks, fountains and bridges. At the same time, he expanded the colony deep into the interior, conducting overland expeditions as far as Chile and maritime excursions that resulted in capture from the Portuguese of São Tomé and the earliest West African slaving post, São Jorge da Mina. 20 Maurits was great news for the shareholders, but the directors saw no need for an ever bigger and better baroque utopia in the jungle. Unable to agree on terms, Maurits returned to the Hague, where his “Mauritshuis” became a temple of Braziliana. But his tenure left Mauritstad—with up to 1,500 Jews, migrants from Holland and New Christian defectors from Portuguese Brazil, accounting for 50% of the city’s European population—the most successful Jewish community in the world, larger and more affluent than even pulsating Amsterdam. The Company, eager to dispose of Maurits’s extraordinary palace (the tallest building on the skyline, with twin cupolas, marked A), negotiated its sale as the city’s main synagogue, but the idea proved too scandalous and the deal fell through. Evidently modest enough to escape censure, though, was the “Judaeorum excubiae,” the Jews’ outhouse, the ritual bath, marked E, between the Carmelite convent (D) and the shore in the view of Olinda (item 19). 21 The lurid memoirs of a French privateer—ex-colleague of the notorious Henry “Juan” Morgan—first appeared in Dutch, then in a pirated translation, tactfully rewritten for the Spanish market and enhanced with a doggerel-epic tour of the Americas by Captain Miguel (or Daniel Levi) de Barrios. Two names for two identities. For years, he commuted between contradictory careers: the Spanish army in Brussels and Jewish poet laureate in Amsterdam—this after near-death in the Caribbean. As Dutch Recife declined, Jews had begun migrating to the islands, especially English Barbados, bringing sugar cane cultivation with them. In time, Dutch Curaçao’s capital, Willemstad, became half-Jewish, but the infertile island was unsuited to sugar. Realizing too late its folly in Brazil, the West India Company determined to create a new sugar colony. Only the Wild Coast (Guyana) was unconquered, so they began recruiting Jews for the coastal island of Cayenne, chartering it as an all-Jewish self-governing colony to enhance its otherwise doubtful allure. Spanish-born de Barrios was among European enthusiasts, but his nightmare trip got him no further than Tobago, where Dutch-French fighting, and the death of his wife, propelled his return. 22 De la Vega was another prolific member of the Spanish-language Amsterdam Jewish literary scene. His florid writing, erudite-jocular, thick with biblical and classical puns, might have been forgotten had he not written the undying classic of business literature. Its reputation unsurpassed, Confusión is the first book to theoretize, describe, and define the operations of the stock market. The title alludes to the author’s contention that “the more one studies their mutations, the less one understands them.” The stock market was a new phenomenon, the invention of the Dutch East and West India companies, and not yet well-understood—witness the catastrophic tulipomania here described. The book is dedicated to Duarte Nunes da Costa. A leader of the ex-New Christian Jewish communities of Amsterdam and Hamburg, he was John IV of Portugal’s chief procurer of finance and armaments for the ongoing struggle against Spain. Nunes’s uncle, Francisco de Vittoria, was bishop of Tucumán (Argentina) and then archbishop of Mexico, before being returned to Madrid on charges of Judaizing. 23 The Jews had everything to fear from the siege of Recife. The Portuguese were, as Amsterdam’s chief rabbi Mortera observed, their worst enemy, “a people accustomed to take intense pleasure in making human sacrifices” of Jews. And yet, as Mortera continues in his magnum opus of 1659, a rebuttal of the then-standard Catholic contention that the Jews were doomed to unremitting misfortune (which proved their rejection by God): “God inspired Governor Barreto to have it proclaimed in the streets that nobody should so much as touch anyone of the Hebrew nation on pain of severe punishment. Not only that, but he allowed them to sell their possessions and provided passage to Holland for all 600 that remained. For want of Dutch ships, he managed to find them Portuguese ones, and so they boarded 16 vessels, many old and rickety—yet, by divine grace and providence, every one of them arrived safely. Such were the risks of the voyage and such the degree of providence, that when one of the ships was captured en route by Spaniards, who resolved to take the Jews to the Inquisition, before they could carry out their design, God provided a French vessel, which took them out of the Spaniards’ hands and brought them safely to Florida or New Netherland, whence they continued in peace to Holland.” The Hope of IsraelThe visionary Manasseh, Mortera’s energetic and independent deputy in the Amsterdam rabbinate, did not know Latin. Still, his books typically debuted in that language, for Manasseh found admiration and affection as the authority on all things Jewish in an ever widening circle of Protestant scholars. First it was van Baerle and other rationalist academics. Next came a more radical elite, including numerous refugees, in exile in the Netherlands on account of their biblically-informed hopes of impending politicotheological global revolution. Dismayed by the fragmentation of Protestant Europe into antagonistic nations and, especially, sects, such progressive luminaries as Adam Boreel and the Scot John Dury sought instead not just the union of all Christian churches but the ultimate reconciliation with the Jews and their restoration to the re-established Kingdom of Israel, its capital in Jerusalem, a utopian superpower for the Book of Daniel’s “fifth monarchy,” interpreted as the last 1,000 years of history. 1648-9 was a tumultuous period, the Peace of Westphalia after 80 years of conflict in western Europe coming at the same time as the Cossack-Polish War devastated eastern Europe. The decapitation in England of King Charles I, and his replacement by a pro-millenarian republican regime, was enough to settle many people’s doubts that something cosmic was afoot. Manasseh, the one widely-known representative Jew of his age, now published his endorsement of these congenial views, which put an imminently glorious Jewish future front and center of world history. 24 While too reticent to confirm the 1655-6 date many Protestants expected, Manasseh assembled in Hope of Israel support for four indicators of salvation: i) if “that horrible monster the Spanish Inquisition” had not fulfilled every last preredemption biblical curse, what could? ii) the ascent through the 16th century of Hebrew and Jewish studies to a position of extraordinary prestige in the 17th century, strongly suggested the corner had been turned; iii) the evidence of travelers in the western hemisphere, to which he devotes most of his book, suggested that the newfound Indians were none other than the long lost ten tribes of Israel. In particular, he publicized for the first time testimony given him by a Jewish sea captain, Antonio Montezinos, who reported his encounter (near Medellín, Colombia) with an Indian woman and her three male companions. Asked who their ancestors were, they made a gesture with three fingers; to Montezinos and Manasseh, this signified, undoubtedly, the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; iv) the final fulfillment of prophecy is the recent arrival in the western hemisphere of Jews like his own brother, a merchant in Recife: “The time of the fifth monarchy shall be hid, until the time when it shall begin. Yet this I can affirm, that it shall be about the end of this age …The shortness of time when we believe our redemption shall appear is confirmed by this, that the Lord hath promised that he will gather the two tribes, Judah and Benjamin, out of the four corners of the world, from whence you may gather, that for the fulfilling of that they must be scattered through all the corners of the world; as Daniel saith, “And when the scattering of the holy people shall have an end, all those things shall be fulfilled.” And this appeares now to be done, when as our Synagogues are found in America.” 25 Manasseh’s tact, accessibility, enthusiasms and sympathies won him the esteem of thinkers and doers across Europe, and his unpretentious manner went down well with the Puritans. Rembrandt, by no means a Puritan, clearly had an especially soft spot for him too. While his subjects may include chief rabbi Mortera (as Moses with the tablets) and the poet Daniel de Barrios with his wife, Abigael (The Jewish Bride), only with Manasseh is there much evidence of close friendship. In 1655, the year Manasseh left for London on his mission of a lifetime—to dissuade the less eagerly “Judeocentric” members of the clergy from opposing the return of the Jews to English soil—Rembrandt even broke his rule against book illustration and executed extraordinary artwork for Manasseh’s new messianic commentary on Daniel. 26 The title, in use since the first Rembrandt catalog (1731), is problematic. An earlier reference conjectured Pharisees in the Temple. Certainly, the architecture was not drawn from Amsterdam synagogue life, but the figures (apart from the seated gentleman in a turban) strongly suggest 17th century East European Jews. Unpersuasive is the scholarly opinion that the traditional title “cannot be correct because Rembrandt shows Polish and Portuguese Jews together in one interior, whereas the two different sects never met in the same synagogue.” It was not until 1697 that the outnumbered Sephardi community took such a desperate measure as decreeing the expulsion of members who married Ashkenazi women. Ture, German Jews had a synagogue in Amsterdam from 1640, Poles from 1660, but for 1648 all bets are off. That year, which the sacred text of Kabbalah, the Zohar, slated for the messianic redemption, brought only the apocalyptic holocaust of the Cossack-Polish War. Genocidal Cossacks destroyed what, with Spain eliminated, had become the main center of Jewish life. With countless thousands of Jews slaughtered and the communities of eastern Europe reduced to a wretchedness from which they never recovered, refugees started streaming into Amsterdam, the continent’s most unthreatening destination. Not all easily absorbed, there were those who now continued their westward migration by sea. 27 The ship Endracht arrived about half past five in the afternoon with the following:
Found among family papers by a New York woman of Dutch extraction in 1960, this scrap is older by three years than any other document from New Amsterdam. But, as Richard Morris, then chair of history at Columbia, told the Times, it is also the “missing link” that confirms that the earliest colonists to settle on Manhattan arrived on this ship, the Endracht, and on this date, July 16, 1625. Morris admitted finding the possibility “intriguing” that the trade goods referred to were those used months later by Director Minuit in his 60 florin purchase of Manhattan from the Indians. While doubt is often expressed about the adequacy of the $24 equivalence—first propounded in 1846—it is evident from this document that the “purchase price” was in any case the equivalent of a pile of woolen blankets. 28 The original colonists of New Netherland went out as employees, “engaged in the service of the West India Company” and bound by its order of 1624 that: “They shall within their territory practice no other form of divine worship than that of the Reformed religion as at present practiced here in this country and thus by their Christian life and conduct seek to draw the Indians and other blind people to the knowledge of God and of his word, without, however, persecuting anyone on account of his faith but leaving each one the use of his conscience.” New Amsterdam’s Reformed church and its tavern were both completed in 1643. The presence in this image of the church and the absence of the tavern suggests a date maybe early that year. In 1647, a new Director General of New Netherland arrived in New Amsterdam. A staunch supporter of the Reformed Dutch Church, Peter Stuyvesant found much that was not to his strict Calvinist liking. His first deed here that set the tone was to act against the tavern’s sale of liquor on Sunday. 29 One Sunday in Middelburg, capital of the Dutch province of Zeeland, an anonymous artist prepared this heraldic draft for the consideration of the Heeren XIX, the West India Company’s directors in Amsterdam. On the right is the device approved for New Netherland. Left and center were two options for New Amsterdam. The design on the left was rejected. It was too radical, letting beavers completely displace the two lions that, with the triple cross, made up old Amsterdam’s coat of arms. To have two beavers rampant by way of supporters went quite far enough. In truth, though, the wild western frontier settlement of New Amsterdam was a habitat where beaver was king. Other pelts (otter, raccoon, bear, deer, elk) came a distant second, and local tobacco, which an Englishman conceded was “as good as is usually made in Maryland,” placed third. 30 New Amsterdam became a city, a self-governing corporation, on February 2, 1653. We would not know this but for one indiscretion too many on the part of Cornelis van Tienhoven, schout (sheriff) of New Netherland, a thug on whom Stuyvestant was heavily reliant. Not enough that his thuggery provoked a dreadful war with the Indians after one of them stole a peach from the ex-fiscal (district attorney)’s garden; he was only discharged when found running down the street in pursuit of a prostitute (not with intent to arrest—he was naked). The city council now wrote the directors requesting a replacement and enclosing the city’s foundational text—copied from the now long-lost original by city clerk Jacob Kip (of Kip’s Bay). A provision of this document was to list qualifications for membership of the corporation, which was to act as the city’s judiciary as much as its administration. It stipulated that: “qualified, honorable, reasonable, intelligent, and the most well-to-do persons be chosen, who are neither corrupt nor opponents of the Directors of the Company nor their government here established, but peace-loving and well-affected subjects, being native-born or real estate-owning inhabitants, who, according to the laudable custom of Amsterdam, have been for at least seven years burghers here in this city, or else were born and brought up within the provinces of the United Netherlands, promoters and professors of the Reformed religion, as in conformity to the word of God and the regulations of the Synod of Dordrecht it is at present taught in the churches of the United Netherlands and here in this country [the Synod (1619) being where the strict Calvinists triumphed over the tolerant, universalist, Remonstrant faction]. Which court of justice, for the present time, until it shall be otherwise ordained or enlarged by the aforesaid Honorable Directors or their agents, shall consist of two burgomasters [city managers] and five schepens [councilmen], to be chosen and sworn by the Director General and Council [his two aides], and it is to be served by a secretary or clerk.” 31 “September 7: Jacques de la Motte, skipper of the bark___ [illegible] requests payment of passage and board for the Jews whom he brought here from Cape St. Anthony [Cuba]. Solomon Pietersen, a Jew, appears and says that there are 23 souls, big and little, who must pay equally.” It was off Cuba, then, that the French privateer attacked the Spanish ship that had attacked the Portuguese ship that was taking the Recife refugees to the Netherlands (per item 23) and now the boat came into New Amsterdam. But after an eventful trip, the Jewish passengers—perhaps half a dozen families, it is very unclear—lacked means, or friends ashore, to pay for the ride. “September 10: Skipper of the bark St. C____[page torn; St. Charles? St. Catherine?] v. various Jews. Court orders Jews’ possessions sold at auction. September 16: Auction fails to cover obligation. Principal debtors to be confined until debt is paid. October 5: Sailors’ spokesman demands 106 florins outstanding. Jew, Assar Leeven [Asser Levy], says no funds remain. Representative debtors ordered to stay in jail.” By spring, though, there were signs of stability—and threat: “March 1, 1655: Abram de la Sina [i.e., de Lucena], a Jew, has kept his store open during the [Sunday] sermon and sold by retail and therefore shall be deprived of his trade and fined six hundred florins. Director General and [New Netherland] Council have resolved that the Jews, who came last year from the West Indies and now from the fatherland, must prepare to depart herewith.” 32 Stuyvesant writes: “Jewish liberty here is very detrimental, because the Christians cannot compete against them; and if they receive liberty, the Lutherans and papists cannot be refused.” But his distrust of diversity is not exclusively religious, for fellow-Calvinists are also cause for concern in this letter: “The Scots itinerant merchants who only travel hither and thither spoil the trade. These same always bring with them gunpowder and fire-locks, which they sell to the savages to our own damage.” Not that Stuyvesant’s suspicion stops at ethnic groups; in accompanying dispatches, he reports that his “First Councillor de Sille is no fit man for these parts” (October 28), while Second Councillor La Montaigne “is an evil instrument…a viper in our bosom” (November 7). 33 His case against tolerating Jews rejected by the Company, Stuyvesant begins this letter in a tone that seems almost sarcastic: “Concerning the Jewish nation, as far as trade is concerned they are not hindered, but trade here with the same privileges and liberties as other inhabitants. They have many times petitioned us for the free and public exercise of their abominable religion. Time will show what they can obtain from Your Honors.” Earlier in the year, they had obtained a cemetery (still visible on St. James Place, just south of Chatham Square) but the old 1624 limitation of worship in public to that of the Reformed Dutch Church remained in place for the lifespan of New Amsterdam. 34 Much of the Library’s unique Dutch Brazil and New Netherland material comes from the papers of Hans Bontemantel, a schepen of Amsterdam and the main “policy wonk” on the board of the West India Company. A respected public figure, privately he was the amused observer, accumulating material for his diary of Dutch politics 1653-1672, a “chronique scandaleuse” not published until 1893. As a director, he was much involved in cleaning up the financial mess left behind in the Company’s hasty withdrawal from Brazil, a complex situation typified by this private act of the federal legislature to enable Jacob Valverde, once one of Recife’s chief Jewish merchants, “to plead before the Court of Holland concerning the revision for annulment of the judgment pronounced by the [defunct] Council of Brazil.” With van Baerle and others, Bontemantel pressed the Amsterdam city council in 1654-6 to help out the now-struggling Company by providing free passage and a year’s stipend to anyone who would go out to New Netherland. A Dutch culture of tolerance, millenarian excitement, the influence of Dutch Jews, with their growing role in Amsterdam’s burgeoning stock market, may all have been factors in the Company’s refusal to endorse Stuyvesant’s planned expulsion of Jews; but the directors’ anxiety about New Netherland’s lackluster economy and its failure to attract immigrants was likely at least as significant. 35 The year’s news is delivered summary-style: “Clergy petition Burgomasters and Schepens against the Lutheran preacher, who is ordered to depart. Some women banished from the territory on account of their evil life. The village of Vlissingen [Flushing] on Long Island gave the Director an insolent reply in refusing to obey the order to expel the Quakers, saying that they regard themselves as morally obliged and legally entitled to lodge them. The matter has been taken care of and punishment meted out.” That insolent letter—the Flushing Remonstrance—is long lost, but the content endures. Transcribed into the record of the New Netherland Council, it was finally transferred to Albany in time to be caught up in the Capitol fire of 1911. Singed but complete, it survives. Its pluck gives Flushing a special place as home of New York spirit and spirituality. A long letter, tautly-argued, its key passage reads, “We desire not to judge lest we be judged, neither to condemn lest we be condemned, but rather let every man stand and fall to his own Master. The law of love, peace and liberty in the states extending to Jews, Turks, and Egyptians, as they are considered the sons of Adam, which is the glory of the outward state of Holland, so our desire is not to offend one of his little ones, in whatsoever form, name or title he appears in, whether Presbyterian, Independent, Baptist or Quaker, but shall be glad to see anything of God in any of them, desiring to do unto all men as we desire all men should do unto us, which is the true law both of Church and State.” 36 This pair of prints (items 36 and 37) shows the growth of the city through the second Dutch period. The English and Dutch were such close friends (first in spite of Dutch non-recognition of the Commonwealth, then, after the restoration of the monarchy, because of it) that when they went to war—three times, once under Cromwell (1652-4) and twice after the Restoration (1664-7 and 1672-8)—it was in a spirit of candid commercial rivalry, to settle the question of who ruled the waves (i.e., slave trade). In 1664, Richard Nicholls, groom of the Duke of York’s bedchamber, appeared in New Amsterdam with a very small fleet. Stuyvestant was stubborn to the last, but, with no means of defense, the city council negotiated a surrender and left him no choice but to sign. 37 By the terms of the capitulation, preserved in its original printing in two copies, one in the Netherlands and the other in The New York Public Library, the English got their chief wish, a monopoly on shipping New Netherland’s imports and exports. In return, the Dutch settlers, too, got to make a wish. Stuyvesant’s administration having made such an issue of protecting the Reformed Dutch way of life, the request, duly granted by the Anglican victors, was that “the Dutch here shall enjoy the liberty of their consciences in divine worship and church discipline.” Thus the champions of exclusivity while in power became the champions of toleration in defeat. However eager to embrace the principle of toleration, though, it took the Dutch old guard, still dominant on New York’s city council, until the 1690s to abandon objection to the opening of the city’s first synagogue. 38 Court records must give a limited picture of a place, but the New Amsterdam that emerges is such a rough-and-tumble and litigious town that, besides court appearances and the activities described therein, there cannot have been much time for anything else. Though never more than some fluctuating fraction of one percent of the population, Jews are well represented in these proceedings. One (more Jewish than typical) day, when the court heard 14 cases, opened with Jacob Barsimon v. Isaack Israel—plaintiff claimed that on Friday last defendant injured him, striking him in the face in Abram Lusina’s cellar—and closed with the case of Cohen’s canoe. Pieter Montfoort said it was his; a witness saw him give the Indians ten fathom of wampum for it. Cohen, though, had two witnesses, who borrowed his boat before that alleged transaction. It was definitely the same canoe, with the couple of holes, from being shot at, that Cohen had warned of. Between Barsimon and Cohen, the court also heard from “a Jew named Elias Silva” on the complaint of Jan Gerritsen, brewer, that “he detained his negress or slave and had carnal conversation with her.” And there was the regular David Frere appearance, this time on a charge of excise evasion. 39 Frere was one of New Amsterdam’s more assertive characters. In one day’s sitting of the court, he is plaintiff in one case and defendant in another: “David Frere, plaintiff, v. Claes Jansen Ruyter’s wife. Plaintiff demands payment of 400 florins in peltries according to obligation. Defendant acknowledges the debt, as she offered plaintiff payment, but that he will not accept any other payment but elks’ hides of 20-24 lb. each, which cannot be had. Says she gave him the deed of her lot, her furniture, etc., in pledge, and offers that, on the arrival of her husband’s vessel, which will come in five or six days, she will pay him in wampum at ten florins a beaver. Claims damages for glasses and a tree broken by the plaintiff. Parties being heard, defendant is condemned to pay plaintiff within three weeks, barring any action that she may institute.” The other case is similar, just that this time he wants cash, not skins. He ends up obstructing the bailiff and is prosecuted for contempt. The verdict, “that the said Jew shall be publicly whipped at the stake and banished forth from this Province of New Netherland,” was commuted, after mediation by New Amsterdam’s solitary cultivated Jew, Joseph da Costa, to a 120 florin fine. For all Stuyvesant’s misgivings, the “Jewish pilgrims” turn out to be just like the rest of his rollicking frontier townspeople. Only one, Frere, seems actively unattractive, and, besides the transient da Costa, only one, Asser Levy, proves exceptionally civic-minded. Time and again it is Levy who overcomes Stuyvesant’s objections to according Jews civil rights: the right to participate in the defense of New Amsterdam by joining the militia or to acquire Burgher rights (“citizenship”). By 1660, Levy is an established town worthy, a founder of the butchers’ guild, “granted special exemption from slaughtering hogs and allowed to take oath in Jews’ manner.” The proprietor of a butcher’s shop on Wall Street and of a popular tavern, he supports religious diversity with a large loan for the construction of the first Lutheran church in 1672 and joins Jacob Kip as trusted executor of wills and guardian of orphans. 40 This census counts the buildings in New Amsterdam–342–and shows their distribution over 28 streets, naming one prominent resident of each street for ease of identification. The city’s Jewish homes were generally in the six buildings that abutted “Slick Steegie [Muddy Lane], where Evert Duijckingh lives”—probably not the best address in town. The city institutions listed are the Latin School; Red Lion Brewery; Fiscal’s Garden; fort; church; cemetery; city hall; slaughterhouse; fish market; weighing house; hospital; West India Company warehouses; and the gallows. 41 This flattering portrait of the first great New York personality does little to soften the dyspeptic impression left by contemporary documents. Controlling, intolerant, and egotistical, in defeat Stuyvesant mellowed to become a symbol of change. Retirement in English New York transformed him into a convivial local hero to English and Dutch alike—bigot turned mascot. PilgrimsNothing made the Puritans so distinct as the resonance, pleasure, and personal and social direction they discovered in the Hebrew Bible——a literature hitherto more-or-less marginalized through the whole history of Christianity as not just the Old but the more or less obsolete Testament. Many of the Puritans were influenced by exposure to Hebrew while undergraduates at Cambridge—hence the name of the Massachusetts site of the Puritans’ own academic foundation, the first in the world where mandatory Hebrew study dominated the undergraduate syllabus. In England during the 17th century, pagan Greek and Latin would be far surpassed in stature by Hebrew, the pristine, primitive language of God. Accomplishment in Hebrew became the hallmark of scholarship, and the published sermons of the period are studded with quotations in Hebrew script. Under this influence, even English underwent radical change, absorbing more and more of the cadences, constructions, idioms and allusions of biblical Hebrew—to the point where English and Israelite identities began to verge on the interchangeable. The Judaizing of practice followed the Hebraizing of language; soon stricter Sabbath observance was widespread, and pioneers began experimenting with pork abstention and circumcision. And finally there was faith. A brand new interpretation came out of nowhere to be the centerpiece of doctrine. In his Letter to the Romans, Paul had said, “All Israel shall be saved.” This was now construed to mean that first the Jews would be saved and only then the elect among the non-Jews. First, God would restore the Jews to favor as his chosen people. They would receive revelations that only they were equipped to comprehend. They would understand the truth as Christians had never understood it. In the great war that would take place, the Protestants would defeat the Catholics and the Jews would defeat the Muslims to usher in the messianic Millennium. Then the Jews would rule the world in Jerusalem, together with their allies and partners in faith, the elect, the Saints, who would imbibe purified, perfected religion, the best of Christian gospel and Jewish ordinances, from the Jews, who had absorbed the truth and would now gladly “hold out the sweet breasts of gospel-ordinances.” In all this, New England formed the avant-garde. As Puritans gained in numbers and came under much greater pressure from the Church of England establishment, the Pilgrims of Plymouth (1620), and the settlers of Massachusetts (from 1630) and New Haven (1637) brought their ideas to a place where they could grow luxuriantly. Their leading figures, William Bradford of Plymouth, John Cotton of Massachusetts, and John Davenport of New Haven, were all passionate Hebraists. All were committed, too, to the idea that the Law of Moses was as binding on Christians as on Jews, the only proper source of law, and they were determined to make it the law of the land. Not all Puritans in England or America were millenarians and not all millenarians envisioned a central role for Jews. Nevertheless, a belief in the coming Age of the Jews, what historian Richard Cogley has handily termed “Judeocentric” millenarianism, could reasonably be described as more important to more people than any other grand idea in mid-17th century New England. 42 “I received yours a few days since,” Cromwell begins. “It was welcome to me because signed by you, whom I love and honor in the Lord.” Then he tells John Cotton what has just happened. One minute, the Battle of Worcester is going against him; the next, he has won the eleven-year Civil War. If early on constrained by diplomacy, Cromwell now feels free to wax messianic: “Surely the Lord is greatly to be feared as to be praised. We need your prayers in this [i.e., in triumph] as much as ever. How shall we behave ourselves after such mercies? What is the Lord a-doing? What Prophecies are now fulfilling? Who is a God like ours?” The idea was even entertained that Cromwell was himself the Jews’ expected messiah, one authority reporting that a group of “Asiatick” Jews visiting England caused “great scandal amongst the Saints” by making indiscreet “enquirys into Oliver’s pedigree.” Regardless, Cromwell, millenarian and pragmatist, was working on the readmission of Jews to England as early as 1652 and was even involved in a briefly-floated proposal to back a Jewish invasion of Chile. 43 With Cromwell dead and the English monarchy restored in 1660, many changes made under the Commonwealth were reversed. Violet, London goldsmith, sometime alderman, and belligerent pamphleteer with nativist and hard currency bees in his bonnet, was determined that Cromwell’s very recent readmission of the Jews should be high on the “to undo” list. For the new regime’s benefit, he refers back to Manasseh’s meetings in London in 1655-6: “Upon several days hearing, Cromwel and his Councel did give a Toleration and Dispensation to a great number of Iewes to come and live here in London, and to this day they do keep publick Worship in the City of London, to the great dishonour of Christianity, and publick scandal of the true Protestant Religion, and to the great damage of the Kingdome, especially our Merchants, whose Trade they engross, and eat the childrens bread: and in the Barbadoes they do so swarm, that had not care bin taken to banish them, in twenty years they would eat out the English: but by the care of this blessed Parliament they are within a year to be banished thence.” Violet’s petition backfired. The King let it be known that he was more interested in measures to protect the Jews than expel them. The threatened Barbados community was reprieved, and, when New York soon became an English possession, these domestic and colonial precedents were applied there as well. 44 Early Quakers were as obsessed with Jews as the majority of other radical English Protestants. The first important Quaker theologian to settle in America was George Keith, in New Jersey from 1685 and Philadelphia from 1689. After three years in the city of brotherly love, he found himself in the dock. The establishment there maintained that Quakerism allowed its members unfettered freedom in matters of belief. Keith disagreed and—a bit of a paradox—was tried for sedition. Also on trial was William Bradford, the first printer in Philadelphia, a follower of Keith and about to publish his book (he later published Keith’s account of the trial as New-England's Spirit of Persecution Transmitted to Pennsilvania.) The outcome of this first American trial on issues of freedom of the press encouraged the governor of New York to invite Bradford to relocate to his colony. Two years later, Bradford produced the first book ever printed in New York. Darkly apocalyptic and featuring quotations in Hebrew script, Truth Advanced is geared to “the Expectation of many People, both of Jews and Christians, that within a few Years, some great Alteration will come to pass in the World” and concludes that “measuring the Temple perhaps may begin about the year 1700.” Keith insists here that not four but seven “persecuting monarchies” must precede the millennium. The sixth (Rome) is “near expired” “and last of all cometh the seventh, who shall call himself the Christ and shall either really be or pretend to be a Jew, otherwise how could he deceive so many of the Jewish nation, who do expect the Messiah shall be a Jew?” This first book published in New York is chiefly concerned with “this outward & visible Anti-christ,” who “shall deceive….many of the Jewish nation especially; and though some petty false Christs have formerly arisen, and deceived some Jews, yet they were nothing considerable to this last false Christ, that shall arise and shall work false miracles and lying wonders.” 45 Verwunderlicher Anfang und Schmählicher Aussgang des Unlangst
Neuenstandenen Juden Propheten Nathan Levi und des Jüdischen Messiae
Sabezae [Sensational Rise and Humiliating Fall of
Nathan Levi, Newly Emerged Prophet of the Jews, and the Jewish
Messiah, Shabbethai Tzevi] Much the least petty of the “false Christs” was the charismatic Turkish Jew, Shabbethai Tzevi, who exhilarated, then disappointed, not just “some Jews” but most Jews. Made receptive first by the spread of messianic kabbalah, first brewed by Isaac Luria in 16th century Safed, and then by the trauma of the East European holocaust of 1648-55, Jews of all sorts and in all sorts of places were transformed by ecstasy at news of Shabbethai's self-proclamation as messiah (Gaza, 1665). Shabbethai scheduled the restoration of Israel for the following year, when he would seize the crown from the Ottoman Sultan in a miraculous bloodless coup. This was all almost as big news for non-Jews as for Jews—and just what the Protestant millenarians expected for their Year of the Beast. Protestant enthusiasm reinforced Jewish receptivity to Shabbethai, and much of the Jews’ worldwide awareness came from “mainstream media” such as this graphic newssheet from Germany. Returning to Turkey at the beginning of 1666, Shabbethai was politely arrested by the sultan and offered him the choice of Islam or death. Shown here is the kabbalist Nathan of Gaza, the brains of the movement, performing miracles to demonstrate Shabbethai’s messiahship; Shabbethai’s coronation, presentation to the Sultan, and arrest; and Shabbethai, his throat cut; disemboweled; and hanged upside down to the dismay of Constantinople’s Jews. Like the reports a little earlier that the ten lost tribes had marched into Mecca, rumors of Shabbethai’s death proved greatly exaggerated. Instead he chose Islam, the option with the pension, pretending to convert on September 15, 1666, and dying of natural causes ten years later, on September 17, 1676, the Day of Atonement. 46 The most prominent Shabbatean in America was Increase Mather, son-in-law and successor of John Cotton as “high priest” of the Massachusetts theocracy and future president of Harvard. In his introduction to Mather’s collection of sermons delivered in Boston in 1665-6, The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation (item 59), John Davenport, founder of New England’s ultimate theocracy, the Colony of New Haven, explained that the sermons were “preached in a time when constant reports from sundry places and hands gave out to the world that the Israelites were upon their journey towards Jerusalem, from sundry foreign parts in great multitudes, and that they were carryd on with great signs and wonders by a high and mighty hand of extraordinary providence to the admiration and astonishment of all that heard it, and that they had written to others of the Nation, in Europe and America, to encourage and invite them to hasten to them. This seemed to many godly and judicious to be a beginning of the accomplishment of that Prophecie concerning the noise and shaking, and coming together of those dry bones spoken of in Ezekiel 37:7.” Mather’s belief in the imminent Restoration of Israel survived the Shabbatean debacle unscathed. Finding encouragement instead in the rumor of an individual Jew’s conversion here or a Turkish military setback there, it remained the obsession of a lifetime until his death, aged 84 in 1723—notwithstanding the caption to this image (which actually shows him aged 63). 47 The kindly-faced chief justice was an English-born Harvard graduate when appointed in 1692 to Massachusetts’s new Court of Oyer and Terminer. During that year, this inexperienced tribunal achieved celebrity status with the 19 death sentences of the witches of Salem. In 1697, Sewall made news on his own, with an act of public contrition for those hysterical convictions. Three years later, his book, The Selling of Joseph, was the first attack ever published on the American slave trade, based in Boston. The Puritan blueprint for society, the Hebrew Bible, compelled his conclusion that “all men, as they are the sons of Adam, are co-heirs, and have equal right unto liberty, and all other outward comforts of life.” But it was neither witchcraft nor slavery that dominated his mind, but the restoration of Israel. For 12 years, he labored on Phaenomena Quaedam Apocalyptica [Aspects of the Apocalypse]. Published in 1697, the year of his witchcraft trial recantation, his researches determined that the messiah would come to the Jews not in Jerusalem but in the Heart of America (i.e., Mexico), it being “manifest to all that very considerable numbers of Jews are seated in the New World.” Descriptions follow of communities in Barbados, Jamaica, Surinam, and Curaçao. “There are several families of them at New York and New England is seldom wholly without them. Now there are two at Boston, viz., Mr. Joseph Frazon and Samuel Frazon, his brother, to whom I am beholden for a sight of the Spanish Bible.” To show more impressive numbers of American heirs to the biblical promises, he must turn to the indigenous population. Anticipating the imminent reign in the American New Jerusalem of the Jews (to include the ten lost tribes) and the Saints, their allies among Protestant Christians, Sewall argues against the enslavement of Indians, for “the English nation, in shewing kindness to the aboriginal natives of America, may possibly shew kindness to Israelites unawares.” 48 The “Elizabethan Settlement” was a precarious compromise between Catholic and Reformed elements. Dissent, in either direction, was obsessively monitored. This popular volume by an Anglican bishop is a compendium of thwarted Catholic conspiracies against Elizabeth I (1558-1603) and James I (1603-1625). Until eclipsed by Guy Fawkes’s plot to blow up the King in Parliament in 1605, the most famous of these alleged regicidal endeavors tried “not only to do away with King Antonio [the Portuguese pretender, in exile in England] but also to take away Queen Elizabeth’s life by poison, and that, by the means of Doctor Lopez, a Iew, the Queen’s physician, for fifty thousand crowns promised him.” Roderigo Lopez, Portuguese New Christian refugee, had been trying to use his influence with the Queen to have his friend Francis Drake permitted to capture Brazil for Don Antonio (compare item 11). The engraving of “Lopez compounding to poyson the Queene” has him asking “How much will you give?” of a double agent for Spain and the Earl of Essex, in the sting operation that produced Lopez’s hanging and the wave of anti-Jewish patriotism to which Shakespeare catered with The Merchant of Venice, the “Christian comedy” he proceeded to write. Still, how far the new biblical basis of English religion had replaced Catholic-identified Christian imagery with symbols identifying instead with the people of Israel may be gauged from this book’s title page, where full-length portraits of the monarchs are labeled not Elizabeth and James but Deborah and Solomon, between whom a female personification of the true church crushes a disheveled pope beneath her feet, the scene crowned with the Hebrew inscription, Maccabee. 49 When James VI of Scotland became James I of England, he is said to have asked on arrival in London to meet the author of this especially treasured book. Learning that he was no longer alive, the King replied, “By my soul, then, the greatest scholar of Europe is dead.” Udall’s modest publication was basically a translation of Petrus Martinius’s Grammaticae Hebraeae, “all Englished for the benefit of those that (being ignorant in Latin) are desirous to learn the holy tongue.” Udall may not have been “the greatest scholar of Europe”—subsequent editions of his book were “carefully corrected, and many faults emended …by a Jew rabine”—but he did produce the first Hebrew grammar in English. Udall, an early Puritan, was known for his humanitarianism and his humor. He was not joking, though, when he ended his book—in Hebrew—with the words, “Written by Yohanan Udall in jail.” Elizabeth’s Archbishop of Canterbury had sent him to the White Lion prison for “wicked, scandalous and seditious libel” [i.e., Puritanism], and there he died, giving the Puritan cause its first martyr. This copy bears the ownership signatures of Increase Mather and William Stoughton, instigator and chief judge of the Salem witchcraft trials and subsequently commander-in-chief and acting governor of Massachusetts. 50 If any Englishman of the time really was “the greatest scholar in Europe,” it was Hugh Broughton. His selected writings were published posthumously as “the works of the great Albionean [i.e., English] divine, renown’d in many nations for rare skill in Salem’s [i.e., Jerusalem’s] & Athens’ tongues and familiar acquaintance with all rabbinical learning.” To avoid Elizabethan persecution, Broughton moved to Europe, where he traveled around engaging rabbis in fluent biblical Hebrew as he went. Back in England on the ascent of King James, he was the chief proponent of a new English translation of the Bible, free of the distortions that riddled even the Geneva Bible. When his idea was adopted but he was excluded from the translation team in favor of lesser (but less opinionated) colleagues, he went back into exile in the Netherlands and ministered to the Puritan expatriate community of Middelburg. The notes in this volume were copied by Edward Holyoke, a young English admirer of Broughton’s, from the master’s own Geneva Bible. The margins are full of annotations in Greek and, most importantly in Hebrew, pointing out the shortcomings that arose from the translator’s failure to understand the Hebrew subtext of the Greek New Testament. The last page includes a list of Greek and Hebrew words used by Broughton that Holyoke found hard to understand and the following inscription: “This correction of the N.T. is from Mr. Broughton’s own hand: whose correction is in a large quarto of an English letter [i.e., in Gothic type] printed by the deputies of Christopher Barker, 1596. Englished from Mr. Beza by L. Tom. The orignall correction is in the custody of Mr. John Turner, host of the English house in Midleburgh; who sent it us over in Novem. 1615. This N.T. was corrected for Mrs. Baynard in May 1617.” Signed in Hebrew: “Edward Holyoke” and followed by a postscript: “We thinke the whole correction is not as he would have done it, but infinite matter is amended for great knowledg & comfort.” The ancestor of one of the great Massachusetts families, Holyoke emigrated to the colony around 1637, became a judge in Salem in 1639, and published his contribution to millenarian literature, The doctrine of life, or of mans redemtion by the seed of Eve, the seed of Abraham, the seed of David, in 1658. 51 The first book printed in the future United States, the so-called Bay Psalm Book is an example of the determination of the settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony to create a lifestyle based on the Hebrew Bible. The metrical versions of the Psalms used for worship by Puritans in England and by the Pilgrims in neighboring Plymouth were found unacceptable because they failed to convey without fail an exact sense of the Hebrew. Determined to do better, Richard Mather, founder-minister of Dorchester, Massachusetts, and John Cotton’s closest colleague, assigned different psalms to thirty New England ministers, for translation from the Hebrew into English rhyme as well as possible without deviating in any way from the original. With Weld and Eliot, two of the ministers of Roxbury, he edited the uneven results into a volume that was used as the colony’s liturgy for over a hundred years. Prefixed to the translation is a discourse, by Mather or Cotton, “declaring not only the lawfullnes, but also the necessity of the heavenly ordinance of singing Scripture Psalmes in the Churches of God.” In it, the author asks whether anything besides the Psalms may be sung in church and answers no. Ministers may compose prayers and sermons but the gift of spiritual poetry is something else: the Book of Psalms is an inspired “system,” so complete that “let our condition be what it will, the Lord himself hath supplied us with farre better.” Can soloists be tolerated? No; at the Red Sea, “all Israel sang that song ... all as well as Moses, the women as well as the men.” Since Hebrew poetry does not use rhyme, is it permissible to do so in translation? Yes, we might just as well have a problem “singing the Hebrew psalms in our English tunes (and not in the Hebrew tunes) as singing them in the English meeter (which are our verses [i.e., the English way in poetry]).” Since “the Lord hath hid from us the Hebrew tunes,” and likewise the rules of Hebrew prosody, both of which, otherwise, “wee should think ourselves bound to imitate,” every nation may “without scruple” follow “the graver sort” of their own country’s tunes and poetry. Finally the author apologizes that, for all the translators’ diligence, readers will not always find word for word equivalence, a problem inherent in the superiority of Hebrew, for “some Hebrew words have a more full and emphaticall signification than any one English word can or doth sometime express.” 52 A team effort, the Bay Psalm Book was mocked as much for its inconsistencies as its infelicities. But its ambition—to render the Psalms into memorable English verse while sacrificing none of the Hebrew meaning—laid down the ultimate challenge to the Puritan poet. The blind Milton, who rose daily at 4:00 a.m. to listen to Job in its impossibly hard Hebrew, tried and failed. But Cotton Mather, the leading intellectual of colonial New England and author of around 400 books (he aimed for one a month), was not one to be deterred. Grandson of John Cotton and Richard Mather, son of Increase Mather and his successor in the pastorate of Boston’s North Church, he also inherited the spiritual leadership of the little that was left of Puritan New England by the beginning of the 18th century, and this gave the task practical as well as artistic purpose. This manuscript is the result of his attempt at “a translation exactly conformed unto the original; but all in blank verse, fitted unto the tunes commonly used in our churches.” Published in 1718, together with a brief commentary, made up in large part of what he liked to call “treasures,” or “golden treasures,” from the “learned rabbins,” Mather’s attempt seems to have been roundly ignored, and no evidence remains of any congregation ever attempting to use it, not even his own. But such was his fate. Non-Puritan immigrants now vastly outnumbered the Saints. The new royal charter of 1691 allowed the colony to keep its autonomy but destroyed the theocracy by forbidding limitation of the franchise to members of its churches. The liberals took over Massachusetts, and Mather was left as the apologist, more isolated than revered, for preoccupations that most people no longer cared about. Jews, for example. Mather, a proud Hebraist who preferred to be addressed as “rabbi,” remained a Judeocentrist in a non-millenarian age. Accordingly, he lowered his expectations and chose to find encouragement anywhere he could, publishing a report that a couple of Jewish children in Berlin had converted to Christianity despite the opposition of their parents as if it were a matter of apocalyptic moment. And “from the dust,” he wrote, “where I lay prostrate before the Lord, I lifted up my cries...for my own having the happiness, at some time or other, to baptize a Jew that should by my ministry be brought home unto the Lord.” By 1724, however, the year after his father’s death, after an enervating century of Puritan expectation of the imminent restoration of Israel, he concluded that the prospect was in a “dead sleep.” Before his death in 1728, he was ready to go even further; in a piece entitled “A national conversion of the Jews: whether to be hoped for,” he finally answered in the negative, and this founding hope of America was indeed, at last, allowed to sleep—in Boston, if not in New Haven. 53 In 1636, Cotton and others were invited to contribute their thinking on the codification of Massachusetts law. Cotton’s goal was to recreate a pure Israelite theocracy, purged of any trace of English common law. To that end, he submitted a code titled Moses, his Judicials (i.e., his judicial, as opposed to ritual, laws). Finally, in 1641, the eclectic Body of Liberties was adopted, drafted by another Hebraist, Nathaniel Ward, and drawing on common and Mosaic law alike. In Plymouth, Mosaic law was accorded the status of principal authority, and in the Colony of New Haven, Judeocentrist central, a majority of all statutes ever enacted derived from biblical authority. The most ambitious formulation of this vision for America, however, was Cotton’s. Published in London with an over-optimistic title in the year it was rejected, it calls for the death penalty in cases of: “blasphemy; idolatry; witchcraft; perjury; seducing others to heresy; profaning the Lord’s day; betraying the country; reviling governor and council; sedition; rebellious children, whether they continue in riot or drunkennesse after due correction from their parents; murder; adultery; incest; unnaturall filthinesse, man with man or woman with woman; buggery; pollution of a woman known to be in her flowers; whoredom of a maiden in her father’s house; man stealing; and false witness bearing.” Personal injury law features, of course, the principle of “member for member,” while in international law, “women, especially such as have not lyen by man, little children and cattel, are to be spared and reserved for spoyle.” 54 The first direct attack on New England theocracy came from Roger Williams, the minister of Salem, who came to the view that the judges of the Massachusetts courts should not be in the business of enforcing conformity of belief on behalf of John Cotton and the colony’s religious establishment. Introducing the concept of separation of church and state to American discourse, he coined the formulation “wall of separation.” For his “new and dangerous opinions against the authority of magistrates,” the Massachusetts General Court expelled Williams in 1635. The following year, he began settlement of Providence as an experimental colony without coercion. Subsequent refugees from Massachusetts would join him in developing Providence, Portsmouth, and Newport (notably Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer in 1638), or would seek refuge under Stuyvesant: Quakers unsuccessfully in Flushing, Baptists successfully, under Deborah, Lady Moody, in Gravesend (Brooklyn). Williams, in London in 1644 to obtain a charter for the Providence Plantations, presented to Parliament his manifesto against the bloody tene(n)t of persecution. His proposition was that “to molest any person, Jew or Gentile, for either professing doctrine, or practicing worship merely religious or spiritual, it is to persecute him, and such a person (whatever his doctrine or practice be, true or false) suffereth persecution for conscience.” His twelve-point platform culminates in the idea that “true civility and Christianity may both flourish in a state or kingdom not withstanding the permission of divers or contrary consciences, either Iew or Gentile.” Note proposition nine: “in holding [against] an enforced uniformity of religion in a civil state, we must necessarily disclaim our desires and hopes of the Iewes conversion to Christ” and proposition seven: “the state of the land of Israel, the kings and people thereof in peace and war, is proved figurative and ceremonial, and no pattern nor precedent for any kingdom or civil state in the world to follow,” the latter a rebuttal of the prevailing New England view that the only legitimate model for a state was the theocratic state of Israel envisioned in the Torah.
Jewes in AmericaThomas Thorowgood, millenarian rector of Grimston, was a country gentleman in the English county of Norfolk. Ahead even of leading “revivalist” Richard Baxter, he was the most enthusiastic advocate of the evangelization of Native Americans, organizing support for the missionary efforts of John Eliot (see item 51) and his colleagues. As early as the 1630s, he had been taken with the possibility of the “Jewish-Indian theory” and had written to Roger Williams, “the first of our new nation in New England that learned the language and so prepared towards the conversion of the natives,” to ask if “he found anything Judaicall among them.” Williams replied that there was indeed reason to “suspect that the poore natives…are Jewes.” In particular, “they constantly and strictly separate their women in a little wigwam by themselves in their feminine season…and some taste of affinity with the Hebrew I have found.” In 1650, John Dury sent over to Thorowgood from the Netherlands a copy of The Hope of Israel (item 24), the contents of which he promptly shared in English summary, together with evidence on the subject that he had been gathering on his own. The Jewish-Indian theory as propounded by Thorowgood was widely accepted in its time and popular into the 19th century, when it inspired the Mexican archaeological research of Viscount Kingsborough and provided the mythological underpinnings of Mormonism. 55 Thorowgood’s case comprises several distinct elements. Most of the book is devoted to identifying customs common to various American Indian tribes and rabbinic or, especially, biblical Jews. The privileging of biblical evidence made sense, since the theory presumed that these ten northern tribes of Israel had been lost, in this unknown landmass at the end of the world, all through the rabbinic period. Accordingly, their Judaism might be expected to reflect arrested development. Thus: They delight exceedingly in dancing, men and women, yea and women apart by themselves. And so they did in Israel (Exodus 13: 20); virginity is not a state praiseworthy among the Americanes and it was a bewaileable condition in Iury [Jewry] (Judges 11:37); the Indian women are easily delivered of their children without midwives, as those in Exodus 1:19; the Indians are much given to weeping, their women especially, and at burials; this was in fashion among the Jews (Jeremiah 19:17); the Indians have their posts and messengers that were swift of foot whom they dispatcht upon their affaires and they ran with speed and such were among the Jewes (2 Samuel 18:24). Thorowgood is a proficient Hebraist and does his best with language similarities. Thus: “the name of that great city Mexico is observed in sound and writing to come very neare unto that name of our deare lord, (Psalme 2:2), Meschico [“his anointed,” or “his messiah.”].” When he argues from the “man-devouring” practiced in Brazil, Guyana and the Lesser Antilles, he realizes it may sound like a stretch and that his readers may be tempted to ask: “‘There be Carybes, cannibals, and maneaters among them, therefore they be Jewish?’ But let it be considered, among the curses threatned to Israel upon their disobedience, wee read Levit. 26:29 ‘Yee shall eate the flesh of your sonnes and of your daughters’.” 56 Sir Hamon was a great English landowner of ancient lineage, but any suspicion of a P.G. Wodehouse or Gilbert and Sullivan character of limited acumen suggested by the exotic name or hereditary title can be dismissed. Antiquary and naturalist, he is best known for his description of the dodo. A Royalist, he was not favorably impressed with what had become of English intellectual and spiritual life since the Revolution. But it was with special interest that he picked up the book sent him by his neighbor, Parson Thorowgood. In response, he published a wide-ranging review essay, in the course of which he objects to Thorowgood’s coinage in referring to the people of New England as Novangles—he says it could all too easily be confused with Newfangles—and takes a swipe at “Mr. Cotten, a man and minister of prime note, and smooth and venerable carriage and esteem, but...a great factor and fosterer of strange opinions.” One by one, he works through Thorowgood’s proofs—suggesting that dancing is a fundamental human impulse, not something the American Indians could only have brought with them from the land of Israel, and arguing that the cruelty the Indians had suffered from the Spaniards did not necessarily suggest they were Jews, whose acute suffering in exile the Bible prophesied, otherwise the Dutch, who also suffered so much in their struggle for independence from Spain, should be Jews as well. Having finished with Thorowgood, L’Estrange “was ready to fold up this frolique” when “there came unto mine hands a small book entitled The hope of Israel, showing the place of the ten tribes” in the Andes. Well, Sir Hamon knew the Andes firsthand, and “though I have often travailed over those parts on dry foot, yet I could never find the least track or trace of any matter that might invite my sense or opinion to concur with him.” He concludes that the author is a perfect talmudist, but he does not intend this as a compliment. Rather, he describes how Manasseh “proceeds to tell a number of strange stories, till he comes to the greatest wonder of all, which is the Sabbaticall River, where he drowns himself in dividing it...I confesse I finde him a man of so sharpe an appetite and strong and easie an ostrich concoction [constitution], as I cannot sit at table any longer with him and therefore I now rise and offer others every one to feed according to his own phancie.” 57 The independent-minded Pynchon was one of the original (1630) Massachusetts Bay colonists and it was entirely on his determined initiative that colonization was extended west of the Bay area. The founder of Springfield, he made a fortune in the beaver trade, then turned his hand to theology. His first book, The Meritorious Price (London, 1650), was enough to put him on the wrong side of the theocracy. It has the distinction of being the first book banned (in fact, burned) in Boston; the Library has one of the eight surviving copies. Pynchon was a Judeocentrist of a kind—he gave pride of place to the Hebrew Bible and Jewish studies—but he was not a Judaizer nor a millenarian. Rather than reinventing Christianity in the image of the Hebrew Bible, as did the Cotton club, Pynchon reinvented the Hebrew Bible in the image of Christianity. Reading Christianity into ancient Israelite worship is the function of his next book (1652), The Jewes synagogue: or, A treatise concerning the ancient orders and manner of worship used by the Jewes in their synagogue-assemblies. Gathered out of the Sacred Scriptures, the Jewish rabines, and such modern authors, which have been most conversant in the study of Jewish customes. Finally, there is Holy Time, written after the first pioneer of America’s westward expansion had retreated to England to escape the reach of his nemesis, John Cotton. The book is an attack on the Sabbath schedule—from sundown on Saturday through sundown on Sunday—that had become common in New England in imitation of Cotton’s personal practice. With an epigraph boldly drawn from Maimonides’ Laws of Sacrifices, Pynchon claims to prove “that the Lord’s Day doth begin with the natural morning, and that the morning of the natural day doth begin at midnight; that the Jews’ beginning of the day at the sunset evening was only in relation to the date of the person purified from his Levitical uncleanness; that the Jews themselves did hold that the natural day did continue after sunset till midnight.” 58 Aspinwall, a notary in Charlestown, was another Massachusetts colonist who returned to England, in his case more to attack than retreat. In the messianic year 1655, he prepared a second edition of Cotton’s Laws, in the hope that they might be implemented now that they needed so urgently to be in place. To those who argue that Moses’s “judicials” are too terse to provide the colony’s exclusive legal authority, he answers in his Brief Description of two years earlier, “that though the Laws be few and brief, yet they are perfect and sufficient, and so large as the wisdome of God judged needful for regulating judgment in all ages and nations. For no action or case doth, or possibly can, fall out in this or other nations, by sea or land, but the like did, or possibly might fall out in the land of Israel (Ecclesiastes 1:9), and yet they had no other laws or rules of judgment, but what now remains to all posterity. Nevertheless that people were counted even by the Nations to be the only free and wise people in respect of their Statutes and Judicials (Deuteronomy 4:5-8).” Aspinwall was one of the leaders of the Fifth Monarchy Men, a Massachusetts-based political movement that believed in immediate implementation of the conditions of the millennium by whatever means necessary, rather than waiting around for “salvation history” to unfold. In this book, he concludes “that the uttermost durance of Antichrist’s dominion will be in the year 1673, as I have proved from Scripture… ere which time, it will be necessary that the ten horns, or kings, which are the strength of the Beast, be broken off, which work is already begun in the beheading of Charles, late king of three kingdoms… Verily there hath been a great shaking already, and more yet remaines, for the work will not be wholly finished until the Jewes be called.” With the restoration of Charles II in 1660, the Fifth Monarchists’ millennial plans suffered a devastating setback. On January 1, 1661, a few dozen of them, led by the Boston cooper Thomas Venner, attempted a coup in London. Venner’s Rising lasted through January 4, when the leaders were apprehended (and later hanged), 4,000 Quaker followers were arrested, and the counter-counter-revolution was over. 59 Mather’s survey of opinions on the restoration of the Jews acknowledges that there are Protestant millenarians who grant “the Jewish nation shall be called, but not come into their own land.” For his part, though, he considers this limited or individual salvation not nearly good enough to be in God’s plan for the Jews—for the Gentiles, who have their own lands, “were never made partakers of so much grace nor of so great privileges as the Jews.” With citations from such classical Jewish sources as Targum, Talmud, and Midrash, and the medieval commentators Rashi, ibn Ezra, Nahmanides, and Abrabanel, Mather, an uncompromising “Christian Zionist,” proceeds to expound his own view that “their salvation be national.” Nevertheless, “before this salvation of Israel be accomplished, the Pope and Turk shall be overthrown and destroyed… Of the destruction of these enemies, doth Moses seem to prophesie (Deuteronomy 32:43). The Pope (Anti-Christ) shall be destroyed before all Israel be saved… The Turk must likewise be destroyed before all Israel be saved. For that Eastern Anti-Christ (as some are wont to call him) having the land of Israel in his possession, we may be sure they may never peaceably enjoy the Land of the Fathers again, as long as he hath any power to hinder it… Before this salvation is over, the great battle of Armageddon must be fought which will be the most terrible day of battle that ever was: Turk and Pope, and the house of Austria, etc., the great dragon of the bottomless pit acting and breathing in them all. All Europe, Asia and Africa will be in a flame when this day is come. Asia is like to be in a flame of war between Israelites and Turks, Europe between the followers of the Lamb and the followers of the beast, the worshippers of Christ and Anti-Christ… At the return of Israel, the land of their fathers will be too little for them, such will the multitude of their number be, and… therefore they must have other countries adjoining for their possession. The salvation of Israel will be glorious in respect of the continuance of their happiness when once this great work is brought unto perfection.” 60 The New Testament is not without mixed messages. Some of its statements might be understood as vaguely philosemitic, others vaguely antisemitic. The latter, however, are easier to spot, and it was from these that Richard Baxter, Thorowgood’s collaborator in supporting missionary work amo |