Protestant Bible-Reading


The Christian Hebraist Johannes Buxtorf (1564-1629)

In the first half of the sixteenth century, a number of Christian scholars approached Jewish learning - the Hebrew language, rabbinic interpretation of the Old Testament, the Talmud, and kabbalah (a form of Jewish mysticism) - with less anxiety and greater adventurousness of mind. (This is not to say that the phobic view did not persist: Erasmus, observing his contemporaries’ enthusiasm for Hebrew studies, expressed concern that the revival of Hebrew letters might lead to a revival of Judaism, “the most pernicious plague and bitterest enemy that one can find to the teaching of Christ.”) Motivations ranged from an academic interest in Hebrew philology to an occult interest in kabbalistic numerology, making it difficult to generalize. But these efforts together did reflect a relatively widespread break with the cautious traditional approach of the Church, one that endorsed the Latin Vulgate as the authoritative text of the Old Testament and discouraged involvement with Hebrew and rabbinic literature except for the purposes of anti-Jewish polemics. The implications of the awakened interest in Hebrew learning for Christian perceptions of the Jews, though modest at first, were eventually far-reaching.

There was no way to gain an intimate acquaintance with the Hebrew text except through the medium of Jewish scholars. (Baptized Jews were an alternative but they often proved inadequately trained.) It is not surprising that Italy was the first focus of Christian Hebraist activity. Here the Jewish and Christian communities were less isolated from one another than they were in the German states, both culturally and psychologically. (This remained the case even after the ghettoization of Italian Jewry.) Johannes Reuchlin and Pico della Mirandola, two of the earliest Christian Hebraists, were instructed by Italian Jews - Reuchlin by the physician and exegete Obadiah Sforno and Pico by the thinker Yochanan Alemanno. Among humanist churchmen in Rome, Hebrew study became a natural adjunct to classical studies; several bishops turned to the papal physician Jacob Mantino for instruction, while the erudite Cardinal Egidio de Viterbo exchanged Greek lessons for Hebrew with the Jewish scholar Elias Levita.

Hebrew studies were soon pursued throughout Europe, even in places where Jews had not lived for generations. Given the Protestant affirmation of sola scriptura (the doctrine of the authority of Scripture alone) and the importance of lay Bible reading, it is not surprising that Luther and many of the early reformers worked to promote Hebrew studies. Some of the reformers, like Münster, Zwingli, and Melanchthon, were themselves Hebraists. An “infrastructure” for Hebrew studies was created rather rapidly: University chairs in Hebrew were established, and Hebrew grammars and dictionaries were printed for the Christian student.

Through their tutors and, for the very few whose proficiency was sufficient, through the texts themselves, Christian Hebraists became familiar with rabbinic Bible commentaries. This was to have a profound effect. Contact with the Jewish exegetical tradition eroded the boundary between the christological, “spiritual” reading of the text and the historical, “carnal” one. Protestant scholars began to view the narrative passages of the Old Testament in historical, non-Christological terms.

Many of the Christian Hebraists, while enthusiastic about the Hebrew language, continued to loathe the Jews. This is nicely illustrated by the behavior of Otto Henry, the Calvinist Elector of the Palatinate and an ardent Hebraist, who expelled the Jews from his territory in 1556, making sure, however, to appropriate valuable Hebrew books and manuscripts from the exiles before they left, so as to add them to the rich collection of Heidelberg’s University which he had helped to build. Luther saw Christian Hebraism as a way to retain Hebrew while dispensing with Jews. Not only would the Hebraists provide the needed expertise in Hebrew; they would purify what he regarded as a corrupted Jewish biblical text. The great Reformers - Reuchlin, Luther, Zwingli, Münster, Melanchthon – all placed great value, in one way or another, on Hebrew texts; none had any particular sympathy for the Jews.


Rembrandt, Old Woman Reading

The truly momentous change brought by the new focus on Scripture was not in the return of Christian scholars to Hebrew texts, but in the wide dissemination of the Hebrew Bible itself, whether in Hebrew, Latin, or the vernacular. The Bible had always been the most widely-read book in Christian Europe. But before the Reformation it had been read mainly by a tiny minority of educated, Latin-trained clerics. With the advent of vernacular translations in print, with increasing numbers of educated lay people, and with the strong encouragement of lay Bible-reading by reformers, a radically different relationship developed between lay Christians and the Scripture of the Jews.

It was one of the very few ways in which Reformation theology had a direct impact on the way Christians saw Jews. Vernacular Bibles became a common household object in Protestant Europe. Protestants and sectarians were reading the Bible freshly, unshackled by a theologically-driven exegetical tradition. Familiarity entailed a certain demystification, even desacralization of the text. Fathers who were now responsible for the religious life of the household integrated the Bible into domestic life; its reading became a form of sacred entertainment and folksy instruction, and its narratives took on the flavor of popular epic, with heroes and villains, love stories and war sagas.

A striking indication of increasing Protestant identification with figures from the Hebrew Bible was the trend to name boys after Old Testament figures – Abraham, Daniel, Elias, Benjamin. The fact that the Jews in one’s midst bore such names – and, with the resettlement, such Jews were visible in more places – no longer marked them as outsiders or relics of a dead Law. Jewish law and custom also became more familiar. Bible-reading revealed the sources in Scripture for such prominent sights as mezuzot on the doorposts of Jewish homes and the booths built for the holiday of Sukkot. A market developed for engravings and books on the subject of Jewish ceremony. Thomas Godwyn’s Moses and Aron (1625) in the English-speaking world and Buxtorf the Elder’s Synagoga judaica (1603) in the German-speaking world presented Jewish ritual in a reasonably matter-of-fact way.

It is no wonder that with such a wealth of visual and verbal imagery in the atmosphere, it seeped into political discourse as well. The political rhetoric of the English Puritans was suffused with allusions to the Israelites in Egypt and the Wilderness. A less pervasive but parallel phenomenon can be found in the Netherlands as well, where defiant Dutch Calvinists depicted their liberation from Spanish tyranny as a second crossing of the Red Sea. In a less poetic vein, political thinkers weighed the virtues of Hebrew biblical government and law in their ruminations about ideal government. And while in general the biblical archetypes remained just that, and did not interfere with reality, the imaginative hold of the biblical narrative on the imagination was such that radical reformers like Thomas Münzer in the sixteenth century or the Ranters and Fifth Monarchy men in the seventeenth identified with the ancient Israelites in the most immediate way.

The latter were among the millenarian voices in the Protestant world, sectarian voices that echoed the new Bible-reading with a focus not on history but on prophecy. The debate among the English millenarians about the role the Jews would play in the Second Coming threw a spotlight on contemporary Jews and prompted action during the Puritan regime aimed at obtaining their resettlement on English soil. The millenarian assumption that the Jews would convert just prior to the Second Coming was not, of course, compatible with the Jewish scenario. Nevertheless, some Jews were energized by the atmosphere of common expectation - not least among them the Amsterdam rabbi Menasseh ben Israel, who addressed Oliver Cromwell with arguments that the Jews should be readmitted to England for both commercial and millenarian reasons.

The great variety of Protestant and sectarian ideas by the seventeenth century makes generalization about attitudes to Jews risky. Yet certain trends seem to cut across confessional lines. Bible-reading Protestants tended to associate Jews somewhat less with the murderous Pharisees of the Gospels, and more with the flesh-and-blood heroes of the Pentateuch and historical books of the Old Testament, as discussed above.

The more human, realistic view of the Jews that thus emerged was reinforced by another current in Protestant life, namely the suppression of magical belief. The fierce Protestant propaganda campaign against the Roman Church, a campaign which targeted miracles, pilgrimages, and devotion to saints, had the effect of rendering magical practices ludicrous in the eyes of an ever-widening public. Where Jews were concerned, the demystification of the Eucharist, an object associated with Christ’s physical suffering and as such liable to arouse desecration of the Host charges, was particularly significant. Popular fantasies persisted, to be sure, but a public that heaped scorn on “papist” fantasies was less likely to entertain demonic fantasies about the Jews.

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