Yisroel Benporat
Reports of the Puritan minister cosplaying as a rabbi have been greatly exaggerated. In the 1980s, historian Arthur Hertzberg bizarrely claimed that the eminent clergyman Cotton Mather (1663-1728) “took to wearing a skullcap in his study and to calling himself a rabbi.”[1] Several scholars have cited Hertzberg’s anecdote as a fact, and the story has even survived the scrutiny of academic peer review.[2] But sometimes, it turns out, fiction is stranger than the truth. Hertzberg misleadingly interpolated the claim while paraphrasing a diary entry written by Mather in 1696, but the text never mentioned these details.[3] Hertzberg, who elsewhere carefully rejected characterizing Puritans as philosemitic,[4] perhaps mistakenly conflated a similar story attested about a later Christian Hebraist, Calvin Ellis Stowe (1802-1882).[5] Regardless of his intentions, Hertzberg’s error exemplifies a broader trend. The myth of Puritans embracing Judaism has a long history, and it still captures the imagination of American Jews. It deserves a critical examination.
In recent years, such ideas have gained new traction. In his popular history book Making Haste from Babylon (2010), Nick Bunker relates with poetic license that “the first Thanksgiving in America…took place at the instant of arrival, at the moment on Cape Cod when the Pilgrims fell on their knees to say the Jewish prayer.” As evidence, Bunker notes that Governor William Bradford (1590-1657) cited verses from Psalm 107 in his manuscript history of Plymouth colony. In a gloss on that biblical passage, the commentary of Puritan Hebraist Henry Ainsworth (1571–1622) had cited Maimonides’ list of criteria for reciting birkat ha-gomeil.[6] Based on Bunker’s book, an oft-cited essay by Moshe Sokolow argues that Jews should celebrate Thanksgiving because the holiday had Jewish origins.[7] But Bradford did not write that the colonists had recited Psalm 107 upon their arrival; instead, he quoted the passage in the context of imagining future generations of Plymouth Puritans memorializing that moment.[8]
Despite their fascination with Scripture, Puritans viewed Judaism as erroneous. Like nearly all Christians, Puritans believed in the doctrine of supersession: that a new universal covenant through Jesus replaced the Mosaic covenant with the Jews, and that the New Testament abrogated much of the Old Testament, as they called it. It is inconceivable that the yarmulke, an article of clothing through which Jews have long distinguished themselves from Gentiles, sat atop Cotton Mather’s wig. Similarly, Ainsworth and other Puritans would have shuddered at the thought of reciting Jewish liturgy.
The conflation of Puritanism with Judaism is an old canard that dates back to the movement’s origins in the early modern period. When Elizabethan Puritans advocated for eliminating all extra-biblical rituals, defenders of the religious status quo accused Puritans of Judaizing.[9] In New England, the dissident Roger Williams (1603-1683) criticized a document composed by the Massachusetts clergy that in his view “wakens Moses from his unknown Grave, and denies Jesus yet to have seene the Earth.”[10] These jabs persisted long after Puritans lost political power; as one poem put it: “New-England they are like the Jews, / as like, as like can be.”[11] In a few rare cases, such as the sectarian leader John Traske (1585-1636), some fringe radical Puritans did embrace Jewish rituals, but they remained beyond the pale for nearly all Christians.[12]
In the late nineteenth century, the Judeo-Puritan paradigm emerged more prominently, perhaps prompted by the onset of mass immigration to the United States. In 1889, an anonymous contributor to The New England Magazine described Bradford’s Plimoth Plantation as “our New England Old Testament.”[13] A year later, amid rising nativism, an article in Jewish Quarterly Review outrageously described the Puritans as born to “the wrong race, Aryan when they should have been Semitic.”[14] A historian of fasts and thanksgivings in New England deemed it “obvious” that the “Jewish ceremonials” influenced Puritans.[15] In 1922, James Truslow Adams’ Pulitzer prize-winning book declared that “in spirit they may almost be considered as Jews and not Christians.”[16] This claim prompted correctives that sought to demonstrate the primacy of the New Testament in Puritanism.[17] Yet, over the next few decades, scholars continued to exaggerate Puritanism’s purported Judaic dimensions. Philosopher Herbert W. Schneider asserted, “Only the remoteness in time and space of the ancient Israelites…prevented Puritan law from becoming more Jewish.”[18] Puritanism received such descriptive phrases as the “rebirth of the Hebrew spirit in the Christian conscience,” a “kind of new Judaism…transposed into Anglo-Saxon terms,” and a “translated Judaism.”[19] Such perspectives, which paralleled post-Holocaust notions of the American melting pot and cultural pluralism that sought to reaffirm Jewish continuity after enormous devastation,[20] seriously distorted the degree of cohesion between Puritanism and Judaism.
Eventually, however, the historiographical pendulum temporarily swung in the opposite direction. In the December 1967 issue of The New England Quarterly, historian Eugene R. Fingerhut published a polemical and footnote-free article entitled “Were the Massachusetts Puritans Hebraic?” No, Fingerhut emphatically answered. He showed numerous ways in which Puritans deviated from literal understandings of the Old Testament as well as various aspects of Jewish practice.[21] Yet Fingerhut arguably extended his argument too far, setting up somewhat of a strawman position; his outright dismissal of Puritan Hebraism belied the undeniable ubiquity of Old Testament sources in early New England.
Scholars should acknowledge the potency of Puritan biblicism without exaggerating its significance. As I argue in my recently completed PhD dissertation, the Old Testament flourished in the political theory and, to some extent, legal practices of the New England colonies.[22] The Puritans were not Judaic, but they were Hebraic. Political theorist Gordon Schochet distinguishes “between Jewish and Judaic, on the one hand, to refer to things directly about or internal to Judaism itself, and Hebraic, on the other, to refer to things about or external to Judaism and/or the uses of Judaic ‘things’—Judaic language, history, sacred writings, practices—for purposes that are not necessarily Jewish.”[23] Puritans decisively fell under the latter category; they made use of Judaic texts for Christian purposes, but they were not Jewish.
The persistence of the Judeo-Puritan paradigm in Jewish communal discourse exemplifies what Jonathan Sarna has famously termed “The Cult of Synthesis.” As he notes, American Jews have long sought to harmonize their religious values with general culture. This phenomenon has often manifested with patriotic celebrations, especially on holidays such as Thanksgiving.[24] By appropriating the founders of the New England colonies, Jews seek to write themselves into America’s origin story, much like the myth of Columbus’ secret Jewish identity or Haym Solomon’s supposedly saving the American Revolution. Instead of embracing these false narratives, we should study and remember the early American past on its own terms.
[1] Arthur Hertzberg, “The New England Puritans and the Jews” (1987), reprinted in Shalom Goldman, ed., Hebrew and the Bible in America: The First Two Centuries (Hanover, 1993), 105; Hertzberg, The Jews in America: Four Centuries of an Uneasy Encounter (1989; 2nd ed., New York, 1997), 39-40.
[2] See, e.g., Michael Hoberman, New Israel/New England: Jews and Puritans in Early America (Amherst, 2011), 71; Rachel Wamsley, “‘A Pure Language (or Lip)’: Representing Hebrew in Colonial New England,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 37, no. 2 (2018): 117-144 (at p. 121).
[3] Hertzberg, “New England Puritans and the Jews,” 108; Hertzberg, The Jews in America, 41; Diary of Cotton Mather, 1681-1724, 2 vols. (Boston, 1911), 1:199-200.
[4] Hertzberg, “New England Puritans and the Jews,” 106; Hertzberg, The Jews in America, 33.
[5] Edmund Wilson, “Notes on Gentile Pro-Semitism: New England’s ‘Good Jews,’” Commentary (October 1956); idem, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New York, 1962), 64; Annie Fields, ed., Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Boston, 1897), 336, 340-341.
[6] Nick Bunker, Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History (New York, 2010), 65-67; Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Berakhot 10:8.
[7] Moshe Sokolow, “Thanksgiving: A Jewish Holiday After All” (Jewish Ideas Daily, 11/23/2011).
[8] Kenneth P. Minkema, Francis J. Bremer, and Jeremy D. Bangs, eds., Of Plimoth Plantation: The 400th Anniversary Edition (Boston, 2020), 180.
[9] See, e.g., John Whitgift, The Defense of the Aunswere to the Admonition Against the Replie of T.C. (London, 1574), 120.
[10] Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent, of persecution, for cause of conscience, discussed, in a conference betweene truth and peace (London, 1644), 118.
[11] Peter Folger, A Looking Glass for the Times (1763), 12.
[12] Aidan Cottrell-Boyce, “John Traske, Puritan Judaizing and the ethic of singularity,” Journal of the Irish Society for the Academic Study of Religions 6 (2018): 1-37.
[13] “Round About Scrooby,” The New England Magazine, new series, vol. 1, no. 1 (Sept. 1889): 31-40 (at p. 31).
[14] John G. Dow, “Hebrew and Puritan,” The Jewish Quarterly Review, vol. 3, no. 1 (1890), 52-84 (at p. 77).
[15] William DeLoss Love, The Fast and Thanksgiving Days of New England (Boston, 1895), 40-41.
[16] James Truslow Adams, The Founding of New England (Boston, 1921), 80.
[17] See, e.g., Kenneth B. Murdock, “The Puritans and The New Testament,” Publications of The Colonial Society of Massachusetts: Transactions, 1922–1924 (Boston, 1924), 239-243; Isidore S. Meyer, “Hebrew At Harvard (1636-1760): A Résumé of the Information in Recent Publications,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, no. 35 (1939): 145-70 (at n. 4).
[18] Herbert W. Schneider, The Puritan Mind (Ann Arbor, 1930), 27.
[19] Abraham A. Neuman, Relation of the Hebrew Scriptures to American Institutions (New York, 1943?), 6; Clifford K. Shipton, “The Hebraic Background of Puritanism,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 47, no. 3 (March 1958): 152; Wilson, “Notes on Gentile Pro-Semitism.”
[20] For this historiographical context, see Brian Ogren, Kabbalah and the Founding of America: The Early Influence of Jewish Thought in the New World (New York, 2021), 187-195.
[21] Eugene R. Fingerhut, “Were the Massachusetts Puritans Hebraic?” The New England Quarterly 40, no. 4 (December 1967): 521–31.
[22] Israel Ben-Porat, “Hebraic Puritans: Old Testament Politics in Early New England’ (PhD diss., CUNY Graduate Center, 2024).
[23] Gordon Schochet, “The Judeo-Christian Tradition as Imposition: Present at the Creation?” in Gordon J. Schochet, Fania Oz-Salzberger, and Meirav Jones, eds., Political Hebraism: Judaic Sources in Early Modern Political Thought (Jerusalem, 2008), 279 n. 1. See also Dru Johnson’s similar definition of “Hebraic thought” as including the New Testament.
[24] Jonathan D. Sarna, “The Cult of Synthesis in American Jewish Culture” (1998), reprinted in idem, Coming to Terms with America: Essays on Jewish History, Religion, and Culture (Philadelphia, 2021), 3-27.
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