The Arc of a Covenant, page 13
If Protestants’ theology led many of them to take a different and more positive view of the continuing role of the Jews in God’s plans, a combination of theology and historical experience led them to a sense of connection and identification with Jews. In England and Scotland in particular a popular nationalism and identity arose which saw these countries as Chosen People standing in the same kind of relationship to God that the ancient Hebrews did: chosen by God and standing in a covenanted relationship with him. The failure of the Reformation to sweep Europe and the success of the Catholic Counter-Reformation meant that a solid majority of Europe remained faithful to the old religion. That left Protestants feeling exposed. Before the rise of Prussia in the mid-eighteenth century, England was the only Protestant great power, and from the time of the Spanish Armada (1588) through the Battle of Waterloo (1815) the English associated threats to their national security with great powers on the continent often in league with the pope.
The more radical Protestants in Britain and their American cousins felt themselves further embattled at home. Combating the backsliding, Catholicizing Stuart kings, the seventeenth-century dissidents saw themselves as a tiny minority of believers in a hostile world, utterly dependent on the power of God for their survival.
For Bible-reading people, the parallels with the situation of the ancient Hebrews were numerous and convincing. Like the Hebrews, they were the one faithful nation in a world of darkness. Like the Hebrews, they were surrounded by powerful enemies. And like the Hebrews, they could only survive by staying close to God.
One of the most powerful moments in the Hebrew scriptures comes in Exodus when the Hebrew people, newly rescued from slavery in Egypt, assemble before the presence of God on Mount Sinai, receive the Ten Commandments, and accept the Covenant that God has offered them. They will keep God’s laws and worship him only, and God will protect the people. This is the moment that makes the Hebrew people a nation; it was a moment that echoed in the thoughts of the early Protestants who also saw themselves under a covenant with God.
The most dramatic expression of this current of thought politically was found among the Scottish Covenanters. As the storm clouds that would lead to civil war gathered over England and Scotland, radical Calvinists in Scotland interpreted current events through a biblical lens and came to believe that God had called the Scots as a people to a special relationship, just as God extended protection to Israel in the Bible when the Jews obeyed the biblical laws. As religious and political tension mounted, Calvinists summoned the Scottish people to make a national covenant with God, and in 1638 swore the Scottish National Covenant, in which they pledged to God and one another their determination to preserve and live by the Reformed (Presbyterian) Church in Scotland. Their decision to abide by this covenant and protect it by force directly precipitated the so-called Bishops’ Wars and indirectly led to the English Civil Wars. The Scottish determination to stick by this covenant guided Scottish policy throughout the violent period that followed. It led various factions to split first with the king, then with the English Parliamentarians, then with each other. It encouraged popular uprisings and lonely martyrdoms alike. One of the last factions to adhere to it, the Cameronians, were almost an archetype of what would later become American religiosity: outlawed by their own government, they would meet and preach in fields, “worshipping defiantly with a Bible in one hand and a weapon in the other, and slaughtering the forces that were sent to suppress them.”[17]
The New England settlements also believed themselves to be under a covenant with God. Through their experience, so like that of the biblical Hebrews, of moving into a land inhabited by others and making it their own, they came to see themselves as a Chosen People, like the ancient Hebrews, called to covenant with God and given a new land to possess on condition that they fulfilled the covenant.[18] This provided them with both psychological reassurance that God would protect them in the strange, dangerous, and remote corner of the world to which he had called them, and perhaps also justification to salve their consciences about taking land from the natives.
During all the wars of the colonial era and the Revolution itself, many Americans saw themselves as a Chosen People in the wilderness, protected by and accountable to the God of the Bible. When they won victories, they gave thanks to God; when they suffered defeat they looked for the faults in their conduct that had led God to punish them. Whether fighting off Native American tribes, French forces, or, during the Revolution, the armies of King George, many Americans compared their situation to that of the ancient Hebrews; they prayed to Jehovah and looked to his mighty arm for protection.
While only a relatively small number of Americans went as far as to think of the United States as God’s “New Israel,” the idea that God would deal with America with something analogous to the care—and discipline—that he showed the Hebrew people in the Bible was widely accepted. The American colonists formed their view of history by studying the books of the Bible that recount the adventures of the Hebrew people under the judges and kings, seeking parallels in the careers of those ancient leaders to the events of their own time. From the first English settlement in the New World to the Revolution and beyond, the Americans were immersed in the images, the language, and the historical ideas of the Hebrew Bible. Of the over three thousand citations catalogued in the works of the Founding Fathers by Professor Donald Lutz, 34 percent are to the Bible, marking it by far the most cited single influence on their thought, and many of those citations reference the Jewish scriptures.[19] In 1776, both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson proposed designs for the Great Seal of the new nation that would appeal to the public: Franklin’s showed Moses dividing the Red Sea as Pharaoh (often presented at the time as synonymous with King George III) is drowned, while Jefferson’s showed the Israelites following the cloud and the pillar of fire through the desert.[20] (This was an appeal to popular sentiment on Jefferson’s part; privately he wrote that the God of the Old Testament was “cruel, vindictive, capricious, and unjust.”)[21]
The connection with Israel became a building block of American identity, and not just for free whites. Enslaved Blacks, as they turned to Christianity in large numbers during the waves of evangelical revivals in the generation after the American Revolution, saw themselves as God’s Israel in Egyptian bondage. They awaited a Moses who would lead them forth, and spoke longingly of the year of jubilee, the biblical promise of freedom for the slaves.
Such ideas about the ancient Hebrews did not automatically make Americans lovers of modern Jews, but they steadily undercut the negative ideas and stereotypes that they inherited from the medieval past. Their direct experience with Jews was small.[22] The first written record of a Jewish presence in Maryland, for example, comes in 1658 when a Jew by the name of Jacob Lumbrozo was tried for blasphemy; convicted, he was released as the result of an amnesty issued on the occasion of Richard Cromwell succeeding his father in power that same year.[23] Only about one thousand Jews lived in the thirteen colonies at the time of the Revolution.[24]
The Desacralization of the Social Order
A third set of changes brought about by the peculiar course of the Reformation in Britain and America ended by changing the core values of many people in both societies in ways that made it easier for Jewish individuals and organizations to find a comfortable place in the English-speaking world.
The medieval Christian world, as noted, was a holistic society that sought to bring all of society into harmony and unity under a set of basic values and rules grounded in the theology and the practice of the Roman Catholic Church. It was in many ways a beautiful vision, but it had no room for religious or social dissidents.
The Reformation did not at first challenge the medieval ideal of a united Christendom. Martin Luther and John Calvin wanted to correct the abuses they saw in the Catholic Church, but their goal was to set up a purified and reformed Christendom that would be just as holistic and united as the old one. Both Protestants and Catholics long struggled to unite Europe under one of the two competing faiths before reluctantly accepting the fact of division.
Even so, the ideal of the holistic society was dominant in most of the individual political units of the post-Reformation world. Europe as a whole might be divided, but Prussia was Lutheran, Spain was Catholic, Geneva was Calvinist, and Russia was Orthodox. The famous cuius regio principle from the Peace of Augsburg upheld the idea that the ruler of each state could choose the religion around which that particular country would be organized.
This meant that Europe was more religiously diverse than formerly, but each European kingdom, principality, and city-state held up an ideal of religious uniformity within its frontiers. The Jews still stuck out, however, and their presence was still seen by many, Protestant as well as Catholic, as containing moral, political, and economic threats to the social order.
But in England and Scotland, the lengthy and drawn-out process of the Reformation took a different turn. Protestant opinion continued to divide; the English, for example, read their King James Bibles in the hundreds of thousands, and they found that they could not agree on what the Bible meant. Should churches be governed by bishops? Should babies be baptized in infancy, or should baptism be for adults only? Was it necessary that Holy Communion be administered by an ordained priest, and what exactly happened to the bread and the wine during a Communion service? Were kings and lords appointed by God, or did the Bible teach that all people were equal? Was war against the law of God? Were stained glass windows and statues of saints useful reminders of divine truths, or did they tempt ignorant people to practice idolatry, worshipping an image rather than worshipping God alone?
All these questions and more divided British Protestants, and before long the differences were so deep and the passions aroused by the disputes so intense that more and more English and Scottish Christians began to leave the established churches in their respective kingdoms. The English Civil Wars of the 1640s and the upheavals of the next generation when England and Scotland executed one king, lived under a Lord Protector, overthrew a second monarch, invited three princes from overseas to come and reign over them, and ended by merging the two kingdoms of England and Scotland into the United Kingdom, saw the religious unity of the realms broken once and for all.
Communities of dissidents like the Presbyterians, the Baptists, the Quakers, the Congregationalists, and dozens of others broke off from the churches of England and Scotland for various reasons, until both countries were full of “nonconformists” who belonged to different religious sects or, as we now call them, denominations. Most Christians at the time thought this breakdown was terrible, and hoped that it was a temporary way station on the road back toward a unified, holistic Christian society. But as time went by, in Britain and much more in America, it became clear that this hope was an illusion. The religious differences between the denominations were too great for the restoration of a national church that everyone would belong to.
For some Christians, however, “denominationalism” wasn’t just a necessary evil. It was a positive good. For some of the more radical Protestants, the medieval ideal of a single church supported by and supporting the government was evil in and of itself. The union of church and state corrupted both. People would belong to a church not because they agreed with its doctrines and sought to work out their salvation in its fellowship, but because church membership was the road to political and economic power. Meanwhile, the government, with the powerful backing of the clergy, would soon become so powerful that civil liberty would be lost.
For these Protestants, the traditional, all-encompassing vision of a unified Christendom was losing its appeal. They believed that the civil authorities should run the secular government and leave each religious congregation free to manage its own affairs. The separation of church and state became an ideal, especially for groups like the Baptists who had known little except persecution and discrimination from governments aligned with religious establishments.
Along with the separation of church and state, another concept took root: the sinfulness of religious persecution. During the religious wars of the seventeenth century in Britain, every religious group underwent periods of persecution. The Anglicans persecuted the radical Protestants until the civil war broke out. Once the king was defeated and Cromwell was in power, the Anglicans could be stripped of their power and wealth unless they were careful. When Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, the triumphant Anglicans forced savage persecution laws through Parliament, and many nonconforming clergy and believers were deprived of their positions, fined, imprisoned, and worse.
As Reformed Protestants and their Baptist cousins endured persecution, they developed a new and radical religious idea: that persecution was not, as generations of popes, archbishops, and kings had taught, a religious duty. It was a terrible sin, and not just when Christians were the victims. Out of the fires of religious persecution came a belief among increasing numbers of Protestants that religious toleration, as well as the separation of church and state, was God’s will.
In 1644, Roger Williams, who had been expelled from Massachusetts by the Puritans on religious grounds and had just secured the charter for what would become the state of Rhode Island (then the colony of Providence Plantation), published The Bloudy Tenent, of Persecution, for Cause of Conscience. In it, he declared:
It is the will and command of God that since the coming of his Son the Lord Jesus, a permission of the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish or anti-Christian consciences or worships be granted to all men in all nations and countries….God requireth not a uniformity of religion to be enacted and enforced in any civil state….True civility and Christianity may flourish in a state or kingdom notwithstanding the permission of divers and contrary consciences either Jew or gentile.[25]
It will not surprise the reader to learn that all denominations were tolerated in Williams’s new colony, one of a growing number—mostly founded by groups that suffered persecution in England, such as the Quakers (Pennsylvania) or Catholics (Maryland)—that enshrined freedom of worship and of conscience into law.
By the eighteenth century, the United States was well on the way to a new kind of ideal for a Christian society. Each denomination would have its vision about how the church and family life ought to be structured. Society depended on the strength of these faith communities and associations and on their ability to form virtuous citizens who could provide the civil government with honest and public-spirited administration. But it was not the place of any one of these religious communities to remake the body politic in its own image. America would be a Christian republic in the dual senses that most of its citizens would be Christians and that the republic they built proceeded from their understanding of the kind of commonwealth Christians ought to build. However, the authorities of that republic had nothing to do with regulating the beliefs of the citizens. No special class of prelates would share in its tax revenues, no religious test would be required for any civil office whatever, and the republic would not favor one denomination or oppress another.
This idea of a nonreligious republic in a country of many independent religious societies could not have been more congenial to Jews. The synagogue became another denomination, and Jews who went to synagogue were one minority among many. In this kind of society, Jews no longer endangered the social compact simply by existing. As George Washington told the elders of Touro Synagogue, Jews who obeyed the general laws of the land stood on exactly the same footing with the government as any of their neighbors. The Jewish “denomination,” like the denominations of the Methodists, Presbyterians, and Unitarians, was free to regulate itself in its own way, and it was the duty of the government to treat this denomination as it treated all others.
Without really thinking about Jews, and certainly without trying to change Christian society in a way that would benefit Jews, American Christians had, for their own mix of theological and historical reasons, developed a social structure in which Jews could comfortably fit. And the Jews among them no longer looked so much like the agents of chaos and the destroyers of communal life; they were a religious minority in a nation of religious minorities, and the counsels of religion, humanity, and civil order favored letting them live in peace.
Capitalism and the Jews
The other great change that occurred in the English-speaking world between the time of Shakespeare and the time of George Washington was the transformation of society from a traditional agricultural economy with elements of capitalism embedded in it to a capitalist economy with some traditional features. By the end of the eighteenth century, capitalism was increasingly accepted in the English-speaking world as the ethical as well as the practical foundation of modern life. The shift had large consequences for attitudes toward Jews.
In the Middle Ages, Jews were seen as both a resource to be exploited (by hard-pressed rulers who could tax them at will and confiscate their wealth without a murmur from the wider community) and a force to be feared. Whether as merchants or as moneylenders they dealt in forces that the rest of society did not like, did not understand, and dimly suspected were undermining the foundations of social order.
The rise of capitalism in the English-speaking world led to new attitudes toward economic exchange and even, to some degree, banking. Elites in particular came to view old prejudices against free markets and finance as relics of the past. The Bank of England, a fiercely capitalist institution, became the epitome of establishment respectability, and the upper and middle classes entrusted their savings to interest-bearing government bonds. As finance and financial markets became integral to the life of the English-speaking political classes, and as non-Jews engaged in the financial markets became increasingly powerful and respectable, one more element of the medieval fear of the Jews began to be undermined. A spirit of commercial rivalry might lead to personal hostility between Jewish and Anglo-Saxon bankers, but it grew increasingly difficult to believe that the Rothschilds were doing anything different from the Barings and the Morgans. Dislike of the Jews and prejudice against them began slowly to soften as the logic of the religious and social changes in non-Jewish society gradually made themselves felt.
