Milton and the Jews

This page intentionally left blank

M I LTO N A N D T H E J E W S

The issue of the Jews deeply engaged Milton throughout his career, and not necessarily in ways that make for comfortable or reassuring reading today. Whereas Shakespeare and Marlowe, for example, critiqued rather than endorsed racial and religious prejudice in their writings about Jews, the same cannot be said for Milton. The scholars in this collection confront a writer who participated in the sad history of anti-Semitism, even as he appropriated Jewish models throughout his writings. Well grounded in solid historical and theological research, the essays both collectively and individually offer an important contribution to the debate on Milton and Judaism and will inspire new directions in Milton studies. This book will be of interest not only to scholars of Milton and of seventeenth-century literature, but also to historians of the religion and culture of the period. douglas a. brooks is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University.

M I LTO N A N D T H E J E W S edit ed by DOUGLAS A. BROOKS Texas A&M University

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521888837 © Cambridge University Press 2008 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2008

ISBN-13

978-0-511-47881-9

eBook (EBL)

ISBN-13

978-0-521-88883-7

hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For Bella And all, that might his melting hart entise To her delights, she vnto him bewrayd: The rest hid vnderneath, him more desirous made. Spenser, The Faerie Queene

v

Contents

Acknowledgments Contributors

page ix xi

1 Introduction: Milton and the Jews: “A Project never so seasonable, and necessary, as now!”

1

Douglas A. Brooks

2 England, Israel, and the Jews in Milton’s Prose, 1649–1660

13

Achsah Guibbory

3 Milton’s Peculiar Nation

35

Elizabeth M. Sauer

4 Making Use of the Jews: Milton and Philo-Semitism

57

Nicholas von Maltzahn

5 Milton and Solomonic Education

83

Douglas Trevor

6 T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and the Milton Controversy

105

Matthew Biberman

7 A Metaphorical Jew: The Carnal, the Literal, and the Miltonic

128

Linda Tredennick

8 “The people of Asia and with them the Jews”: Israel, Asia, and England in Milton’s Writings Rachel Trubowitz

vii

151

Contents

viii

9 Returning to Egypt: “The Jew,” “the Turk,” and the English Republic

178

Benedict S. Robinson

Select Bibliography Index

201 217

Acknowledgments

I first conceived of this collection when I began researching the topic of Milton’s knowledge of Hebrew and Jewish thought for an article I wanted to write. My goal back then was to find out what the current state of knowledge in the field was and to begin a conversation with some of the Miltonists who were working in the field. I could not have anticipated at the time just how exciting that conversation would be and how much I would learn from those scholars whose essays appear here. For that, for the depth of their knowledge, for their patience, and for their willingness to revise, I am extraordinarily grateful. I also want to thank three scholars, Jeffrey Shoulson, Jason Rosenblatt, and Tom Festa, who were involved in the early stages of this project and have continued to be remarkably supportive. Ray Ryan at Cambridge University Press greeted my initial proposal with enthusiasm, and he has been loyal and steadfast in getting the manuscript of this book read, revised, and now published. I am profoundly grateful to him for believing in this project and for staying with it. In the early 1980s when I was a graduate student in linguistics at the University of Michigan I had the good fortune of taking a class in literary theory with Sandor Goodhart, who was very excited at the time about emerging scholarly interest in the links between poststructuralism and Rabbinic thought. Over coffee at the Fleetwood Diner, we began to discuss Jonathan Culler’s On Deconstruction, but wound up talking mostly about Judaism and what it meant to be a Jewish literary critic. It was the beginning of a sustained dialogue between us that greatly encouraged me to think about Milton’s complicated treatment of the Jews, Judaism, and Jewish thought. This book is lovingly dedicated to Bella, who took me by the hand, led me back to the garden, and introduced me to the luxuries of Paradise regained.

ix

Contributors

douglas a. brooks is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University and the Editor of Shakespeare Yearbook. He is the author of From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and the editor of a collection of essays entitled Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England (Ashgate Publishing Co., 2005). Brooks has published essays in Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Shakespeare Studies, ELR, Philological Quarterly, Genre, Renaissance Drama, Studies in English Literature, and Poetics Today. He is presently completing a book entitled The Gutenberg Father in Early Modern England. matthew biberman is Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisville. His book, Masculinity, Anti-Semitism, and Early Modern English Literature: From the Satanic to the Effeminate Jew, was published by Ashgate in 2004. He has published essays in Milton Quarterly, Studies in English Literature, and other journals and collections. achsah guibbory is Professor of English at Barnard College. Her most recent book is Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge University Press, 1998). She has published nearly thirty articles in anthologies and journals such as English Literary History, Studies in English Literature, John Donne Journal, Huntington Library Quarterly, and Philological Quarterly. benedict s. robinson is Associate Professor of English at SUNY Stonybrook. He has published articles in Sixteenth-Century Journal, Studies in English Literature, Spenser Studies, and a collection of essays on John Foxe. His book, Turning Turk: Islam and English Literature after the Reformation, has just been published by Palgrave.

xi

xii

Contributors

elizabeth m. sauer holds a Chancellor’s Chair for Research Excellence at Brock University. She is the author of Barbarous Dissonance and Images of Voice in Milton’s Epics (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996) and “PaperContestations” and Textual Communities in England 1640–1675 (University of Toronto Press, 2005). Sauer has also edited a number of books, including Imperialisms: Historical and Literary Investigations 1500–1900, with Balachandra Rajan (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004); Reading Early Modern Women, with Helen Ostovich (Routledge, 2004); Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies, with Jennifer Andersen (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); and Milton and the Imperial Vision, with Balachandra Rajan (Duquesne University Press, 1999). linda tredennick is Assistant Professor of English at Gonzaga University. Her book, Repairing the Ruins: Milton, Allegory, and the Poetics of Broken Knowledge, is forthcoming from University of Pennsylvania Press. douglas trevor is Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan. His book, The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2004. He is the co-editor (with Carla Mazzio) of Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture (Routledge, 2000) and has published essays in Studies in English Literature, Sixteenth Century Journal, and Reformation. rachel trubowitz is Associate Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. She has published articles in Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, and Papers on Language and Literature. She is presently editing a collection of essays and completing a book on Milton and gender. nicholas von maltzahn is Professor of English at the University of Ottawa. He is the author of Milton’s History of Britain: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1991) and the editor of Andrew Marvel, An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government, in The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell (Yale University Press, 2003), vol. 2.

c h a pter 1

Introduction: Milton and the Jews: “A Project never so seasonable, and necessary, as now!” Douglas A. Brooks

Barring the official pronouncements of the leaders of what were to become the “orthodox” versions of both religions, one could travel, metaphorically, from rabbinic Jew to Christian along a continuum where one hardly would know where one stopped and the other began. Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism.1

Noting references to the Biblical figure of Samson in post-9/11 polemics about terrorism, Feisal G. Mohamed observes: “It should come as no surprise, then, that the current political climate sparks controversy over Samson Agonistes, inspiring especially those critics who have always found in Milton’s Samson a portrait of blind animosity.”2 Thus, in a move that could have been borrowed from Coleridge’s characterization of Iago as a “motiveless malignancy,” the figure of Samson – Biblical and Miltonic – is called upon to reduce terrorism to something like an impulsive act, one that discourages us from examining the complex conditions that produce it. For Mohamed, such efforts are typified by a now infamous essay written by John Carey for a special issue of the Times Literary Supplement dedicated to the first-year anniversary of 9/11. In that essay, Carey asserts, “The similarities between the Biblical Samson and the hijackers are obvious. Like them he destroys many innocent victims, whose lives, hopes, and loves are all quite unknown to him personally. He is, in effect, a suicide bomber, and like the suicide bombers he believes that his massacre is an expression of God’s will.”3 Although Carey subsequently attempts to rescue Milton’s portrait of Samson from those critics – most notably Stanley Fish – who would accuse the poet of condoning terrorism, he also contends that readers should refrain from attributing aesthetic value to a work that condones 1 2 3

Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999, p. 9. “Confronting Religious Violence: Milton’s Samson Agonistes,” PMLA (120), 2005: 327–40; 327. “A Work in Praise of Terrorism?” Times Literary Supplement 6, September 2002: 15–16; 15. Quoted in Mohamed, p. 328.

1

2

dougl as a. brooks

Samson’s actions: “September 11 has changed Samson Agonistes, because it has changed the readings we can derive from it while still celebrating it as an achievement of the human imagination.”4 The post-9/11 association of Samson Agonistes with terrorism may be a significant development in the history of the critical discussion of Milton’s work, one that deserves the kind of careful attention Mohamed accords it.5 Nevertheless, relying on the biblical figure of Samson to express and comment upon contemporary concerns is not of course new at all, and Milton’s decision to rethink and retell the biblical material is itself a response in part to comparable attempts in his own time. As Joseph Wittreich observes, “If the Samson story had been decontextualized in order to pave the way for New Testament contextualizations . . . there was during the Renaissance, especially among typologists, a parallel effort to offer recontextualizations from materials that had been repressed by Reformation theologians but that now acquired new importance and relevance, particularly in the world of politics.”6 Thus, any effort to interpret Milton’s recasting of the Samson narrative in his historical, cultural, and political moment must acknowledge the extensive hermeneutic tradition that necessarily shaped the early modern reception of the Biblical account from which he was working. Mohamed rightly locates recent interpretative convergences of Samson Agonistes and terrorism within another hermeneutic tradition – often referred to as the “Milton Controversy” – and he touches briefly on three important moments in that tradition. First, there is T. S. Eliot’s contention that Milton’s poetry compels us to bring our own “theological and political dispositions” to it, preventing us from appreciating it as simply poetry. Next he refers to Ezra Pound’s notorious “‘disgust’ with Milton’s ‘asinine bigotry, his beastly hebraism, [and] the coarseness of his mentality.’”7 Lastly, Mohamed offers up Samuel Johnson’s depiction of Samson as “the tragedy which ignorance has admired, and bigotry applauded.”8 Only Eliot’s position hints at the complexities of making Milton our contemporary that have surfaced in recent readings of Samson, though the other two positions 4 5

6 7

Quoted in Mohamed, p. 328. Scholarly reliance on Milton’s poetry to interpret and comment upon recent crises is not, of course, new. G. Wilson Knight’s 1942 book The Chariot of War: The Message of John Milton to Democracy, for example, reads Paradise Lost in the context of Britain’s struggle against Hitler and Nazi Germany. As one reviewer (Geoffrey Tillotson) observed, “Professor Knight is able to give us not only a book of literary criticism but also a war book about Britain and Hitler (power allied to badness).” Quoted in Stanley Fish, “Transmuting the Lump: Paradise Lost, 1942–1979” in Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1989), pp. 247–93; 258. Interpreting Samson Agonistes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). 8 Quoted in Mohamed, p. 328. Quoted in Mohamed, p. 328.

Introduction

3

inadvertently suggest how the deeply emotional responses provoked by the work in the past can begin to explain how and why Milton’s dramatic poem has figured in recent, understandably emotional responses to 9/11 by some scholars of literature. Nevertheless, in the introduction to a collection of essays entitled Milton and the Jews, Pound’s attribution of a “beastly hebraism” to the poet as part of an effort to devalue his work demands our attention. It wasn’t always so. Referring to Samson Agonistes as “the ripe and mellow fruit” of Milton’s literary career, William Wordsworth observed: “When he wrote that his mind was fully Hebraized. Indeed, his genius fed on the writings of the Hebrew prophets. This arose, in some degree from the temper of the times; the Puritans lived in the Old Testament, almost to the exclusion of the New.”9 For Wordsworth, Milton’s “hebraism” is to be celebrated, as it constitutes one of the sources of his “genius.” However, what seems most noteworthy here is Wordsworth’s instinctual, almost na¨ıve desire to historicize the “hebraism” he finds so laudable by tracing it back to “the temper of the times.” Later readers of Milton, most notably since the appearance of Louis Ginzberg’s seven-volume compendium of rabbinic stories, The Legends of the Jews (1909–1938), have sought to expand upon and fulfill this historicizing desire. Interestingly, however, this effort has in part worked to cast doubt upon the extent to which Milton’s “hebraism” was his own as well as the extent to which it nourished his “genius.” Depicting what may have motivated Wordsworth’s Puritans to “live in the Old Testament,” Golda Werman observes, “Of particular interest to the English Puritans were the ancient Jewish explications dealing with religious and public institutions of the Bible because like the Rabbis they believed in reestablishing a religious order and a political system based on Scripture. Both Jews and Puritans maintained that the Bible, if properly understood, contains the answers to all of life’s problems, personal and civil, as well as theological.”10 If this was the “temper of the times,” then Milton may have been less intellectually suited to it than Wordsworth supposed. According to Werman, “In the perspective of this Protestant theological zeitgeist, Milton’s use of rabbinic materials in his prose works is not especially remarkable and does not indicate a profound knowledge of the Semitic languages. . . . the most plausible conclusion is that he consulted the same translations and lexicons that so many other learned Protestants of his day utilized.”11 9

10 11

Quoted in The Romantics on Milton, ed. Joseph Wittreich (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University, 1970), p. 136. Milton and Midrash (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995), p. 30 Werman, p. 30.

4

dougl as a. brooks

Subsequently, she states the case against his knowledge of rabbinic texts even more forcefully: “A close inspection of Milton’s use of this material, however, demonstrates that he had such a narrow understanding of the principles he cites that it is inconceivable that he read his Jewish sources in the original.”12 So much for Milton’s “hebraism,” “beastly” or otherwise. Writing after Werman, scholars such as Jason P. Rosenblatt13 and Jeffrey S. Shoulson14 have greatly refined our knowledge of how Milton and some of his contemporaries15 relied on rabbinical texts and the Hebrew Bible to rethink their relationship to Christianity in an age of tremendous theological turmoil. My goal here is not to enter into the debate over how much Hebrew Milton knew, or how familiar he was with rabbinic texts,16 a debate that has attracted a number of scholars since Dennis Saurat,17 Harris F. Fletcher,18 and Edward C. Baldwin19 first weighed in on the topic in the early decades of the twentieth century. Nor is there space here to survey in any detail the scholarly contours of that debate. Rather I think it suffices to point out that Milton has proved to be tremendously implosive in terms of collapsing the Hebraic milieu in which he thought and wrote back into him – in Wordsworthian phrasing, from the “temper of the times” to the “genius” that has come to represent and dominate that cultural moment. Paradoxically, this concentration on Milton’s handling of his Semitic sources has contributed, Matthew Biberman argues in this volume, “to the erosion of Milton’s cultural capital within the larger academic community.” Such an erosion, I would suggest, has facilitated the demonization of Samson Agonistes as an endorsement of terrorism. A certain opposing or explosive movement can recently be discerned in critical approaches to Milton’s engagement with the Bible and rabbinical texts. Arguably, however, this trend began in the context of Shakespeare, and has subsequently found its way into Milton studies. Rosenblatt astutely 12 14

15

16

17 18 19

13 Torah and Law in Paradise Lost (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Ibid, p. 31. Milton and the Rabbis: Hebraism, Hellenism, and Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). The most notable of these contemporaries is, of course, John Selden. See Rosenblatt’s recent book, Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi: John Selden (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), for a study of Selden’s Hebrew scholarship and its impact on seventeenth-century writers and intellectuals. See my essay – “‘Ill Matching Words and Deeds Long Past’: Englished Hebrew and ‘the Readmission of the Jews’ in Paradise Lost.” Philological Quarterly (2003): 53–80 – for an effort to examine Milton’s “hebraism” without getting bogged down in this debate. Milton: Man and Thinker (New York: Arms Press, Inc, 1925). Milton’s Semitic Studies (Chicago: Gordian, 1926). “Some Extra-Biblical Semitic Influences upon Milton’s Story of the Fall of Man,” JEGP 28 (1929): 366–401.

Introduction

5

describes the origins of this movement even as he seeks to shift the scholarly conversation from Milton to John Selden: Acting on the belief that the stories we tell about others reveal even more about ourselves, recent and well-regarded studies of England and the Jews, during a period that includes Selden’s lifetime, have demonstrated that a culture’s representation of “otherness” has important consequences for its own self-imagining. The often vile racist stereotypes unearthed by James Shapiro in Shakespeare and the Jews20 can only have meaning if our fantasies about others reveal our deepest fears about ourselves. The fear and loathing of Jews as child abductors, murderers, and cannibals can help explain the confused struggles among the English in the early modern era to develop a religious and national identity in a turbulent time. Judaism as a race, nation, and religion is defined as different in every way from the English Protestantism that it threatened to contaminate.21

In light of the uses to which Jews were put in early modern England – and beyond – it is easy to understand why Rosenblatt would want to focus on the work of a writer such as Selden, “whose rabbinic researches,” he observes, “are free of Judeophobia.”22 Nevertheless, it will be helpful to tarry here briefly on the threat of “contamination” the Jews represented – in an important sense, were compelled to represent – in England’s project to construct a post-reformation Christian identity for itself. To do so, I believe, enables the reader to begin to see the importance of this collection’s contribution to our understanding of that project and the role Milton played in it. This double focus, I want to suggest, is at the heart of the present volume because its primary scholarly objective is to have it both ways, as it were: to elucidate the impact of Jews and Jewish texts on Milton’s work and to locate Milton in “the times” that enabled Jews and Jewish texts to have such a powerful impact on the poet who wrote those works. Long persecuted for being the descendants of Christ’s killers and allegedly practicing demonic rituals such as murdering Christian boys during the Easter holiday in order to obtain blood for baking Passover matzos, Jews were finally exiled from England in 1290 during the reign of Edward I. As such, for late Medieval and Renaissance England Jews had largely become figments of the collective English imagination, where they figured chiefly as ciphers for all that was improper and un-Christian. As Shapiro has amply 20 21

22

New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. “John Selden’s De Jure Naturali . . . Juxta Disciplinam and Religious Toleration,” in Hebraica Veritas? Christian Hebraists and the Study of Judaism in Early Modern Europe, ed. Allison P. Coudert and Jeffrey S. Shoulson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), pp. 102–24; 103. Rosenblatt, “John Selden’s,” p. 104.

6

dougl as a. brooks

demonstrated, this strategy of negating Jews in order to strengthen Christian self-definition became even more vital during Shakespeare’s lifetime, when the English Reformation – implemented spasmodically over the second half of the sixteenth century – greatly complicated what it meant to be a Christian. What is perhaps most significant about this long and complex period in the history of England’s interaction with Jews is that English attitudes were shaped mainly by religious concerns, though some primitive racialist notions of Jewish difference figured in late sixteenth-century English efforts to construct nationalist myths about England’s pure AngloSaxon origins. By the time Milton was writing many of the works that have come to be the focus of scholarly efforts to determine his debt to Semitic sources, Jews were on the verge of becoming more than just figments of the English imagination. Indeed, those who participated in the Whitehall Conference of 1655 acknowledged what must have begun to be somewhat apparent to at least some of Milton’s intellectual contemporaries: “There is no Law that forbids the Jews’ return into England.”23 Accordingly, as Biberman – following Shapiro – observes, the “cultural poetics of the Anglo-heritage industry” has positioned Milton “quite precisely as the sign of the end of Shakespeare’s England, that Jew-less, lost paradise.” It is this transitional moment in England’s history, one in which the conflation of imaginary Jews and “real” Jews suddenly becomes possible, that preoccupies a number of the scholars in this volume. Nevertheless, one could argue that such an endeavor represents a kind of back-to-the-futurism, inasmuch as there is something like an important precedent for it within one of the earliest efforts to write a history of English Jewry. In his Anglia Judaica: or the History and Antiquities of the Jews in England (1738), D’Blossiers Tovey begins his analysis of the events leading up to the decision to readmit the Jews to England – after nearly four centuries of exile – with a brief historical overview of English attitudes toward the Jews between the reign of Henry VII and the middle decades of the seventeenth century: “Not one of those good natur’d Ministers of our succeeding Princes . . . gave any Encouragement to the Jews to attempt a Return into that Country, from whence they had so solemnly been banish’d by Parliament, at the request of all the people.”24 Subsequently, in Tovey’s account, the ministers experienced a rather striking change of heart: “But when once they observ’d the Fulness of Time was come, when England was to be 23

24

Quoted in David S. Katz, Philosemitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England 1603–1655 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 243. New York: Burt Franklin, 1967, p. 259.

Introduction

7

punish’d for all her Transgressions . . . They thought that then, if ever, was the proper Time to endeavour their [the Jews’] REESTABLISHMENT.”25 Regarding this abrupt reversal, Katz observes, “The initiative for the return of the Jews to England came from the English themselves and not from the Sephardic Jews who made up the tiny Marrano community in London.”26 However, if England was finally ready for the Jews, Tovey also indicates that the Jews were equally ready to return: “And accordingly we find, that as soon as King Charles was murther’d, the Jews Petition’d the Council of War to endeavour a Repeal of that Act of Parliament which had been made against them. Upon which, one Official remarked, ‘A Project never so seasonable, and necessary, as now!’”27 Having expelled its Jews in 1290, suddenly England had decided it wanted them back. The Jews were only too happy to oblige. Simple enough. Nevertheless, an examination of political, legal, cultural, religious, literary, and imaginary encounters between seventeenth-century England and Jews suggests that the situation was far more complicated than Tovey would have his readers believe. The case of Anne Curtyn, for example, hints at the complexity. In 1649, the year Charles I was deposed and executed, Curtyn was sent to New Prison at Clerkenwell “for being a professed Jew and causing children to be circumcised.”28 The charges, apparently brought against her for emulating Old Testament rituals, were subsequently dropped because it turned out that she was a Christian, albeit a follower of the radical Puritan John Traske. Seven years before Oliver Cromwell presided over the Whitehall Conference, Curtyn’s troubles pointed to something of an identity crisis that Shakespeare’s Portia might have expressed as, “which is the Christian here, and which the Jew?” Indeed, the presence of what Inge Leimberg has called “the Jewish remnant”29 in England during the first half of the seventeenth century was so strongly felt that the term “REESTABLISHMENT” hardly does justice to the moment when the participants in the Whitehall Conference began to contemplate the possibility that Jews might soon occupy the same space as their legacy. Furthermore, it seems clear that the symbolic systems relied upon to distinguish religious, cultural, and national identity were not fully legible. In the particular case of Anglo-Jewish relations, the ability to make such distinctions was greatly complicated by the 25 26 27 28

29

Tovey, Anglia, p. 259. Typographic emphasis in original. The Jews in the History of England 1485–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 108. Tovey, Anglia, p. 259. Quoted in James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 25. Shapiro suggestively argues that questions concerning Jewish identity in early modern England serve as the matrix for larger issues of race, gender, and nationalism in the period. “The Letter Lost in George Herbert’s ‘The Jews,’” Studies in Philology 90 (1993): 298–321; 298.

8

dougl as a. brooks

fact that, as Katz notes, “The only Jews of most people’s acquaintance were biblical figures, literary characters, and entirely imaginary, and it may be that this lack of personal contact with such an extraordinary people facilitated their readmission.”30 In this cultural context, Milton’s literary, polemical, and political writings may be viewed as a substantial and intensive effort to identify and define oppositionally what it was to be English and Protestant – and to do so with reference to some rather complex biblical, historical, and imaginary constructions of Israel, Jews, and Judaism. Indeed, as Elizabeth Sauer argues in her essay here, “England achieved its literary embodiment in the imaginatively constructed nations of Spenser and Shakespeare. The nation’s main prophet, however, was Milton, whose writings best exhibit the early modern preoccupation with the intersecting identities of ancient Israel and early modern England.”31 Furthermore, given what Katz refers to as “the highly biblical wash over the language of the period” and “the frequency with which the Jews intruded into discussions of all varieties,”32 Milton’s work demands that we consider it in light of those discussions to which he so powerfully contributed. Such a consideration is the primary objective of Milton and the Jews, and the contributors to this collection explore nearly every significant phase of Milton’s prolific career, with essays ranging in their focus from Paradise Lost to Samson Agonistes, from the Aeropagitica to his translations of the Psalms. Moreover, this collection not only aims to participate in the scholarly conversation about Milton’s poetry and prose, but also to investigate the cultural/historical moment in which they were written. Before offering an overview of the essays that follow, I want to pause for a moment to consider a question germane to this volume and the larger scholarly project to which it hopes to contribute: Given the apparent hostility to Jews and Judaism in Milton’s writings, why are so many scholars who have worked on Milton – including some of the contributors to this collection and its editor – Jewish? Matthew Biberman, a Jewish Miltonist who has written a monograph that examines the prominence of anti-Semitism in early modern English literature,33 briefly touches on this issue. Referring to Robert Adams’s critical project to negate the impact of Jewish scholarship on a Milton who, he worries, is “in danger of being forever cast into 30 32

33

31 “Milton’s Peculiar Nation,” Ch. 3, pp. 37–8. Katz, Jews, p. 108. Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England 1603–1655 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 8. Masculinity, Anti-Semitism and Early Modern English Literature: From the Satanic to the Effeminate Jew (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2004).

Introduction

9

an ‘imbecilic role’ as a thinker under ‘rabbinic influence,’ trafficking in the ‘elaborate mass of mumbo jumbo’ and ‘puerile legends’ found in such Judaic texts as the Zohar,” Biberman sees in such scholarship “a striking impression of Anglo-American academic culture at mid-century as it reacts to the burgeoning influx of Jews.”34 Referring to the same moment in the Anglo-American academy, Stanley Fish asks, “How do postwar changes in the size and constitution of student populations put pressure on literary studies in general and Milton studies in particular?”35 By way of an answer, Fish observes: Here one might profitably focus on the extraordinarily large number of Jewish scholars who begin to populate Renaissance studies. For many Miltonists writing before 1945 the problem was to reconcile one’s assumed Christianity with the thesis of poetic autonomy; but for many Jewish academics Christianity was an object of study like any other, and consequently they were not about to be made uneasy, as Samuel Johnson was, by the mingling of poetic fictions with “the most awful and sacred truths.”36

A Jewish Miltonist himself, Fish intimates that a certain lack of emotional attachment and a correlative potential for objectivity was possible for Jewish academics who took up Milton after the war. He does not address the question raised earlier about why such academics would be drawn to a poet who may be portrayed as largely unsympathetic to Jewish issues in his day, especially so soon after the Holocaust. Rather, he asks an alternative question about them, a question he declines to answer: “What influence did the influx of this group and of others hitherto excluded from the academy, either by finances or by visible and invisible quotas, have on the study of Paradise Lost?”37 One answer to Fish’s query, which inadvertently invites us to consider the earlier one, can be gleaned from the preoccupation with Milton’s thinking about Jews and Judaism in the works of many of these scholars, as well as the work of more recent Jewish Miltonists such as Golda Werman, Jeffrey Shoulson, Jason Rosenblatt, and some of the contributors to this collection. Perhaps a facile explanation for the interest in Milton by Jewish academics can be traced to what Sander Gilman identifies as “the hidden language of the Jews,” a kind of Jewish anti-Semitism or Jewish self-hatred.”38 In closing, I want to offer an alternative response, one that I think is borne out by the essays that follow. Regardless of Milton’s stance on the Jews, their history, their religion, and their texts, it is clear that he 34 36 38

35 “Transmuting,” p. 289. “T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and the Milton Controversy,” pp. 118–19. 37 Ibid. Ibid. Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).

10

dougl as a. brooks

thought powerfully about them and took them seriously. Consequently, his work deserves to be treated in a comparable fashion. Offering such a treatment is the primary objective of Milton and the Jews. overview The first three essays introduce many of the central themes of this collection inasmuch as they examine seventeenth-century England’s real and imagined encounters with Jews, as well as Milton’s position in these encounters. The book begins with an essay by Achsah Guibbory, “England, Israel, and the Jews in Milton’s Prose, 1649–1660,” that scrutinizes Milton’s curious silence on the issue of the readmission of the Jews to England and his failure to speak on their behalf. Looking closely at Milton’s polemical prose during the 1640s and 1650s, when the “Jewish question” received a great deal of attention, Guibbory finds that Milton was neither a supporter of the Jews’ readmission nor optimistic about their conversion. In her essay, “Milton’s Peculiar Nation,” Elizabeth Sauer takes up Milton’s preoccupation with the role of Israel/England in the drama of Reformation history and his negotiation of the “Hebraism-Judaism” divide in Paradise Lost. This analysis enables Sauer to demonstrate how Milton’s texts chart an irregular but consistent movement from his attraction to the notion of England as Regnum Christi to his disillusion with the destined heirs of the kingdom. In “Making Use of the Jews: Milton and Philo-Semitism,” Nicholas von Maltzahn sees Milton’s life and work as a point of intersection between philo-Semitism and anti-Semitism in seventeenth-century England. Examining new biographical details, including Milton’s usury, the anti-Semitism of his brother-in-law, Richard Powel, and the poet’s friendship with the philo-Semite, Samuel Hartlib, in the context of English Christian literary efforts to appropriate the Hebrew God, von Maltzahn finds important similarities between anti-Semitic and philo-Semitic discourses of the period. These similarities, he contends, have literary consequences, especially for some of Milton’s late works such as Samson Agonistes, Paradise Regain’d, and the Psalm translations published in 1673. In his essay, “Milton and Solomonic Education,” Douglas Trevor studies Milton’s heavy reliance on the Hebrew Bible to legitimate his claims, noting that among figures from Hebrew Scripture, few are invoked more frequently by Milton or his contemporaries than the third and last king of united Israel, Solomon. Trevor contends that throughout the multitude of prose works Milton writes during his public career – beginning with his antiprelatical tracts of the early 1640s and continuing through those

Introduction

11

publications produced while serving as Cromwell’s Secretary of Foreign Tongues (1649–60) – the different tasks at hand solicit varied presentations of Solomon. Essays by Matthew Biberman and Linda Tredennick look more generally at Milton’s engagement with Jewish thought and some of the critical issues that engagement has provoked. In “T. S. Eliot, AntiSemitism, and the Milton Controversy,” Biberman begins by considering “the temptation of Athens” episode of Paradise Regained, in which Milton’s representation of a dialogue between Jesus and Satan seems to privilege Hebraic knowledge over Hellenic. Biberman uses this analysis of Jesus’ apparent “Semitic-centrism” as the launching point for an assessment of the anti-Semitic elements in Milton’s critical reception in the twentieth century, especially in the criticism of T. S. Eliot. Noting how Christianity has historically defined itself as not Jewish, Linda Tredennick contends in “A Metaphorical Jew: The Carnal, the Literal, and the Miltonic” that this oppositional strategy is significantly complicated by Protestant theology. Specifically, Tredennick argues that Luther embeds Jewishness into the very heart of Christian experience, and she explores how this Lutheran innovation informs Milton’s poetics and his politics. For Tredennick, Milton relies on his most infamous allegory, the figure of Sin in Paradise Lost, to strategically remind us that we, as mortal readers, cannot escape textuality and literalness – that we are all (metaphorically) Jewish readers. The two essays that conclude this volume approach Milton’s thinking about Jews from the perspective of rapidly changing notions of national, racial, and cultural identity in the first half of the seventeenth century. In “‘The people of Asia and with them the Jews’: Israel, Asia, and England in Milton’s Writings,” Rachel Trubowitz considers the extent to which Jesuit commentaries on China’s “ancient annals” as well as European travel narratives extolling China’s natural riches troubled Milton because they offered an idealized picture of China as an alternative Eden that threatened the Mosaic account of the Fall and Hebrew scriptural history. Yet, rather than merely seeking to protect the Israel of Hebrew Scripture against Stuart England’s fascination with China, Trubowitz argues that Milton also undermines the privileged status of the Mosaic books by conflating the Jews with “the people of Asia.” As such, for Milton, England’s emancipation from custom, tradition, and kingship must be understood in opposition to a conjoint Asia-Israel in bondage. Benedict Scott Robinson, in “Returning to Egypt: ‘The Jews,’ ‘the Turks,’ and the English Republic,” traces the significance of the Jews for the English political imagination, taking into account material as diverse as Milton’s reference to the “Senate” of the Israelites in Paradise Lost, the allusions to the Jews in Milton’s political prose, and

12

dougl as a. brooks

James Harrington’s discussion of the book of Samuel in Oceana. Noting close connections between republican writing about the Jews and contemporary readings of “eastern” or “Asiatic” politics, Robinson argues that both Harrington and Milton believed the Jews fell from God into Orientalism and became just like other Eastern peoples, Egyptian, Babylonian, or Turkish. The Hebraic/Rabbinic material discussed in this collection belongs to a remarkably rich intellectual tradition that may be somewhat unfamiliar to many students and scholars of English literature. Although the essays collected here provide access to some very important clusters of ideas and texts from this tradition, they do not pretend to offer comprehensive accounts. For a number of reasons elucidated by the contributors to this volume, Milton and several of his contemporaries felt compelled to immerse themselves in Jewish history and thought. Because no individual study could adequately document the depth and complexity of this immersion, I hope that Milton and the Jews will serve as a useful starting point for many future investigations.

c h a pter 2

England, Israel, and the Jews in Milton’s Prose, 1649–1660 Achsah Guibbory

Milton’s attitude towards the readmission of the Jews has long been an object of puzzlement. He was close with people in the Samuel Hartlib circle who expressed tolerant attitudes towards the Jews and were interested in their readmission, believing the conversion of the Jews would be part of the millennial reign of Christ on Earth. Milton’s friend, Moses Wall, was the translator of Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel’s The Hope of Israel (1650), which prepared the way for Menasseh’s petition to Cromwell and his Council in 1655. For a time in the 1640s and 1650s, Christian millenarianism and Jewish messianism intersected, as some Christians and Jews were drawn together by a shared sense of impending end times that led to interest in readmitting the Jews to England.1 And yet Milton, despite an early millenarian strain, was curiously silent on the issue of readmission. Although as secretary of foreign tongues to the Council of State he could hardly have been unaware of the controversy over readmission, he recorded in his writing no comments that directly reveal his stance. More than forty years ago, Don Wolfe remarked on Milton’s “failure to speak for the Jews,” and Jeffrey Shoulson has recently noted that Milton mentions the matter of toleration and conversion only twice in his prose, and then only briefly.2 Milton’s “real” opinion of Jews and his attitude towards Jewish readmission are, arguably, unknowable. Still, we can get a clearer picture of Milton’s thinking about Jews and of what his stance towards readmission probably 1

2

See especially Richard H. Popkin, “Introduction” and “Christian Jews and Jewish Christians in the 17th Century,” in R. H. Popkin and Gordon M. Weiner, Jewish Christians and Christian Jews: From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer, 1994), pp. 1–9, pp. 58– 72; Popkin, “Some Aspects of Jewish-Christian Theological Interchanges in Holland and England 1640–1700,” in J. Van den Berg and Ernestine G. E. VanderWall, Jewish-Christian Relations in the Seventeenth Century: Studies and Documents (Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer, 1988), pp. 3–32; and David S. Katz, Philosemitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England 1603–1655 (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1982). Don M. Wolfe, “The Limits of Miltonic Toleration,” JEGP 60 (1961): 846; Jeffrey S. Shoulson, Milton and the Rabbis: Hebraism, Hellenism, and Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), p. 36.

13

14

achsah guibbory

was by looking at his polemical prose during the 1640s and 1650s, when the “Jewish question” was on people’s minds. Particularly of interest is his prose published in the aftermath of Charles I’s execution in January 1649, when millenarian hopes were high and Millenarians expected the imminent conversion of the Jews that was supposed to accompany the thousand-year reign of Christ described in Revelation (20: 4–5), itself a Christian conversion of Daniel’s vision of the “fifth kingdom” ruled by “one like the Son of man” and “the saints” (Dan. 7: 13–18). Like many of his contemporaries, Milton turned to the Hebrew Bible to understand England’s present turbulent situation, finding that the history of the ancient Israelites (as the “first” people of God) spoke to contemporary English experience. Although Milton’s invocation of biblical Israelite history is well known, it has not been closely examined for what it can tell us about Christian/Jewish relations.3 His habit of finding biblical precedents for contemporary English history reveals attitudes towards the biblical Jews that imply opinions about present Jews as well. Although the full complexity and variety of seventeenth-century attitudes towards Jews both ancient and modern are beyond the scope of this essay, the attitudes expressed in Milton’s prose need to be placed in the context of his contemporaries if we are to better understand what his position towards Jewish readmission is likely to have been. Before examining his use of English/Israelite analogies, though, it is necessary to look briefly at his anti-prelatical tracts of the early 1640s, which formulated the theological relation between Christianity and its Jewish ancestor that, I would argue, colored his developing sense of the relation between England and the Jews. In his antiprelatical pamphlets of 1641 and 1642, Milton occasionally voiced the identification of England with Israel that was common during the seventeenth century, particularly during the civil war period when Puritan ministers invited to preach to Parliament beginning in November 1640 repeatedly cast England’s experience within the framework of biblical Israel’s history, turning to the Hebrew Bible for exemplary advice. Like Henry Burton and Edmund Calamy, Milton in Of Reformation drew an analogy with the Israelites suffering in Egyptian bondage when he condemned the 3

See especially Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-century Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1993), though Hill does not focus exclusively on the Old Testament or discuss what uses of Jewish history suggest about attitudes towards Jews. Jason Rosenblatt, Torah and Law in Paradise Lost (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), and Shoulson, Milton and the Rabbis, focus on post-biblical (rabbinic) rather than Biblical material. Dayton Haskin, Milton’s Burden of Interpretation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), discusses the Protestant “experimental” reading of the Bible, which sought to fit biblical “places” to experience.

England, Israel, and the Jews in Milton’s Prose, 1649–1660

15

Laudian prelates as “Egyptian task-masters of Ceremonies.”4 Like Cornelius Burges and Francis Cheynell, Milton suggested that the English were like the Jews suffering under the Babylonian captivity when he called the prelates the “Babilonish Marchants of Soules” (Of Reformation, CPW, I, p. 592).5 However, more often Milton in his antiprelatical prose was voicing his Christian distance and difference from the ancient Jews – at the very time when almost all of the Puritans preaching to Parliament were stressing the identity between English Christians (the “true Israel”) and ancient Israel, even as they insisted the Church of England needed to be reformed. In his notion of the true Church and his vision of reformation, Milton insisted on the separation, indeed opposition, between Christian and Jewish. His sense that the true Church must be purged of all traces of Jewish ceremonial (abolished by Christ, but supposedly still polluting the Roman church) was, of course, orthodox reformed thinking. It had been repeated by John Foxe’s influential Acts and Monuments, which identified the Church of Rome with the continuation of Jewish ceremonial, priesthood, and “superstition” while defining the Reformation as the break from a Judaism that had contaminated Christianity and was presumed to be “anti-Christian.”6 Such anti-Judaic thinking was grounded on Pauline supersessionism (the notion that the Gospel superseded the Law), which identified the Law with the flesh, works, and bondage, and the Gospel of Christ with spirit, grace, and liberty (Rom. 8, Gal. 4–5). The liberty of the Gospel had superseded and cast off the bondage of the Law, a bondage under which Judaism was presumed still to lie. However, changes in the Church of England under Archbishop William Laud in the 1630s – the greater emphasis on ceremony and the power of the prelates – had led “hotter” Protestants like William Prynne and Milton to fear that the Jewish elements were creeping back into the English church. Indeed, the Laudian defenders of the ceremonial, Episcopal Church of England had grounded it on ancient Jewish precedent. Attacking the Laudian Church of England, with its priests and 4

5

6

Henry Burton, England’s Bondage and Hope of Deliverance . . . Preached before the House of Commons [June 29, 1641](1641), esp. pp. 11–14; Edmund Calamy, Gods Free Mercy to England. Presented as a Pretious and Powerfull motive to Humiliation: In a Sermon before the Honourable House of Commons, at their late solemne Fast. Feb.23.1641 (1642), pp. 45–46. For Milton’s prose, I have used Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), I, 545; hereafter cited as CPW, by volume and page number. For Milton’s poetry, I have used The Complete Poetry and Major Prose, ed. Merrit Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey, 1957). Cornelius Burgers, A Sermon Preached to the Honourable House of Commons Assembled in Parliament, At their Publique Fast, Novem. 17.1640, 3rd ed., (1641), pp. 34–35; Francis Cheynell, Sions Memento, and Gods Alarum. In a Sermon . . . on the 31st of May 1643 (1643), pp. 1–2. John Foxe, Actes and Monuments, 2 vols. (1570), I, pp. 38, 524, and the prefatory “To all the professed frendes and followers of the Popes procedynges.”

16

achsah guibbory

ceremonies, Milton’s polemical writing of the early 1640s insists that the Christian church is no temple, and that its government and worship must have nothing in common with the Temple of Jerusalem.7 Milton’s antiprelatical pamphlets are strongly anti-Judaic. He vilifies the Mosaic Law along with episcopacy and the ceremonial worship of the English church, which seemed to Milton “anti-Christian” as they were based on Jewish laws abrogated by Christ. Believing that the English church under the prelates had been contaminated by “popery,” which itself was, from his reformed perspective, an amalgam of Jewish and pagan traditions, Milton declares in Of Reformation that England has “backslid” into the “Jewish beggery, of old cast rudiments” (CPW, I, p. 520). He is appalled by the “fleshly” prelates, clothed in the “guegaws fetcht from Arons old wardrope” (CPW, I, pp. 520–21). He contrasts the “perfection of the Gospell” with the “Ephod, and Teraphim of Antiquity” (Of Prelatical Episcopacy, CPW, I, pp. 652) – linking the breastplate (Ephod) of the Jewish high priest with the idols (Teraphim) that belonged to Rachel’s father (Gen. 31:19). An Apology against . . . a Modest Confutation (1642) appropriates Isaiah’s description of the corrupt priests in the Temple as “dumbe and greedy dogs” to attack the English prelates, but turns the Hebrew prophet to anti-Jewish as well as antiLaudian ends as Milton insists the prelates with their “sorcerous doctrine of formalities” have “transforme[d]” “Christian men into Judaizing beasts” (CPW, I, p. 932). Whereas the prelates claim descent from Aaron (the first high priest appointed by God to serve in the Tabernacle), Milton insists that the “true Fathers” of the prelates are the “Pharisees,” the “great Rabbis” (CPW, I, p. 933), long represented by the Christian church as the adversaries of Christ. Milton updates the conventional anti-Judaic position, identifying the Laudian bishops as descendants of the Jews. “The Prelates bring as slavish mindes with them, as the Jewes brought out of Egypt” (CPW, I, p. 949). The spirituality and liberty of Christianity contrast with the supposed carnality and servility of Judaism, which has found a new incarnation in the Laudians. In the early 1640s, that is, Milton was arguing for the need to purge the Church of England of all traces of Judaism, now embodied in the episcopacy, the prelates, and their worship, even as he himself identified with the Hebrew prophets who had been messengers of God. From the first, Christianity had defined itself in relation to the Judaism from which it had emerged, and that relationship has been complex, difficult, and 7

See further Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 28–41, 153–55, 184–86.

England, Israel, and the Jews in Milton’s Prose, 1649–1660

17

shifting. Milton’s own attitude towards Jewish precedent was ambivalent and divided. Yet there was, to his way of thinking, no contradiction between identifying with the Hebrew prophets and denouncing residual Judaism, for the Hebrew prophets had themselves criticized the Jews for turning to idolatry. Rosemary Ruether has shown how Christianity from the second decade on had revised history and reinterpreted the texts of the prophets to label “the Jews” and the Pharisees the “enemies” of God, responsible for the death of Jesus.8 Some seventeenth-century English Christians departed from this formula in urging toleration. However, read through the Christian interpretive lens that had transformed the prophets’ attack on Israel’s and Judah’s relapses into an attack on Judaism itself, the prophetic discourse of the Hebrew Bible could be used by Milton to attack the Jewish/popish “idolatry” that had contaminated England and her church. The Reason of Church Government was a key tract. In presenting the rules for the discipline of the Church, Milton both identifies with Moses (the Lawgiver) and displaces him, as the Gospel displaces the Law. As he gives the theological argument about how the Christian church cannot be based on the Law or biblical Jewish worship, Milton not only rejects the Laudian, ceremonialist effort to legitimize episcopacy and the controverted ceremonies by their biblical Jewish precedents, he echoes Foxe’s earlier position that the Reformation, recapitulating the defining moment of early Christianity, must purge all Jewish elements from worship.9 Drawing a sharp distinction between Gospel and Law, between Christian and Jewish, Milton indicts the Jewish “discipline” as “carnal bondage” from which Christians are freed. In the Hebrew Bible, the Israelites were supposed to keep separate from heathen idolatry; now Christians must maintain a similar distance from the Jewish religion: “That which was to the Jew but jewish,” Milton explains, “is to the Christian no better then Canaanitish” (Reason of Church Government, CPW, I, p. 845). In order to evaluate the attitudes expressed in these tracts, it is important to recognize that during the years when Milton was writing these tracts, “puritan” ministers preaching their “fast sermons” to Parliament and urging the work of reformation were expressing their opposition to the Laudian church in distinctly less anti-Judaic terms, even as they, too, identified with the Hebrew prophets. There was a range of attitudes towards the Jewish biblical past. Indeed, in their biblical parallels to Israelite history, ministers like Cornelius Burges, Edmund Calamy, and Thomas Goodwin expressed 8

9

Rosemary Radford Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism, rpt. 1974 (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), esp. Chapter 2, pp. 64–116. On Foxe, see Sharon Achinstein, “John Foxe and the Jews,” Renaissance Quarterly 54 (2001): 86–120.

18

achsah guibbory

a stronger sense of continuity with the pre-Christian Jews. They repeatedly stressed their sense of kinship with the ancient Jews who had struggled with idolatry, been delivered from bondage, and were “the people of God.”10 Like the “root and branch” petition for the abolition of episcopacy presented to Parliament in 1640, the fast sermons identified the idolatry that needed to be purged from the church as “popish” rather than Jewish idolatry. The fierceness of Milton’s theological anti-Judaic attitude in his antiprelatical tracts stands in contrast to the Puritan sermons to Parliament and is actually closer to the Foxean attitudes being voiced by Milton’s contemporary William Prynne, who from the early 1630s to 1641 had been insisting that Christianity had no place for Jewish things, which he (like Foxe) equated with “popish” superstition. Following John’s description of the Jews as the offspring of “the devil” (John 8:43), Prynne attacked the prelates as the descendents of the devil and the Pharisees (the rabbis).11 In December 1655, Prynne would publish the vitriolic Short Demurrer against the Jewes, an anti-Semitic “history” of the Jews that argued against Jewish readmission and that David Katz suggests probably precipitated the abrupt dissolution of the Whitehall Conference that Cromwell had called to consider the matter.12 Although Milton’s growing concern with liberty of conscience and his greater flexibility and intelligence distinguish him from Prynne, he too shared Foxe’s position that Christianity must be purified of residual Jewish elements. One could say that Foxe and Prynne – and even Milton – were expressing “only” theological anti-Judaism, but the long sweep of history – and Foxe’s Acts and Monuments and Prynne’s Short Demurrer – shows how theological anti-Judaism can spill over into dislike of Jews.13 However, what of Milton’s well-known fondness for drawing analogies with the ancient Israelites in his political pamphlets from the late 1640s through the eve of the Restoration in 1660? His allusions to Israelite history participate in the godly identification of England with Israel, and thus one might expect them to reveal a more positive attitude towards the ancient Jews. Perhaps there is a distinction between the theological anti-Judaism of the antiprelatical tracts and the attitudes expressed in his other prose 10

11 12

13

See e.g., Cornelius Burges, A Sermon Preached to the Honourable House of Commons Assembled in Parliament. At their Publique Fast. Novem. 17.1640, 3rd ed. (1641); Edmund Calamy, England’s Looking-Glasse (1642); Thomas Goodwin, Zerubbabels Encouragement to Finish the Temple (1642). William Prynne, A Quench-Coale (Amsterdam, 1637); A Looking-Glasse for all Lordly Prelates (1636). See Katz, Philosemitism and the Readmission of the Jews, p. 221. See William Prynne, A Short Demurrer to the Jewes (1655); but also the earlier Looking-Glasse and A New Discovery of the Prelates Tyranny (1641). For a compelling examination of the phenomenon, see James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), as well as Ruether’s Faith and Fratricide.

England, Israel, and the Jews in Milton’s Prose, 1649–1660

19

during the revolutionary period. Jason Rosenblatt has shown how Milton’s divorce tracts and Areopagitica were indebted to rabbinic thinking, and how these bold tracts from 1643 to 1645 show a generous Hebraism and a movement away from Pauline supersessionism.14 Yet when we turn to the later antimonarchical tracts and Milton’s defenses of the new commonwealth and protectorate, we see a disturbing anti-Jewish attitude emerging in his invocations of Israelite history. Like many of the “godly,” Milton understood England’s contemporary experience in relation to Israelite history as represented in the Hebrew Bible. The Puritan – and Miltonic – identification with Israel and the ancient Jews is well known.15 The godly felt they shared a sense of being God’s chosen people. Yet this seemingly commonplace identification of England with Israel was complicated. It was shared by many Royalists and supporters of the Church of England, and involved a range of complex, contradictory attitudes towards the Jews. Moreover, despite his sense of connection between their histories, there was, for Milton, no simple, inevitably positive equation of the English and the Jews. An anti-Judaic element was part of Milton’s sense of England’s Israelite identity; his attitudes are complex and shifting, his parallels between England and ancient Israel increasingly negative.16 Milton’s evolving sense of the relation of Israelite and English history and the “nature” of the Jews is worth attending to as it casts light on his probable attitude towards the readmission of Jews to England. A strong identification with biblical Israel is evident in his defenses of the regicide and of the commonwealth and protectorate, where Milton invoked characters and incidents from the Hebrew Bible to attack Charles and the Royalists in ways that identified them with Israel’s enemies, and implicitly 14

15

16

Rosenblatt, Torah and Law, discusses the tension between the Hebraic and the anti-Judaic Pauline impulses in Milton’s thinking. In addition to Hill, The English Bible, see William Haller, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (London: Macmillan, 1988). Haller argues that, though “Israel of the Old Testament was a familiar paradigm” for Protestant England, Protestants were “internationalists,” and that “prophetic preaching” was generally “castigatory” rather than “triumphalist” (p. 18). Neither Fixler, Milton and the Kingdoms of God, nor Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1977), who points out that the analogy of Egyptian bondage was a “favourite” with Milton and “a Puritan clich´e” (p. 206), examine the anti-Jewish implications of Milton’s English/Israel analogies. Shoulson, an exception, observes that Milton turns to Hebraic and rabbinic precedent “in a remarkably conflicted manner” (p. 6). John Hale, “England as Israel in Milton’s Writings,” Early Modern Literary Studies: A Journal of Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century English Literature, 2:2 (1996): 3. 1–54, argues that Milton is increasingly less inclined to turn to the England/Israel parallel (particularly the Exodus parallel), but Hale does not attend to the range and detail of Milton’s use of the Hebrew Bible in the prose. Where Hale sees “absence” (para. 5), I argue for a revision of the image of England as Israel. Cf. Elizabeth Sauer, “Milton’s Peculiar Nation,” in this volume, who argues that Milton moves away from belief in England as a “chosen nation.”

20

achsah guibbory

associated the godly with ancient Israel. Published two weeks after Charles’ execution, the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649) defended the right of the people to execute God’s justice on a tyrant who had committed “massachers” on “his faithful subjects,” and Milton drew on “Mosaical” as well as “Christian” authorities for support, calling both “Orthodoxal” (CPW, III, pp. 197, 198). He looked to the Hebrew Bible to show the venerable “custom of tyrant-killing among the Jews” (CPW, III, p. 213). Eight months later in Eikonoklastes (October 1649), written to refute the Royalist Eikon Basilike’s glorification of the executed king as a Davidic, Christ-like martyr, Milton relentlessly referred to Charles as Pharaoh, giving supportive details to prove his point. Like the Egyptian ruler, Charles both feared and afflicted the English Israelites, persecuting the true Protestants when they grew numerous (Eikonoklastes, CPW, III, pp. 509–10, 516; cf. Ex. 1). When Parliament objected to the king’s efforts to turn the English church into the “Church of Rome” and demanded the dissolution of “Prelatical proverment,” Charles “strait, as Pharaoh accus’d of Idleness the Israelites that sought leave to goe and sacrifice to God, he layes faction to thir charge” (CPW, III, p. 573). Like the Israelites, the godly have been prohibited under Charles and his prelates from worshipping God properly. God “hardened” Charles’ “heart” as he did Pharaoh’s, making him blind to the truth and vindictive to God’s people (CPW, III, p. 516). Milton piled on analogies to other negative figures in the Hebrew Bible from later periods in Israel’s history, as if Charles epitomized the worst enemies biblical Israel had faced. Charles was Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king who conquered Jerusalem in 587 BCE and sent the Jews into captivity (CPW, III, p. 498). In hiring “other esteemed Prophets” (the prelates) against “a Nation of Prophets,” Charles was like Balak, who (Num. 22) hired Balaam to curse the Israelites (CPW, III, p. 510). Charles was also Ahab (CPW, III, pp. 550–51), one of the worst kings of Israel, who, married to the seductive, evil idolater Jezebel, followed “baalim” (1 Kings 18–21) – the allusion to Ahab served also to indict Henrietta Maria for seducing Charles to Roman Catholic worship. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates had suggested Charles was Agag, king of the Amalekites (CPW, III, p. 193), the people who attacked the Israelites in the desert soon after they had left Egypt (Exod. 17:8–16), and with whom God swore eternal enmity (Exod. 17:16). Saul captured Agag in his war with the Amalekites, but out of mistaken mercy “spared” him, disobeying God’s explicit order to “smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not” and earning the divine judgement that removed the monarchy from Saul’s line

England, Israel, and the Jews in Milton’s Prose, 1649–1660

21

(1 Sam. 15).17 Milton’s Biblical analogy makes it clear that it is a divine commandment to kill Charles. When Salmasius in Defensio Regia pro Carolo Primo presented Charles I as a Davidic king, anointed by God and not accountable to men, Milton responded by comparing Charles to Eglon, the “tyrant” king of Moab under whom the Israelites in the period of Judges served until “the Lord raised up a deliverer,” Ehud, who slew the king, acting “at Gods command” (Defence, CPW, IV.i., pp. 401–2; cf. Tenure, CPW, III, p. 213). Denying Salmasius’ identification of Charles with the “good kings” of Judah, Milton identified Charles with the evil kings of the northern kingdom of Israel and, worse, with non-Israelite tyrants who in the period of Judges and then in the later post-exilic period oppressed the Jews. The accumulation of Israelite allusions in Milton’s antimonarchical prose fixed Charles not as religious martyr but as the embodiment of evil. Tenure of Kings and Magistrates also indicted the cowardly Presbyterian ministers who drew back from Charles’ execution. Like Saul in their reluctance to kill the Amalekite king, they would be punished by losing power. They were, Milton insisted, like the Jebusites (CPW, III, p. 256), who in 2 Samuel (5:1–8) tried to prevent David from taking Jerusalem – the act that made him king over all Israel. Opposition to regicide becomes, in Milton’s analogy, not the undoing of the Israelite nation but the creation and unification of it. Here, as in the rest of his antimonarchical prose, Milton denies the Davidic associations the Stuart kings appropriated to themselves, transferring them instead to Christ, who is to reign over all his people in the godly nation-state. Milton complains that the hypocritical Presbyterians, who earlier had preached war but no longer had the courage to finish the business by executing the king, now want to prevent Christ, “our only King, the root of David,” from establishing his kingdom in England (CPW, III, p. 256). Those ministers like Milton’s former Presbyterian ally Stephen Marshall, who had preached on the text “curse ye Meroz” from the Song of Deborah, are themselves like the inhabitants of Meroz, cursed in Judges 5:23 for not coming “to the help of the Lord in fighting against the Canaanite enemy.”18 17

18

Hezekiah Woodward, in his The Kings Chronicle: In two Sections: wherein We have the Acts of the wicked and good Kings of Judah (published in two sections, 1643), drew a similar analogy, identifying Agag and the Amalekites with Laud and the Laudians and urging Parliament not to make Saul’s mistake (p. 14). Stephen Marshall, Meroz Cursed, or A Sermon Preached to the Honourable House of Commons, At their late Solemn Fast, Febr.23.1641 (1641/2), p. 22.

22

achsah guibbory

As England’s internal enemies are represented as Israel’s, godly England is imagined to be Israel and the successful revolution precisely analogous to God’s miraculous “deliverance” of the Jews from their Egyptian bondage. Like many revolutionaries, Milton appropriated Exodus, the founding narrative of the Jews, as the founding narrative of the English Israel. In Eikonoklastes, his first commissioned piece for the new commonwealth, Milton reminds the English how God delivered them from bondage under Charles by a “strong and miraculous hand” (CPW, III, p. 580; cf. Exod. 15:6–7; Ezek. 20:33–36). Appropriating the chosenness of the Israelites for the English, who, as the Christian Israel, are presumed to outdo the ancient Jews, Milton proclaims that the “incomparable deliverance” of England was greater than that of Israel (CPW, III, p. 580). The Exodus analogy continues in his Defences of the English people, as Milton defends England and the regicide to an international audience by insisting on England’s chosenness, while also advising the English people in more measured terms, as we shall see. In the first Defence, Milton speaks of how in the deliverance of the English from their “long term of slavery,” “great and wonderful deeds” were “performed evidently by almighty God himself” (CPW, IV.i., pp. 303, 305). Where Salmasius had attacked the English as “wicked scoundrels,” Milton asserts that “their sins were taught them under the monarchy, like the Israelites in Egypt, and have not been immediately unlearned in the desert, even under the guidance of God” (CPW, IV.i., pp. 386–87). When the anonymous Cry of the Royal Blood (Regio Sanguinis Clamor ad Coelum adversus Parricidas Anglicanos) (1652) presented Charles as a saint killed by evil “parricides” (a crime far worse, its author said, than “the crime of the Jews who crucified Christ” [printed in CPW, IV.ii., p. 1049]), Milton countered in his Second Defence by praising England’s “liberators” for accomplishing “the most heroic and exemplary achievements since the foundation of the world” (CPW, IV.i., pp. 549, 599–600). With the tyrant vanquished and dead and the idolatrous prelates ousted, England seemed a chosen nation, a Christian Israel standing on the edge of what could be a glorious future. Milton’s biblical tropes in these tracts consistently demonize Charles, prelacy, and the monarchy as the Egyptian and Canaanite enemies of Israel, and identify the English with the Israelites, delivered from bondage and newly entered into Canaan, trying to establish their nation. Milton’s strong, positive identification with the ancient biblical Jews shapes his attack on what he sees as the contemporary forces of oppression and ungodliness, as he understands contemporary experience in terms of biblical Jewish history. However, there is also a counterstrain that appears in a series of

England, Israel, and the Jews in Milton’s Prose, 1649–1660

23

negative analogies between the English and the ancient Jews. As the establishment of the godly kingdom receded further from likelihood and the English appeared inclined to servility and idolatry, drawn to the baseness of monarchy, they seemed to Milton more like those Jews in Judges who, having entered Canaan, still served “other gods” and, succumbing to idolatry, threw away the opportunity for deliverance accorded by their heroes. Despite the invocation of Jewish precedents and his own identification with the inspired Hebrew prophets like Moses (whom he invokes in both Reason of Church Government and his Second Defence of the English People), the parallels between England and the Israelites become, more often than not, negative, particularly after the publication of Eikon Basilike in 1649. Eikon Basilike had sanctified and idealized the recently executed king; the text itself was a seductive icon luring the people to idolatrous worship of the dead king and stirring them to desire the restoration of the monarchy. Echoing the diatribes of the Hebrew prophets against the apostasy of the kingdoms of Judah and (the more thoroughly idolatrous) Israel, Milton upbraids this “ungrateful and pervers generation,” who first wanted “deliverance” from the prelates’ and king’s oppression and now are mourning their dead king. “Having first cry’d to God to be deliver’d from their King, [they] now murmur against God that heard thir praiers” (Eikonoklastes, CPW, III, p. 346). Remarking how some of the “divines” at Charles’ death “cutt thir flesh for him like the priests of Baal Elijah mocked” in 1 Kings 18:27, Milton identifies the dead Charles not as Christ’s representative but as Baal and the Anglican divines as Baal’s priests, implying that any English people who remain loyal to Charles are like the Israelites who, once in Canaan, went astray after the false Canaanite gods. Now that God has miraculously delivered the English from their Egyptian bondage to Pharaoh/Charles, if “we make so slight of this incomparable deliverance,” we will “like those foolish Israelites, who depos’d God and Samuel to set up a King, Cry out one day because of our King, which we have been mad upon; and then God, as he foretold them, will no more deliver us” (Eikonoklastes, CPW, III, p. 580, citing 1 Sam. 8:1–18). The identification of Christians with Israel, with its unstable, volatile mix of identification with and opposition to the Jews, goes back to the New Testament, where Paul (Rom. 9; Gal. 3–5) identified the “true,” “spiritual” Israel with the Christian church, seen as inheriting the promises to Israel. While serving to designate the Christians rather than Jews as God’s “chosen,” the notion of a “Christian Israel” itself involved a tension between continuity and discontinuity with the Jewish past. The Reformation appropriated biblical Israel’s narrative to describe the history of the “true” Church,

24

achsah guibbory

persecuted but promised deliverance; the history of Israel according to the “flesh” provided a typological narrative for the universal Protestant Church in its conflict against Babylon/Rome. In post-Reformation England and especially during the Revolution, the biblical “history” of “the nation of the Jews” seemed especially appropriate to the specificity of English experience and to England as a distinctly chosen nation.19 The analogical link between England and Israel held the potential for a variety of meanings. It could be a source of comfort, as when in the midst of the civil wars Puritan ministers remembered that God had always eventually had mercy on his chosen people. It could be a source of pride and honor, as when it was hoped that England, newly free, would prove a light to the nations (as Isaiah had prophesied about Israel in 42:6 and 60). It could also suggest, however, that if the English failed to preserve their Christian superiority, they too might be found to be a people who rejected their divine deliverer and thus be cast off – no more God’s chosen than the present Jews, who persisted in rejecting Christ. It is this last position to which Milton comes, even while identifying with exemplary, inspired figures like Moses from the Hebrew Bible. Milton, like many other Christians, distinguished between the Jews in Christ’s time and after, who rejected Christ, and the biblical Israelites, who lived before Christ. It has become a scholarly convention to distinguish between the “Hebrews” or Israelites, who were potentially recuperable for Christians, and the “Jews” who were an easier object of scorn and persecution.20 Yet many mid-seventeenth-century texts that invoke precedents from Israelite history do not always make such a clear distinction. The ancient Israelites are often called “Jews.” Milton is often more precise, referring to the ancient Israelites as the “children of Israel” – with an emphasis on their lack of (Gospel) maturity – but he too uses “Jews” loosely. So, despite theoretical distinctions, there was a good deal of slippage, as 19

20

Thomas H. Luxon, Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Reformation Crisis in Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), suggests that in reformed typology, as in medieval allegory, the “real” history of Jews is “emptied out” in the emphasis on a Christian eschatology (chapters 2–3, pp. 1–70). However, many of these Puritan sermons return to historical emphasis of Renaissance biblical scholarship; see Debora K. Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 7. Paul Stevens emphasizes the importance of the Hebrew Bible to English nation-formation. See “‘Leviticus thinking’ and the Rhetoric of Early Modern Colonialism.” Criticism 35 (1993): 441–61. Samuel S. Stollman, “Milton’s Dichotomy of ‘Judaism’ and Hebraism,” PMLA 89 (1974): 105– 112, suggests Milton “dichotomizes” between the “Judaic,” which is the particular (Jewish religion and race) and the “Hebraic” or “universal” elements of Hebrew Scripture, de-Judaized and hence adoptable by Christians. Shoulson qualifies Stollman, insisting that the Hebraic and Judaic are more “ambivalent” categories in Milton and “function diagonally” (p. 29).

England, Israel, and the Jews in Milton’s Prose, 1649–1660

25

attitudes towards biblical Jews could slide into attitudes towards modern ones, and vice versa. Reading contemporary English history in terms of the ancient Israelite experience, Milton fears that the English will prove to be like the “foolish Israelites,” whose example comes to seem largely negative. Going against the traditional interpretation of the trajectory of Jewish history as presented in the Hebrew Bible, Milton reads the narrative from Exodus through the two books of Samuel as a record of Jewish idolatry and perverseness. Not only the Jews who hoped for the messianic restoration of their nation, but also the Stuart monarchs and defenders of the Episcopal Church of England, who sought a biblical foundation for their monarchy and church, had seen the establishment of the Davidic monarchy and the united kingdom of Israel with its temple as a triumphant culmination of the promises to Abraham and the liberation from Egypt. However, Milton interprets Israel’s request for a king and the establishment of monarchy as an idolatrous defection from God. From the moment of Charles’ execution, Milton’s recurrent and growing fear is that the English in their desire for a restored monarchy will be like the Jews. Milton’s stance is complicated, for he indicts the English as Jews yet identifies intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually with the Hebrew prophets. His diatribes against the English – his critique of the nation on the edge of apostasy – precisely mirror the prophets who indicted the corruption of the multitude (and often their leaders and priests), advised Israel to return to God, and held out hope for a remnant. Yet Milton is also heir to a Christian hermeneutic that in reinterpreting the Hebrew prophets condemned the Jews as apostates and identified the “remmant” to be saved as Christians, or those Jews who embraced Christ. Milton uses the words of the prophets to critique his own nation, but in reading them through this Christian lens he also brings into his criticism of England an anti-Jewish commentary as well. We see this move in Eikonoklastes, where Milton warns the English, echoing the prophet Samuel’s warning to the Israelites who were demanding a king: “And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the Lord will not hear you in that day” (1 Sam. 8:18; CPW, III, p. 580). Milton identifies with the prophet Samuel, and he rightly discerns in Samuel an antimonarchical stance, the clear suggestion that God was the only king the Israelites needed, but he uses Samuel’s warning for distinctly present, Christian purposes of warning the English to separate themselves not only from monarchy but from the example of the biblical Jews. If, after this miraculous “deliverance” the English people would seek a king, they “would shew themselves to be by nature slaves, and errant

26

achsah guibbory

beasts,” “fitter to be led back again into their old servitude” (CPW, III, p. 581) – that is, they would show themselves to be like the Jews, who, after their deliverance from Egypt, first wanted to return and then asked for a king. Eikonoklastes ends with an ugly description of the “Image-doting rabble” eagerly embracing monarchy, holding out “both thir ears with such delight and ravishment to be stigmatiz’d and boared through” in witness of their voluntary baseness (CPW, III, p. 601). The English here are not the champions of liberty, but the Hebrew bondslaves described in Deuteronomy 15:12–17 who wishing to remain life-long servants had a hole bored through one ear, only the English are, for Milton, even more degenerate, eagerly holding up both ears for the stigma of bondage. From Eikonoklastes on, despite the idealization of England as Israel implicit in his attack on Charles as Israel’s enemy, Milton’s comparisons between the English and the Israelites are devastating, and sharply at odds with the positive ideal of England as Israel, the chosen nation, elect of God.21 Cumulatively, these negative identifications of England with Israel undermine the interrelated patriotic dreams of nationhood and millennial hopes evident earlier in the 1640s, particularly in Areopagitica, where he had imagined England as a “Nation chos’n before any other” to proclaim the “Reformation,” “a noble and puissant Nation rousing herself ” and now “entering the glorious waies of Truth” at a time when “new light” is “springing daily in this City” (CPW, II, pp. 552, 557–58). Milton’s negative identifications of England with Israel come at exactly the time when some of his countrymen were increasingly interested in readmitting the Jews. Milton represents the Jews as “naturally” servile and disposed to slavery – signified by their asking God for a king in 1 Samuel, after they had entered Canaan and were governed by “judges” in a commonwealth. In the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, though Milton approvingly mentions that the “Church of Jews” disliked using titles of “Sov’ran” or “Lord” for kings (reserving such terms for God), he also declares that Asians and Jews “especially since they chose a King against the advice and counsel of God,” are “much inclinable to slavery” (CPW, III, pp. 202–3). There is a question, here, about whether the Jews’ disposition to slavery is only the consequence of bad choice – whether, that is, their servility can be changed through education or the proper exercise of reason – or whether it is innate, a racial flaw. However, almost two years later in his first Defence, even as Milton looks to the Jewish precedent for republicanism, citing Deuteronomy 17:14 as proof 21

Sauer, “Milton’s Peculiar Nation,” suggests that Milton finally transfers “the Hebraic as elect status” only to those individuals who have become ‘Jews inward.’” Cf. Shoulson’s remark that “Milton’s conception of English election begins with ambivalence and concludes . . . with dismissal” (p. 33).

England, Israel, and the Jews in Milton’s Prose, 1649–1660

27

that God thought “republican form of government” “more advantageous for his chosen people” (CPW, IV, p. 344), he even more sharply suggests a racial disposition to slavery in Jews and Asians, citing “our most reliable authorities” Aristotle and Cicero, who wrote that “the peoples of Asia readily endure slavery, while the Jews and Syrians were born for it” (CPW, IV, p. 343). The English disposition to liberty, seen in “those brave and upright men” (CPW, IV.i., p. 303) who fought for their freedom, may be justified by reference to the Hebrew Bible, but it is also defined against the supposed Jewish affinity for bondage – as Milton suggests that the sad postbiblical history of the Jews (unemancipated, persecuted, with no country of their own) is something that fits their nature and accords with their vulnerability to idolatry and bondage described in the Old Testament. Milton, that is, reads the Hebrew Bible as the record of the people who as “chosen” by God prepared the way for (and thus were connected with) the Christian church, but who also stubbornly rejected Christ as their savior, preferring the Mosaic Law, a covenant of bondage from which Christians have been freed. Bondage is “the punishment awaiting those headstrong people who in opposition to God’s will wished to have a king” (Defence, CPW, IV.i., p. 353), preferring an earthly king to the true King (God) in an act foreshadowing their later rejection of Christ. There is, for Milton, a continuum of political freedom, ranging from the oriental peoples who “readily” endured despotism, to the Jews who were partially liberated by the “old law” which “set God’s people free” from “slavery” and the “wilfull despotism” of “kings and tyrants” even though Moses’ “laws . . . were in a sense slavish” (Defence, CPW, IV.i., p. 374, 379), and finally to the Christians, who are the only ones to be granted full liberty by Christ, who “won for us all [i.e., Christians] proper freedom” (CPW, IV.i., p. 374), political and outward as well as inward. The pattern of Milton’s tropes implies that to be a Christian is to love liberty, to be a Jew is to incline to slavery – a condition signified by the Israelites’ “by no means wise” desire to have a king “in imitation of the gentiles” (Defence, CPW, IV.i., pp. 452, 347). We are close here in Milton’s political and ethical analysis to the theological position voiced in The Reason of Church Government that the “jewish” is “no better then Canaanitish.” The Jews are, for Milton, lacking in wisdom and always on the verge of becoming like the Gentiles, sinking into bondage and idolatry. Thus, having invoked Jewish precedents and the Hebrew Bible for his arguments against tyrannical kingship, Milton divorces himself and his fellow Englishmen from the Israelites when he wants to praise the English, insisting in the first Defence that the English are better than the Israelites,

28

achsah guibbory

for rather than asking God for a king as the Jews did in 1 Samuel, they have gotten rid of their king and executed him! “We never opposed God’s will in seeking a king nor did we receive one by his grant, but rather followed the rights of people and established our own government without God’s mandate or prohibition.” It is “a tribute to our courage and increase [to] our fame to have deposed a king when the Israelites indeed found themselves accused for having sought one” (Defence, CPW, IV.i., p. 354). Milton, significantly, turns in his Defences and The Readie and Easy Way (1660) from the Hebrew Bible to the classical precedents in arguing for republicanism. We might contrast this move with, for example, the millenarian minister John Brayne, who in 1653 advised Parliament that the English republic should take its legal system from God and “the Jews Commonweale” as set out in the books of Moses, and not from the Romans who, after conquering Judea, replaced God’s system with the “custom of heathens.”22 Milton comes to look, not to the biblical Jews, whose exemplary heroes turn out to be exceptions to the Israelites, but to the Greeks and Romans, whose “noble” natures and innate “love of liberty” contrast with what Milton sees as the servile nature of the Jews and thus provide worthier ancestors for the English. In the first Defence, he expresses his “pride in our fathers who, in establishing this state, displayed a wisdom and a sense of freedom equal to that of the ancient Romans or the most illustrious Greeks” (CPW, IV.i., p. 495). The Second Defence opens speaking of “those illustrious Greeks and Romans whom we particularly admire,” who expelled tyrants in their “zeal for freedom” (CPW, IV.i., p. 5505), and ends praising the great English defenders of liberty like Fairfax and Cromwell, who join this classical pantheon. From February 1649 until 1660, Milton fought against the residual, unabated English desire for a king – a desire that, to Milton, identified the English negatively with the Jews, presumed to have preferred bondage under a king to liberty. During these years, the English proved their disposition to idolatry (forsaking God their deliverer for other “gods”), their baseness, their attraction to bondage – that is, in Milton’s eyes, their true identity with the Israelites who were the progenitors of modern Jews, still unfree and rejecting their deliverer. At the end of the first Defence, he warns his countrymen about the danger of returning to the bondage of monarchy: “for you to wish to . . . return to slavery after your freedom had been won by God’s assistance and your own valor, . . . would be not simply a shameful act but an ungodly and a criminal act! Your sin would equal the sin of those 22

John Brayne, The New Earth (London, 1653), “Epistle Dedicatory,” and pp. 2–3; cf. John Rogers, Sagrir (1654), p. 139.

England, Israel, and the Jews in Milton’s Prose, 1649–1660

29

who were overcome with longing for their former captivity in Egypt and were at length destroyed by God in countless disasters of all sorts, thus paying to their divine deliverer the penalty for their slavish thoughts” (CPW, IV.i., p. 532; my italics). Here, as Milton urges the English not to be like the ancient Jews, the biblical Israelites are conflated with the later Jews, who are imagined, not as “convertible” but as, in fact, already “destroyed,” their disasters just punishment for their incapacity for freedom and an extorted “payment” for their longing for an Egyptian captivity that is equated with their rejection of the “deliverer” Christ.23 It is crucial to realize that Milton was drawing these increasingly negative comparisons between the English and the Jews – comparisons that identify the Jews as servile, anti-Christian, and dangerous company – during the very years (1649–1654) that the interest in the Jews and their possible readmission was at its height in England. Throughout the 1640s there had been millenarian publications on the calling of the Jews. Millenarian chronologies predicted that the conversion of the Jews would occur in 1655 or 1656. The hope that the English would have a special role in their conversion fueled interest in readmitting the Jews. On 5 January 1649, Joanna Cartwright and her son Ebenezer petitioned for the readmission of the Jews. In 1650 Menasseh ben Israel published Spes Israelis (the Latin version) in Amsterdam, dedicating it to the Supreme Court of Parliament and suggesting that the Jews’ admission would bring about the messianic end-times. Moses Wall immediately translated Menasseh’s text, and The Hope of Israel quickly went through two editions. By late summer 1655, “London seems to have been in a frenzy of expectation.” By the end of September, Menasseh was in England. His formal petition to Cromwell’s Council was presented on 13 November 1655, and Cromwell convened the Whitehall Conference on 4 December.24 23

24

Cf. Milton’s comment in Christian Doctrine (CPW, VI, p. 132), in which the dispersal of the Jews is described as not only punishment for “their sins” but “much rather to give the whole world a perpetual, living proof of the existence of God and the truth of the scriptures” – a truth confirmed, supposedly, by the fact that the Jews are seen as experiencing the punishments the prophets warned would overtake the Israelites if they forsook God’s commandments. On the ideas of the Jews as living witness, see Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Popkin, “Christian Jews and Jewish Christians,” p. 63. For more information on Wall, see Popkin, “A Note on Moses Wall,” in Menasseh Ben Israel: The Hope of Israel. The English Translation by Moses Wall, 1652, ed. with introduction and notes by Henry Mechoulan and Gerard Nahon; introduction and notes translated from the French by Richenda George (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 165–70. On the concern with the Jews, Menasseh ben Israel, and the debate over readmission, see Katz, Philosemitism and the Readmission of the Jews, esp. chapters 3, 5, and 6, to which I am deeply indebted. See also the earlier important studies, Menasseh ben Israel’s Mission to Oliver Cromwell,

30

achsah guibbory

The topic of whether the Jews were admissible or even convertible became the subject of intense debate, with a variety of attitudes expressed, which has been well discussed by David Katz. There were those like Alexander Ross, William Prynne, and the author of Anglo-Judaeus, who attacked the Jews and questioned the orthodoxy of a Christian belief in Jewish conversion, resurrecting old ugly libels as they condemned the Jews as foolish, diabolic, and not even human. Yet there was also the tolerationist Roger Williams, whose The Fourth Paper (1652) addressed the issue of religious toleration and argued against the authority of civil power in religion – specifically in favor of admitting the Jews. Whereas Williams’ position on toleration of Christian diversity and even heresy is like Milton’s, his comments about the Jews contrast sharply with Milton’s, as he speaks of the Jews as “a Beloved people,” prays for “their Return and Calling,” and warns England that “the unchristian oppressions, incivilities and inhumanities of this Nation against the Jews, have cried to Heaven against this Nation and the Kings and Princes of it.” Insisting that God will “avenge” the Jewish blood shed under Henry II, King John, Richard I, and Edward I, Williams insisted that it was England’s duty to let the Jews come to England and treat them well to pacify God’s wrath, because they are still “a people above all the peoples and Nations in the world,” and because we hope to convert them.25 Milton’s friend, Moses Wall, took a similar position towards the Jews, countering the criticism of Sir Edward Spencer by insisting that the Jews “have the same Humane nature with us,” sharing Abraham as our “common Father,” and that we ought “to love the Jewish Nation.” Like Williams, Wall believed that they would be converted – but not by discourses, books, preachers, or a conqueror, but only by the “Spirit” of God, as Paul was turned to God.26 We might expect that Milton, who, like Williams, opposed civil interference in matters of religion and argued for broad religious toleration of Christian differences (except of “popery,” which he considered antiChristian), would share Williams’ position about tolerating and admitting the Jews. We might expect Milton to have Moses Wall’s sense that Christians and Jews share a common humanity and father. Yet instead what we

25

26

ed. with introduction and notes by Lucien Wolf (London: Macmillan and Company for the Jewish Historical Society of England, 1901), and Cecil Roth, A Life of Menasseh ben Israel: Rabbi, Printer, and Diplomat (Philadelphia: JPS, 1945). See Alexander Ross, A View of All Religions of the World (1655), first section (on the religion of the Jews and Asians); William Prynne, A Short Demurrer to the Jewes (1655); Anglo-Judaeus or the History of the Jews whilst here in England (1656); Roger Williams, The Fourth Paper presented by Major Butler, with other papers edited and published by Roger Williams (1652), pp. 18, 19. Moses Wall, Considerations Upon the Point of the Conversion of the Jews, at the end of his translation of Menasseh ben Israel’s The Hope of Israel, 2nd ed. (1651), pp. 48, 54.

England, Israel, and the Jews in Milton’s Prose, 1649–1660

31

see when we look at Milton’s references to the Jews in his prose during these years, and particularly his historical parallels between the contemporary England and biblical Jewish history, is that the analogies between England and Israel point to a feared, not a desired, connection, for they implicitly insist on the need for sharper Christian/Jewish difference.27 The fear, repeatedly articulated, is that the English have become, not like the noble Greeks and Romans, but like the Jews, a people Milton describes as slavish and unfree. I would suggest that the anxiety expressed in Milton’s biblical tropes describing impending English apostasy resonates with the concern expressed in the debate over readmission that the Jews, if admitted, would convert or seduce their Christian neighbors, that English Christians would “turn Jew.” The prospect of Jews coming into England, conjoined with what he saw as the moral weakness of the English people, may well have intensified for Milton his sense of necessary boundaries preserving Christianity from Judaism, and Christians from Jews. It did so even for men like John Dury, who, though he had warmly encouraged Menasseh, by January 1656 had shifted from his earlier enthusiasm to insist that the Jews, if readmitted, must remain separate and restrained by disabling conditions.28 The Whitehall Conference was disbanded in December 1655 without readmitting the Jews, but within a few years Charles II was returning to the throne in England. It would be Charles who in 1664 would state, in response to a petition, that the Jews could live in England so long as they were obedient. When Milton published The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660) on the eve of the Restoration, he turned for the final time in his prose to the example of biblical Israel, not out of any sense of a shared elect identity but out of anger and a fear that the English were about to become unchosen like the Jews. Milton read this disastrous return to monarchy as a shameful repetition of Jewish history, even as he spoke of the valor of those who earlier had fought for liberty and established the commonwealth as expressing “a spirit in this nation no less noble . . . then . . . the 27

28

Milton’s prose seems to support James Shapiro’s conclusion that in the early modern period the Jew became the “Other” against which English Christian identity was defined, though there was, in fact, a greater diversity of English attitudes towards the Jews than the model of the Jew as “Other” suggests. See Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). John Dury, A Case of Conscience, Whether It Be Lawful to Admit Jews into a Christian Commonwealth (1656). Lucien Wolf speaks of Dury’s change of mind, that Dury was now “studying Jewish disabilities at Cassel, with a view to their introduction into England,” and remarks that “Not a single influential voice was raised in England in support of Menasseh’s proposals” – in contrast with the earlier interest in readmission (p. xliii). Roth says Menasseh began writing Spes Israel at the “request” of Dury, in response to questions Dury had addressed to him.

32

achsah guibbory

ancient Greeks or Romans” (Readie and Easie Way [2nd ed.], CPW, VII, p. 420). It was as if, in a conflict between the noble classical and the baser Jewish for the soul of England, the Jewish had won out. Yet in evidence of what Shoulson has called the “tense” “coexistence of Helleneism and Hebraism” in Milton’s writing (p. 84), Milton echoes Jeremiah, assuming the stance of the Hebrew prophet as he castigates the English for being like the apostate Jews. The English are like the Israelites who in the wilderness wanted to return to Egypt, who in Canaan rejected the rule of God and his judges in favor of having a king like the “gentiles,” and who during the Babylonian captivity longed for Egypt. Though the English boasted that they would build “this goodly tower of a Commonwealth” and “be another Rome,” they have proved themselves not noble Romans but base Jews, having fallen into a worse “confusion . . . of factions, then those at the tower of Babel ” (CPW, III, p. 423). Ready to restore Charles II, who would be greeted in sermons and panegyrics as another David, the English multitude are, like the ancient Jews, ready to abandon the dream of a commonwealth – which has been “held by wisest men in all ages the noblest, the manliest, . . . the most agreeable to all due libertie, . . . most cherishing to virtue and true religion,” and “enjoin’d by our Saviour himself, to all Christians” (CPW, VII, p. 424). Christians are associated with liberty, wisdom, nobility, and manliness, whereas the Jews are, implicitly, identified with all the things that, for Milton, are antithetical to a free commonwealth. “Regal domination is from the gentiles” (p. 429), but it was, Milton suggests, transmitted through the “gentilizing Israelites, who though they were governed in a Commonwealth of God’s own ordaining, . . . affecting rather to resemble the heathen . . . clamourd for a king” (pp. 449–50). The Israelites relapsed into the Gentile culture from which they had been separated, and the English face a similar relapse into a Jewish matrix from which Christianity separated, a Jewishness that turns out to be hard to distinguish from the heathen idolatry and bondage. For Milton, the identification of England with Israel, formerly God’s “chosen people” but now facing destruction, is ominous. And thus Milton urgently exhorts his countrymen at the end of The Readie and Easie Way NOT to be like the ancient Jews, who are implicitly identified as anti-Christian in their association with darkness, slavery, and submission to the feminine: “if lastly, after all this [Christian] light among us, the same reason shall pass for current to put our necks again under kingship, as was made use of by the Jews to return back to Egypt and to the worship of their idol queen, because they falsely imagind that they then livd in more plenty and prosperitie, our condition . . . will bring us soon . . . to those calamaties which attend always and

England, Israel, and the Jews in Milton’s Prose, 1649–1660

33

unavoidably on luxurie, all national judgements under foreign or domestic slaverie” (CPW, VII, p. 462).29 One might say that Milton’s earlier sense of pride in an English Israelite identity carried with it an anti-Judaic potential that was triggered by his growing disillusion with the English people, who had frustrated his expectations for a free, godly society. We see in Milton’s increasingly negative versions of the analogy between England and Israel – his fear that the English were, in fact, like the Jews – an extension of the theological assumption, expressed in his antiprelatical tracts, that the Jewish (carnal, fleshly, and associated with bondage) is anti-Christian, and that, politically, the English have slid into the “beggary” of the Jews much as the Church of England had under the influence of the Laudians. As the English have proved themselves disposed to submit to the idolatry of the Stuart monarchy, which appropriated the symbolism of Davidic kingship, and of an English ceremonial church based on Jewish precedents, they have shown themselves (in Milton’s logic) to be not fully Christian. By 1660, Milton had given up on the English, though he held out hope that there were still a few who retained the seeds of ancient “Christian” liberty and had not reverted to the pre-Christian Jewish condition. Milton moved away from the idealization of an English Israelite identity, much as he lost the millenarian expectations to which desires for Jewish readmission in England were firmly attached.30 It has been observed that Milton did not give “the calling of the Jews the same prominent position among the signs of the coming apocalypse that many of his contemporaries had given it.”31 His growing feeling that any earthly reign of Christ was, at best, far off suggests that he did not look forward to any imminent conversion of the Jews. In a dismissal of seventeenth-century millenarian dreams as well as first-century (and contemporary) Jewish messianism, the Son in Paradise Regained makes clear that his kingdom is not earthly, and the future conversion of the Jews only a possibility, not a certainty (CPW, III, pp. 422–40). God “at length . . . by some miraculous call, / May bring them back repentant and sincere” (433–35). The door is not firmly shut – there is always the possibility of a “wondrous call” that might transform a recalcitrant nature. However, the hope of conversion is tempered by the 29

30

31

See Laura Knoppers on Milton’s reference to Jeremiah, and his preoccupation with the possibility of England becoming unchosen; “Late Political Prose,” in The Blackwell Companion to Milton, ed. Thomas Corns (London: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 310–25; at 318. See Christopher Hill’s classic essay, “‘Till the conversion of the Jews,” in The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill, Volume Two: Religion and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), pp. 269–300. Shoulson, p. 38.

34

achsah guibbory

Son himself leaving “their fate” to God (as if such deliverance is beyond his power) and by his expressing strong distaste for the ten tribes, “a race” incapable of liberty, “unrepentant” (423, 429).32 The Son’s position that those “captive” tribes may be unredeemable from their servile, idolatrous nature is at odds not only with the Hebrew Prophets, who speak of the “remnant” being gathered from all the nations where Israel has been dispersed, but with the Christian millenarian tracts of John Archer and Robert Maton, who, refusing to overturn the literal sense of the Hebrew prophets, insisted that the Jews remain God’s “first borne” and “chosen” and will enjoy a preeminent position when Christ’s millennial “personall reign” is restored on Earth.33 We would like Milton, the most deeply Hebraic of English literary writers, to have supported the readmission of the Jews and their toleration. That would fit our cherished notion of the liberal Milton, as well as our desire to believe that it was political and religious radicals, not “Anglican” conservatives, who were most tolerant and the champions of liberty. Yet the attitudes expressed in his prose, in his use of English/Israel parallels, suggest that it was unlikely that he would have welcomed the Jews or expected their conversion any time soon. His growing disillusion with the English was expressed in terms of what seemed their increasingly obvious identity with the biblical Jews, who were, supposedly by their own prophets’ accounts, disposed to idolatry.34 The case of Milton reminds us how the noble ideal of liberty can be compromised by arguable ideological assumptions, and often comes with a human cost. With his deep-seated fear of Christians “backsliding” not only to a monarchy imagined as deriving from the Jews but also to the Judaism he identified with the Church of Rome and the Laudians, it is hard to imagine that Milton viewed the possibility of Jewish readmission to England very sympathetically. 32

33

34

N. I. Matar, “Milton and the Idea of the Restoration of the Jews,” SEL 27 (1987): 109–24, sees the Son’s speech as Milton’s endorsing the idea of the Restoration of the Jews (their conversion and return to Palestine), but I read these lines as more equivocal and restrained. However, Matar quite rightly concludes that, viewing Jews as “delayed Christians,” Milton was not interested in “unconverted Jews” and hence had no concern for those seeking admission to England (p. 121). [John] Henry Archer, The Personall Reign of Christ Upon Earth (1942), pp. 4, 27; Robert Maton, Israel’s Redemption (1642), “To the Christian Reader,” and pp. 50, 69. Stollman rightly concludes that Milton’s concept of Christian liberty was “a factor in his silence regarding ‘liberty of Jewish’ conscience” (p. 111).

c h a pter 3

Milton’s Peculiar Nation Elizabeth M. Sauer

i. millenarianism and the nat ion With the death in 1270 of Boniface of Savoy, England’s last foreign archbishop, a nascent nationalism increased hostility toward foreigners. A corresponding intolerance within the nation led to the expulsion of the Jews in 1290. In the early modern period, the emerging nation-state grew up with the Protestant Reformation as the Tudor monarch declared his independence from the Holy Roman Empire, whose external authority he renounced.1 In an influential study on the nation-state, Anthony Giddens observes that, unlike the premodern nation, the modern state (“a bordered power-container”)2 has definite boundaries so that the foe is designated an outsider. The distinction between permeable frontiers and recognized borders, however, breaks down in the case of early modern England’s corporate identity, which is marked geopolitically, temporally, religiously, and culturally. English national self-fashioning involved both policing what was outside of the pale and acts of internal colonization whereby the core introduced policies aimed at institutionalizing the existing stratification system.3 1

2

3

Henry VIII, Act in Restraint of Appeals (1533), Act of Submission of the Clergy (1534); see Walter Ullmann, “‘This Realm of England Is an Empire,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 30 (1979): 175–203, and Lacey Baldwin Smith, “‘This Realm of England Is an Empire,” This Realm of England: 1399 to 1688, 7th ed. (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Co., 1992), pp. 112–30. As Anthony Pagden explains, “empire” became synonymous with earlier meanings of the term status, state (Lords of all the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c.1500–c.1800 [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995], p. 13). With the famous exception of Thomas More, few directly challenged the sovereign national and imperial status that Henry VIII bestowed upon England. See Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; rpt 1999), pp. 52–3. Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 120. Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), p. 9. Hechter maintains that nationhood is a product of the last two centuries; see Containing Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 24.

35

36

eliz abeth m. sauer

The definition and identity of the nation in fact lie then as now in its foreign relations as well as in its rhetoric and management of cultural, political, and religious difference. Since the 1980s, the mimetic creation of the nation, though conventionally regarded as a modern concept, has generated an impressive amount of scholarship on early modern England. Building on the influential concept of the imagined community, Richard Helgerson, Linda Gregerson, Claire McEachern, Paul Stevens, and Raymond D. Tumbleson, among others, have mapped out the materially and discursively produced forms of nationhood.4 Of particular interest to this chapter is the emergence of the nation-state from discourses of difference, domination,5 and, paradoxically, even toleration which writers used to lend it the authorizing force of a sacred and moral foundation. The forms of nationhood under investigation here are contained in writings on England’s status as “peculiar,” a designation for Israel that New Testament writers applied to the Christian community. As I demonstrate in this study of Milton, the politics of this act of appropriation shape conceptions of Jewishness and Jewish-Christian relations in early modern English culture. The lessons supplied by the frustrated messianic hopes of the ancient Hebrews and by the early evangelists’ disappointed expectations of an imminent Second Coming were lost on the proto-nationalists of the Reformation period, who translated a belief in election into their own national mythology. Through divine intervention, John Lyly announces, order was restored to a divided nation in the sixteenth century: “So tender a care hath [God] alwaies had of that England, as of a new Israel, his chosen and peculier people.”6 “Peculiar” in this context connects the English with the chosen people of the New Testament. 1 Peter 2.9 states: “ye are a chosen generation

4

5

6

Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Linda Gregerson, The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590–1612 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Paul Stevens, “Milton’s Janus-faced Nationalism: Soliloquy, Subject, and the Modern Nation State,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 100.2 (2001): 247–68; Raymond D. Tumbleson, Catholicism in the English Protestant Imagination: Nationalism, Religion, and Literature, 1660–1745 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Homi K. Bhabha explains that the dialectical development of nationhood evolves and is underwritten by “foundational fictions,” which demonstrate that the origins of national traditions are as much “acts of affiliation and establishment as they are moments of disavowal, displacement, exclusion, and cultural contestation” (“Introduction: narrating the nation,” Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha [New York: Routledge, 1990], p. 5). John Lyly, Euphues (1580), The Complete Works of John Lyly, ed. R. Warwick Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), 2: 205.

Milton’s Peculiar Nation

37

(genos), a royal priesthood, an holy nation (ethnos), a peculiar people (laos).”7 The prerogatives of ancient Israel are thus applied to the early Christians; “a chosen generation” is derived from “a chosen race” (Isaiah 44:1 ff.); “a royal priesthood” from “a kingdom of priests” (Ex. 19:6); “a holy nation” from Exodus 19:6 and “an holy people” (Deut. 14:2); “a peculiar people” from “a peculiar people unto himself ” (Deut. 14:2) and “his peculiar people” (Deut. 26:18). Thomas Fuller reinforces the transference of divine favour from the Jews to the Christians (and converted Jews) throughout his lengthy treatise, in which the Christian reader occupies a position of privilege: “May the reader now conceive himself standing on the top of mount Pisgah.” Whereas the contemporary reader must content himself with “a narrower compass, then what Moses discerned,” he now enjoys the true vantage point and the sense of entitlement it affords. This perspective of history reveals that the Jews have a role to perform in the fullness of time: “once Gods peculiar, [they] are still preserved a peculiar people, for some token for good, in due time to be shewed upon them; and that these materials are thus carefully kept entire by themselves, because intended by Divine Providence, for some beautifull building to be made of them hereafter.”8 However, in the present day, the gathering of the Jews and the temporal restoration of the New Jerusalem remain indefinitely deferred, while the Hebraic heritage is rendered “serviceable” to Christians in the writing of their national history and foundational narratives.9 In the simultaneous declaration of nationhood and election, England subsumed the culture and tradition of ancient Israel in its providential history, the culmination of which was for millenarians, as for the early Christians, a temporal regnum Christi. The concept of national election and the coming of the kingdom, however, constantly demanded adjusting in the face of changing political, cultural, and religious events. Contemporary history was in turn read through biblical history as well as through debates about present-day Jews, whose proposed readmission became “the most searching tolerationist dilemma” of this period.10 England achieved its literary embodiment in the imaginatively constructed nations of Spenser and Shakespeare. The nation’s self-designated prophet, however, was Milton, whose writings best exhibit the early modern 7 8 9

10

King James Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House Co., 1978). Thomas Fuller, A Pisgah-sight of Palestine (London, 1650), book 2, p. 64; book 5, ch. 4, p. 198. John Lightfoot, In Evangelium, qt. in Jeffrey S. Shoulson, Milton and the Rabbis: Hebraism, Hellenism, and Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), p. 19. Don M. Wolfe, “Limits of Miltonic Toleration,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 60 (1961): 841.

38

eliz abet h m. sauer

preoccupation with the intersecting identities of ancient Israel and early modern England.11 In his early days, when the rise of Parliament brought hope for national reform, Milton joined the chorus in ascribing a privileged status to England: “The favour and the love of heaven, we have great argument to think in a peculiar manner propitious and propending towards us. Why else was this Nation chosen before any other?”12 However, taken together, Milton’s texts chart the irregular and yet consistent movement from his belief in a chosen England to his disillusion with the newly destined heirs of the kingdom. His biblical national narrative, Paradise Lost, is written on the base of Israel’s national epic as read through the Protestant Reformation and the English Restoration. As indicated by the loss of Eden and the deferral of the kingdom in the poem, Milton, while reassigning the status of election to England, ultimately laments both the ancient and the new Israelites’ unworthiness. Election, which he regards in general rather than individual terms, becomes for him a condition of merit and conversion. The migration (and metempsychosis) of the Hebraic as elect status is unmistakable in Milton’s writings;13 however, it is reserved, I argue, for those who have become heart-circumcised Christians (i.e., Gal. 5.6), or, in the language of seventeenth-century dissenters to whose thinking Milton subscribes, for those who have become “Jews inward.”14 In an illuminating study on Milton and the Rabbis, Jeffrey Shoulson features Paradise Lost as a midrashic poem and offers explicit parallels between Milton’s experience of defeat in the Reformation period to that of postTemple Jews.15 Shoulson demonstrates how Milton’s political disillusion, 11

12

13 14

15

On the comparison of the English nation with the new Israelites, see Christopher Hill, “‘Till the Conversion of the Jews,’” Religion and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England, 2:277, in The Collected Works of Christopher Hill, 3 vols. (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1986). Jason P. Rosenblatt examines the Eden-Israel-England triad in “Eden, Israel, England: Milton’s Spiritual Geography,” All Before Them: Attitudes to Abroad in English Literature 1660–1780, ed. John McVeagh (London: Ashfield, 1990), pp. 49–63. Cf. John K. Hale argues that Milton is increasingly less inclined to apply the parallel, see: “England as Israel in Milton’s Writings,” Early Modern Literary Studies: A Journal of Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century English-Literature 2. 2 (1996): 3.1–54. Milton, Areopagitica, Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al., 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), 2: 552. All citations from Milton’s prose are to this edition and marked “CPW.” As a critic of Calvinism and proponent of Arminianism, Milton favours general over personal election, while also maintaining that salvation is contingent on worthiness of the nation: “predestination and election are not particular but only general: that is, they belong to all who believe in their hearts and persist in their belief ” (CPW 6:176). Samuel S. Stollman, “Milton’s Dichotomy of ‘Judaism’ and ‘Hebraism’,” PMLA 89 (1974): 108. See John Milton, Christian Doctrine, Complete Prose Works, 6:543. Milton cites Rom. 4:12, Gal. 5:3, John 7.22–23. See also Achsah Guibbory’s “England, Israel, and the Jews in Milton’s Prose,” in which she observes that Milton’s negative identifications of England with Israel coincide with the emerging debates about Jewish readmission. Jeffrey S. Shoulson, Milton and the Rabbis: Hebraism, Hellenism, & Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).

Milton’s Peculiar Nation

39

his response to Judeo-Christian tradition, and his reconception of national election are illuminated by the poet’s engagement with the midrash, as well as with the tradition that developed alongside, in opposition to, and in conjunction with Hebraism – that of primitive Christianity. Like the rabbinical writings, the commentaries of the early Christians constitute a diaspora literature that recounted the stories of “strangers and pilgrims” (1 Peter 2:11). In the early modern era, various religious, political, and cultural movements participated in the interaction between Hebraism and Christianity, including messianism and millenarianism. Proponents of those movements, like the religious radicals in England, identified their suffering with that of the Jews – ancient and contemporary – while replicating the writings of the early church in its last days. In this regard, the culture of dissent offers a compelling context for interpreting the role of the Israelites in providential history and in the cycles of tragedy and consolation that make up the final books of Paradise Lost. i The histories of Jews and Christians intersected at various points throughout history from the early centuries to the seventeenth century, in part through the convergence of messianism and millenarianism. Each movement developed from the experience of despair and hope. Evolving from the rabbinical tradition and responding to the Jews’ persecution and displacement, messianism moved to the forefront of the Jewish national consciousness and was linked to the independence of Israel. The horrendous tragedies suffered by European Jewry during the Thirty Years’ War renewed an interest in the Kabbalah and in messianism, asceticism, and mysticism during the seventeenth century. The atrocities committed against the Jews by the Cossacks in the Ukraine and Poland were especially horrific and fueled the expectation of Jews and Kabbalists that 1648 was to be the Messianic year (never imagining what would happen three hundred years hence). The kingdom of God advanced by the prophets was thus temporal, and messianists anticipated its establishment by the chosen who would govern it from Jerusalem. Although the coming of the kingdom also referred to the rule of the spiritual and ethical righteousness, it never displaced the belief in the earthly kingdom.16 For radical Protestants, in the meantime, the prophetic books of the Bible, above all Daniel and Revelation, served as a gloss for interpreting 16

See A. H. Silver, A History of Messianic Speculation in Israel (Boston: Beacon Press, 1927), ch 1.

40

eliz abet h m. sauer

their history. Millenarians went on to design a revolutionary ecclesiastical and political program that challenged not only the authority of the church from which it developed but also the state that established the church.17 In England God charged Parliament, the persecuted and imperial instrument of God, with the task of building the New Jerusalem (Rev. 21:17). The fall of Roman Babylon – the English monarchy and the Laudians – preceded the inception of the millennium, the gathering of the lost tribes of Israel and conversion of the Jews being among the signs of millennial promise. Two English works in particular, John Archer’s The Personall Reigne of Christ upon Earth – printed five times in 1641 and 1642 – and the anonymously published sermon, A Glimpse of Sions Glory, not only lent momentum to the movement but gave it political underpinning. Archer prophesied the establishment of a “Three-fold” regnum Christi – providential, spiritual, and material, or in his terms, “Monarchicall.” The “Nation of Israel in their Mosaicall Discipline and Liturgy” was but a type for the “fifth Monarchy” (p. 8). Millennial history culminated in the imperial political reign of the elect and fulfillment of Christ’s role as cornerstone, that “which the builders refused,” a recurring image in Christian commentaries on election. Christ would return to Earth, defeat the wicked, and save the chosen in anticipation of the final judgement. The fall of Roman Babylon and conversion of the “Israelites or the Ten Tribes” (p. 16), who would play an important role in the millennium, confirmed the advancement of the kingdom. Numerological analyses legitimized Archer’s prediction of the coming of the Jews in 1650 or 1656 and of the beginning of the antichrist’s demise in 1666 (p. 46). Similarly, A Glimpse of Sions Glory proclaimed in light of Revelation 19:6 that the destruction of Babylon and the deliverance of Jerusalem, to which Parliament actively contributed, were signaled by the calling of the Jews.18 Though the kingdom he envisioned would ultimately be governed by the elite, Jeremiah Burroughs, a parliamentary preacher who defended the separatist position and may have authored A Glimpse of Sions Glory, used the apocalyptic tradition of the persecuted as an opportunity for social levelling by casting the poor in the vanguard as reformers: “It is the voice of the Waters, the voice of Jesus Christ reigning in his Church, comes first 17

18

Michael Fixler, Milton and the Kingdoms of God (London: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 15. Also see Paul Christianson, “Visions of a New Jerusalem,” Reformers and Babylon: English Apocalyptic Visions from the Reformation to the Eve of the Civil War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978). A Glimpse of Sions Glory (London, 1641), p. 3. Fixler identifies Jeremiah Burroughs as the author (p. 212), while N. I. Matar names Thomas Goodwin (Matar, “Milton and the Idea of the Restoration of the Jews,” SEL 27 [1987]: 122 n5).

Milton’s Peculiar Nation

41

from the Multitude, the common People, the voice is heard from them first, before it is heard from any others” (Burroughs p. 4). In his antiprelatical tracts, Milton too deflated the image of the elite,19 but as a defender of the “middling sort,” he placed the burden of responsibility for national change on Parliament rather than the lower orders. Burroughs observes that the foundation of the Temple of the Lord, a symbol for the New Jerusalem, remained incomplete (p. 18). He offers in turn a typological interpretation of Hebrew prophecies by deferring their consummation to New Testament times. Isaiah’s proclamation, “Look upon Zion the City of our solemnities: Thine eies shall see Jerusalem a quiet Habitation, a Tabernacle that shall not be taken downe,” refers to future times, Burroughs insists: “This Text . . . hath not bin fulfilled hitherto, but must remaine. . . . When Antichrist shall fall down, and the Jewes, called; and this Halleluia sung, The Lord God omnipotent reigneth: then this Promise may be made good” (p. 18). The visions of Isaiah in general have yet to be realized: “Isay. 60. if you read the whole Chapter, there are glorious things spoken of the reigne of the Church: but there have never beene such glorious times since those Prophecies, and therefore these we are to expect to be fulfilled” (pp. 18–19). New Testament visionaries, particularly John in Revelation, can prophesy the construction of the Temple; the Hebrew prophets, however, only know half the story. Jews thus are cast as performers in the larger drama of Christian eschatology. According to The Land of Promise, which was concurrent with A Glimpse, the building of the New Jerusalem, which John compares to a New Eden, would see the gathering of the Jews from out of the countries where they now live, thus fulfilling the Hebrew prophecies of Ezekiel and Zechariah.20 In the same way, the Christian Jerusalem would be erected on the base of the (necessarily) unrealized or uncompleted Jewish temple. In the Reason of Church-Government (1642), Milton glosses Ezekiel’s prophecy in chapters 42–48, claiming that “the promised new temple in Ezechiel, and all those sumptuous things under the Law were made to signifie the inward beauty and splendor of the Christian Church thus govern’d” (CPW 1:758). If the temple were actually rebuilt, the reconstruction would signal the restoration of all those ceremonies that the Gospel abrogated. Samuel Lee’s compendious treatise outlining the dimensions and characteristics of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem describes “in our Mother Tongue” the material and symbolic features of this “wonder of the world.”21 Two hundred pages of 19 20 21

Milton, Of Reformation, CPW 1:556–79. I. E., The Land of Promise (London, 1641), pp. 18–19. [Samuel Lee,] Orbis Miraculum, or The Temple of Solomon (London, 1659), A.

42

eliz abet h m. sauer

minute detail lead to a discussion of the “mystical Significations” (and, ultimately, the dissolution) of the temple. The temple’s material foundation is then displaced by the “precious corner-stone laid by the Father in the heart of mount Zion” (p. 194). Twelve pages of biblical quotations reduce the prophesied Jewish temple to a type for the living temple of Christ. Typology would serve in general as the lens through which Christian writers read their relationship with and subsumed the Hebraic tradition. Between the time that Burroughs and Lee participated in the discursive reconstruction of the Hebrew temple on a Protestant English foundation, Jewish messianists appeared for a brief time on the Continental and English stages. Jewish messianism and English millenarianism in particular met in the person and writings of the famous Jewish scholar Menasseh Ben Israel, to whom mystics and scholars communicated their messianism and declared the imminent establishment of God’s kingdom. Most compelling for Menasseh was the encouragement he received about the calling of the Jews in England.22 The hope for Israel, that is, the restoration of the Jewish nation, would soon be realized. By readmitting the Jews, England in turn would not only reinforce its distinction from the Turks and the “Papist” nations who persecuted the Jews, but would also serve as an example to Christian nations and thus validate its peculiar status: “the Lord hath exalted England in spiritual, and in temporal mercies and deliverances, as much as, (or more then) any other Nation under Heaven”; and “the good people generally have more beleeved the promises touching the calling of the Jews . . . then any other Nation that we have heard of.”23 Menasseh reached England on 31 October 1655 and presented To His Highnesse the Lord Protector . . . The Humble Addresses of Menasseh Ben Israel five days later. However, he had made his mark years beforehand through Spes Israelis, published in English as The Hope of Israel for Hannah Allen – a sympathizer of the dissenters who had also printed Henry Jessey’s 22

23

N. Homes and H. Jessey to Menasseh Ben Israel, 24 Dec. 1649, rpt. Paul Felgenhauer, Bonum Nuncium Israeli (Amsterdam, 1655), pp. 103–106. See also Nathaniel Homes, The Resurrection Revealed, or, The Dawning of the Day-star (London, 1654), in which Homes quotes Menasseh’s views. Edward Spencer recommends Homes’ book in a letter included as part of an appendix to Moses Hall’s 2nd ed. of Menasseh’s Hope of Israel in Menasseh Ben Israel’s Mission to Oliver Cromwell, ed. Lucien Wolf (London: Macmillan & Co., 1901), p. 67. In his “To His Highnesse the Lord Protector . . . The Humble Addresses of Menasseh Ben Israel” (1655), Menasseh mentions that “the Nobility of the Jews” has been “most worthily and excellently shewed and described in a Certain Book, called, The Glory of Juhud and Israel, dedicated to our Nation by that worthy Christian Minister Mr. Henry Jessey, (1653 in Dutch) where this matter is set out at large: And by Mr. Edw. Niicholas Gentleman, in his Book, called An Apologie for the Honorable Nation of the Jews, and all the Sons of Israel (1648. in English)” (Menasseh Ben Israel’s Mission to Oliver Cromwell, ed. Lucien Wolf, p. 103). See also Henry Jessey, A Narrative of the late Proceeds at White-Hall concerning the Jews (London, 1656), pp. 4, 6.

Milton’s Peculiar Nation

43

translation of Caspar Sibelius’ Of the conversion of the five thousand and nine hundred East-Indians, in the isle Formosa (1650) and Edward Winslow’s The glorious progress of the Gospel amongst the Indians (1649), extracts of which appear in Of the conversion. At this time when apocalypticism was inflamed by the catastrophes which had befallen Jews in eastern Europe, as well as by the recent declarations about the American Indians’ descent from the tribes of Israel, Menasseh urged Parliament that prophecy should be the basis for policy and specifically for the resettlement of the Jews. Citing Daniel 12:7, he explains that the long-awaited restoration of the Israelites, who were scattered throughout the world, had been fulfilled (p. 81) and confirmed by the recently discovered associations between Jews and Amerindians to which Menasseh devoted his treatise. Several years later, what was for most a very unsettling proposition became the basis for the 1655 Whitehall Conference on the Jewish Readmission in England. As the conference proceeded, defenders of the proposal like Hugh Peter and even John Dury, a devotee of the Christian Kabbalah, eventually experienced a change of heart once faced with the prospect of Jews actually settling in England. No reference was made to the conversion of the Jews. The matter had already been addressed in a retort to Menasseh’s Spes Israelis, which “gives very small hopes of his conversion,” according to the member of parliament for Middlesex, E[dward] S[pencer], who had read Moses Hall’s English translation of the work.24 Such sentiments, which were symptomatic of a general suspicion about the Jews, gave way to intolerance. During the Whitehall Conference, Dury determined that because they imagine themselves “the onely noble people in the world,” the Jews should be restrained, otherwise “they will in short time be oppressive.” To avoid conflicts, Jews should, furthermore, be required to live by themselves in England.25 In The Commonwealth of Oceana, James Harrington advances a more exclusionist policy by recommending that Panopea (Ireland), which was open for “colonization” in the mid-1650s, be “farmed out unto the Jews” for pay.26 As for Menasseh himself, “the cheife Agent for ye Introduction 24

25

26

Menasseh Ben Israel, The Hope of Israel: Written by Menasseh Ben Israel . . . Newly extant, and Printed in Amsterdam . . . Translated into English, and published by Authority (London: R.I. for Hannah Allen, 1650). Moses Hall, who translated the first edition of The Hope of Israel, sought to address the question of Jewish conversion in “Considerations upon the Point of the Conversion of the Jewes,” an appendix to the second edition. Moses Wall, ed. The Hope of Israel, 2nd ed. (1652) in Menasseh Ben Israel’s Mission to Oliver Cromwell, ed. Lucien Wolf (London: Macmillan & Co., 1901), p. 71. John Dury, A Case of Conscience, Whether It Be Lawful to Admit Jews into a Christian Common-Wealth (London, 1656), pp. 8, 9, 4. James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana, The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 159. On the colonization of Ireland in the

44

eliz abet h m. sauer

of ye Jewish Nation,” Edmund Gayton dismisses him in an anti-Jewish poem that reinforces an early church distinction between “children of the flesh” and the “children of the promise” (Romans 9:8): “Thou sonne of Abrams loynes but Faith never.”27 By early 1656 the proposal for Readmission had failed, blocked by ideological barriers that circumscribed English conceptions of its peculiar status.28 ii. quakers and post-millenarianism Early modern Puritans and Quakers read Jewish history as fundamentally tragic, their apostasy and stubborn rejection of Christ being followed by their disinheritance. Millenarians had nevertheless welcomed and in fact lobbied for the readmission and conversion of the Jews as a prerequisite for the establishment of the Fifth Monarchy. Though they were excluded from the Whitehall Conference on the Jewish readmission, Quakers saw some affiliations between themselves and the Jews, attributable to their related millenarian interests, as well as their mysticism, skepticism, and shared sense of persecution. Quaker leaders attempted to familiarize themselves with Judaism by learning some Hebrew and making contact with Menasseh Ben Israel, which also led them to ascribe to the Jews an important role in the final days.29 This identification with the Jews underscores Thomas Luxon’s observation that the ancient/contemporary Jews served as “the Christian’s crucially constitutive others” while confirming “the typical status of the Israelite of the Hebrew scriptures.”30 In her first tract, For Manasseth-Ben-Israel: The Call of the Jews out of Babylon (20 Feb. 1656), Margaret Fell in appealing for Jewish readmission

27

28

29

30

1650s, see T. C. Barnard, “Crisis of Identity among Irish Protestants, 1641–1685,” Past and Present 127 (May 1990): 58–77. Edmund Gayton, “Upon Rabbi Manasses ben Izrel” in David S. Katz, “Edmund Gayton’s AntiJewish Poem Addressed to Menasseh Ben Israel, 1656,” The Jewish Quarterly Review, New Ser., 71.4 (Apr. 1981): 249. See also Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England 1603–1655 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). W. C. Abbott notes that the parliamentary committee on the Readmission had confined itself to theological concerns about the prospect of Jewish settlement in England, but took no position on denization over which Cromwell thus retained some authority (The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, ed. W. C. Abbott, 4 vols. [New York: Russell & Russell, 1970], pp. 4:54–55). On Milton and the question of Jewish Readmission, also see Elizabeth Sauer, “Religious Toleration and Imperial Intolerance,” Milton and the Imperial Vision, ed. Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press), pp. 214–30. Samuel Fisher, The Scorned Quakers True and honest account, both why and what he should have spoken . . . before the Protector etc. ([London,] Sept. 17, 1656). Also see Hugh Barbour, The Quakers in Puritan England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), pp. 188–89; and Nigel Smith, “John Perrot and the Quaker Epic,” Literature and the English Civil War, ed. Thomas Healy and Jonathan Sawday (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 260. See Thomas H. Luxon, Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Reformation Crisis in Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 56, 57.

Milton’s Peculiar Nation

45

exhorts the famous Jewish scholar to “hear the word of the Lord, thou who are called Manasseth-Ben-Israel, (who art come into this English Nation, with all the rest of thy Brethren), which is a Land of gathering, where the Lord God is fulfilling his Promise.”31 At the same time, however, she warns him that Jews must acknowledge and renounce their malignancy: “Therefore to the pure Light and Law in the inward Parts turn your Minds, which shews you your evil Deeds, and makes manifest Sin and Evil” (p. 109). In this tract which he likely never read, Menasseh was urged to become a “Jew inward.” “Jew inward” is a favourite phrase for George Fox who, according to Fell in “The Testimony of Margaret Fox,” announced in St. Mary’s Church, Ulverston, in 1652: “He is not a Jew, that is one outward; neither is that Circumcision, which is outward: But he is a Jew, that is one inward; and that is Circumcision, which is of the heart” (Fell, Manasseth, p. 118). The effect of Fox’s words on her, Fell judges, is comparable to an act of circumcision: “This opened me so, that it cut me to the Heart.”32 Ironically, although the ecstatic quality of her words is characteristic of the language of the dissenters, Fell’s statement originates with Moses, the great lawgiver, in Deuteronomy 10:16: “Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no more stiffnecked.” What this suggests is that an important strain in Judaism is willfully overlooked not only by the seventeenth-century radicals but also in Christian typology generally. The Christian tradition is almost by necessity obliged to see Judaism as only a partial expression or realization of religious experience and providential history. Transferred from the Old Testament to the New, the figurative act of circumcision becomes “a symbol for the covenant of works” (Milton, CPW 6:543). “Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart” (Manasseth, p. 118) functions as a refrain throughout Fell’s works. For Fell, as for Fox and

31

32

Margaret Fell, For Manasseth-Ben-Israel: The Call of the Jews out of Babylon (London, 1656), A Brief Collection of Remarkable Passages and Occurrences Relating to . . . Margaret Fell, but by her second Marriage M. Fox (London: J. Sowle, 1712), p. 105. Judith Kegan Gardiner, “Margaret Fell and Feminist Literary History: A ‘Mother in Israel’ Calls to the Jews,” The Emergence of Quaker Writing, ed. Thomas Corns and David Loewenstein (London: Frank Cass, 1995), pp. 42–56. Also see Achsah Guibbory, “Conversation, Conversion, Messianic Redemption: Margaret Fell, Menasseh ben Israel, and the Jews,” Literary Circles and Cultural Communities in Renaissance England, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), pp. 210– 34, and Elizabeth Sauer, “The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Female Contemporaries,” Milton and Gender, ed. Catherine Gimelli Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 133–52). Margaret Fell, “The Testimony of Margaret Fox Concerning her Late Husband George Fox; Together with a brief Account of some of his Travels, Sufferings and Hardships endured for the Truth’s sake,” A Journal or Historical Account of the Life, Travels, Sufferings, Christian Experiences and Labour of Love in the Work of the Ministry, of . . . George Fox (London, 1694), ii.

46

eliz abet h m. sauer

Milton, the term “Jew” was marked by a distinction between the inward and outward Jew. “This is the Covenant which the Lord made with Abraham,” Fell reminds Menasseh, “and your Temple to be Spiritual, which is made of living Stones, Elect and Precious, and your Circumcision to be inward of the heart, in the Spirit, and not in the Letter. . . . and so that you may not only be the Jew outwardly, and so be found to be the Synagogues of Satan, but that you may be the Jew inwardly” (p. 123). In a genealogy she offers of the Judeo-Christian tradition, one that involves a typological interpretation which nevertheless retains a place for the Jews, Fell in An Evident Demonstration to Gods Elect invokes the example of the precircumcised Abraham who “received the signe of Circumcision a seal of the righteousnesse of his faith which he had before he was Circumcised.”33 However, Fell distinguishes between the uncircumcised and the circumcised Abraham to allow for the transference of the promise “not to that onely which is of the Law, but to that also which is of the faith of Abraham which is the Father of us all” (Demonstration, p. 7). The inclusion of “onely” is a gesture of toleration,34 and Fell “generously” extends the status of election to all, “whether they be Jew or Greek, bond or free, there is neither male nor female here but they are all one in Christ Jesus” (p. 7). Nevertheless, faith rather than circumcision becomes the sign of election; and there is no mistaking that “faith” refers to Christian belief, which culminates in a union with Christ “who is the Corner stone and Rock of Eternal salvation” (p. 9). Toward the end of her tract, Fell rehearses the early Christian affirmation of election: “you that do believe on [Christ] are the chosen Generation, a Royal Priesthood, an Holy Nation, a peculiar People” (p. 12). Fell represents the promise of salvation in terms of the transformation of the wasteland of Zion into an Edenic garden, which is intended for “the believing Jews and the believing Gentiles” (p. 13, misnumbered p. 12). At this point in history, however, the period of trial and of wandering in the desert are far from over for Jews and Christians alike, Fell laments in declaring that the Lord “hath found Jacob in a Desert Land, and a wast howling Wilderness” (Demonstration, p. 11). In his Preface to George Fox’s Journal, William Penn compared Quakers to “poor Sheep appointed to the Slaughter, and . . . a People killed all the Day long” and reinforced the image of the Quakers as a suffering people reminiscent of the early Christians: “they 33 34

Margre (Margret) Fell, An Evident Demonstration to Gods Elect (London, 1660), p. 6. See Jason P. Rosenblatt’s reference to the “welcome surprise” of the inclusion of “only” in Paradise Lost 12.447 (Torah and Law in “Paradise Lost” [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994], p. 231).

Milton’s Peculiar Nation

47

rise Low, and Dispised and Hated, as the Primitive Christians did.”35 Like the early church evangelists who were forced to reassess their theology of an imminent Second Coming, Quakers in the Restoration years conceded that Christ’s kingdom and the gathering and conversion of the Jews were not to be realized. Millenarianism waned and the building of the New Jerusalem proclaimed in A Glimpse of Sions Glory and The Land of Promise, which would result in the gathering of the Jews and the fulfillment of the prophecies of Ezekiel and Zechariah, assumed a purely spiritual significance. Correspondingly, the Jews must remain dispersed and the raising of their temple perpetually deferred “unlesse we mean to annihilat the Gospel” (CPW 1:757). George Fox insisted on reminding the Jews that they were now at God’s mercy and that the gathering of which Zechariah spoke in chapter 14 was in Christ’s hands: “the gathering of you now is by the power of the Messiah up in [sic] into his Kingdom, and so that which doth gather you and all people now, is the power of the Messiah, who came long since, and you Crucified him, which doth dash to pieces rebuke, and judge, until he hath made all quiet and peace able.”36 Fell seems to have taken these words to heart in declaring some years later “the Lord Jesus Christ is building the Temple, which is his Church, which is made up of living Stones . . . in the Hearts of Men and Women, he is at work . . . the gathering is unto him, yea, the gathering of all Nations is unto him.”37 The imagery featured here is derived from scriptural accounts of the primitive church in 1 Peter 2 in which the author exhorts the early Christians: “[Come to him], as unto a living stone, disallowed indeed of men, but chosen of God, and precious, / Ye also as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ. / Wherefore also it is contained in the scripture, Behold, I lay in Sion a chief corner stone, elect, precious: and he that believeth on him, shall not be confounded. / Unto you therefore which believe he is precious: but unto them which be disobedient, the stone which the builders disallowed, the same is made the head of the corner” (lines 4–7). According to the Judaic interpretation of this verse from Psalm 118, Israel (called the stone of Israel in Genesis 49:24) is despised by the rulers of the surrounding nations, as Jason Rosenblatt has recently stated. The Targum reads the verse as a reference to David, 35

36

37

William Penn, “The Preface . . . of the Divers Dispensations of God to Men,” A Journal or Historical Account of . . . George Fox (London, 1694), n.p. George Fox, An Answer to the Arguments of Jews (1661), p. 43. Also see Bonnelyn Young Kunze, Margaret Fell and the Rise of Quakerism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 223. Fell, The Daughter of Sion Awakened (1677), A Brief Collection, p. 526.

48

eliz abet h m. sauer

the author of the psalm, who was rejected by his own Father and brothers; when the prophet Samuel announced that one of Jesse’s sons was to be anointed, no one thought of David, the youngest, who was tending the sheep.38 Though appearing long after the Jewish tradition had been firmly established, Christ became the new cornerstone, according to the first Christians, who raised for their communities and their culture a sacred foundation comprised of living stones. The Geneva Bible glosses the passage from Peter as a description of a spiritual temple, the “foundation whereof is Christ.”39 Those who “resist this doctrine of the Gospel,” the commentator continues, occupied prominent positions during the early years of the Christianity, but denied the truth; they were “cheifest amongst the people of God . . . at that time that Peter wrote these things, the Priests, and Elders, and Scribes” (7n). As previously noted, Samuel Lee, author of the Temple of Solomon, is among numerous seventeenth-century authors who reconstructs the Hebrew temple on Christian supports, featuring Christ the keystone, the “precious stone” (p. 196). In turn, the builders of the spiritual temple are designated as the elect. William Penn thus commends “those that feared God, and waited daily in the Temple, not made with Hands, for the Consolation of Israel; the Jew inward, and Circumcision in Spirit.” Further, he prays that Quakers in particular might constitute “a Generation . . . to God, an Holy Nation and a Peculiar People, Zealous of Good Works” (Preface, n.p.). iii. “bef ore all t emples t h’upright heart and pure” ( PL 1.18) Not unlike his millenarian contemporaries, Milton, in his early days, combined the language of apocalypse with the idea of English election. Providential and imperial visions of history converge in the fiery apocalyptic Of Reformation in which Milton envisions an elect nation, a “Britannick Empire [built up] to a glorious and enviable heighth with all her Daughter Ilands about her” – a “great and Warlike Nation” awaiting the imminent Second Coming (CPW 1:614, 616). Yet earlier in the same text, Milton already began to ask how England could fall behind other Protestant nations in the 38

39

Jason P. Rosenblatt, Respondent, “Milton and the Jews,” special session organized by Douglas A. Brooks, MLA Convention, Dec. 2001. I am very grateful to Professor Rosenblatt for his astute observations on my presentation on “Milton, the Regnum Christi, and the Politics of Deferral” delivered during this session. 1 Peter 2:4n, The Geneva Bible (1602) (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1989).

Milton’s Peculiar Nation

49

Reformation movement. Throughout this 1641 treatise, Milton attributes the cyclical declines suffered by the English to their stubborn refusal to acknowledge their providential destiny. The outbreak of the revolution brought new hope for the deliverance of the nation. The sense of providential history was heightened during the religious and political upheavals through the triumphs of Cromwell and Parliament, which were read as signs of divine favour. Milton’s Areopagitican representation of the holy nation, which was “chos’n before any other, that out of her as out of Sion should be proclam’d and sounded forth the first tidings and trumpet of Reformation to all Europ” (CPW 2:552), predicts the coming of the kingdom. Milton figures the newly revived England in terms of a “noble and puissant Nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks” and a molting eagle that strengthens her grasp on the vital purpose of national life (CPW 2:558). The elect nation carries out the work of God in erecting the temple, a symbolic monument extolling national diversity, as represented by the “many schisms and many dissections . . . in the quarry and in the timber” (CPW 2:555) of the structure. The construction of the temple is undertaken by sectarians and heretics and those who oppose Parliament’s censorship practices, which restrict the dissemination of knowledge, thus inhibit the Reformation. Only a few years later, the nation’s declining revolutionary aspirations and its failure to live up to its potential set the stage for Milton’s shifting positions on the question of England’s election. Milton vilifies Charles’ supporters throughout Eikonoklastes and at last dismisses them as an “inconstant, irrational, and Image-doting rabble” (CPW 3:601). Eikonoklastes marks a pivotal representation of the England-as-Israel commonplace: the chosen nation now chooses the path back to monarchy, rejecting the Bible’s own preference for judges and prophets. Milton hereafter restricts his designation of elect to the fit though few (CPW 3:339–40) as his faith in the nation is shaken by what he later describes as the backsliding of the English like “the Jews . . . to Egypt” (CPW 7:387). In Sonnet XVIII, published in the same year as Cromwell’s proposal for the readmission of the Jews in 1655, Milton deploys some of the few positive references to the ancient Israelites found in his later works. Yet the images are reserved neither for the Jews nor the English nation at large but for the exemplary, foreign Protestants who fly the “Babylonian woe.”40 40

N. I. Matar, “Milton and the Idea of the Restoration of the Jews,” SEL 27 (1987): 121; John Milton, Sonnet XVIII, John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957), l.14. All citations from Milton’s poems are to this edition. See also Elizabeth Sauer,

50

eliz abet h m. sauer

When the restoration of monarchy became imminent, Milton warned his compatriots that their failure to erect the main structure of the commonwealth for which they fought during the revolution would “render [them] a scorn and derision” before all of Europe. Indeed England was raising “another Rome in the west” (CPW 7:422–3). In the final pages of the Readie and Easie Way (Second Edition), in which he came closest in all his writings to imitating the Hebrew prophets, the New Israel becomes enslaved of its own volition to Egypt (CPW 7:463). On the base of the envisioned commonwealth, Milton would compose a national epic about the tragic loss of paradise and the ill-fated English mission to usher in the regnum Christi (Fixler p. 221). In his experience of defeat, Milton, moreover, revisits the chosen status bestowed upon Protestant England. Election, he determined, necessitated repentance and conversion, and depended on “Merit more than Birthright” (PL 3.309), a lesson now directed at the tragically fallen nation. While Quakers maintained that the Jews were like the builders of Babel scattered for “their Rebellion against the Lord” (Fell, Manasseth p. 103), Milton underscores their apostasy, while demonstrating how they might be rendered “serviceable” for Christians, as Lightfoot suggested. At the same time, he retained an ambivalent, and as Aschah Guibbory demonstrates, an often-hostile attitude toward contemporary Jews, thus exposing a Hebraism-Judaism divide in his thinking.41 Milton’s differentiation in Eikonoklastes between a tolerant Reformed Religion and tyrannical Catholicism forced from him a distinction between Judaism and Jews: “while we detest Judaism, we know our selves commanded by St. Paul, Rom. 11. to respect the Jews, and by all means to endeavor thir conversion” (CPW 3:326). Here the fate of the Jews serves as a warning for reprobate Christians, while confirming the justness of God’s ways. In the Christian Doctrine, the Jews again provide an instructive counterexample: “the Jews, an extremely ancient nation, are now dispersed all over the world. . . . God often warned them that this would be the outcome of their sins. Amidst the constant flux of history they have been preserved in this state, scattered among the other nations, right up to the present day. This has been done not only to make them pay the penalty of their sins but much rather to give the whole

41

“Toleration, the Irish, and Milton’s ‘On the Late Massacre in Piemont,” Milton Studies 44 (2005): 40–61. Stollman, p. 108. Shoulson demonstrates, however, that the Hebraic and the Judaic are more tenuous than Stollman’s dichotomy allows. “Neither fully rejected nor wholly embrace, they function dialogically” (Shoulson, p. 29).

Milton’s Peculiar Nation

51

world a perpetual, living proof of the existence of God and the truth of his scriptures” (CPW 6:132). Of course none of Milton’s texts so strenuously attempts to demonstrate “the existence of God and the truth of his scriptures” as Paradise Lost, whose great argument deigns to “justify the ways of God to men.”42 In an unprecedented attempt at self-vindication, Milton’s God, in his opening speech in Paradise Lost, outlines his plans for the creation and ultimate redemption of a human race, featured here as both peculiar and reprobate. God wastes no time in warning the yet uncreated beings of their need for repentance: “Some I have chosen of peculiar grace / Elect above the rest; so is my will: / The rest shall hear me call, and oft be warn’d / Thir sinful state. . . . I will clear thir senses dark, / What may suffice, and soft’n stony hearts / To pray, repent, and bring obedience due” (PL 3.183–90). As the epic narrative unfolds, the first parents succumb to temptation, despite the instructions and warnings they receive. The effects of their betrayal and consequent disinheritance are transferred to the malignant generation they beget, represented by the Old Testament Israelites. Israel’s idolatry, disobedience, and betrayed election, the instances of which fill the final books of the poem, are set in a paradise lost. Their disinheritance is prefigured in Milton’s epic by God’s iconoclastic act in book 11 of reducing Eden to a wasteland, “an Island salt and bare” (PL 11.834) in response to the first couple’s irreverence for God’s hallowed ground. According to Michael, God “´attributes to place / No sanctity, if none be thither brought / By Men who there frequent, or therein dwell.”43 Entitlement to (the promised) land, regarded as a rightful inheritance, a permanent and binding arrangement and, paradoxically, as a reflection of the Israelites’ fluctuating worthiness,44 is now denied to a dispersed, diasporic people. The desecration of Eden, like the incomplete commonwealth and the New Jerusalem, suggests a world closed off to the Jews. Loss, tragedy, sin, and sorrow are in turn troped Jewish. Citing Ephesians 2:12 in his discussion of the abolition of the old covenant by the new, Milton emphasizes the Jews’ dispossession: the Jews “were alienated from the state of Israel and excluded from the promise of the covenants” (CPW 6:527). In books 11 and 12 of Paradise Lost, where Milton and Michael rhetorically plant the seeds of nationhood, the transference of elect status from 42

43 44

John Milton, Paradise Lost, 1.26. Quotations from Paradise Lost are to Merritt Hughes’s edition; see note 40 above. PL 11.836–38; See Rosenblatt, “Eden, Israel, England,” p. 60. On the old covenant, see Exodus 23:30; Deut. 11:23, 31; 12:10, 17:14, 19:2–3, 21:23, 24:4, 25:19, 26:15, 31:7, 32:49); see also Joel Rosenberg, King and Kin: Political Allegory in the Hebrew Bible (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 87.

52

eliz abet h m. sauer

the Hebrews to the Christians is enacted. Having led Adam up the “Hill / Of Paradise” (PL 11.377–78), Michael offers him what amounts to a PisgahSight of Hebrew history translated into a typological Christian providential narrative. Adam learns that the favour bestowed on the “one peculiar Nation” (PL 12.111) has its roots in Abraham in whose “Seed / All Nations shall be blest” (PL 12.126–27). However, without delay, Michael informs Adam that the Seed by which the nations are blessed refers to “thy great deliverer, who shall bruise / The Serpent’s head” (PL 12.149–50). The fit though few Israelites who prepare the way for the Son are all “types / And shadows, of that destin’d Seed” (PL 12.232–33). Guiding the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt is Moses, whose role is “to introduce / One greater, of whose day he shall foretell” (PL 12.241–42). Moses thus leads the people to Canaan without being able to enter the promised land himself: “And therefore shall not Moses, though of God / Highly belov’d, being but the Minister / Of Law, his people in Canaan lead” (PL 12.307–09). Near the conclusion of Deuteronomy, which is replete with divine promises of land for the Israelites, Moses is forbidden from entering Canaan. Milton explains Moses’ exclusion in the Christian Doctrine: “The imperfection of the law was made apparent in the person of Moses himself. For Moses, who was the type of the law, could not lead the children of Israel into the land of Canaan, that is, into eternal rest. But an entrance was granted to them under Joshua, that is, Jesus” (CPW 6.519).45 In Paradise Lost, Joshua, who is featured as a type for the Messiah – “His Name and Office bearing, who shall quell / The adversary Serpent” – is entrusted with the responsibility of bringing the people to what Michael designates the “eternal Paradise of rest” (PL 12.311–14). Adam’s exchange with the evangelizing angel, Michael, prompts Milton’s readers to interpret the Old Testament laws as the forms of a nation and providential history in the making. The Christian hermeneutics of typology, derived from early church writings, underwrites the narrative; the language of types and shadows will be fulfilled by a new covenant “disciplin’d / From shadowy Types to Truth, from Flesh to Spirit,” and from “works of Law to works of Faith,” Michael announces (PL 12.302–3, 306) in accordance with Hebrews 10:1. The pressure to read the history of Israel in Paradise Lost typologically is tremendous, and as compelling as it is in the New Testament scriptures. Yet rather than being perfectly linear, typology involves an ongoing encounter with what it has fulfilled and left behind. Regina Schwartz has persuasively characterized typological interpretations 45

See Rosenblatt, Torah and Law, pp. 219–20.

Milton’s Peculiar Nation

53

in these terms in analysing the “conclusion” of Paradise Lost, which is distinctive in its inconclusiveness: “Milton draws sudden attention to the fiction within his fiction; Michael has reached the end of the world only in his story . . . he brings us back from the end of biblical time to its beginning, from Christ to Adam, who still has the world – and all its woes – before him.”46 The result, as Jeffrey S. Shoulson has aptly identified it, is “an inassimilable historical residuum, one that is inextricably bound up with the figure (and the body) of the Jew” (p. 201). For various reasons, as Shoulson demonstrates, Paradise Lost resists a “purely typological reading” (p. 231). In book 12, where Milton “balances our attention between the episode under narration and the act of narration,” typology proves a particularly inadequate hermeneutic mode of interpretation. Through the transition from prophecy to narration at the opening of book 12 is comparable to the “rabbinic replacement of the visionary mode of prophecy with the hermeneutic mode of midrash” (Shoulson, p. 231), Adam becomes an active reader and historical actor, while Milton underscores the political and literary importance of writing. Yet Michael’s move into narrative mode in book 12 is occasioned not by a desire for clearer understanding but by the angel’s efforts at compensating for Adam’s impaired vision: “I perceive / Thy mortal sight to fail; objects divine / Must needs impair and weary human sense: / Henceforth what is to come I will relate” (PL 12.8–11). Moreover, the blind Adam cannot rely on insight for truth, as confirmed by his erroneous remarks on the prophesy and narrative of human history; rather he must depend on Michael’s corrective responses. For Milton and his Christian contemporaries, Adam’s sins correspond with those of the misguided Israelite nation – ancient and contemporary. So while it is true that English Protestants, who are “hoarse with railing one at another” and whose “hands are imbrued in the bloud of those of [their] own religion” (Fuller 5.5.200), are hardly supplying a positive example, the Christians’ prospects for conversion are more promising than those of the Jews who are handicapped by the “internall obstacle” of their “blindness” passed down through the generations, Thomas Fuller judges. Fuller further laments: “woefull is the present condition of the Jews, having a fog of ignorance, and a tempest of violence, both together in them in the highest degree” (5.5.200). Such is the condition in which Michael finds Adam in Paradise Lost when he first removes “the Film . . . / Which that false Fruit that promis’d clearer sight /

46

Regina Schwartz, “From Shadowy Types to Shadowy Types: The Unendings of Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies 24 (1988): 126.

54

eliz abet h m. sauer

Had bred” (PL 11.412–13) and when he condescends to narrative mode in book 12. Also included among the vices repeatedly invoked in typological readings of Jewish-Christian relations is idolatry. Fuller, for example, devotes an entire chapter to the Jews’ worship of idols in his Pisgah-Sight (4.7.123–38), which is preceded by an engraving of the “Pantheon sive Idola Judeorum” (4.7.120–21). Adam in Paradise Lost is certainly guilty of this crime, as Jason Rosenblatt has observed in paralleling Milton’s postlapsarian character with the Jews who were judged as “idolatrous” by Tertullian.47 In book 12 of Paradise Lost, Adam’s errors are, moreover, characteristic of the misreading of history of which Jews and millenarians, including Milton, were initially guilty but which the latter eventually renounced with the royalist restoration to power. Messianists and millenarians in the 1640s and 1650s imagined the “Monarchy of Israel” and kingdom of God, respectively, as “temporal and terrestrial” constructs, prospects that a reader of Moses Hall’s translation of Menasseh’s Hope of Israel exposed and criticized; “I pray you take heed,” cautions Sir Edward Spencer in the Appendix to the text’s second edition, that “you [mistakenly identified as John Dury] fall not into the same snare wherein the Jewes are, to looke for a temporall reigne, which you seeme to intimate” (Appendix, Hope of Israel, 2nd ed., p. 57). In a much more vindictive tone, Roger L’Estrange in No Blinde Guides mocks Milton as the author of The Readie and Easie Way for his delusions, idolatry, and blindness: “Under the Reign of God onely their King you say. This expression, doubtfully implies you a Millenary. Doe you then, really expect to see Christ, Reigning upon Earth, even with those very eyes you Lost (as ‘tis reported) with staring too long, and too sawcily upon the Portraiture of his Vicegerent, to breake the Image, as your Imprudence Phrases it? (It is generally indeed believed, you never wept them out for this Losse).”48 In the postlapsarian world, Milton’s Adam mistakenly awaits the material fulfillment of the divine plan when only the spiritual is possible. He anticipates a direct combat between the forces of good and evil: “Needs must the Serpent now his capital bruise / Expect with mortal pain: say where and when / Thir fight, what stroke shall bruise the Victor’s heel” (PL 12.383–85). Offering further evidence of his misinterpretation of Michael’s prophesy, Adam wonders whether the proclaimed act of redemption by the Son would not vindicate him and expunge his guilt for his original crime 47 48

On Adam’s Jewish identity, see Rosenblatt, Torah and Law, p. 227. Roger L’Estrange, No Blinde Guides (London, 1660), p. 8.

Milton’s Peculiar Nation

55

(PL 12.473–75). His lack of discernment and failed reason reinforce for the Christian poet Adam’s reprobate, Jewish identity. However, Milton’s Adam is not relegated to a pre-Christian world in which he merely serves as a type for the second Adam, and this is where a rigidly typological reading of the final books of the poem might be incomplete. Rosenblatt explains that late in Paradise Lost, Milton’s typological construction of biblical history ensures that Adam “disappears as a subject, relinquishing agency and identity, dying in Christ” (Torah, 227). I would suggest instead that Adam, having been made privy to the consequences of the original act of disobedience, is cast as a figure between two worlds and intersecting narratives of Old and New Testament history. By undergoing a process of evangelization through Michael, who is himself “Betwixt the world destroy’d and world restor’d” (12.3), Adam becomes at once a negative and potentially positive example. On the one hand, as one who is evicted from the promised land and left to wander, Adam is like the ancient Israelites, who, as a scattered people, offer “a perpetual, living proof of the existence of God and the truth of his scriptures” (CPW 6:132). On the other, as the antihero of Milton’s Christian epic, Adam can be redeemed if he repents and accepts the good news of the fulfillment of history by the “one greater Man” (PL 1.4). The Gospel message delivered by Michael in fact transforms Adam into an “inward Jew.” Adam’s conversion suggests not his death in but rather his continuity with Christ. Though the relationship between the first and second Adam remains for Milton hierarchical, Adam dominates the epic in its account of both the loss and regaining of paradise. No sequel to the poem is necessary, despite the request made by Milton’s Quaker friend and amanuensis, Thomas Ellwood.49 Rather the epic emphasizes the feasibility of the coming of the kingdom, and Milton reverts back to the early Christian tradition in outlining the conditions for this prospect. Adam is informed that God will inscribe the “Law of Faith . . . upon [the peoples’] hearts” (PL 12.488–9; Hebrews 8:10 and 10:16), and create “living Temples, built by Faith to stand” (PL 12.527; 1 Cor. 3:16–17). Having heard the Gospel, Adam is given a list of directives resembling those outlined in 2 Peter 1:5– 7 which confirm the early Christians’ “calling and election” (2 Peter 1:10). Michael urges Adam in book 12: “add / Deeds to thy knowledge answerable, add Faith, / Add Virtue, Patience, Temperance, add Love, / By name to come call’d Charity, the soul / Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loath / 49

See John T. Shawcross, John Milton: The Self and the World (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky), p. 148.

56

eliz abeth m. sauer

To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess / A paradise within thee, happier far” (PL 12.581–87). The Christianized “paradise within” takes root in a “paradise lost.” A romantic ending is envisioned for the tragic epic through the references to the “living Temples” and the “paradise within” (12.587), which recall the opening prayer to the Christian muse for the creation “Before all Temples” of an “upright heart and pure” (PL 1.18). The epic of Israel supplies the forms and foundations of nationhood for the newly christened members of the primitive church and later for the Reformation Protestants who declared their nationhood and election at once. In England, Protestantism and biblical nationalism underwrote history and sanctioned the nation’s expansionary and exclusionary policies, including the historical and rhetorical treatment of the Jews. Internally colonized, the Jews and their heritage are thus absorbed in the founding narratives of the early modern nation. There may be a time, Milton contends in Paradise Regained, when God, “Remembering Abraham by some wond’rous call / May bring [the Jews] back repentant and sincere” (PR 3:433–35; CPW 6:617), but it is only as penitent sinners or “delayed Christians” (Matar p. 121) that Jews would play a role in history.50 Judaism must always be a delayed presence because, according to the Pauline epistles, Christ, who abrogates the law by fulfilling it, “is the end of the law” (Rom. 10:4). Ultimately, the Jews must remain dispersed, their gathering and the reconstruction of their temple perpetually deferred “unlesse we mean to annihilat the Gospel” (CPW 1:757). On the eve of the Restoration, millenarian impulses subsided and the English betrayed their election by enslaving themselves to an earthly monarch. At this point “lived history” and all its revolutions and particularities, as Shoulson observed, unsettle the metaleptic nature of the nation’s typological historical narrative. Milton thus turned his notes to tragic and took upon himself the task of asserting divine providence in the native tongue, lamenting and memorializing the fall of the New Israel. National salvation now depended on the excision or colonization of Judaism, the transference of elect status, and the internalization of the Hebraic in the chosen individual, the obedient heart-circumcised Christian, the “Jew inward.” 50

See Milton, CPW 6:617; Is. 11.11–12; Fuller 5.5.200, sect. 6.

c h a pter 4

Making Use of the Jews: Milton and Philo-Semitism Nicholas von Maltzahn

Und sie lobten nicht Gott, der, so h¨orten sie, alles dies wollte, der, so h¨orten sie, alles dies wußte.1 Paul Celan

This essay examines John Milton as a point of intersection between philoSemitism and anti-Semitism in seventeenth-century England.2 It takes new biographical details – centring in Milton’s usury, the philo-Semitism of his close acquaintance, the anti-Semitism of his brother-in-law – and relates them to questions of typology, especially the claiming techniques whereby English Christian literature seeks to make its own the Hebrew God. I argue that early modern complaints about the perceived instrumentalism of Jewish law and ceremony find their own answer in the instrumentalizing of Jews and Jewish culture, even where the latter eventuates in what seem strikingly different results. In sum, there is more similarity than at first appears between anti-Semitic proposals “For raiseing monyes out of the Jewes estates in Your Majesties Dominions” and the reconciliations of “Jew and Gentile” in more philo-Semitic discourse. The literary consequences of this convergence invite exploration, with special reference to Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regain’d, and to Milton’s Psalm translations as published in 1673. Milton’s generosity to his in-laws the Powells included little measure of fellow-feeling. In the spring of 1647 he complains to the Florentine nobleman Carlo Dati about the upheavals in his nation and in his own household, with the affliction of the Powells’ descent on him in London 1

2

And they did not praise God, who, so they heard, willed all this, who, so they heard, knew all of this. “Anti-Semitism” is here used as the opposite to “philo-Semitism” and need connote no scientific racism (a later development) but the hostility to Judaism or to the readmission of Jews to England in the 1600s.

57

58

nichol as von maltz ahn

seeming the more pressing evil.3 Over twenty-five years later, the terms of Milton’s will indicate the hardening of his resentments against his daughters by Mary Powell and also his Powell mother- and brother-in-law. The last, a second Richard Powell, had done well as a lawyer and man of business in the Restoration. Yet neither he nor his mother ever honoured the dowry of £1000 promised Milton, a substantial debt that had been confirmed as still owing in the elder Richard Powell’s will.4 We may hope that Milton’s misgivings about his brother-in-law ran deeper still. For as well as being a monarchist, Powell proves to have been one of the more threatening anti-Semites of whom record remains from the Restoration. The return of Jews to England won from him some “humble proposalls . . . For raiseing monyes out of the Jewes estates in Your Majesties Dominions.”5 Only by royal leave, it was argued, had Jews been permitted to live in England, which in medieval times had allowed them to be much fined and taxed. Moreover, they had been ghettoed and, as Powell is pleased to recall, they “weere punished if they transgressed, and allso wore Badges on their Brests, to distinguish them from other his Majesties Subjects.” Kings “had of them very great Ransoms and taxes (particularly)” as “It appeareth by sundry Records in the Tower of London.” For the latter, Powell presumably relied on William Prynne’s report in the Second Part to his Short Demurrer (1656), perhaps also as recalled in the representations of the mercantilist goldsmith Thomas Violet, especially his Petition against the Jewes (1661).6 Powell and his fellow-projectors urged the rich profits available in renewing such confiscatory practices. This was all the more threatening because so in keeping with the extortion, confiscations, and expulsions enforced on European Jewry through the centuries. The financial problems that afflicted the English crown in the 1670s made such measures still more inviting. When Charles II, reporting a debt of “four millions” and more, 3

4

5

6

Complete Prose Works of John Milton [CPW], gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven, 1953–78), vol. 2, pp. 762–5 (21 Apr. 1647). This was perhaps also because of his father-in-law’s recent death (William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biography, rev. Gordon Campbell, 2 vols. [Oxford, 1996], p. 931) – or despite that consolation (the will of Richard Powell, sr., was proved 26 March 1646/7), J. Milton French, Milton in Chancery (New York, 1939), p. 84. Witnessed by Milton, J. Milton French, The Life Records of John Milton, 5 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ, 1949–58), 2:166; French, Milton in Chancery, 100–107. Oxford, All Souls College, MS 239, f. 478. The lawyer Powell draughted these with some London merchants, Thomas Rastall and Thomas Newsham; that this was Milton’s brother-in-law rather than Milton’s nephew, also a Richard Powell of the Inner Temple, shows from the context and in the apparently enduring association between the older Powell and Newsham, the latter being one of the signatories to Powell’s will in 1693 (French, Life Records, 5:291). For Prynne, see William Lamont, Marginal Prynne (1963); for Violet, see Oxford DNB – this poacher turned gamekeeper had a mercantilist obsession with preventing the export of coin, which concern aggravated his bitterness against Jews, whom he saw as fostering such international commerce.

Making Use of the Jews: Milton and Philo-Semitism

59

narrowly lost the money vote in the House of Commons late in 1675, among the other ways debated for raising the necessary sum was “upon the Jews,” though eventually it was “laid upon land” instead.7 Nor did the threat soon pass. Powell’s proposal is included with papers gathered in aid of a plan a few years later to establish a ghetto in London so that the taxation of Jews might be more effectively farmed – this the plan of Sir Peter Pett approved by Milton’s friend the Earl of Anglesey.8 Again the aim was how best to make use of Jews, perceived as an alien group available for exploitation. Prynne and Violet had argued at length that “by the Lawes of God, and of this Nation, these Jewes are Blasphemers against Christ, and . . . [that] their Purse and Bodies may pay for it.”9 Violet learned from Prynne that Jews had been “good milch kine” to earlier kings, as shown by “the Records in the Tower,” and seems to recommend the practice of the great Turk, who “makes use of them as Spunges, that suck up the wealth of the People . . . and once in seven years or oftner, [he] squeezes them” (2, 5). Moreover, it might be hoped “the Jewes over all the World will ransom these Jewes Bodies at a great rate” (7). Whatever the fascinations of such exploitation, Prynne and Violet were also concerned about matters of Christian principle. Their concerns followed from New Testament injunctions that seemed to demand the continuing exclusion of Jews from England.10 It appeared self-evident that God Himself had rejected the people who had rejected His Son, for Jews had been made the saddest Spectacles of divine Justice, and humane Misery of all other Nations in the World, being quite extirpated out of their own Land, almost totally deleted by the sword, pestilence, famine; carried away Captives, and dispersed like so many Vagabonds over the face of the whole Earth, as the very off-scowring of the world, and execration, derision of all other people, having no place, City, Form of Government, or Republike of their own, in any corner of the Universe.11

This general condemnation had a more specific inflection, however, for Prynne and others were acutely concerned about the consequences of 7

8

9 10

11

Memoirs of Sir John Reresby, ed. Andrew Browning, rev. ed. Mary K. Geiter and W. A. Speck (1991), p. 99. For this context, see Anglesey’s letter of 6 Aug. 1680 recommending Sir Peter Pett’s expertise on the Jewish question to Secretary [of State, Leoline Jenkins] (Oxford, All Souls MS 239, f. 424), transcribed and discussed in Lucien Wolf, “Status of the Jews in England after the Re-settlement,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 4 (1899–1901), pp. 177–93; for Pett as Anglesey’s man of business at this time, Mark Goldie, “Sir Peter Pett, Sceptical Toryism and the Science of Toleration in the 1680s,” in Persecution and Toleration, ed. W. J. Sheils (Oxford, 1984), p. 250. Violet, Petition (1661), p. 6. Prynne, A Short Demurrer To the Jewes Long discontinued Remitter into England, 1st ed. (1656), pp. 57–61, 105. Prynne, Short Demurrer, p. 1.

60

nichol as von maltz ahn

readmission for English religion. Not least in 1655, the Presbyterian of the Interregnum might agree with former members of the Church of England, “That it was now a very ill time to bring in the Jews, when the people were so dangerously and generally bent to Apostacy, and all sorts of Novelties and Errors in Religion; and would sooner turn Jews, than the Jews Christians.” Prynne’s characterization of medieval Jewry’s insolence “against the Christians” recalls the present boldness in the mid-1650s of Socinians, Quakers, and other sects.12 He plainly implies that the proposed readmission of Jews is but another evil fruit of Cromwellian toleration.13 Violet soon observes that “since this Toleration many people have bin seduced, and the Jewes Exercise of their Religion, being every day solemnly kept in London . . . multitudes of men and women seeking after novelties, and seduced by the devil, have been wavering in their Religion, and at length turned absolute Jewes, keeping Saturday for Sunday, and in many other Jewish Ceremonies are their Proselites.”14 The sabbatarian threat provided just an instance of the wider Judaizing of the sects.15 Aggravating these concerns was the fear that Cromwell’s government might profit financially from this readmission. It found lasting description as one of his tyrannical schemes, and as one from which he might benefit hugely.16 Such resentments were shot through with the certainty that Jews had ever prospered financially, however punished by God and man. Alleged to be ruinous to trade, Jews were also seen as gatherers of wealth who had much enriched medieval kings. The “Machiavillian Policy” of encouraging their settlement only to charge them heavily for the privilege seemed to permit the crown anciently, or the Protector presently, to circumvent parliament in raising supply. A further tension discloses itself in Violet’s claim in 1660–1661 that with a fresh expulsion “posteritie shall for ever be rid of them in this Kingdom, to the comfort of all good Christians, Merchants, and Tradesmen of London.”17 That London had in the years before the Restoration suffered too many bad Christian merchants and tradesmen was understood. Nor is it long before Violet states as much.18 12 13

14 15

16 18

Prynne, Short Demurrer, p. 4. For the pejorative associations of “toleration” already in the 1640s and 1650s, and Cromwell’s own demurral from a “Cromwellian” toleration, see Blair Worden, “Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate,” in Persecution and Toleration, ed. W. J. Sheils (Oxford, 1984), pp. 199–233. Violet, Petition (1661), p. 2. See the discussion in David S. Katz, Sabbath and Sectarianism in Seventeenth-Century England (Leiden, 1988), pp. 1–20. 17 Violet, Petition (1661), p. 7. Violet, Petition (1661), p. 7. Violet, Petition (1661), 2nd pagination, 5–6: “All men knowes London commands all the Treasure of the Kingdom, the merchants commands the Treasure of London, what swarms of Sectarian

Making Use of the Jews: Milton and Philo-Semitism

61

Might the city merchant now be reclaimed for Restoration royalism? At issue was the lasting association of the prosperous Puritan, or later the prosperous Dissenter, with a Judaizing Protestantism given to Old Testament legalism.19 As Zeal-of-the-Land Busy knows, his “brethren stand taxed” of Judaism.20 Moreover, because the greedy “Citt” was identified with usury, it was possible to see religious and business practices alike as informed by Jewish example. In the culture wars of the day, the alien Shylock’s qualities were often recognized in his homegrown counterpart. One example may stand for many: when Thomas Randolph satirizes a hypocritical Puritan in The Muses Looking-Glasse (1643), he supplies an avaricious burgher who complains of comedy that “We cannot put our monies to increase / By lawfull usury . . . / . . . but our ghosts must walk / Upon their stages” (2). Taking interest on money was of course widespread and a central part of the commercial revolution now just underway. How far did commercial society side with or against the crown? One strategy of self-defence seems to have been to project onto Jews evils that might otherwise be identified more widely with the merchant class, thus also deflecting confiscatory royal measures. It was, after all, with City merchants that Richard Powell made his “humble proposalls . . . For raiseing monyes out of the Jewes estates.”21 The more personal aspect of Powell’s animus is difficult to judge. His own family had had sometimes bruising encounters with City moneymen, not least the Miltons, to whom the family estate and his sister Mary had been in some part sacrificed. That this need not spell complete alienation is suggested by his long association with Christopher Milton, a fellow bencher at the Inner Temple whose career his own parallels.22 However, whether or not he shared his father’s propensity for schemes to get rich quickly, Powell seems in proposing wide confiscation from Jews to have combined political opportunism with resentment of Jewish financial success. Their vulnerability as aliens engaged from him no sense of their rights under

19

20

21 22

Merchants, and Tradesmen are in London, all wise men know, that for sixteen years together they had the rule in the Common Councel, and Court of Aldermen . . . be wary of them.” For a recent discussion of some eighteenth-century manifestations of the same stereotypes, see Frans De Bruyn, “Anti-Semitism, Millenarianism, and Radical Dissent in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 34 (2001), pp. 577–600. Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1925–52), vol. 7, p. 39. Oxford, All Souls College, MS 239, f. 478. F. A. Inderwick, A Calendar of the Inner Temple Records, 5 vols. (1896–1919), vols. 2 and 3 passim. Christopher Milton acts on both his brother and this Richard Powell’s behalf in a way that suggests some longer-term accord about the Wheatley estate (Parker, Milton, 450, 504, 648); but Milton to his death saw himself as owed the Mary Powell dowry of £1000 (Parker, Milton, 634, 647–9). See also John T. Shawcross, The Arms of the Family (Lexington, 2004), pp. 43–5.

62

nichol as von maltz ahn

the law of nations, but rather an eagerness to exploit their legally dubious status. Against this we may be reassured to find Milton among the philo-Semites. Of those who welcomed Menasseh Ben Israel’s mission to achieve the readmission of Jews, so many were Milton’s friends that he seems likely to have been welcoming too. Surveying the leading Independents, Nabil Matar associates the philo-Semites Thomas Goodwin, John Owen, Peter Sterry, and Henry Jessey with Milton although, as Matar observes, “Milton’s name is conspicuously missing from the list of Cromwell’s supporters on the project of the Jews’ admission in 1655.”23 Still closer connections can be drawn between Milton and with the millenarian members of the Hartlib circle. Nevertheless, even these warmer friendships need not entail a complete sharing of views. Samuel Hartlib, for example, had a long commitment to the conversion of Jews and also to improving Christian knowledge of Judaism.24 The closeness of Milton’s self-declared “private friendship” with Hartlib is hard to assess, however. In addressing Of Education to Hartlib in 1644 he signals their common purpose and the frequent references to Milton in the Hartlib papers show some persistent contact between them for at least a decade (1643–54).25 Yet these references do not indicate whether Milton was philo-Semitic. To Hartlib, he recommends an educational programme in which the learning of Hebrew seems something of an afterthought, to be achieved perhaps in the sixth year of study, though Milton’s own schooling and that which he then offered his pupils included an unusual measure of “the Chief Oriental Languages,” including Hebrew, for the purpose of Bible study.26 Milton’s note differs from Hartlib’s, even in the heady days of 1641,27 and his comparatively moderate millenarianism accords with his apparent reserve where it comes to the conversion of Jews. 23

24

25

26

27

N. I. Matar, “Milton and the Idea of the Restoration of the Jews,” Studies in English Literature 27 (1987), pp. 111–12. For specific measures Hartlib took toward these ends, see especially Richard Popkin, “Hartlib, Dury and the Jews,” in Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation, ed. Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie, and Tim Raylor (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 118–36; David S. Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England 1603–1655 (Oxford, 1982), pp. 216–20. CPW 2:362–3, 414; Hartlib Papers CD-ROM, sv. “Milton” and “Melton”; Turnbull, Hartlib, Dury and Comenius, 40–44. A later letter from Hartlib to Robert Boyle suggests that by 1658 Hartlib has no close relation to Milton, The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, ed. Thomas Birch, 2nd ed., 6 vols. (1772), vol. 6, p. 100 (2 Feb. 1657/8). It is as if Milton came to remember his plan to teach students Hebrew only when he cited their Sunday studies of “the highest matter of Theology, and Church History,” “ere” which time this language “might have been gain’d” (CPW 2:399–400), although the contemporary Tetrachordon spells out the need for Hebrew and “the oriental dialects” because “to Scholiaze upon the Gospel [only] through Greek” will stumble the scholiast (CPW 2:671). The best evocation of this season of reforming hope remains Hugh Trevor-Roper, “Three Foreigners,” in Religion, the Reformation and Social Change, 2nd ed. (1972), especially pp. 263–76.

Making Use of the Jews: Milton and Philo-Semitism

63

With other of Milton and Hartlib’s friends the contrast can be more striking still, especially in later years. For example, the difference shows between Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649) and the more millenarian cast of the contemporary Rights of the Kingdom by his friend John Sadler. Sadler’s warm regard for Milton is attested in three letters from 1648.28 The Tenure is as silent on millenarian matters as The Rights of the Kingdom is vocal. Milton cites Old Testament examples justifying tyrannicide, but Sadler anticipates greater changes still, not least for Jews: How they are Now, I need not say. although I might also beare them witnesse, that They are yet Zealous in Their Way. nor doe they wholly want, ingenuous able men. of whom I cannot but with Honour, mention Him, that hath so much obliged the world, by his learned Writings; Rab Menasseh ben Israel: a very learned, Civill Man, and Lover of our Nation. The more I think upon the Great Change, now comming on Them, and All the World; the more I would be Just and Mercifull to Them, to All. Nay, universall sweetnesse, if I could: a Christian, overcomming All with Love.29

Sadler’s correspondence with Hartlib shows their shared interest in Judaica, which Sadler was well placed to gather during his stay in Amsterdam.30 Moreover, he would play a leading part under Cromwell in fostering the readmission of Jews and in supporting Menasseh Ben Israel and his family even after its unsuccess.31 Already in 1649, however, Sadler writes in a very different spirit than does Milton, who in that year claims that “we detest Judaism” even as “we know ourselves commanded by St. Paul. Rom. 11. to respect the Jews, and by all means to endeavor thir conversion.”32 Other of Milton’s near friends likewise seemed to have had stronger millenarian expectations than he did, in ways that fostered their regard for Judaism. 28

29

30

31

32

In 1648 (17 Aug., 15 Sept. and again, perhaps in October), Sadler, in writing Hartlib from the continent, also sends his regards to Milton: Sheffield University, Hartlib Papers, 49/9/4A, 5B and 17B – cf. George H. Turnbull, Hartlib, Dury and Comenius (Liverpool, 1947), p. 41; Gordon Campbell, A Milton Chronology (Basingstoke, 1999), p. 96. John Sadler, The Rights of the Kingdom (1649), pp. 47–8 (2nd pag.); Katz, Philo-Semitism, pp. 103, 140–1. For the millenarian strain, see also Sadler’s letters in the Hartlib Papers, especially 46/9/23A (to Hartlib, undated) and his fuller exposition in Olbia. The New Iland Lately Discovered (1660). See especially the books Sadler sends (Mishnah, and so forth), cited in his letter of 16 Sept. 1649 (Sheffield, Hartlib MSS, 46/9/7A). Katz, Philo-Semitism, 194–5, 231, 241–2, 244; Lucien Wolf, “American Elements in the Re-settlement,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, 3 (1896–98), pp. 88–90. CPW 3:326 – he writes thus in Articles of Peace . . . Upon all which are added Observations ([16 May] 1649), in response to the renewed Presbyterian charge that Independency – now the early Commonwealth – was embracing “Paganism and Judaism in the arms of toleration”; more on the context appears in Don M. Wolfe, “Limits of Miltonic Toleration,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 60 (1961), p. 841.

64

nichol as von maltz ahn

Roger Williams, for example, to whom Milton had close ties in 1652–3,33 had long had a tolerant readiness to accept alternative religious traditions as part of the mix that was to issue in the apocalypse.34 Yet as Jeffrey Shoulson has observed, Williams might be faulted by his contemporaries for the freedom of his typology,35 which resulted in interpretations of Jewish history in which the historical specificity of their experience was minimized, and its applications to Christendom enlarged. This is a far cry from Milton’s more forensic use of proof texts from the Hebrew Bible, especially in the contemporary divorce tracts (1643–5), which Jason Rosenblatt has characterized as among Milton’s most philo-Semitic writings.36 Another close friend of Milton’s, Lady Ranelagh, was conspicuously hospitable to Menasseh Ben Israel during his visit, but again her millenarianism seems to run well ahead of Milton’s.37 More like Milton’s is the stance of Sir Henry Vane, whose Zeal Examin’d (1652) invited Milton’s admiring sonnet to Vane a few weeks after its publication. Vane conceded that Scripture “Speakes of the Jewish Ordinances very distinctly, and that they should remaine for ever” whereas “outward Ordinances” had no place in Christianity, unless perhaps in the end-time.38 Although Vane speculated with a millenarian freedom unlike Milton’s caution, he did not propose any human agency in the conversion or even the preparatory gathering of Israel; when he returned to the subject a few years later, he allowed the effectiveness of the first Covenant – a partial acceptance of Christ, as Vane understood it – even as he used a typology as free as that of his friend Roger Williams to explain the Pauline claim that the elder shall serve the younger (Romans 9:12).39 For evidence of Milton’s differences with the millenarian philo-Semites we can turn to his correspondent Moses Wall. Wall’s old friendship with Milton appears only from the one late letter extant (26 May 1659), but it 33 34

35

36 37

38

39

Parker, Milton, p. 1008. Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent (1644), passim, but especially sig. a2v , pp. 206–209; Katz, PhiloSemitism, pp. 110, 144, 172, 174, 186–8. Jeffrey Shoulson, Milton and the Rabbis: Hebraism, Hellenism, and Christianity (New York, 2001), pp. 67–8; see also Katz, Philo-Semitism, p. 174. Jason Rosenblatt, Torah and Law in Paradise Lost (Princeton, 1994), pp. 45ff., 79–89, 97–113. Menasseh Ben Israel, The Hope of Israel: The English Translation by Moses Wall, 1652, ed. Henry M´echoulan and G´erard Nahon (Oxford, 1987), p. 59; Malcolm Oster, “Millenarianism and the New Science: The Case of Robert Boyle,” in Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation, ed. Greengrass et al., pp. 142ff. [Henry Vane], Zeal Examin’d, especially pp. 39–40. Thomason’s date on Zeal Examin’d is 15 June 1652; Milton’s tribute is dated 3 July 1652 in George Sikes, Life and Death of Sir Henry Vane (1662), pp. 93–4; Carolyn Pollizzotto, “The Campaign against The Humble Proposals of 1652,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 38 (1987), pp. 569–81 [571–2, 578–9] – Vane was Williams’ close friend. Henry Vane, The Retired Mans Meditations (1655), 117ff., 128–9, 184–211, 190–1, 198, 202–203, 208, 403–28, 419.

Making Use of the Jews: Milton and Philo-Semitism

65

is a revealing document that deserves a much closer reading than it has received. It shows Milton’s loss of standing in the eyes of the apocalyptics and how they associated him with the Cromwellian court. Moreover, we know much more about Moses Wall than Miltonists have understood.40 Of the two persons of that name ventured by William Riley Parker, he is the younger contemporary of Milton’s at Cambridge, admitted to Emmanuel College in 1627, later chaplain to the Earl of Warwick (1643–44, at least), with close ties to Hartlib and his circle, as well as to Sir Henry Vane.41 He had been an early proponent of the readmission of Jews, to which his translation of Menasseh Ben Israel’s Hope of Israel made an important contribution. Again, however, Wall’s work from the late 1630s shows a contrast with even Milton’s most millenarian writing from 1641, and contrasts more markedly still with Milton’s greater reserve on this score by the end of the 1640s. Wall is a convinced millenarian, “deeply tinctured,” as he puts it, “with Mr. Mede’s notions,” who dates his apocalyptic interests to his Cambridge days.42 However, his patient impatience for “the last day” had in the Protectorate turned to a bitter anxiety about “God’s withdrawing himself from us”: In the time of the wars against the late King, I thought I saw God clearly; god was among us, he showed himself plainly, he roused up himself like a mighty gyant, and was ready to give us more of himself, and to open his bosome to receive us; but upon the unhappy grasping of power into the hands of the late Usurper, god withdrew, and hid himself, and the body of the Nation proved apostaticall.43

Wall’s recovery from his own earlier temptation by “Court, or City vanityes,” when he had lived “for a time about White-hall,” thus led in turn to a hatred for the Protectorate. His distrust was aggravated by “that barbarous action of committing that gallant gentleman Sir Henry Vane (whose name will live in honour, when the memory of that great Persecutor shall rott)” to jail in the autumn of 1656, which imprisonment had for republican and apocalyptic alike so defined the Usurper’s ambition.44 40

41

42

43 44

Cf. CPW 7:510–13, also Parker, Milton, p. 1251. The readiest guide to Wall’s part in fostering Jewish hopes is M´echoulan and Nahon’s modern edition of his translation of The Hope of Israel, especially its “Note on Moses Wall” by Richard Popkin, pp. 165–70. Parker, Milton, p. 1069; Vivian de Sola Pinto, Peter Sterry (Cambridge, 1934), pp. 14–16; Wall – Hartlib, 6 Feb. 1659 (Sheffield, Hartlib MSS 34/4/25B); see also Wall’s dedication to Cromwell’s cousin Elizabeth St. John (2 Oct. 1639) of his translation of Joseph Hall, “Henochisme,” Harvard MS Eng 740, ff. 1r -4r (Henochismus is part of Bishop Hall’s Autoschediasmata [Gr.], 1635). Joseph Mede was the great student of apocalypse who held such sway in Wall and Milton’s Cambridge. Wall’s correspondence is full of such considerations, Wall – Hartlib, 19 Mar., 3 Apr., 8 May 1655, 6 Feb. 1659 (Sheffield, Hartlib MSS 34/4/9A, 11A, 13A, 25B). Wall – Hartlib, 22 Jan. 1659 (Sheffield, Hartlib MSS 34/4/21A). Wall – Hartlib, 4 Jan. and 9 Jan. 1659 (Sheffield, Hartlib MSS 34/4/17A, 19A).

66

nichol as von maltz ahn

Such disenchantment, Wall explains to Hartlib, had contributed to the interruption of their correspondence. A similar rebuke of those too closely associated with the Cromwellian court appears in Wall’s letter to Milton.45 He plainly thought Milton had connived at the tyranny of the Protector, from which Vane had suffered. Moreover, where Milton seems to have complained in his letter to Wall about “the Non-progresency of the nation,” Wall replies with spirit, pleading the betrayal by the populace by its leadership, “those who had made deep Protestations of their Zeal for our Liberty both spiritual and civill, and made the fairest offers to be asserters thereof, and whom we thereupon trusted.” Reacting against Milton’s e´litism, and in keeping with Wall’s regard elsewhere for the poor, this suggests that Milton might bear more responsibility for past failures than he has accepted.46 Wall himself had complained to Hartlib in January 1658–59 that “the body of the Nation proved apostaticall.” Later, however, when the opportunity of “the 2nd great Parliament,” by which he hoped God “about to do great things,” had begun to pass, and when Milton’s response was again to blame the people, Wall’s was now again to blame the leaders.47 It is as if despite his protestation of regard for A Treatise of Civil Power, and his recollection of Milton’s “former Light” in “bad times,” Wall was still suspicious of “court parasites, and time-servers,” and “how court-relations and self-interest will wrest the writings of almost any man.”48 Yet it is when this philo-Semite laments obstructions by the chief priests and Pharisees of the day that his figurative usage hints at a structure of thought that could accommodate Jews, even while disavowing some traditional constructions of Jewry – “You know,” he adds in writing to Milton, “who they were that watched our Saviors Sepulchre to keep him from rising” (Matt. 27:62–66). Wall’s promotion of Menasseh Ben Israel drew on that cleric’s messianism and responded to the theological cast of his works. These shared with 45

46 47

48

Milton may have written more than once, as well as sending the Treatise of Civil Power, before Wall was persuaded to respond: Wall begins “I received Yours the Day after you wrote and do humbly thank you that you are pleased to honor me, with your Letters.” CPW 7:510. CPW 7:511; Wall – Hartlib, 22 Jan. 1659 (Sheffield, Hartlib MSS 34/4/21A). Austin Woolrych questions the dating and proposes this transcript may have mistaken May for March (he claims that Wall would surely have referred to the change in government at the later date), but this is to overlook the subjunctive implication where Wall notes Milton’s “Relation to the Court, (though I think a Commonwealth was more friendly to you than a Court)” (CPW 7:83, 510, 513). Woolrych is right to suppose Wall keen on the new parliament earlier in 1659, as letters in the Hartlib correspondence prove (Wall-Hartlib, 22, 25 Jan. 1659: Sheffield, Hartlib MSS 34/4/21A, 23B). The latter phrase comes from Wall’s evaluation of Nedham’s Mercurius Politicus, but also of those of even “better principles than Mr Needham hath.” Wall – Hartlib, 9 Jan. 1658/9 (Sheffield, Hartlib MSS 34/4/19A).

Making Use of the Jews: Milton and Philo-Semitism

67

other Sephardic productions the conversos’ legacy of having been immersed in a religion experienced as “a complex of dogmas and rules based on revelation.”49 Israel’s role in articulating such a theology contributed to his difficulties with the chief rabbis in Amsterdam. This preceded the further spur to remigration occasioned by the growth of the Ashkenazi population following the exodus from Eastern Europe, especially after the Chmielnicki pogroms in the Ukraine (1648–50) and the devastations of the SwedishPolish War (1655–60), as well as the influx of Sephardim from the West after the Dutch loss to the Portuguese of the Brazilian colonies of Recife and Bahia.50 Wall and others perceived the opportunity in Israel’s disaffection. Like the Karaite sect’s rejection of rabbinical tradition in favour of sola scriptura, which suggested common ground with Protestantism, Israel’s reaction against rabbinical confinements seems to have recommended him as an especially promising target for eventual conversion. Moreover, Jewish messianism might in some part converge with its Christian counterpart, as Katz has shown. Far from discouraging such expectations on both sides, Israel himself was profoundly in their grip, even as he sought relief from any more constraining rabbinism in Amsterdam.51 The philo-Semites’ efforts to readmit Jews to England seem never, as Hans Schoeps observed over fifty years ago, to have extended to a liberal or humanitarian regard for toleration and Jewish faith and culture.52 To apply the categorical imperative, however anachronistic,53 to their work is to reveal their friendship to Jews as doubly suspect. First, the millenarians’ kindness to Israel was explicitly aimed at his and his coreligionists’ conversion. A Jewish population newly recovered from its baptism into Iberian Christianity, and its uneasy history as conversos, was now to be reconverted 49

50

51 52

53

Peter van Rooden, “Conceptions of Judaism as Religion in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic,” in Christianity and Judaism, ed. Diana Wood (Oxford, 1992), pp. 299–308 [308]; Yosef Kaplan, “The Jews in the Republic until about 1750: Religious, Cultural, and Social Life,” in The History of the Jews in the Netherlands, ed. J. C. H. Blom, R. G. Fuks-Mansfeld, and I. Sch¨offer, trans. A. J. Pomerans and E. Pomerans (Oxford, 2002), pp. 116–63 [116–7, 139]. Jonathan Israel, “The Republic of the United Netherlands until about 1750: Demography and Economic Activity,” in The History of the Jews in the Netherlands, ed. J. C. H. Blom, pp. 85–115. See also Israel, Hope of Israel, ed. M´echoulan and Nahon, pp. 38–40, 42–51. Hans Joachim Schoeps, Philosemitismus im Barock (T¨ubingen, 1952), pp. 1–2. Schoeps’ categories now seem rather of their day and he too hopeful in seeing this ideal as more nearly attained in the eighteenth century; a recent dissection of the lasting resentment against rabbinism argues otherwise, Adam Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2003). Kant himself is much implicated in the German invention of race: Robert Bernasconi, “Who Invented the Concept of Race? Kant’s Role in the Enlightenment Construction of Race,” in Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Oxford, 2001), pp. 11–36; Susan M. Shell, “Kant’s Conception of a Human Race,” in The German Invention of Race, eds. Sara Eigen and Mark Larrimore (Albany, 2006), pp. 55–72.

68

nichol as von maltz ahn

afresh, if to a better Christian confession than that of yesteryear. How hopeful was it thus to become pawns in a confessional struggle? Even this was not an end in itself, however. For the salvation of Jews was just a prelude to the apocalyptic end-time that the millenarians so devoutly expected. Just as there was a failure to credit Judaism as a living faith, so there was an eagerness to sacrifice Judaism to the thousand-year kingdom associated with the Second Coming. David Katz has argued that ulterior motives on the part of Christians need not lead us to forgo the term philo-Semitism. He contrasts mid-sixteenth-century papal measures against Judaism with the interest in Jewish learning and religion in the Protestant world, especially owing to the millenarian scripting of the Jewish role in the apocalypse.54 However, Katz scants two other options, in part because they did not find much articulation at this time, nor is the first positively philo-Semitic although it may be viewed as peculiarly so in effect. This is that, rather than being buffeted between the very different threats of the Catholic and Protestant Reformations, Inquisition and millenarianism, Jews might find acceptance either on the more secular basis of their right as a nation to the rights of nations, or on religious grounds as the seed of Abraham, promised salvation independently of Christian revelation or conversion. The more secular claim is not much apparent in Milton’s work, though it may be inferred from his acceptance of Jews as a nation. The prevalence of the modern states-system has obscured contending Early Modern conceptions of nationality, which much complicate the identification of nation with territory.55 Moreover, Milton himself uses the term “nation” differently in different contexts over the course of his literary and polemical career, a not inappropriate response to the semantic range of the term in his period.56 That Jews might be understood as a nation in some sort invited significant concessions to them. In the divorce tracts, where Milton invoked Mosaic law in support of his position, he seems to have been the readier to impugn 54

55

56

David Katz, ‘The Phenomenon of Philo-Semitism,’ in Christianity and Judaism, ed. Diana Wood (Oxford, 1992), pp. 327–8, 333ff. For a wide-ranging and not uncontroversial discussion of the geopolitical transformation marked by the Westphalian states-system usually thought to have emerged at the end of the Thirty Years’ War, see Benno Teschke’s post-Marxist The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern International Relations (London: Verso, 2003). The investigation of Milton and “nation” is now in full career, in keeping with our need for a better grasp on the protean forms of nationalism (see Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England, ed. Paul Stevens and David Loewenstein [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming]). The richness of the subject may already be estimated from a comparison of the several meanings listed in OED with the many listings for “nation,” “national,” “nations,” and cognates in William Ingram and Kathleen Swaim, A Concordance to Milton’s Poetry (Oxford, 1972) and Laurence Sterne and Harold Kollmeier, A Concordance to the English Prose of John Milton (Binghamton, 1985).

Making Use of the Jews: Milton and Philo-Semitism

69

Jews, but confirmed their status as a “Nation” even there.57 Certainly by the Restoration, and likely before, Milton knew that “Forreigners” were “Privileg’d by the Law of Nations” and that even when these were Catholic their worship might be protected in England (CPW 8:431). His youthful visit to Grotius – “one of prime note among learned men” – may for present purposes symbolize his lasting internationalism, which seems to have led him later to chafe under the parochialism of the Rump Parliament; from Grotian thought he could also learn that foreigners were exempt from some parts of the law.58 Milton’s recognition that Jews had a covenant relation with God eventually comes to supersede the reading of Romans 11 in his earlier Observations (1649), where he, in what may then have been a defensive move, had stressed Paul’s injunction to Christians “by all means to endeavor thir conversion” (CPW 3:326). Milton’s careful biblicism seems to lie behind his growing patience with the postponement of the millennium. Passages in De Doctrina and Paradise Regain’d alike show his resistance to millenarian extravagance on the subject of the calling or conversion of Jews in the end-time. Responding to Wollebius’ caution on this point, in De Doctrina Milton observes that (only) some authorities cite “the calling of the entire nation not only of the Jews but also of the Israelites” as a portent of the Second Coming;59 in Paradise Regain’d, the effect is mirrored in the deliberate uncertainty where the Son suggests God’s “wondrous call / May bring them back” in the fullness of time (3:434–5, emphasis mine). However, the caution here also stops well short of the much more severe position that prophetic claims (especially in Isaiah 11 and 14) refer just to some release from an earlier Captivity. Rather, in following Calvinist orthodoxy, Milton agrees that the Incarnation does not void the old covenant with the Jews and that “God’s blessing still rests among them,” which promise “is to be fulfilled not allegorically but literally.”60 Because Pauline studies in the last twenty years or so have revolutionized our understanding of the relation of Torah to Christ in Paul’s writings, the question also arises how far Milton might have had some better than normal sense of the particular rhetorical 57 58

59 60

CPW 2:289. CPW 2:238, 715; 4:615; Leo Miller, John Milton and the Oldenburg Safeguard (New York, 1985), pp. 171–2, 186; Hugo Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, ed. Frances W. Kelsey, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1925), I.1.16–17. CPW 6:617–18. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1960), Bk 4, chap. 16, sect. 14–15 (pp. 1336–8). For wider context, see Daniel M. Swetschinski, “From the Middle Ages to the Golden Age, 1516–1621,” in The History of the Jews in the Netherlands, J. C. H. Blom, pp. 56–64.

70

nichol as von maltz ahn

orientation of Paul’s epistles to a Gentile audience (not least in Rome), rather than just universalizing from them. Nevertheless, he does not seem peculiarly alert or prescient on this point. Take, for example, his glossing of Romans 9 – a key text for Arminian responses to claims for predestination – with John 1:11–12 and his resulting assertion “Hence God now prefers the Gentiles to the Jews.” He does go out of his way, however, to declare that the election of some does not mean the reprobation of others: “If the elder boy or elder nation shall serve the younger, and in this case certainly the nation is meant rather than the boy, the elder is not necessarily decreed reprobate.”61 It seems impossible for Christians not to be supersessionist in some degree – the New Testament, not least so styled, makes preemptive claims about the meaning of so much of the Old – but here the supersessionism at work is less violent than in most of Milton’s contemporaries. The philo-Semitic impulse may paradoxically have been weaker in Milton because he thought Jews capable of salvation under their law. Moreover, if that law was an impediment to Gentiles, he may even have seen conversion in its historically coercive aspect as an impediment to Jews. The point is of peculiar interest because Milton in Paradise Regain’d describes the calling of Jews at the end of time in terms that nowhere propose conversion. It has been claimed that here Milton’s “Jesus in effect supports former Cromwellian policy”62 but because such policy insisted on the opportunity for conversion it goes unsupported in Milton’s description of God’s “wondrous call” to which Jews will finally respond “repentant and sincere” (PR 3:434–5). Nabil Matar reads the last phrase as insisting on the Jews’ “prior conversion to Christianity” (119). Yet Milton’s understanding of what “due providence and time” (PR 3:440) may bring is conspicuously underdetermined. In what sense is Jesus “Israel’s true king” (PR 3:441)? Jesus can affirm that Jews “shall yet regain / That seat and reign in Israel without end” (PR 2:441–2) without in any way specifying his part in their future reign. The final Jewish repentance and sincerity cited in Paradise Regain’d have as their antecedents the “Unhumbled, unrepentant, unreformed” (PR 3:429) behaviours of Jews in the Captivity, which Jesus, rejecting Satan’s temptation, sees as unchanged in his day and unlikely of change should he already win them an earthly kingdom. However, this eventual repentance 61 62

CPW 6:196–9, 197. John Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd ed. (1997), 482n. Nabil Matar’s argument on this point is complicated by doubtful speculation about some earlier date of composition for Paradise Regain’d, making it in part a Protectoral production (“Milton and the Idea of the Restoration of the Jews,” 111–16); moreover his conclusion that “Milton did not view the Jews as a community with an individual history and religion, but as delayed Christians” (121) seems inconsistent with some of the evidence that Matar himself cites.

Making Use of the Jews: Milton and Philo-Semitism

71

and sincerity are not specifically Christian. The very difficulty of the passage suggests the discipline of Milton’s biblicism, reluctant to impose more on uncertain materials, reluctant too just to accept contemporary assumptions and the aggressive supersessionism that informs them. Milton’s less than Trinitarian conception of the Son may contribute to the uncertainty here. “The elder is not necessarily decreed reprobate” (CPW 6:197); nor do the vistas on futurity in Paradise Lost show Milton requiring conversion of Jews for their salvation (3:323–41; 12:458–65). “To the sons of Abraham’s loins / Salvation shall be preached” (12:447–8), but this prelude to the wider preaching of salvation “to the sons / Of Abraham’s faith” is inclusive rather than exclusive. It has been claimed categorically that “Unconverted Jews . . . like the ones pleading for settlement in 1655 did not interest” Milton.63 What evidence there is on this point seems much less conclusive. His imaginative investment in Samson, for example, suggests no lack of curiosity, and if this hero of faith was sanctified by Hebrews 11:32, the complexity of Milton’s engagement with him is reflected in the extraordinary range of responses to the poem, not least in recent years. It may be argued that Samson Agonistes reflects less curiosity than the egotism of self-projection – that Milton was not here interested in a Jew but in himself – but if so the very choice of alter ego is telling. In my eyes, the poem movingly describes the trials of faith without Christian revelation, and as published with Paradise Regain’d in 1670–71, after the renewal of the Conventicles Act, compellingly evokes for a dissenting audience the possible merit in occasional conformity.64 However, it is the self-identification with a Jewish hero that may recall for us Milton’s long-standing preoccupation with distinguishing the spirit from the letter of the Law, as well as his insistent references to those who betray the tradition of faith described in Hebrew 11:32. It is here that Samuel Stollman has been able to distinguish between Milton’s disparagement of “Judaism” (narrow legalism and ceremonial observance) and his regard for “Hebraism” (a piety capable of more universal application, or “the ‘spirit’ of the Old Testament”) – and to distinguish between Milton’s “anti-Judaic” stance and any consciously anti-Semitic one.65 Yet Stollman’s is a synchronic 63

64

65

Matar, “Milton and the Idea of the Restoration of the Jews,” p. 121, who seems here to revert to Don M. Wolfe’s judgement on Milton’s “ambivalence and withdrawal,” “Limits of Miltonic Toleration,” pp. 834–46. On the last, I am grateful to Phillip Donnelly for sharing with me before publication his chapter on “Samson Agonistes as Personal Drama,” which seeks to move beyond the present impasse between regenerationist and revisionist readings. Samuel S. Stollman, “Milton’s Dichotomy of ‘Judaism’ and ‘Hebraism’,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 89 (1974), pp. 105–112 [108, 111]; and for the application of this distinction to

72

nichol as von maltz ahn

reading of Milton’s position which draws on the Pauline emphasis on the conversion of Jews in Observations; he does not investigate the possibility of Milton changing that position over time.66 The complexity of Milton’s response and its energy must have followed in part from his concern lest he be mistaken for one of the “scribes and Pharisees” he so often attacks. Here he had twofold reason to fear being inscribed into the very category he so often deprecated. First was his own situation as a usurious Citt, brought up in a usurer’s household and himself a usurer.67 Was Milton at all self-conscious where he wrote of Jews that “their hearts were set upon usury, and are to this day, no Nation more [so]”?68 Did he worry that their readmission to England, and London in particular, might increase the competition in this quarter? For money-lending was not just part of Milton’s youth, some immediate legacy of his father’s business, but rather his own lifelong means of making a living, a source of income more lasting than the salaries he drew as a teacher and then state servant.69 In addition to the suggestive documents already known (the Maundy mortgage and Hamey sale, for example, detailed in J. Milton French’s Life Records), there is new evidence, from as late as 1666, of Milton’s having money out on loan.70 It is not clear whether the “M. Gr.” in question is a relation of Sir Richard Grosvenor, to whom Milton’s father lent money, although this being John Pell’s report with reference to William Brereton argues the continuation of the Miltons’ role as money-lenders to

66 67

68 69

70

Samson see his “Milton’s Understanding of the ‘Hebraic’ in Samson Agonistes,” Studies in Philology 69 (1972), pp. 334–47. Stollman, “Milton’s Dichotomy,” pp. 106, 111. On the historical background see Norman Jones, God and the Moneylenders: Usury and Law in Early Modern England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), and for the propitious circumstances in the 1630s for metropolitan money-lenders, Frank T. Melton, Sir Robert Clayton and the Origins of English Deposit Banking 1658–1685 (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 12, 25. CPW 2:289. Miltonists seem reluctant to concede as much: for a recent instance, compare the assumption that only Milton’s “father’s fortune, on which the poet lived for long periods, was made largely by moneylending” (David Hawkes, “The Concept of the ‘Hireling’ in Milton’s Theology,” Milton Studies 43, 2004, p. 67); or his “leisure was purchased by the interest earned from his father’s loans,” (Stephen M. Fallon, “‘Elect above the rest’: Theology as Self-Representation in Milton,” in Milton and Heresy, ed. Stephen Dobranski and John Rumrich (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 99–100. John Pell writes to Theodore Haak (27 June 1666) with regrets about what is plainly some ill fortune on the part of one “M. Gr.” who seeks to clear his estate through an advantageous second marriage with a much older woman; because their friend “My Lord” William Brereton (third Baron Brereton of Leighlin) “promis’d to make inquiries as soone as may be,” Pell has advised Brereton “to be a little wary in speaking to Mr Milton of it, because he is one of those who have lent M. Gr. mony upon his land. So M[y]. L[ord]. hath thought of others . . . ” First reported in my “Naming the Author: Some Seventeenth-Century Milton Allusions,” Milton Quarterly 27 (1993), p. 10, the letter is in John Aubrey’s transcription of some of John Pell’s correspondence “rescued from the pies,” Bodl. MS Aubrey 13, ff. 89r , 92.

Making Use of the Jews: Milton and Philo-Semitism

73

Cheshire gentry.71 The evidence tallies with French’s estimate of Milton’s lasting involvement in such transactions, where, whatever his losses at the Restoration, he presumably did not lose his business acumen, even as he lost his other means of making a living.72 Suggestive too is Milton’s lending “mony upon [Gr.’s] land,” which business practice conforms with the secured loans recorded earlier in his career. Where De Doctrina Christiana turns to commutative justice, it is quick to conclude that usury “is no more reprehensible in itself than any other kind of lawful commerce” and to group it with business transactions in general, “only to be condemned if it is practised at the expense of the poor, or solely out of avarice, or to an uncharitable and unjust extent” (CPW 6:775–8). Milton’s self-conception seems in part designed to help him “soar above” any darker construction of his career as a Judaizing Citt. This oddly plays itself out years later when the young Christ Church poet John Philips, parodying Milton in The Splendid Shilling (1701), has his student protagonist suffer a visit from “a Dunn” who, if disguised with a beard, still looks rather like the ghost of John Milton come back to collect on his imitator’s debt. The unwelcome visitor is a cross between Satan and the money-lending persona of Horace’s “Beatus ille . . . ” (which formula introduces Philips’ poem), but compare “his faded Brow / Entrench’d with many a Frown, and Conic beard, / And spreading Band, admir’d by Modern Saints,” with William Faithorne’s portrait of Milton, not least as reproduced in the recent folio editions of Paradise Lost (1688– 95).73 The stereotype was not easily shaken and, in a vivid expression of the anxiety of influence, Philips at once mocks it and seems still to associate it with the Milton he professed to admire. Milton’s uneasy relation to Presbyterians is the second factor complicating his ready denunciation of Pharisaic failings, which might otherwise seem just a Christian commonplace, required by the need to distinguish the spirit from the letter of the law. He had seemed to make common cause with Presbyterians in the apparently Smectymnuan beginning of his career in prose. Yet where he had at first attacked “Prelaticall Pharisees” or “Pharisaicall” prelates, he would soon come to see that “New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ large,” this by the mid-1640s, when he could excoriate these latter-day Pharisees – in the first version of “On the New Forcers of Conscience” he associates them still more directly with William Prynne – and 71

72 73

Parker, Milton, p. 693. For Pell’s Cheshire connection, see Noel Malcolm and Jacqueline Stedall, John Pell (1611–1685) and his Correspondence with Sir Charles Cavendish (Oxford, 2005), pp. 198–9, 213. French, Milton in Chancery, p. 148 and passim. The Splendid Shilling, ll. 48–50, in The Poems of John Philips, ed. M. G. Lloyd Thomas (Oxford, 1927), p. 5.

74

nichol as von maltz ahn

hopes that they might have their “Phylacteries” clipped.74 How soon he determined as much is not quite clear. Recent work by Sharon Achinstein has shown that Milton might already in 1641–2 stand at a remove from the Presbyterians with whom he is so often associated, and that his later break with them, long thought to have followed from their censure of his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, may have followed from his never having so entirely sided with them in the first place.75 As Achinstein has it, we need to be more careful in assessing Milton’s allegiances at this date and in doing so “disentangle political ends from political means.” Her argument accords with the thesis Hugh Trevor-Roper laid out some forty years ago when he described “The Religious Origins of the Enlightenment”: that Arminian or Socinian dissidents, and the Erasmian tradition on which they drew, might require “Calvinism, however intellectually reactionary, . . . [as] the necessary political ally of intellectual progress,” that when embattled they might don a Calvinist “suit of armour.”76 However, the distinction may not have been quite so easy to draw. Recent work has underscored that such “intellectual progress” toward toleration in particular might also develop within Puritanism.77 So Milton, perhaps already uneasy about his Smectymnuan identity, had work to do in distancing himself from his sometime colleagues. Moreover, he was reviving Mosaic law in the divorce tracts at just the point he encountered the challenge of “Judaizing” Presbyterians seeking to impose a national church. The latter were Judaizing, at least in the eyes of “radical tolerationists,” because “the ‘Jewish church’ was co-extensive with the Jewish nation, [and] the magisterial reformers who followed the Israel model assumed that Protestant churches should also be national, state churches.”78 Not for Milton the Lutheran injunction to “beat Moses to death and throw many stones at him”;79 but not for him any return to those who would, early or late, have “miserably Judaiz’d the church.”80 74

75

76

77

78 79

80

Against these Milton ever evinces a Christian resentment, CPW 1:897, 2:582, 3:252. Milton, Poems (1673), p. 69; Poems: Reproduced in Facsimile from the Manuscript in Trinity College, Cambridge (Menston, 1972), p. [48]. Prynne’s attack on “divorce at pleasure” won Milton’s reproach in Colasterion (CPW 2:722–4). Sharon Achinstein, “Before Independency? John Milton in 1641,” 2004 MLA Convention, Philadelphia – I am very grateful to the author for letting me see this in typescript. In Hugh Trevor Roper, Religion, the Reformation, and Social Change (1967, 2nd ed. 1972), pp. 193–236 [234–6]. John Coffey, “Puritanism and Liberty Revisited: The Case for Toleration in the English Revolution,” Historical Journal 41 (1998), pp. 961–85. Coffey, “Puritanism and Liberty Revisited,” 972–3. Quoted from the Table Talk in P. D. L. Davis, “Moses and the Magistrate: A Study in the Rise of Protestant Legalism,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 26 (1975), p. 152. CPW 7:290.

Making Use of the Jews: Milton and Philo-Semitism

75

Self-consecrated to purity and a lay expert in Mosaic law, Milton had reason to be defensive about the Pharisaism of which he was accused in relation to his position on divorce.81 He seems unlikely to have thought of himself as having made a Pauline transition “from Pharisaism to Christianity,”82 but what of others’ perceptions? Might he be thought to wear a phylactery? The tension shows in the rhetoric as well as the structure of argument in the divorce tracts, where Jesus’ apparent strictures have to be understood not as rejections of but as respect for Mosaic permission to divorce (Matt. 5:31–2; 19:3–12; Luke 16:18). Having in the anti-episcopal tracts scourged Levitical failings, Milton now turns very insistently to those of the Pharisees whose only ritual pieties had betrayed the legacy of “That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed” (PL 1:8). How much was Moses “forc’t to suffer by their abuse of his Law”!83 Again and again Milton seeks to redeem primitive Mosaic purity from the overlay of “depraving” Pharisaic “law breakers” (CPW 2:331, 639ff.). That he became comparatively moderate in his supersessionism is the more impressive in view of these inducements to disparage ceremonial observance and “what in the Judicial law is . . . meerely judaicall” (642). Even now he eagerly observes that “It cannot be easily thought that Christ heer included all the children of Israel under the persons of these tempting Pharises” (664). Such (auto)biographical issues invite consideration when we turn to Jason Rosenblatt’s moving evocation of “Milton’s felt knowledge of the saving power of the deuteronomic Mosaic law” in these prose tracts of 1643–5, framed as that is by Milton’s reluctance to concede as much elsewhere in his prose. Rosenblatt convincingly argues that Milton’s hot and cold responses to Mosaic law in the prose are paralleled by how the “neglected Hebraic ethos” of Books 4–9 in Paradise Lost is framed by harsher perspectives in the first and last books.84 Such is the synthetic power of Paradise Lost that it has required an analysis as attentive as Rosenblatt’s to lay bare what may then seem the crosspurposes in that work’s relation to the Hebrew Bible. More familiar is the phenomenon of Milton’s typology, which Milton criticism has with Christianity read as appropriative rather than expropriative of the Hebrew Bible. Here the escape from Pharisaism further engages those extraordinary powers of invention, narration, and versification of which Milton seems to 81

82

83 84

An Answer to a Book, Intituled, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1644), pp. 7, 26–9; the opprobrium of “judaizing” is discussed in Shoulson, Milton and the Rabbis, p. 27. The formulation (with its irony) is that of Jason Rosenblatt, Torah and Law in Paradise Lost (Princeton, 1994), p. 204. This is but one example of many in his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (CPW 2:307–8, ff.). Rosenblatt, Torah and Law, pp. 6, 12, and passim.

76

nichol as von maltz ahn

have had some awareness from an early age, and with which he long sought to associate some saving grace. Our admiration for these last, which have brought so many of us to the study of Milton, should not obscure how the claiming techniques at work as Milton’s typology insistently respond to the authority of the Hebrew Bible only to supplement it and thus often to contest it. In some cases, Milton just follows the lead of the New Testament, shaped as it often is by its participants’, narrators’, or correspondents’ recollections especially of the Psalms and the prophets. On the second day of Milton’s War in Heaven, for example, the angelic host responds to the artillery bombardment it has suffered at the hands of the fallen angels by fighting back with hills or mountains, which those fallen angels belatedly return in kind (6:637–69, 697). This evidently alludes to the Giants’ war against the Olympians, “a pagan type of the angelic rebellion,” often described in classical poetry (Hesiod, Claudian).85 Yet this classical example Milton brings into a biblical frame of reference. Thus he can use the episode to recall Paul’s message that faith can move mountains, even though charity is more important still (I Corinthians 13:2).86 However, it also recalls the terrors of the damned, as evoked in Hosea 10:8 – “they shall say to the mountains, Cover us; and to the hills, Fall on us.” This is to be understood according to Luke 23:30, where Jesus warns the Daughters of Jerusalem of the terrors that will befall the ungodly: “Then shall they begin to say to the mountains, Fall on us; and to the hills, Cover us.” Milton applies this to the War in Heaven because Revelation 7 records how “the stars of heaven fell unto the earth” after the opening of the sixth seal, an apocalyptic description (as it was understood) of the fall of angels. Here too the scene of devastation that follows includes all the great men begging “the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb: For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?” (Revelation 7:26–7). The example is characteristic of Milton’s use of later biblical typology as a means of projecting what had happened near the beginning of time. Nevertheless, that something more appropriative than midrash is here at work appears more plainly where material from the Hebrew Bible supplies Milton with his means of describing the proto-history of Paradise Lost.87 85 86

87

Thus noted in John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, 2nd ed. (1998), p. 370. On this point I am again grateful for Phillip Donnelly’s advice, subject of his study of “Interpretation and Violence: Reason, Narrative and Religious Toleration in the Works of John Milton,” diss. University of Ottawa, 2001. Compare Golda Werman’s Milton and Midrash (Washington D.C., 1995) and Jeffrey Shoulson, “The Embrace of the Fig Tree: Sexuality and Creativity in Midrash and in Milton,” English Literary History 67 (2000), pp. 873–903.

Making Use of the Jews: Milton and Philo-Semitism

77

In the dialogue between the Father and the Son in Book 3, for example, when the Son enlarges upon the goodness of the Father’s offer of grace, He pleads that human folly never spell the final frustration of mankind, saying with passionate repetition “That be from thee far, / That far be from thee, Father” (3:144–55). This draws on Genesis 18, where Abraham responds to the danger of judgement upon the evils of Sodom and Gomorrah. Pleading that the righteous within the city may merit its protection from destruction, Abraham moves beyond his own interest to become an advocate for others: That be far from thee to do after this manner, to slay the righteous with the wicked: and that the righteous should be as the wicked, that be far from thee. (Genesis 18:25; and compare Matthew 16:22)

In the chronology of Paradise Lost, the Son speaks these words long before Abraham does, enlarging into Christian principle Abraham’s insistent bargaining for social justice. It is another matter whether this invention should be viewed as philo-Semitic in extending to Abraham a charity and faith understood as always already Christian.88 Need this be a displacement of Israel, in a supersessionism setting the church above the election of Jews by God through descent from Abraham? The Son of God’s description in Paradise Regain’d (3:433–40) of the future history of Jews argues a supersessionism less strong than might be expected, not least given the context in some of Milton’s and most of his contemporaries’ works. However, the Christology at work here, even if its orthodoxy remains disputed, is not such as will soon avoid the modern charge that supersessionism is at work. Even as generous a reader as Rosenblatt registers its cumulative force through Paradise Lost, the work with which tradition has insistently identified Milton, whatever Milton’s own reported affection for Paradise Regain’d.89 It might be ventured that Milton’s less than Trinitarian God – if he does not retreat from the theology of De Doctrina Christiana into the more tactful formulations in Paradise Lost, which may not be just tactical – might suggest a convergence in worship, an easier way of bridging between the permanence of Israel’s election and Christian hopes (Romans 11). How uneasy does the logic of the supplement make us? Milton’s use of Abraham’s pleadings may seem a wresting away of his faithfulness for Christian myth. Or it may seem a profound tribute in which only Abraham could show us how to imagine 88

89

The De Doctrina asks us to “understand the name Christ as meaning also Moses, and the prophets who foretold his coming, and the apostles whom he sent” (CPW 6:126, with reference to Galatians 3:24). Helen Darbishire, ed., Early Lives of Milton (1932), pp. 75–6 [Edward Phillips].

78

nichol as von maltz ahn

what the Son’s plea for fallen humankind might have entailed (however doubtful a welcome this tribute might find in some quarters). Even in Milton’s systematic theology the answer seems twofold: on one hand, a harsh description of God’s rejection of Jews for their sins;90 on the other, a subordination of “Christ the Mediator” to “God the Father” as “the ultimate object of faith,” owing to which “a lot of Jews, and Gentiles too . . . are saved although they believed or believe in God alone, either because they lived before Christ, or because, even though they have lived after him, he has not been revealed to them.”91 It is in a much less synthetic work of Milton’s that another means of reconciling these differences suggests itself. In Poems (1673), the very miscellaneity of the compilation, whether of “Poems, &c Upon Several Occasions” or the silva included in the book, admits a different basis for understanding its parts. Here an incipient aestheticization of speech-acts permits the open publication of controversial views despite the climate for their reception being hostile. The shift appears also in the seller for this book being the innocuous Thomas Dring, rather than the resolutely oppositional John Starkey to whom Milton had turned for Paradise Regain’d . . . Samson Agonistes a few years before.92 Some such aestheticization allows Milton, who was widely thought “a criminall and obsolete person,”93 to publish without imprimatur a work that might seem defiantly at odds with the gathering Anglican reaction late in 1673 against toleration, which in the Cavalier Parliament had forced Charles II to cancel his Declaration of Indulgence (8 March 1673), and which in 1674, with the end of the Cabal and the Earl of Danby’s rise to power, occasioned the attempt at what may be thought a second Restoration with a renewal of the Clarendon Code. Moderate Presbyterians joined Anglicans in rejecting an Indulgence perceived as too kind to Catholics, thereby becoming “new forcers of conscience” under a new “long parliament” (elected in 1661 and only dissolved in 1679). Milton’s poems and the republication of Of Education spoke to the issues of the hour “with mortal voice, unchanged / To hoarse or mute, though fallen on evil days.” 90 92

93

91 CPW 6:474–5. For example, CPW 6:132, 172, 507, 697. Both their shops served the neighbouring Inns of Court, with Dring’s list including mostly legal books, and Starkey’s more political fare. For Starkey, see Mark Knights’ biography in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004); his long career in oppositional publishing in print and manuscript is attested by the many references to him in the state papers, Stationers’ Company records, his imprints and book advertisements, and related publications from the 1660s to the 1680s. Sir John Hobart to John Hobart, 22 Jan. 1667/8, Bodleian MS Tanner 45, f. 258; Nicholas von Maltzahn, “The First Reception of Paradise Lost (1667),” RES 47 (1996), pp. 491–2.

Making Use of the Jews: Milton and Philo-Semitism

79

Poems (1673) has proven a difficult book for modern students of Milton to gauge. The publication might have found mention in Neil Keeble’s magisterial Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England, but perhaps seemed too far removed from the world of dissent to catch his eye, despite Milton’s authorship and the interest of his choosing at this date to present his psalm translations, as well as such poems as “On the New Forcers of Conscience.” Nor does the republication in the same volume of Milton’s Of Education find mention in Keeble’s discussion of Milton’s views on literature, where more might have been made of his recommendation of what “would make [students] soon perceive what despicable creatures our comm[on] Rimers and Play-writers be, and shew them, what religious, what glorious and magnificent use might be made of Poetry both in divine and humane things” – a set of concerns relived in Andrew Marvell’s commendatory poem on Paradise Lost, written the following April of 1674.94 Likewise Keeble’s discussion of Milton’s view of learning might have drawn on his present insistence that schooling include “the Hebrew tongue” so that “the Scriptures may be now read in their own originall.”95 In Sharon Achinstein’s Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England the volume also goes almost unmentioned, with the exception proving the rule by adducing Milton’s translation of Psalm 6 only to date it back to its time of composition in 1653. Achinstein prefers to look back to Poems (1645) for Lycidas, rather than responding to its republication in the Restoration with “strength undiminisht,” its headnote again proclaiming in 1673, as it had in 1645, that this pastoral elegy “by occasion foretells the ruine of our corrupted Clergie then in their height.”96 At this date this is a notable verdict on the Laudian r´egime, and one that chimes with Marvell’s like assessment of the unlucky career of the English church (in The Rehearsal Transpros’d, 1672, and its Second Part, which appears at almost the same date as Milton’s Poems late in 1673). Nor does Mary Ann Radzinowicz, writing on Milton’s Epics and the Book of Psalms, note the interest of Milton’s publishing his psalm translations soon after his publishing the epics that so draw on Psalms. Instructive as her account is, its breadth of reference to Milton’s uses of Psalms seems to have forbidden closer investigation of just how inflected those references might be and how indifferent to their 94

95 96

CPW 2:405–6; Poems (1673), 2nd pagination: p. 110; Nicholas von Maltzahn, An Andrew Marvell Chronology (Basingstoke, 2005), p. 152. CPW 2:400; Poems (1673), p. 109. Sharon Achinstein, Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 147–8; Poems (1673), p. 75

80

nichol as von maltz ahn

non-Christian origin. About the supersessionism at work Radzinowicz shows no unease. Yet these critics’ omission may seem justified: Poems (1673) is a less clarion call to reform of church and state than its record of Milton’s views suggests. In part this follows from the framing of its parts as occasional work, often given their dates; moreover, the republication of Of Education is framed by the claim that it was “Written above twenty Years since.” Even so, in thus recalling the hopes or frustrations of the 1640s, themselves controversial in the 1670s, the tract also speaks to problems still grievous in 1673. “This nation perishes,” for example, for lack of better education, suffering from those who “betake them to State affairs, with souls so unprincipl’d in virtue . . . instilling [the people’s] barren hearts with a conscientious slavery,” and who “in a dangerous fit of the commonwealth be such poor, shaken, uncertain reeds, of such a tottering conscience, as many of our great counsellers have lately shewn themselves.”97 Students should practice riding to be more accomplished citizen-soldiers, in Milton’s recommendation, a stark contrast with current manners where “the Monsieurs of Paris . . . take our hopefull Youth into their slight and prodigall custodies and send them over back again transform’d into Mimicks, Apes and Kicshoes.” Moreover, the university curriculum still invites reform: Milton condemns the “old errour of universities not yet well recover’d from the Scholastick grosnesse of barbarous ages,” failing to begin “with Arts most easie, and those be such as are most obvious to the sence,” and instead losing students in abstraction. Was this a call to arms in 1673 for those who in “this age have spirit and capacity enough to apprehend”?98 If so, it seems in the main to have fallen on deaf ears. For such claims in Poems (1673) arise within the miscellaneity of “poems on several occasions” or silva.99 Although the generic distinction is made in the largely Latin Poemata between the formal elegies (in distichs) and the “Sylvarum Liber” that comprises its second half, the genre of silva prevails in the collection as a whole. This is a side of Milton’s poetics that has gone understudied, as if the poet’s powerful presence in Paradise Lost, and the Milton tradition’s eventually Kantian regard for the sublime, subordinated 97 98

99

CPW 2:363, 375–6, 398; Poems (1673), 2nd pagination: pp. 95, 101, 108. CPW 2:414, 374, 415; Poems (1673), 2nd pag.: pp. 116, 100, 117. For the importance of subsequent complaints against French manners and education, “which ‘had changed our natures, and enslaved our nation’,” see Steven Pincus, “‘To protect English liberties’: The English Nationalist Revolution of 1688–1689,” Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c.1650–c.1850, ed. Tony Claydon and Ian McBride (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 75–104, 83. On the genre, see Frans De Bruyn, “The Classical Silva and the Generic Development of Scientific Writing in Seventeenth-Century England,” New Literary History 32 (2001), pp. 347–73.

Making Use of the Jews: Milton and Philo-Semitism

81

his otherwise often occasional work, applauded chiefly for its frequent passages of apparent transcendence. It is instructive, for example, that Alastair Fowler’s discussions of silva should overlook this salient example.100 The collection’s organizing principle seems to have gone unrecognized in part because the provisional quality of silva seems to resist categorization, while being a category in its own right. Where Statius in his preface to Silvae had vaunted his rapid improvisation in such poems (“subito calore”), Milton too can emphasize the impromptu flair of many of his compositions, where he seems to commend the rapidity as much as the “earliness of his own proficiency to the notice of posterity.”101 Conspicuously the Psalm translations are framed by dates in Poems (1673). Psalms 1–8, which are noted as daily exercises from a week in August 1653, and those in a bravura variety of metres, some specified; Psalms 80–88 as Milton’s work of April 1648, in the familiar measure of eight and six. The dating advertises poetic power as much as occasion – in keeping with the energetic rapidity of Statian silva – but seems to retreat from these psalms’ topicality in 1673, which might have been sharp enough. Take, for example, the possible applications to the situation late that year of Psalm 2, with the attempted English oppression, in alliance with France, of the beleaguered Dutch while at home a season of toleration was yielding to a winter of renewed persecution: Why do the Gentiles tumult, and the Nations muse a vain thing, the Kings of th’earth upstand With power, and Princes in their Congregations Lay deep their plots together through each Land, Against the Lord and his Messiah dear . . . (Poems, 1673, p. 131)

The Messianic Psalm 2 has a significant part to play in Paradise Lost, where it shapes Raphael’s description of the rebellion in heaven (PL, 5:603vv.), and provides a “typological context for the rest of the epic plot into which the psalmic text has been woven.”102 The Christological interpretation of this psalm is emphatic in the epic. However, its presentation in Poems (1673) includes the headnote dating it to 1653 and celebrating its translation 100

101

102

Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), p. 134; Fowler, “The Silva Tradition in Jonson’s The Forrest,” in Poetic Traditions of the Renaissance, ed. Maynard Mack and George deForest Lord (New Haven, 1982), pp. 165–6. To borrow Samuel Johnson’s words, Life of “Milton,” paragraph 8; Statius I, trans J. H. Mozley (Cambridge, Mass., 1928), Silvarum, Liber 1, opening sentence. Donnelly, “Interpretation and Violence,” 202–3ff.; compare Radzinowicz, Milton’s Epics and the Book of Psalms, pp. 146, 202–4.

82

nichol as von malt z ahn

here into free-flowing “Terzetti” (terza rima). The dating may hint at the enduring topicality of this important psalm, but it seems also to convey the devotional impulse of the psalm into a more aesthetic realm where it registers as a tour de force of poetic translation, psalm by psalm, day by day. With this psalm, of all psalms, a Christological reading may be assumed (“Thou art my Son I have begotten thee / This day”). However, mere translation does not insist on typological transposition, or the supersession entailed by such typology. Hence the psalm translation does differ from the extraordinary intertextual exposition the same psalm receives in Paradise Lost. Examples can be freely multiplied here: a related instance comes from Psalm 3, where the “millions” in “Pavillions” arrayed against the Psalmist are translated in Paradise Lost from this world into Heaven. There, as if the original fact (in this typological transposition), the primordial heavenly “Pavilions numberless” are arranged around the “high mount of God” (PL 5:643, 653) which is about to be rejected by a Satanic rebellion born of the rejection of the Son. Again, the version presented in Poems (1673) requires no such transposition. Its celebration of God’s intervention and his final “blessing” does not so depart from the Hebrew Bible. In the context of their first publication in Poems (1673), the Psalm translations advertise Milton’s Hebraism in a way partly subsumed by the aestheticized reading the collection as a whole invites. There may seem to be more room for cultural difference under the sign of aesthetics, and we may wish to see this as a harbinger of aesthetics as a neutral territory in which cultural difference can be appreciated. Here literature may seem a handmaid of toleration, of the experience of and respect for other traditions of faith, made available through translation in particular. This looks more genuinely philo-Semitic in Milton’s case than his otherwise strongly typological poetry. Given the alternatives in the early modern period and since, such endeavors invite admiration for the space they seem to permit to another religious culture. Yet the question remains whether a supersession of another kind arises, where the Hebrew Bible, if not subsumed to New Testament reading of Old Testament, begins to be transposed into a more secularized aesthetic. Such a consequence may have philo-Semitic possibilities, but may also prove an unwelcome destination for law or prophecy.

c h a pter 5

Milton and Solomonic Education Douglas Trevor

And God gave Solomon wisedome, and understanding, exceeding much, and largenesse of heart, even as the sand that is on the sea shoare. And Solomons wisedome excelled the wisedome of all the children of the East countrey, and all the wisedome of Egypt. For hee was wiser then all men; then Ethan the Ezrahite, and Heman, and Chalcol, and Darda the sonnes of Mahol: and his fame was in all nations round about. – 1 Kings 4.29–311

In recent years, scholars with intimate knowledge of Hebraic sources have greatly expanded our understanding of Milton’s intellectual debts to nonChristian texts. In Milton’s Epics and the Book of Psalms (1989), for example, Mary Ann Radzinowicz examines Milton’s lifelong appreciation of Hebraic poetics, focusing on the poet’s translations and appropriations of the Psalms. Rather than identify specific intellectual debts of a religious or legalistic nature, Radzinowicz considers instead how a stylistic appreciation of Hebrew Scripture shaped Milton’s own prosody.2 In Torah and Law in Paradise Lost (1994), Jason Rosenblatt complicates the traditional understanding of the poet’s Pauline hermeneutics, revealing that Milton’s attitude toward Mosaic law was far less cynical and condemnatory than the views of other contemporary English Protestants. Rather than denigrate the Hebraic emphasis on obedience as established through covenant rather than grace, Milton uses the Old Testament’s high regard for law – according to Rosenblatt – as a basis both for his scriptural justification of 1

2

Subsequent citations of Biblical passages will be noted parenthetically. All are taken from the King James Bible, or, The Holy Bible: A Facsimile in a reduced size of the Authorized Version published in the year 1611 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911). See Mary Ann Radzinowicz, Milton’s Epics and the Book of Psalms (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), esp. pp. 81–131. On Milton’s high appreciation of Hebraic poetics, see also Regina M. Schwartz, Remembering and Repeating: On Milton’s Theology and Poetics (1988; Chicago: 1993), esp. pp. 1–24.

83

84

dougl as t revor

divorce and his empathetic depiction of prelapsarian Edenic happiness.3 In Milton and Midrash (1995), Golda Werman makes a persuasive case for the relevance of Willem Vorstius’ Latin translation of Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer (1644) to Paradise Lost (1667, 1674), pointing out many instances in which Milton’s poem corresponds more closely with the eighth-century Palestinian Midrash than with other sources once thought to hold an unrivaled sway over the English poet’s work, such as the Book of Revelations.4 Finally, in Milton and the Rabbis (2001), Jeffrey Shoulson explores hitherto largely uncommented upon passages in Milton’s works where the citation of Jewish precedent is less flattering than in, for example, the divorce tracts. At the same time that Shoulson emphasizes the limits of reading Milton through a Hebraic lens, he also insists that “the discourses of Hebraism, Hellenism, and Christianity” are closely linked, and that Milton is not merely turning to Jewish sources for argumentative purposes but rather confronting questions of sexuality, history, and ontology with the speculations of Hebraic writers in mind.5 The four studies mentioned here are only a small sampling of the recent work being done on Milton and Judaism, and indeed – like the field more broadly – do not represent a consistent view of the English poet. Werman, for example, is more skeptical of Milton’s knowledge of Hebrew than Rosenblatt and Radzinowicz, whereas Rosenblatt has distanced himself from others by arguing that Milton relied on the Judaic scholarship of John Selden to a staggering degree. Shoulson, by contrast, is skeptical of “any direct link between a specific collection of rabbinic midrashim – in either their original Hebrew and Aramaic or in translation – and Milton’s inventions.”6 Likewise, for him, the figure of the “Jew” is itself a deeply problematic one for Milton, at once alluring and disconcerting. In spite of their various disagreements, all of these projects are representative of the primary orientation of scholarly investigation of the influence of Judaism on Milton’s work: establishing possible sources or parallels for Milton’s learning according to the poet’s perceived intellectual skills and the availability of certain texts. Even the first wave of criticism on Milton and Judaism in the 1920s, embodied by the work of scholars such as Harris Fletcher and Denis Saurat, organized itself around issues of idea reception 3

4

5

6

See Jason P. Rosenblatt, Torah and Law in Paradise Lost (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), esp. pp. 12–70. See Golda Werman, Milton and Midrash (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1995), esp. pp. 42–74. Jeffrey S. Shoulson, Milton and the Rabbis: Hebraism, Hellenism, and Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), p. 9. Ibid., p. 3.

Milton and Solomonic Education

85

and influence.7 We see now that it is an oversimplification to say that Milton merely studied the Bible, or that – in the words of John Carey – “[for] Milton the sole rule and canon of faith and the sole determinant of all controversies is scripture, that is, the books of the Old and New Testaments pronounced canonical in Protestant editions of the Bible.”8 Milton also studied commentators on the Bible, Jewish and Christian alike, and – like so many of his contemporaries – he read the Apocrypha closely and carefully. In addition, Milton identified not only intellectually but also personally and emotionally with figures from the Old Testament. Whereas scholars have examined Milton’s self-analysis in the context of his treatments of, for example, Moses and Samson, the particular connections he makes between himself and Solomon, the son of David and Bathsheba, have been less excavated.9 This essay endeavors to correct this imbalance, as well as argue that Milton’s views on education – as made manifest in Paradise Lost – are more “Jewish” than have previously been granted and, as a result, even more eclectic and diffuse than we might have once thought. Among figures from Hebrew Scripture, few are invoked more frequently by Milton, or by his contemporaries, than Solomon, the third and last king of united Israel. Through the multitude of prose works that Milton writes during his public career, beginning with his antiprelatical tracts of the early 1640s and continuing through those publications produced while serving as Cromwell’s Secretary of Foreign Tongues (1649–60), the different tasks at hand solicit varied presentations of Solomon. At certain junctures, when scripture attributed to him appears to support Milton’s political, religious, and even domestic views, then praise and veneration is unequivocal; Solomon becomes the “wise Hebrew” of Israel (CPW 8.237), a “transcendent Sage” (CPW 1.909) through whom “the Spirit of God” speaks (CPW 2.306). Elsewhere, and with varying degrees of discomfort, Milton touches upon Solomon’s failings, both as a political leader and a religious man, but in spite of the mistakes he is said to have made, Solomon remains highly 7

8

9

See Harris Francis Fletcher, Milton’s Semitic Studies and Some Manifestations of Them in His Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1926), and Milton’s Rabbinical Readings (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1930). See also Denis Saurat, Milton, Man and Thinker (New York: Dial Press, 1925). Werman qualifies Fletcher’s finding in particular. See Milton and Midrash, p. 3. John Carey, “Introduction” to John Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana in the Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), vol. 6 of 8, pp. 3– 116, 43. All references to Milton’s prose are from the complete works (CPW) and will be noted parenthetically, citing volume and page numbers. On Milton and Moses see, for example, Mary Ann Radzinowicz, “ ‘Tendentious Purposes: Milton and Freud on Moses,” Criticism, vol. 35, no. 3 (1993), pp. 463–85; for a biographical reading of Samson Agonistes see Ricki Heller, “Opposites of Wifehood: Eve and Dalila,” Milton Studies, vol. 24 (1988), pp. 187–202.

86

dougl as trevor

esteemed in the Englishman’s work, largely because of his nearly unrivaled reputation for intelligence. In Paradise Lost, the Hebrew King’s purported writings inform and shape the scenes of education we witness – particularly those directed by the Archangel Raphael – as well as the fall of Adam and Eve. Throughout the poem, instances of learning and disobedience pivot on the Solomonic distinction between divinely granted wisdom and humanly acquired knowledge and the dangers that emerge when the two are confused. Additionally, the figure of Solomon provides a powerful example of how an eminently learned man can nonetheless become spiritually corrupted when he fails to avoid perilous forms of love: forms that encourage the forfeiture of religious devotion in favor of “Female charm.”10 Accentuating Milton’s debts to Solomonic texts thus hardens the anti-female tone of certain prelapsarian passages in his first epic, and also makes it harder to assert, as have various defenders of Milton over the years, that such scripted attacks on female nature in no way impugn Milton’s own personal opinions.11 At the same time, the postlapsarian scenes of contrition and reconciliation shared by Adam and Eve reverberate more powerfully once we acknowledge that Eve succeeds in transcending her previous designation – in Book 9 – as an idol/idle fancy. Indeed, a reading of Paradise Lost sensitive to Milton’s attentiveness to Solomon as a figure of learnedness and depravity must also necessarily be sensitive to the shift in the poem from what Rosenblatt has characterized as a prelapsarian, Hebraic dispensation to a postlapsarian, Pauline accommodation.12 We come to realize, in the course of reading Paradise Lost, that not merely in ecclesiastical terms – as Achsah Guibbory points out in her essay in this volume – but in terms of personal salvation as well, Milton’s “vision of reformation” eventually insists upon “the separation, indeed opposition, between Christian and Jewish.”13 We also come to realize, however, that Christian exegesis of Solomonic texts means that just as the example of Solomon as an archetype of errancy is set aside in the postlapsarian, Pauline world of Paradise Lost, love is itself rehabilitated, in part by evoking the images and language of reconciliation with which the 10

11

12 13

John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 9, line 999. All subsequent references to Milton’s poetry are from John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (1932; New York: Macmillan, 1957), and will be noted parenthetically. See, for example, Diane Kelsey McColley, Milton’s Eve (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), pp. 23–24. See Rosenblatt, Torah and Law in Paradise Lost, p. 208. Achsah Guibbory, “England, Israel, and the Jews in Milton’s Prose, 1649–60,” in this volume, pp. 13–34.

Milton and Solomonic Education

87

Song of Solomon concludes. In the Christian, postlapsarian world, however, these images have themselves been subsumed by the typological readings of the Song with which Milton was familiar: readings that confer on Adam and Eve a network of symbolic meanings that the prelapsarian world was not required to sustain. Well before Eve tempts Adam, Milton figures the sin of idolatry implicitly through Solomon’s experiences. Among the first of the fallen angels to rise from the burning lake are those false gods once worshipped by the Israelite King (1.392–446). Moloch, Chemos, and Astoreth all represent Solomon’s devotional waywardness, as well as the peculiar temptation of idolatry that – in Milton’s attentive reading of Hebrew Scripture – had, at various times, disastrous consequences for the Jewish people. The devotional antithesis established in the opening of the poem is not, we should note, between Christianity and Judaism but rather between monotheism and idolatry. The fallen angels are, in other words, not likened to Jews, with the good angels as a consequence paired with Christianity. On the contrary, the good angels in Paradise Lost are really good Jews: capable of believing in an angry, Hebraic God whose will seems at once inscrutable and terrifying, while the fallen angels are more like the Israelites who succumb to the worship of the golden calf in Exodus 32. Of course, the Adam of Paradise Lost is like Solomon only to a point – the point, that is, of Christian redemption – just as Eve resembles the pagan tempters of Solomon, not to mention Dalila, only partially. Nonetheless, the privileged place held among the fallen angels by the false gods that corrupt Solomon foreshadows Adam’s own disobedience and provides a preemptive reason for that fall: not the “many strange women” that will lead Solomon astray (1 Kings 11.1) but the first wife of humankind, Eve. This account of Adam’s transgression is a conventional one in the early modern period. As Diane Kelsey McColley has noted, traditionally the story of Adam and Eve was “interpreted literally as male virtue undone by female concupiscence and figuratively as passion subjugating reason or the soul made thrall to the body’s rebel powers.”14 Milton invites this interpretation initially by drawing our attention – at least typologically – to Solomon’s fall before we see the fall of Adam and Eve. This strategy provides Milton the opportunity to complicate this traditional account of Adam’s fall being caused wholly by female concupiscence, first by offering allusions to an iconographic template of this kind of aberrancy through the example of Solomon, and secondly by depicting the fall of Adam and Eve, and with 14

McColley, Milton’s Eve, p. 9.

88

dougl as t revor

it the recourse that the first couple have – through contrition, faith, and God’s mercy – to their own restoration. As Achsah Guibbory argues, “Milton’s stance [toward the relation between the English and the Jews] is complicated, for he indicts the English as Jews yet identifies intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually with the Hebrew prophets.”15 He also self-identifies during his lifetime with Solomon, but this self-identification is often a vexed one. According to Shoulson, “[t]he Jew – especially as constructed by the Christian imagination – appeared uncannily close to Milton’s evolving self-perception while at the same time resisting full assimilation to his Protestant English identity.”16 Owing in particular to the problems he experienced with his first wife, Mary Powell, his subsequently staunch support of divorce, and even his approval of polygamy, Milton’s many references to Solomon preceding his composition of Paradise Lost typically demonstrate sensitivity toward the King’s marital problems. Again and again, the Englishman qualifies the nature of the Israelite’s fall. “Solomon was lured to crime, but it is not said that he lured others” (CPW 4.1.372), Milton comments in A Defence of the People of England (1651). And then, in his De Doctrina Christiana, Milton writes: “[Solomon] is not blamed, however, for marrying many wives but for marrying foreign ones” (CPW 6.367).17 If he were not the most prominent proponent of the right of a husband and wife to dissolve their marriage contract in seventeenth-century England, we might accuse Milton of needlessly quibbling with the specific details of the Israelite King’s domestic problems. Instead, throughout the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643, 1644), Milton assembles Biblical evidence for the merits of divorce, a position he ardently believes Solomon shared: And this Law the Spirit of God by the mouth of Salomon, Pro. 30.21.23 testifies to be a good and a necessary Law; by granting it . . . that a hated woman when she is married, is a thing that the earth cannot beare. What follows then but that the charitable Law must remedy what nature cannot undergoe. (CPW 2.306–7)18 15 16 17

18

Guibbory, “England, Israel, and the Jews in Milton’s Prose,” p. 25. Shoulson, Milton and the Rabbis, p. 6. I share John Rumrich’s conclusion, in the wake of the debate regarding whether or not Milton authored this theological tract, that “if we apply ordinary standards of attribution for seventeenthcentury texts, Milton may be confidently identified as the author of De Doctrina Christiana.” “The Provenance of De Doctrina Christiana: A View of the Present State of the Controversy,” in Mark R. Kelley, Michael Lieb, and John T. Shawcross (eds.), Milton and the Grounds of Contention (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2003), pp. 214–33, 232. “For three things the earth is disquieted, and for foure which it cannot beare: For a servant when he reigneth, and a foole when hee is filled with meate. For an odious woman when shee is married, and an handmayd that is heire to her mistresse” (Proverbs 30.21–23).

Milton and Solomonic Education

89

Milton mentions this passage from the Book of Proverbs again in De Doctrina Christiana, when he claims that it is better for a husband to send such a “hated woman” away than it is for him to keep her: In fact I should be inclined to attribute a thick skin to the man who could keep such a wife, rather than a hard heart to the man who sent her packing. And I am not the only one: Solomon is of the same opinion, or rather the Spirit of God itself is, speaking through the mouth of Solomon, Prov. XXX. 21, 23. (CPW 6.374)

As a fallen figure, Solomon offers a clear example of the consequences of choosing an inappropriate marital companion. The fact that this, the most learned figure of Hebrew Scripture, married disastrously seems to have reassured Milton that his failure to anticipate problems with Powell was excusable, or at least not an indictment of his intelligence. In the political realm as well, however, Milton refers to Solomon frequently, defending him on the basis of his overall record as a public servant. “Solomon did fall into certain vices,” he concedes in A Defence of the People of England, “but he did not therefore become a tyrant immediately: He balanced his vices by great virtues and services to the state” (CPW 4.1.406). Addressing his polemical opponent, Claudius Salmasius, author of the Defensio Regia (1649), Milton wonders “how it could have occurred to you to compare Charles with Solomon” (CPW 4.1.372). Whereas King Charles I is accused of wasting public funds on private extravagances, Milton exonerates Solomon for his heavy taxes because the money was spent on an ambitious public works project, the Temple complex. Finally, while it took many wives to entice Solomon to idolatry, Charles – Milton points out – needed only one (CPW 4.1.372). As described primarily in 1 Kings 1–11, Solomon attains the throne of the kingdom of Israel upon the death of David and rules for forty years. Asked by the Lord in a dream what he most wants to possess, Solomon responds, “Give therefore thy servant an understanding heart, to judge thy people, that I may discerne betweene good and bad: for who is able to judge this thy so great a people?” (1 Kings 3.9).19 In a similar scene, recounted in The Second Book of the Chronicles, Solomon’s precise request is more explicit: “Give mee now wisedome and knowledge, that I may goe out and come in before this people. For who can judge this thy people, that is so great?” (2 Chronicles 1.10). Solomon’s association with educational endeavor, as opposed to his mere embodiment of the mixed benefits of such endeavor, is primarily 19

Heart here is a translation for the Hebrew word for intellect. Cf. 1 Kings 4.29.

90

dougl as trevor

attributable to the assumption – held among Milton and his contemporaries – that he authored the Book of Proverbs, a text consistently evoked throughout Adam’s tutelage at the hands of Raphael.20 These proverbs are themselves presented as an educative text; their purpose, ostensibly, is to enable their reader “To knowe wisedome and instruction, to perceive the words of understanding, To receive the instruction of wisedome, justice, and judgement and equitie, To give subtiltie to the simple, to the yong man knowledge and discretion” (Proverbs 1.2–4). According to Barbara Lewalski, the Book of Proverbs was understood throughout the Renaissance “to be addressed in a special way to the young, or to beginners in the religious life, with the author assuming the stance of father or teacher.”21 It is just such a stance that Raphael assumes when he descends to Earth in Paradise Lost after being given the divine charge to “advise him [Adam] of his happy state” (5.234).22 As an instructor, Raphael employs a Solomonic model of spiritual education that encourages its followers to “Take fast hold of instruction, let her not goe; keepe her, for she is thy life” (Proverbs 4.13).23 Likewise, Adam’s eagerness to learn, his veneration of a figure evidently more knowledgeable than himself, and the unequivocal entrusting of his education in the hands of his able instructor all conform to the precepts outlined in the Proverbs: “Yea if thou cryest after knowledge, and liftest up thy voyce for understanding: If thou seekest her as silver, and searchest for her, as for hid treasures: Then shalt thou understand the feare of the LORD, and find the knowledge of God” (2.3–5). This “knowledge of God” is in fact wisdom and it comes in Paradise Lost – as in the Proverbs – only from above: if not directly from God than from another being whose position on the vertical hierarchy is higher than the 20

21 22

23

Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 53. Ibid., p. 55. Eve absents herself from Adam and Raphael at the outset of Book 8, preferring – we are told – to learn from Adam as “sole Auditress” (8.51). I find the Solomonic model for Raphael’s instruction more present than the Socratic model frequently referenced at this juncture in the poem. On the influence of the Socratic model of education on Milton see Anna K. Nardo, “Academic Interludes in Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies, vol. 27 (1992), pp. 209–41; and Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), esp. pp. 196–99. Unlike Solomon, Socrates not only adamantly resists being termed a teacher (see Plato’s Apology, A-b, 18–19), but also refuses any responsibility whatsoever for the eventual development of his students into good or bad citizens. Neither does prelapsarian education require the frequent missteps in reasoning that Socrates encourages in his interlocutors. Raphael’s eagerness to hear Adam’s creation story in particular reminds us that he is sent to Eden in order to converse with Adam, “friend with friend” (5.229), discharging useful precepts so that the first man might avoid his fall. His is a more gentle instruction than that which Socrates typically offers: more discursive, and offered with specific aims in mind.

Milton and Solomonic Education

91

figure in question. Earlier in his career, in the pages of Areopagitica (1644), Milton evokes this same passage from the Proverbs (2.3–5), only in this explicit postlapsarian context, appropriate knowledge is harder to come by and therefore a variety of different sources must be consulted: “What a collusion is this, whenas we are exhorted by the wise man to use diligence, to seek for wisdom as for hidd’n treasures early and late, that another order shall enjoyn us to know nothing but by statute” (CPW 2.562). Here, in Paradise Lost, Adam’s curiosity can be attended to without statute, but only by a “Divine instructor” like Raphael (5.546). The benefits of such instruction are clear, for “Happy is the man that findeth wisedome, and the man that getteth understanding” (Proverbs 3.13). Adam recognizes that the learning imparted by Raphael is of such a rarefied species that humankind, left uninspired, “could not reach” it (7.75), and thus the first man values it all the more. As his “Divine Interpreter” (7.72), Raphael – for his part – expresses concern over what should and should not be revealed to Adam. Such attention to angelic decision-making rounds out the relatively one-sided portrait of inspired learning we see in the ancient depictions of Solomon. As Raphael explains, what thou canst attain, which best may serve To glorify the Maker, and infer Thee also happier, shall not be withheld Thy hearing, such Commission from above I have receiv’d, to answer thy desire Of knowledge within bounds; beyond abstain To ask, nor let thine own inventions hope Things not reveal’d, which th’ invisible King, Only Omniscient, hath supprest in Night, To none communicable in Earth or Heaven: Anough is left besides to search and know. (7.115–125)

Appropriate knowledge both glorifies God and makes one “happier,” as one is presumably already happy in Paradise. Set in opposition, or outside, of these bounds is that knowledge that cannot be obtained by humans but only pursued in vain. It is these “Things not reveal’d” about which Raphael cautions his listeners, for not only can such knowledge never be procured, but substituting for its absence with self-created “inventions” can cause great harm. Raphael’s warning not to aspire beyond that which one can know echoes the Book of Proverbs. Accompanying its emphasis upon attaining “wisdom and instruction” the book also warns, as does Raphael, of the dangers – and

92

dougl as trevor

fallacious nature – of self-created knowledge. “Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and leane not unto thine owne understanding” (Proverbs 3.5), the reader is told, or – perhaps more relevant to Raphael’s cautious tone – “Discretion shall preserve thee, understanding shall keepe thee” (Proverbs 2.11). In addition to ending with a Solomonic bid toward a continued “search” for knowledge (Paradise Lost 7.125), Raphael’s admonition to Adam to avoid substituting human “inventions” (7.121) for divine wisdom presents oppositional metaphors between lightness and darkness – “Things not reveal’d, which th’ invisible King/Only Omniscient, hath supprest in Night” (7.122–123) – which are among those emphasized in the King James version of the Book of Proverbs: “But the path of the just is as the shining light that shineth more and more unto the perfect day” (4.18).24 Following Solomon, the exegetical tradition founded by Augustine and reanimated by Protestantism typically associated knowledge (scientia) with the earthly realm and wisdom (sapientia) with the divine.25 This is not to say that the connotations of the two words never overlap, as in the passage from 2 Chronicles 1.10 I previously cited (“Give mee now wisedome and knowledge, that I may goe out and come in before this people”), or indeed that a notion of higher knowledge cannot itself be synonymous at times with wisdom. Nonetheless, in devotional terms in seventeenth-century England we should note that wisdom normally names that body of understanding required for salvation, while knowledge can either aid in, or hinder, one’s hopes for redemption, depending upon the point of view of a particular thinker.26 According to the narrator of Paradise Lost, his verse functions as a form of divinely imparted wisdom, with the blind poet inspired nightly 24

25

26

Milton’s appreciation of this particular proverb manifests itself early in his career, when he uses it in The Reason of Church Government (1642): “The actions of just and pious men do not darken in their middle course; but Solomon tels us they are as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfet day” (CPW 1.795). See Augustine, The City of God, trans. by Gerald G. Walsh, Demetrius B. Zema, and Grace Monahan, ed. Vernon J. Bourke (New York: Doubleday, 1958), Bk. 11, chap. 10, p. 219. Augustine cites the Wisdom of Solomon (7.22) for proof that wisdom is itself multiple, with many distinguishing characteristics. The most extensive analysis of Milton’s delineation between knowledge and wisdom remains Barbara Kiefer Lewalski’s reading of Book 4 of Paradise Regained. See Milton’s Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning, and Art of Paradise Regained (Providence: Brown University Press, 1966), esp. pp. 289–302. Consider, for example, John Donne’s high estimation of the importance of knowledge to salvation in his Essays in Divinity (1651), where “Humility, and Studiousnesse . . . are so near of kin, that they are both agreed to be limbes and members of one vertue, Temperance.” Essays in Divinity, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), p. 5. On the opposite side of the spectrum we might place John Bunyan, who insists in Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666) on a stark divide between “that faith that is fained, and according to man’s wisdom, and . . . that which comes by a man being born thereto of God.” Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. W. R. Owens (London: Penguin, 1987), p. 32.

Milton and Solomonic Education

93

by his Heavenly Muse (7.28–31). Knowledge, Raphael explains to Adam, must be kept – in contrast to poetic rapture – “within bounds” (7.120), for otherwise learning risks perverting the highest aim of education, to strengthen one’s faith in God: “But knowledge is as food, and needs no less / Her Temperance over Appetite, to know / In measure what the mind may well contain, / Oppresses else with Surfeit, and soon turns / Wisdom to Folly, as Nourishment to Wind” (7.126–130). Solomon functions, in Paradise Lost, as the paradigmatic example of the limitations of knowledge when it is not accompanied by spiritual faith, while the Solomonic distinction between knowledge and wisdom enables a key distinction to be drawn by Raphael between Adam and Eve’s experience of understanding. Intriguingly, in his adoption of this Solomonic language of understanding, Milton chooses to associate knowledge with selfanalysis.27 This should not entirely surprise us, because belief in the higher truth of God has a way of emptying out one’s interiority in the prelapsarian formulation. Thus, “Hee for God only, shee for God in him” (4.299), often emphasized in contemporary readings of the poem as an example of Eve’s subsidiary status to Adam in the gender hierarchy of the poem, is also illustrative of the fact that Adam does not, in this equation, possess a self for Eve to have so much as a God for her to access.28 Defenses of Eve, such as John Ulreich’s, have often taken as their premise the idea that the loss of Eden is a “necessary consequence of becoming a fully human soul,” but from Adam’s perspective in the poem, part of Eve’s allure is that she seems to know herself so well even before the fall.29 As the first man explains to Raphael, in language that tellingly presents Eve’s self-knowledge in opposition to wisdom, when I approach Her loveliness, so absolute she seems 27

28

29

Similarly, the poet also links taste with knowledge so as to emphasize the connection between eating the fruit and learning to sin. See Christopher Ricks, Milton’s Grand Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), p. 71 n1. This dimension of the poem is easy to miss, even for highly skilled readers. For instance, John Leonard remarks that Adam’s naming of the animals brings him “self-knowledge,” but the passage he cites for evidence in fact establishes just how powerfully Adam places the deity in his own person: “Approaching two and two, These cow’ring low / With blandishment, each Bird stoop’d on his wing. / I nam’d them, as they pass’d, and understood / Thir Nature, with such knowledge God endu’d / My sudden apprehension” (my italics 8.350–354). “Language and Knowledge in Paradise Lost,” in Dennis Danielson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 97–111, 99. John C. Ulreich, “‘Argument Not Less But More Heroic’: Eve as the Hero of Paradise Lost,” in Charles W. Durham and Kristin A. Pruitt (eds.), “All in All”: Unity, Diversity, and the Miltonic Perspective (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1999), pp. 67–82, 77.

94

dougl as trevor And in herself complete, so well to know Her own, that what she wills to do or say, Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best; All higher knowledge in her presence falls Degraded, Wisdom in discourse with her Loses discount’nanc’t. (8.546–553)

The alarm expressed by Raphael in the wake of such an admission makes it clear to us as readers that from a higher, angelic perspective, Adam’s loss of “Wisdom in discourse” indicates a forfeiture of a rational, implicitly male form of devotion. Raphael’s proposed solution for Adam’s quandary is for the first man to counterbalance Eve’s apparent self-knowledge (“so well to know / Her own”) with a patriarchal reassertion of his better reason: Oft-times nothing profits more Than self-esteem, grounded on just and right Well manag’d; of that skill the more thou know’st, The more she will acknowledge thee her Head, And to realities yield all her shows. (8.571–5)

Of course, “realities” here are not real; they are ideological, enforced by Adam acting smart and thus creating greater compliance on the part of Eve. To “acknowledge” here is to induce Eve to look to Adam for instruction while he relies, in turn, on an intuitive wisdom that has its origins in a higher realm. Throughout the end of Book 8, and indeed throughout the poem, Eve is paired with knowledge while Adam is strongly encouraged to trust that he possesses wisdom even when he is himself unsure that this is true.30 “[B]e not diffident/Of Wisdom,” Raphael warns Adam, “she deserts thee not, if thou / Dismiss not her” (8.562–4). Failure to see himself as naturally harboring greater insight than Eve risks an inversion of the gender hierarchy, for – as Raphael reminds Adam somewhat ominously – “Thy mate . . . sees when thou art seen least wise” (8.578). Of course, it is when Eve finds herself in conversation with the serpent, in front of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, that she confuses the distinction between knowledge and wisdom for the last, fatal time, wondering why God “Forbids us good, forbids us to be wise?” (9.759). The attentive reader, one who – unlike Eve – has been 30

Although some scholars have argued that Eve should herself be considered “lowly wise” (8.173), the narrator of Paradise Lost scrupulously avoids such designation. See Ann Torday Gulden, “Milton’s Eve and Wisdom: The ‘Dinner-Party’ Scene in Paradise Lost,” Milton Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 4 (1998), pp. 137–43, 138, 140.

Milton and Solomonic Education

95

privy to the entire exchange between Raphael and Adam, should recognize in this wording a problem, for God does not put limits on sapientia at all. In this sense, both Adam and Eve know all that they must know at the beginning of the poem to be saved, although Adam is reminded of this by Raphael, in part – according to the Almighty Father – so that “Lest wilfully transgressing he pretend / Surprisal, unadmonisht, unforewarn’d” (5.244–245). The question, of which feminist readers of Paradise Lost have made us acutely aware in recent decades, is whether or not Eve knows that she knows enough, or if the effect of being told she is at the bottom of the gender/angelic hierarchy so damages her self-esteem as to make her inclined to make poor decisions so as to somehow, some way improve her standing.31 Adam, of course, does know that his choice is an irrational one when he falls. Although unquestioned obedience would dispel the temptation itself, Eve nonetheless cannot know as Adam does; in fact, it is by virtue of this lack that Eve is Eve, rather than another Adam, in the first place. The point I wish to make here is not to defend Eve on these grounds, as many have done and as makes enormous sense from our point of view – if this point of view sees the gender hierarchy as a terrible arrangement in the first place. My point, rather, is to emphasize that the tree of knowledge of good and evil in Paradise Lost is a different tree than that of Genesis because it exists in a very different text. This second tree is different from the first precisely because of the attention the poem pays to distinctions between knowledge and wisdom. We have learned, by Book 9 of Paradise Lost, that wisdom and knowledge are not the same thing – that indeed they can be antithetical to one another. We have been tutored, along with Adam, dutifully reminded of the example of Solomon, and also encouraged to pursue greater understanding under the dictates that the Book of Proverbs in particular proffers. In the Genesis account of the fall, such clarity is lacking: like Eve, we find ourselves abruptly tempted by the serpent, who promises that we “shall bee as Gods, knowing good and evill” (3.5). As readers of Paradise Lost, on the contrary, we have been cautioned against desiring such knowledge. Eve, however, has not. Thus, for this moment in the poem, she becomes quite suddenly a figure from another experiential 31

See, for example, Christine Froula, “When Eve Reads Milton: Undoing the Canonical Economy,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 10, no. 2 (1983), pp. 321–47; Mary Nyquist, “The Genesis of Gendered Subjectivity in the Divorce Tracts and in Paradise Lost,” in Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson (eds.), Remembering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions (New York and London: Methuen, 1988), pp. 99–127; Joseph Wittreich, “‘He Ever Was A Dissenter’: Milton’s Transgressive Maneuvers in Paradise Lost,” in Kristin Pruitt McColgan and Charles W. Durham (eds.), Arenas of Conflict: Milton and the Unfettered Mind (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1997), pp. 21–40.

96

dougl as trevor

range altogether: left out of the secret that we as readers share with every other character in the poem. Solomon’s desire for both knowledge and wisdom, not unlike Adam’s determination, upon meeting Raphael, “not to let th’ occasion pass / Given him by this great Conference to know / Of things above his World, and of thir being / Who dwell in Heav’n” (5.453–56), makes the son of David – in Milton’s eyes – a religious and a civic leader of high regard, although not without important qualifications. Even before he goes so far as to defend regicide in Eikonoklastes (October 1649), Milton is dubious about monarchy, arguing in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (February 1649) that a king’s power is on loan from the people he governs. The Hebrews’ desire for a king (1 Samuel 8), “against the advice and counsel of God” – Milton is quick to remind us – leads to slavery and suffering (CPW 3.202–3). Although he cites the history of the Jewish people as proof that monarchy could inflict suffering, and that, as a consequence, the “custom of tyrantkilling was not unusual,” Milton never labels Solomon a tyrant (CPW 3.213). Rather, he remains a predominantly positive example of leadership in the Miltonic corpus, principally because, at least at the outset of his reign, Solomon views his role as a leader as one dependent upon sound learning. Following “the best of Political writers,” Milton defines a king as one “who governs to the good and profit of his People, and not for his own ends” (CPW 3.202). The cautious pursuit of knowledge and the desire for wisdom exemplifies the appropriate conduct of a king in Milton’s mind. In this regard, the poet’s high estimation of Solomon is by no means unusual in the seventeenth century. In The Advancement of Learning (1605), for example, Francis Bacon makes the intellectual attributes of Solomon, sanctified by God, unequivocal: “So likewise in the person of Salomon the king, we see the gift or endowment of wisdom and learning, both in Salomon’s petition and in God’s assent thereunto, preferred before all other terrene and temporal felicity.”32 Beyond being blessed with wisdom and obtaining knowledge, however, few scenes in the Hebrew Bible or Apocrypha actually show Solomon in the process of learning. There are the instructions the young Solomon receives from his father (1 Kings 2.1–9), and his judgment, once enthroned, of the claims two women make to the same child (1 Kings 3.16–28), which clearly evinces his perceptivity. He is not seen, however, developing these skills. After absorbing the counsel of his father, and the blessings of God, Solomon 32

Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning and New Atlantis (1906; London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 47.

Milton and Solomonic Education

97

is more than adequately equipped to deal with any of the intellectual, or spiritual, challenges presented to him. Yet, his faith in God is not a given, and will actually falter: “For it came to passe when Solomon was old, that his wives turned away his heart after other gods: and his heart was not perfect with the LORD his God, as was the heart of David his father” (1 Kings 11.4). Solomon’s betrayal of God occurs in spite of his intellectual abilities, and while Milton will esteem the cultivation of such abilities for the spiritual health of the individual and the greater political body, he will not affirm that such endeavors are capable of insulating their practitioners from subsequent deviancy, even of the worse kind. As early as Of Education (1644), Milton makes the Solomonic aspiration to use knowledge and wisdom for both pious and civic ends one of the cornerstones of his pedagogy, directing his students to “the determinat sentence of David or Solomon,” by which he tells his charges that they may perfect their “knowledge of personall duty” (CPW 2.397). For early modern readers of the Bible, Solomon’s works would have included not only Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon but also the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon, which was included in both the Geneva and King James Bibles, both of which Milton owned, and the Junius-Tremellius Latin version of the Bible, arguably Milton’s favorite.33 Taken together, these texts formed what Julio Trebolle Barrera has called “a sort of ‘school of Solomon,’” one that proffered some basic pedagogical principles, along with an endorsement of learning – albeit qualified – that, in the midst of seventeenth-century, Puritan attacks on learnedness, Milton found highly useful.34 Some scholars have argued that Wisdom itself was written to counterbalance either the influence of the Isis cult of ancient Egypt or the Hellenistic culture of Alexandria on Jewish youth by recharacterizing Judaism as more mystical and cerebral than it might have appeared in contrast with its pagan competition.35 Thus do we find fear defined, in Wisdom, as “nothing else, but a betraying of the succours which reason offereth”(Wisdom 17.12), a view of 33

34

35

See Harris Francis Fletcher, The Use of the Bible in Milton’s Prose (1929; New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1970), pp. 43–51. According to F. F. Bruce, it was not until the Long Parliament of 1644 that England decreed “that only the canonical books of the Old Testament should be read in church, and three years later the Westminster Confession of Faith declared that ‘the books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration, are not part of the canon of the Scripture; and therefore are of no authority in the Church of God.’” The English Bible: A History of Translations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 111. Julio Trebolle Barrera, The Jewish Bible and the Christian Bible: An Introduction to the History of the Bible, trans. from the Spanish by Wilfred G. E. Watson (Leiden: Brill Eerdmans, 1998), p. 174. See Lester L. Grabbe, Wisdom of Solomon (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), pp. 79, 93.

98

dougl as trevor

the passions that balances the emotive with the intellectual as Milton was himself wont to do.36 That learning is the answer to individual, and even collective, failings is – for Milton – never in doubt. In The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), its author grants that if the English suffer from inherent “fickl’ness,” as some would claim, then “good education and acquisit wisdom ought to correct the fluxible fault, if any such be, of our watry situation” (CPW 7.437). In the prelapsarian world of Eden, however, Milton appraises the usefulness of learning more cautiously, as we have already seen. In the Wisdom of Solomon, Solomon’s display of learning is both impressive and, in light of his eventual disgrace, a lesson in the limited benefits of knowledge. “For hee [God] hath given mee,” Solomon claims, certaine knowledge of the things that are, namely to know how the world was made, and the operation of the elements: The beginning, ending, and midst of the times: the alterations of the turning of the Sunne, and the change of seasons: The circuits of yeres, and the positions of starres: The natures of living creatures, and the furies of wilde beasts: the violence of windes, and the reasonings of men: the diversities of plants, and the vertues of rootes: And all such things as are either secret or manifest: them I know. (Wisdom 7.17–21)

This “certaine knowledge of the things that are” appears to both Solomon and Milton’s Adam in the form of divinely received understanding, which mitigates the danger of human error in the quest for wisdom by placing a divine agent in control of the learning process. At the hands of Raphael, Adam’s tutorial is more restricted than is Solomon’s: Adam is discouraged from asking questions about the celestial motions and encouraged instead to “be lowly wise” (Paradise Lost 8.173). If not explicitly, Solomon is at least implicitly present in the educational scenes between Raphael and Adam as the quintessential example of the limited usefulness of knowledge, particularly in a perfect world, a world in which no “fluxible fault[s]” need be corrected (CPW 7.437). Although learning possesses greater status in Milton’s mind after the fall, when original sin makes it vital for every human to try to improve him or herself by any and all means necessary, no such learning is ever to be valued over faith. That Adam takes this lesson to heart, assuring Raphael that “prime Wisdom” is precisely “That which before us lies in daily life” (Paradise Lost 8.194, 193), is – from the postlapsarian perspective of the poet – an heroic gesture, and yet it is not enough to prevent the fall; in fact, Milton decides to depart from the Genesis account of the moment of the fall itself (3.6), at least in part to make Adam’s 36

See, for example, Areopagitica, CPW 2.557.

Milton and Solomonic Education

99

errancy more clearly a choice between obedience to God and what Eve – at that moment in the poem – represents. In other words, Adam’s fall in Paradise Lost is modeled more on the fall of Solomon than it is on the fall of Adam in the Genesis narrative, for it is Solomon, not the first Adam, who, “Against his better knowledge” is “fondly overcome with Female charm” (my italics 9.998, 999). As I have already indicated, Raphael’s words of warning in Paradise Lost come in the wake of Solomon’s failure to maintain the proper relation between wisdom and knowledge, a failure that Milton evokes in Book 1 by naming the false gods before which the Hebrew King worshipped: “First Moloch, horrid King besmear’d with blood / Of human sacrifice, and parents’ tears, / Though for the noise of Drums and Timbrels loud / Thir children’s cries unheard, that pass’d through fire / To his grim Idol” (1.392–396). Following Moloch is “Chemos, th’ obscene dread of Moab’s Sons” (1.406). After him, Astoreth appears in the poem, “To whose bright Image nightly by the Moon / Sidonian Virgins paid thir Vows and Songs” (1.440–441). Each of these gods represents the sin of idolatry, the act of coveting that which is physically manipulatable over that which is only spiritually conceived, but the nature of Solomon’s veneration of these gods is sexual as well as blasphemous, conflating the false worship of deities with the excessive veneration of the women who led him to such genuflections. Thus is Chemos associated by Milton with “wanton rites” and “lustful Orgies” (1.414, 415). For the biblically well-versed reader of the seventeenth century, these allusions to Solomon would have been hard to miss, but Milton makes their evocation unambiguous: “Nor content with such / Audacious neighborhood, the wisest heart / Of Solomon he [Moloch] led by fraud to build / His Temple right against the Temple of God” (1.399– 402). The temple of Astoreth as well, we read, “stood . . . on th’ offensive Mountain, built / By that uxorious King, whose heart though large, / Beguil’d by fair Idolatresses, fell / To Idols foul” (1.442–446).37 As in the A Defence of the People of England, Milton blames the wives of Solomon for beguiling, or seducing, their husband into sin, but the charges against Solomon still weigh heavily; he has descended into the sin of idolatry, in spite of his knowledge and wisdom. The exoneration of this transgression, which Milton forwards in A Defence at the expense of Charles I, is absent in Paradise Lost. We are reminded only of Solomon’s loss of faith, and the reminder comes early, four-hundred lines into the poem. 37

Solomon’s sin reemerges in Paradise Regained: “Women, when nothing else, beguil’d the heart / Of wisest Solomon, and made him build, / And made him bow to the Gods of his Wives” (2.169–171).

100

dougl as t revor

By emphasizing Solomon’s status as a someone seduced to sin, rather than any of his other characterizations – the lover of learning, or wise judge, or advocate of divorce, or even teacher, as his assumed authorship of the Proverbs would support – Milton establishes the sin of disobedience within the context of intellectual accomplishment that the figure of Solomon always evokes. The stakes of learning and being misled are thus clearly demarcated at the outset of the poem through reference to a Hebrew King whose sin is made to preempt that of Adam and Eve’s in the poem. In the narrative of the poem, in other words, original sin becomes a variation on the theme of the mishandling of wisdom and knowledge and the fatal love of women: themes that Solomon embodies and Milton’s Adam and Eve reenact.38 Whereas Wisdom unequivocally endorses inspired understanding, the Solomonic corpus, taken as a whole, expresses serious reservations regarding an unlimited pursuit of learning. These reservations manifest themselves – in Paradise Lost – most notably in Raphael’s warnings about unbounded knowledge that we have already examined. Solomon’s close identification with education necessitated that seventeenth-century advocates of pedagogic reform confront his occasionally skeptical appraisal of certain types of learning, most of which are found in Ecclesiastes. Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning wastes little time in acknowledging “that censure of Salomon, concerning the excess of writing and reading books, and the anxiety of spirit which redoundeth from knowledge.”39 Bacon has in mind Ecclesiastes 12.12: “And further, by these, my sonne, be admonished: of making many bookes there is no end, and much studie is a wearinesse of the flesh.”40 The Englishman responds by turning the wise Hebrew against himself: Salomon doth excellently expound himself in another place of the same book, where he saith: “I saw well that knowledge recedeth as far from ignorance as light doth from darkness; and that the wise man’s eyes keep watch in his head, whereas the fool roundeth about in darkness: but withal I learned, that the same mortality involveth them both.”41

In his attempt to mollify the sting of Solomon’s censure, Bacon overlooks the distinctions made in these writings between divinely inspired and 38

39 40

41

On the status of Genesis as a late addition to the Hebrew Bible, see Schwartz, Remembering and Repeating, p. 2. Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, p. 9. Renaissance readings of Ecclesiastes aligned it closely to the Book of Proverbs. See Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric, p. 57. Milton references these lines in Book 4 of Paradise Regained (lines 321–330). Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, pp. 9–10. He is referring to Ecclesiastes 2.13–14.

Milton and Solomonic Education

101

self-obtained learning, all in an effort to present his quite radical educational reforms as mindful of traditional learning and belief. It is, after all, no coincidence that, in his New Atlantis (1627), the college at “the very eye of ” his Utopian state is called the “Society of Salomon’s House”; the name connotes an adherence to the veneration of learning as defined by and associated with scripture.42 Solomon’s support of learning is, as we have already seen, ambiguous – at once celebratory and cautious, depending on the text we consult – but while evoking this Israelite King can convey contradictory sentiments, to ignore his example would be even more hazardous for English writers on education, as it might be construed as suggesting irreligiousness. Milton’s strategy, when he interprets the same problematic passage from Ecclesiastes in Areopagitica, is to emphasize what it does not say: “Salomon informs us that much reading is a wearines to the flesh; but neither he, nor other inspir’d author tells us that such, or such reading is unlawfull” (CPW 2.514). The context of Milton’s claim, the postlapsarian world of seventeenth-century England, has little direct bearing on the scenes of education that occur in the pre-book world of Eden in Paradise Lost, but Milton’s defense of human curiosity does inflect Adam’s questioning of Raphael, and – more problematically – Eve’s confrontation with Satan. In Milton’s hands, the drama of the fall very much revolves around the contradictory relation between knowledge as it is obtained through human endeavor and wisdom as it is acquired through divine visitations. The strong endorsement of wisdom in the Apocrypha depends upon divine tutelage, for without a responsible instructor, knowledge might lead as quickly to death as to revelation. In Paradise Lost, the allure of corrupted – that is, nondivine – pseudowisdom as a vehicle for empowerment finds its greatest spokesman in Satan, who assuages the first humans’ desire to learn and soon resolves to “excite thir minds / With more desire to know” (4.522–23). Satan seizes on the potential mistaking of knowledge for wisdom by ventriloquizing the sentiments of the Wisdom of Solomon and then perverting their ends. “If your delight be then in thrones and scepters,” the author-figure Solomon claims, “O ye kings of the people, honour wisedome, that yee may raigne for evermore” (Wisdom 6.21). Denying any special provenance for divine wisdom, Satan argues instead that the tree that represents temptation is a “Wisdom-giving Plant” (Paradise Lost 9.679), an idol that can itself impart perfect understanding: “Ye Eat thereof, your Eyes that seem so clear,/Yet are 42

Bacon, New Atlantis, p. 267.

102

dougl as t revor

but dim, shall perfetly be then/Op’n’d and clear’d, and ye shall be as Gods” (9.706–708). The tree of knowledge of good and evil offers what it claims: the ability to draw distinctions, not the power to transcend them. As Adam remarks to Eve shortly after the fall, “we know/Both Good and Evil, Good lost, and Evil got, / Bad Fruit of Knowledge, if this be to know” (9.1071– 1073). This is, in fact, all that such knowledge provides. When Adam complains to his wife that she betrayed him, he admits that he turned his pupil into his master mistress, in spite of Raphael’s warning, now contradicting his earlier defense of his own fall, which he had claimed – in Book 9 – had occurred in spite of knowing better: “I by thee,/To trust thee from my side, imagin’d wise” (10.880–881). A reading of Paradise Lost mindful only of the Solomonic educational precepts contained within the poem, as well as the specter of Solomon that haunts its pages, would presumably be content leaving the first man as Solomon is left in 1 Kings 11: buried with his fathers, having disappointed his God by turning away from him. This reading would, however, only present one perspective on Adam’s fall whereas the poem gives us a dizzying array. Such a reading would also fail to note the postlapsarian rehabilitation of both Adam and Eve. John Bunyan’s observations on Solomon’s fall in Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666) alerts us to the reconfiguration of this fall occasioned by Christian faith. As Bunyan recounts, I thought on Solomon, and how he sinned, in loving strange women, in falling away to their idols, in building them temples, in doing this after light, in his old age, after great mercy received: but the same conclusion that cut me off in the former consideration, cut me off as to this; namely, that all those were but sins against the law, for which God had provided a remedy, but I had sold my Saviour, and there now remained no more sacrifice for sin.43

Although Rosenblatt and others have pointed out the operation of Hebraic law in the prelapsarian economy of Paradise Lost, we might add to this account the observation that not just the law, but the narrator himself seems Hebraic: perfectly willing, for example, to dismiss Eve as a charmer just as the narrator of 1 Kings is content to discard Solomon as an idolater. Adam himself justifies his impending fall by emphasizing the deep ties he feels to his wife: “The Bond of Nature draw me to my own, / My own in thee, for what thou art is mine; / Our State cannot be sever’d, we are one,/ One flesh; to lose thee were to lose myself ” (9.956–959). In these lines, Adam does not see himself as under a spell; rather, he describes himself as 43

Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, p. 43.

Milton and Solomonic Education

103

married to Eve, and thus through and with her forming a single, corporate entity. A very different Solomonic text than those we have turned to up to this point validates this expression of union: the Song of Solomon. When Adam wakes Eve at the beginning of Book 5, he does so with language that clearly evokes the Song, softly touching her hand and informing her that “the morning shines, and the fresh field / Calls us” (5.20–21).44 Well before the end of the poem, we as readers are equipped to read Eve not just as the bride stirred from sleep by her husband, but rather as a representation of the historical church. As McColley remarks, “Eve, like the church, will fall into idolatry, and Adam, like Solomon, will be seduced from God by a fair idolatress. But these lapses are not inevitable.”45 Whether these lapses could have been avoided in the poem seems beside the point, at least if our interest is occupied with the Judeo-Christian tradition in which the fall occurs. More relevant to Milton’s creative retelling of the story is the attention he pays to the penitent Eve who first begs forgiveness of Adam and eventually leaves the garden with him. It is their reunion at the very end of the poem – after Adam’s sojourn with Michael – and their departure together from Eden that calls to mind the moment, at the end of the Song of Solomon when the two lovers themselves set out together: “Come, my beloved, let us goe forth into the field” (Song of Solomon 7.11), is echoed loosely by Eve in her final utterance in the poem: “but now lead on; /In mee is no delay; with thee to go,/Is to stay here; without thee here to stay, / Is to go hence unwilling; thou to mee/Art all things under Heav’n” (Paradise Lost 12.614–618). Lost in this last evocation of a Solomonic text in the poem is the exuberance and unbridled hope of the Song of Solomon itself, but this is Milton’s point. In the Christian resolution of the poem, Adam and Eve are saved, but their transgression is not forgotten. They face a world that has itself fallen as a result, and this world – while shaped by “Providence” (12.647) – will not reveal its designs as easily as before. The lessons of Solomonic wisdom remain pertinent, in many ways more pertinent than ever, but the path to such wisdom has become internalized, with faith in God, rather than submission to the law, now being key. The pedagogic principles of Paradise Lost cannot be fully elucidated by merely alluding to one particular model, especially when its author was versed in so many. Nonetheless, the influence of those writings attributed to Solomon on the main precepts of Miltonic education – particularly the Book 44

See the Song of Solomon 2.10, 12–13.

45

McColley, Milton’s Eve, p. 97.

104

dougl as t revor

of Proverbs and the Wisdom of Solomon – is unmistakable, just as the shadow cast by Solomon over Milton’s own conscience evinces itself in the English poet’s treatment of the fall of Adam in particular. Leading up to this moment in Paradise Lost, instruction is a central component of Adam’s experience. Indeed, the first man is encouraged to seek knowledge, although within clearly described limits. That a teacher as wise as Solomon failed so profoundly in spiritual terms further convinced Milton of how complicated – and precarious – it could be to lead a learned, devout life. In Paradise Lost, the shared need that Adam and Eve have for one another after the fall is the only compensation they have for their loss of purity, but when a marriage is broken beyond repair – as in Samson Agonistes (1671) – the result is not forced relocation but rather death. Miltonists continue to remake and reconsider how Milton himself viewed the ideal relation between husband and wife, but regarding his own investment in the institution of marriage, there can be no question that Milton’s was enormously high. The evasive, at times insidious difference between knowledge and wisdom that animate temptation and tests of obedience in Paradise Lost will fuel the Son of God’s impassioned rejection of pagan learning in Paradise Regained (1671) as unrelated to “True wisdom” (4.319). In this later context, when Milton claims “Our Hebrew Songs” to be superior to pagan poetry, we would do well to note the possessive pronoun (4.336). Only through his ownership of Jewish learning and scripture did Milton believe that he could fully “justify the ways of God to men” (Paradise Lost 1.26), and also redeem his own misfortunes and mistakes in terms learned enough for him to find them to be convincing and sound.

c h a pter 6

T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and the Milton Controversy Matthew Biberman

i. milton’s paradise regained and semitic-centrism It is an accepted convention of Milton criticism to speak of Paradise Regained as a sequence of temptations. The poem’s penultimate temptation, a dramatic event in the narrative that Miltonists have come to refer to as “the temptation of Athens,” features lines that characterize and evaluate a body of cultural knowledge that has most often been labeled as the classical tradition. The lines in question occur when Satan tempts the Son with an offer of knowledge. Satan asks Jesus to consider the fact that: All knowledge is not couched in Moses’ law, The Pentateuch or what the prophets wrote, The Gentiles also know, and write, and teach To admiration, led by nature’s light; And with the Gentiles much thou must converse, Ruling them by persuasion as thou mean’st, Without their learning how wilt thou with them, Or they with thee hold conversation meet?1

In my reading of the poem, Satan is not offering the Son the sum of all knowledge. The lure Satan extends here is not even all classical knowledge, but knowledge of a much more limited sort, that is, Gentile “learning” of the kind that will be valuable in helping the Son in his effort to rule not just over Jews but all humanity. Nor do I see Jesus’ response as constituting a rejection of this knowledge. As I read the poem, Jesus’ response to this temptation consists of a rejection of allegiance to the giver (that is, Satan), and a declaration that he need not get this gift of “their [Gentile] learning” from Satan because as a Hebrew he already possesses all the knowledge in question. In other words, I see the Son’s response here as an assertion that 1

John Milton, Paradise Regained, IV, 225–32. All quotations from Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes are to the Oxford John Milton, eds. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Subsequent quotations are given in text.

105

106

mat t hew biberman

the dichotomy presented by Satan is a false one. For Milton’s Son, it is not a question of choosing knowledge over faith or faith over knowledge; rather, it is the occasion to right a misrecognition. What appears as a nowin situation where every outcome involves the individual possessing only one of the two desired attributes in question is, in fact, a win-win situation where the individual can emerge with both desired objects so long as the apparent dilemma is approached from the Son’s perspective. Simply put, in the interpretation of the temptation to Athens scene I am advancing, what Satan characterizes as an either/or problem, the Son solves with a both/and solution. The key lines supporting my reading are uttered by the Son in response to Satan’s offer; they are: “Our Hebrew songs and harps in Babylon, / That so pleased our victor’s ear, declare / That rather Greece from us these arts derived” (IV. 336–8). What I find especially striking about this denunciation is that it is consistent with a conception of Jesus as a historical figure. Milton gives us Jesus as a nationalist, that is, Milton’s Jesus refuses to accept the superiority of Greek culture to his own. Indeed, the point is made so strongly that Satan’s approach already assumes what we could call Jesus’ Semitic-centrism, which is why we get the argument that Jesus will need non-Hebrew knowledge not because it has intrinsic merits but because it will aid him in his rule of non-Hebrews. This Semitic-centrism explains why in rejecting Satan’s offer, Jesus declares all Greek knowledge to have derived from Hebrew culture. The implication is clear: Jesus doesn’t need to get his Greek knowledge from Satan because as a Hebrew he already possesses that knowledge and in a superior incarnation. Yet past Milton scholarship has spilled little ink over the Son’s claim that classical knowledge is an inferior derivation of Hebrew knowledge, and this omission is perhaps all the more surprising given the fact that the same rhetorical gambit is used in the Areopagitica. There Milton seeks to play the homegrown Messiah to his fellow Englishmen, and in the course of making that argument, chooses to emphasize – just as he does in Paradise Regained – that the native culture (in that case British culture) – was the ultimate source of all knowledge. Here is that passage: Therefore the studies of learning in her deepest Sciences have bin so ancient, and so eminent among us, that Writers of good antiquity, and ablest judgement have bin perswaded that ev’n the school of Pythagoras, and the Persian wisdom took beginning from the old Philosophy of this Iland.2 2

Complete Prose Works of John Milton, Volume II, ed. Ernest Sirluck (Yale University Press, 1959), p. 551–2. All references to Milton’s prose are to The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don Wolfe et al., 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82); henceforth YP; subsequent references will appear in the text.

T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and the Milton Controversy

107

Nor is the reappearance of this theory in Paradise Regained surprising; theories that posit the unification of all “true” knowledge through the imposition of a genealogical structure were a commonplace in Milton’s day, and indeed, they remain in circulation today as a cursory survey of the offerings of any New Age bookstore demonstrates. What is interesting in this instance is not then that Milton was familiar with this commonplace, but rather his use of it as a way to establish a claim for what he clearly conceives of as a body of Hebrew political philosophy. Asserting this claim enables Milton to declare that his republicanism derives from the original and best model for a government. This motivation helps explain the Son’s swerve from art to politics in his response to Satan: Their orators thou then extoll’st, as those The top of eloquence, statists indeed, And lovers of their country, as may seem; But herein to our prophets far beneath, As men divinely taught, and better teaching The solid rules of civil-government In their majestic unaffected style Than all the oratory of Greece and Rome. In them is plainest taught, and easiest learnt, What makes a nation happy, and keeps it so, What ruins kingdoms, and lays cities flat; These only with our law best form a king. (IV. 353–64)

These lines illustrate the utility of asserting a genealogical claim for the political system Milton favors. Here the only king Jesus recognizes is the joint authority of the Old and New Covenants. In response to the longestablished antinomian3 inclination within reformational theology not to look to the law lest one separate oneself from Christ, Milton conjures a Jesus to whom he can look, a Jesus who says, Look to the Law. This tactical move is part of Milton’s larger strategy to shore up support for republicanism by establishing that such republicanism is the legal structure propounded by God the Father and endorsed by the Son in his incarnation as Jesus. So doing, Milton cuts the Gordian knot of the Pauline Dilemma. When approached in this context, faith and works are no longer caught in a schematic that places them in tension. Instead faith legitimizes works, and works include the erection of a Hebrew commonwealth (conceived, no 3

In The Catholic Encyclopedia, volume I, eds. Charles Herbermann et al. (New York: The Encyclopedia Press, 1913), Francis Aveling defines ‘antinomianism’ as ‘the heretical doctrine that all Christians are exempt from the obligations of the moral law’ (p. 564).

108

mat t hew biberman

doubt, retroactively as Milton’s ideal republic) where the only king is law. No longer is the Christian at war with the world; instead in the vision revealed in Paradise Regained, the Christian is instructed by the Messiah to make peace with the world, adopting as a stopgap measure the requirements of law and civil government. In the process, Milton addresses a basic problem for Christianity when that theology is approached through the public rather than the private sphere. As David Flusser explains in Judaism and the Origins of Christianity: Christianity did not develop a specific Christian concept of social righteousness. It did not need it, at least until Christianity became a state religion, because it possessed its attitude of love and the deep theology (or theologies) of sin, sinfulness, and divine grace. But, from the time of Constantine until today, when Christianity became the established religion of states and societies which themselves did not originate from basic Christian concepts, a Christian answer to the problems of justice, crime, and punishment, and forensic morality were badly needed. Thus, Christianity always turned in such situations for help to Old Testament or GrecoRoman solutions.4

In place of a code of laws, then, the early Church attempted to substitute the precept to love your enemy. The result is that in Christianity we have a philosophy that, as Flusser puts it, “surpasses Judaism, at least theoretically, in its approach of love to all men, but its only genuine answer to the powerful wicked forces of this world is, as it seems, martyrdom.”5 As Flusser points out, Christianity’s central nexus of shame, forgiveness, and rebirth does not adequately address civic matters such as unrepentant criminality. This oversight helps explain why Christianity proved readily adaptable to classical jurisprudence. Returning now to the Son in Paradise Regained, we are able to recognize that he not only refuses to play the Christian martyr, he also refuses to endorse any set of classical politics. Instead he would apply Mosaic law. In offering this solution, Jesus’ endorsement of Hebrew civil structures is also an acknowledgment that sin and evil are intractable and that therefore measures such as punishment, and separating conflicting parties, need to be deployed. Thus, the solution Milton offers in Paradise Regained is precisely the recognition that the Christian need not reject knowledge in order to embrace faith. Yet where I see Milton using the commonplace of a genealogical theory of unified knowledge to advance a both/and solution in the face of a false choice, the weight of past scholarship has seen instead a tense either/or 4 5

David Flusser, Judaism and the Origins of Christianity (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1988), pp. 126–7. Flusser, Judaism and the Origins, p. 489.

T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and the Milton Controversy

109

drama in which the reader is made to endure the sight of a stoic Jesus rejecting classical knowledge in favor of faith. We find this trend amply documented by Barbara Lewalski in her survey of critical responses to the poem. She writes: R. M. Adams sees in Christ’s speech only a “provincial contempt of the classics,” and “a feeling for the Christian dispensation as not only supplementing but canceling pagan reason.” W. B. C. Watkins declares that Milton here “negates learning like an Alexandrian bonfire” and “rips to shreds the passion of fifty years.” Douglas Bush finds it painful “to watch Milton turn and rend some main roots of his being.” George Sensabaugh explains the “strange pronouncements upon intellectual curiosity and humane studies” as stemming from a “deep disillusion.” And E. M. W. Tillyard senses in the passage a mood of “mortification or masochism” in which Milton “goes out of his way to hurt the dearest and oldest inhabitants of his mind: the Greek philosophers, his early love of Plato included, the disinterested thirst for knowledge, the poets and orators of Greece and Rome.”6

Nor is Lewalski’s list, published in 1966, idiosyncratic. In their 1975 Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton, Walter MacKeller and Edward Weismiller provide this conclusion to their survey of responses to this textual crux: “The most persistent view is that Milton, though himself one of the most learned poets, sometime in his later years came to a complete distrust of intellectual effort.”7 And this either/or approach remains dominant, resurfacing, for example, in Dayton Haskin’s 1994 study, Milton’s Burden of Interpretation. There Haskin characterizes Paradise Regained as a text that “extends the doctrine of justification by faith alone,” one in which Jesus “repudiates the wisdom of the Greeks insofar as it is a ‘work’ analogous to the Jews’ Law and the papists’ sacramental system as these were defined in classic Protestantism.”8 We find Achsah Guibbory rehearsing it once again in 1998: “The Son’s acts of devotion are all, essentially, rejections. . . . He rejects the kingdoms of Parthia or Rome, just as he rejects human learning, ‘Arts,’ and ‘Eloquence’ (IV. 240–1) as irrelevant to his 6

7

8

Barbara K. Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning and Art of Paradise Regained (Providence: Brown University Press, 1966), pp. 282–3. A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton, vol. IV, eds. Walter MacKellar and Edward Weismiller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), pp. 208–209. MacKellar and Weismiller ultimately dissent from the position that the Son’s speech is to be understood as a “sweeping repudiation of studies of all kinds” and endorse the view that Milton is instead subordinating science to ethics and Christian faith (vol. IV, 208–209). I agree with MacKellar and Weismiller on this point, but I have placed this conclusion in the service of a different argument that arrives at different ends. Dayton Haskin, Milton’s Burden of Interpretation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), p. 159.

110

mat t hew biberman

mission,”9 and most recently, Jeffrey Shoulson concludes that in Paradise Regained “all knowledge outside of pure faith is condemned as vain. . . . ”10 Now, the profession of literary criticism is founded upon disagreement. Where others have seen either/or, and I see both/and, that is a good thing, for me, at least, provided, of course, that I can make the argument sufficiently persuasive. My larger aim, however, is not to counter the fundamental premise of the position just profiled; rather, it is to isolate that position’s fundamental premise so that I may move on to ask what I see as a more interesting question: Why have so many critics of Milton seen the temptation to Athens scene as an either/or scenario? Why see Milton’s text as an assertion that one can have either the classical inheritance or the faith of Jesus but not both? And finally, for the sake of clarity, I wish my reader to understand that I am not arguing that the logic of Jesus’ response in Paradise Regained dispenses with the sense that Greek thought is in competition with Jewish thought. Such a structure is clearly present. It is also undeniable that Jesus’ most extended salvage efforts center on Greek poetry and song – art, in short, and that he has harsh words for Greek philosophy, oratory, and political thought. Yet after having given such qualifications their due weight, I believe strongly that the overriding rhetorical effort in the son’s speech is to impose a satisfactory resolution to the acknowledged competition, and he does so by stressing that the two competitors – the Greek and the Jew – exist in a fixed relation, where the Greek is – as my helpful anonymous Cambridge reviewer put it – a “reflection” – or, as I prefer to put it, a derivation of secondary light that originates in the primary light found in the Sheckinah, the Jewish holy light. Indeed, Jesus concludes with just such a reconciliatory move, using the classic trope of natural light, when he acknowledges to Satan that Greek and other non-Jewish teaching can possess “moral virtue” via “light of Nature,” light where “all” is not “quite lost” (4.351–2). Thus, it is compelling I think, to argue that here in this poem Milton has his Jesus salvage Greek culture through the imposition of a both/and solution. Finally, even if I do not win over my critics, I need only point to the persuasive scholarship marshaled by Jason Rosenblatt11 that the conceptual model I am putting forward here – of 9

10

11

Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 219. Jeffrey Shoulson, Milton and the Rabbis: Hebraism, Hellenism, and Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), p. 39. See most recently his book, Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi: John Selden (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 211.

T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and the Milton Controversy

111

God as an intellectus agens figured as an overflowing light illuminating the material world as it falls from its fountainhead – is a well-known commonplace in the period, most especially within Milton’s intellectual milieu. ii. the ant i-semitic aest hetics of the milton controversy Given then that there exists a compelling, alternate way to read this scene in Paradise Regained, I would like now to explore further why the critical consensus reviewed in the previous section remains so entrenched within contemporary scholarship. As a way to open this question, I would like to begin with the following observation made by Wordsworth about Milton: “Comus” is rich in beautiful and sweet flowers, and in exuberant leaves of genius; but the ripe and mellow fruit is in “Samson Agonistes.” When he wrote that his mind was fully Hebraized. Indeed, his genius fed on the writings of the Hebrew prophets. This arose, in some degree from the temper of the times; the Puritans lived in the Old Testament, almost to the exclusion of the New.12

Wordsworth’s comment suggests a powerful narrative: one in which Milton is seen as a Christian who carries out the reformational project to the point where it becomes a collapse into Judaism. In this vision, Milton is figured as the Christian who makes the mistake of worshipping alongside Jesus, rather than worshipping Jesus. It is, I suggest, this logic that lends coherence to the either/or interpretations critics have given to the Temptation to Athens scene. More specifically, this modern critical view is the distillation of two prior rhetorical traditions that have been brought to bear on this subject. First, this image of Milton as the Christian who collapsed into the Jew readily fits into a strand of seventeenth-century English discourse concerning the practice of “Judaizing,” a phenomenon David Katz has amply documented in his study Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England 1603– 1655. Although the epithet seems to have been originally applied to those Christians who observed the Sabbath on Saturday (so called Sabbatarians), it quickly took on a very general meaning. By 1572, John Whitgift could use the term in his reproach of Cartwright for his contention that Christians “have the same laws to direct us in the service of God” as had the Jews; 12

Cited in The Romantics on Milton, ed. Joseph Wittreich (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University, 1970), p. 136.

112

mat t hew biberman

“you Judaizare,” Whitgift calls Cartwright.13 Certainly Milton’s decision to have his Jesus look to the law is precisely the kind of symbolic action that courted the epithet Judaizer. Other aspects of Milton’s thinking, such as his adoption of the Hebraic model of marriage,14 and his assertion in The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth that the republican model of government is superior because it was divinely instituted “among the Jews” who had a “supreme council of seventy, called the Sanhedrin, founded by Moses,” provides additional evidence to cement this identification.15 It is important to recognize that in advocating such beliefs, Milton was aligning himself with the Erastian position that maintained that Christian moral law can only be understand through situating the New Testament in a Talmudic context. As John Lightfoot (a chief Erastian proponent and an esteemed Hebraist) explains, “The surest and sagest construction of phrases and passages in the New Testament, is not by framing a sense of our own, which we think fair and probable, but by observing how such phrases and passages were understood by them to whom they were uttered, according to the common use and signification of such phrases and passages, in the vulgar sense of the nation.”16 We see John Selden deploying this theory to winning effect in the debate that took place in the Westminster Assembly concerning Christ’s injunction that an individual with a grievance against a “brother” should “go and tell him his fault between thee and him . . . but if he will not hear thee, then take one or two more, that in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established. And if he shall neglect to hear them, tell it to the church” (Matt. 15–17 [KJV]). From these lines, many Puritan divines understood Jesus to be endorsing a religious state with ministers as judges, and, indeed, legislators. In response Selden argued that the meaning of “church” (ecclesia) must be expounded “by the custom of the Jews” and that therefore the verse means “Tell the Sanhedrin, which can redress the wrong. That if the Jewish state had continued Christian, their civil government might have continued, though their ceremonies were 13

14

15

16

John Whitgift, ‘The Defense of the Answer to the Admonition, Against the Reply of Thomas Cartwright,’ in The Works of John Whitgift, 3 vols., ed. John Ayre (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1968), p. 271. Quoted in David Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England, 1603−1655 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 16. For an analysis of Milton’s understanding of marriage law see my “Milton, Marriage, and a Woman’s Right to Divorce,” Studies in English Literature 39 (Winter 1999): pp. 131–53. John Milton, eds. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 341. John Lightfoot, “A Sermon Preached Before the Natives of Staffordshire, November 25, 1658,” in The Whole Works of the Reverend John Lightfoot, Ed. John Rogers Pitman, vol. 6 (London: J. F. Dove, 1822), p. 227.

T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and the Milton Controversy

113

gone, so that ecclesia here would mean a civil court.”17 Milton and Selden are in clear agreement on this point. Therefore it is reasonable to assume that the thwarted Presbyterians would have perceived Milton as they did opponents such as Lightfoot and Selden: as a Judaizer.18 However, by itself, this tradition of “Judaizing” is not enough to account for the critical practice of seeing the Temptation of Athens scene as a rejection not just of Christianity but of classical humanism as well. To understand that impulse we must acknowledge the interposing presence of a second rhetorical tradition, one that Matthew Arnold’s codifies in his theorization of English culture as a synthesis of Hebraism and Hellenism. In a crucial and much quoted passage from Culture and Anarchy, Arnold strips this ideology down to its basics: Hellenism is of Indo-European growth, Hebraism is of Semitic growth; and we English, a nation of Indo-European stock, seem to belong naturally to the movement of Hellenism. But nothing more strongly marks the essential unity of man than the affinities we can perceive, in this point or that, between members of one family of peoples and members of another, and no affinity of this kind is more strongly marked than that likeness in the strength and prominence of the moral fibre, which, not immense elements of difference, knits in some special sort the genius and history of we English, and our American descendants across the Atlantic, to the genius and history of the Hebrew people.19

Generally, Arnold distinguishes the “Semitic” race as a culture inclined to a moralism that is both of a good and a bad influence on the English. The emotional zest of Hebraic spiritualism is in large measure good, but the legalistic behavior it produces is to him rather bad in that it is a dull-minded acquiescence in a life spent in unquestioning obeisance to a set of arbitrary laws. Arnold’s conclusion is for “the Indo-European” and “the Semitic” to meet peacefully within English Culture and there reach a proper balance; though it goes without saying that such a balance is weighed far more toward Hellenism then Hebraism. It is the interposing of this framework that stabilizes the image of Milton as the devolved Jew. In the Temptation to Athens scene, Milton is understood by his critics to be renouncing the Arnoldian synthesis of an urbane humanism that is both Hellenic and Hebraic in order to embrace Hebraic spiritualism alone. That, I propose, is 17

18

19

George Gillespie, “Notes of the Debates and Proceedings of the Assembly of Divines and Other Commissioners at Westminster, February 1644 to January 1645, ed. David Meek (Edinburgh: Robert Ogle and Oliver and Boyd, 1846), p. 25. Quoted in Martha Ziskind, John Selden: Humanist Jurist. Dissertation. University of Chicago, 1972. On Erastianism see Weldon Crowley, “Erastianism in the Westminster Assembly,” Journal of Church and State 15 (1973): 49–64. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), pp. 141–2.

114

mat t hew biberman

why, despite rather glaring indicators to the contrary, critics (post-Arnold) insist on reading this scene as they do: such readings conform to the master narrative in which Milton is the Christian who in erasing his Hellenic classicism collapses into not just Hebraism, but to give the identity its recognizable common name – Judaism. Wordsworth’s comment on Samson Agonistes suggests that this master image of Milton as Jew began to emerge and circulate during the Romantic era.20 In 1825, for example, on the occasion of the publication of the Christian Doctrine, we find Wordsworth’s contemporary, Thomas Babington Macaulay, declaring in a straightforward way that Milton “had studied all the mysteries of rabbinical literature.”21 I am concerned not with the veracity of Macaulay’s statement but with its cultural logic. Macauley’s comment illustrates how the image of Milton has been sutured onto a conflation of Judaism and political liberalism so as to give that ideology a recognizable face. Such praise is not surprising coming from a member of Parliament, who, in the year 1833 rose in support of a bill that would allow Jews to hold government positions. Macaulay declared: But where, he [my opponent] says, are you to stop, if once you admit into the House of Commons people who deny the authority of the Gospels? Will you let in a Mussulman? Will you let in a Parsee? Will you let in a Hindoo, who worships a lump of stone with seven heads? I will answer my honorable friend’s question by another. Where does he mean to stop? Is he ready to roast unbelievers at slow fires? . . . [Because] When once you enter on a course of persecution, I defy you to find any reason for making a halt till you have reached the extreme point.22

It is the linkage that gets established between Judaism and political liberalism that allows me to bring these two isolated remarks together under one rubric. This logic appears again in Macaulay when he praises the Areopagitica as “that sublime treatise which every statesman should wear as a sign upon the hand and as frontlets between the eyes.”23 Here Macaulay transforms Milton’s text into phylacteries, and then not only metaphorically dons those phylacteries but encourages all politicians to do so as well. This 20

21

22

23

For a related discussion on the linkage among Milton, Judaism, and political liberalism in the Romantic era see my essay, “‘The Earth is All Before Me’: Wordsworth, Milton, and the Christian Hebraic Roots of English Republicanism,” in Romantic Generations: Essays in Honor of Robert Gleckner, eds. Ghislaine McDayter, Guinn Batten, and Barry Milligan (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2001), pp. 102–28. Thomas B. Macaulay, “Milton,” Select Essays of Macaulay: Milton, Bunyan, Johnson, Goldsmith, Madame D’Arblay. Ed. Samuel Thurber (New York: Allyn and Bacon, 1891), pp. 1–54, 8. Thomas B. Macaulay. “Jewish Disabilities [1833 Parliament Speech on the Jew Bill],” Selected Writings. Edited and Introduction. John Clive and Thomas Piney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), pp. 181–92, p. 183–4. Thomas B. Macaulay, “Milton,” p. 34.

T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and the Milton Controversy

115

remark powerfully illustrates Milton functioning as “the symbolic fiction of the Jew” in British culture.24 Jonathan Freedman has recently illustrated how “the figure of the Jew” comes to function as an “emblem of the artist and intellectual – of the possibilities of transnational culture itself ” during the hegemonic moment of Anglo-American high modernism.25 As Freedman remarks, theorists are only now beginning “to pay more attention to the ways in which capitalism depended not only upon coldhearted rationality but upon a wide range of affects and responses” including, very centrally, affects and responses to the fluid and multiple representations of the Jew.26 Like Freedman, I seek to contribute to this emerging critical discussion by directing attention to the ways in which Milton came to function as the canonical face of the Jew in literary culture. Nor, at the same time do I wish to lose sight of the irony informing such a development for Milton and the literary industry surrounding his work. As Guibbory has convincingly detailed in the essay included in this collection, it is most likely that the historical “Milton would [not] fit our cherished notion of the liberal Milton, as well as our desire to believe that it was political and religious radicals, not “Anglican” conservatives who were most tolerant and the champions of liberty. But the attitudes expressed in his [Milton’s] prose, in his use of English/Israel parallels, suggest that it was unlikely that he would have welcomed the Jews or expected their conversion any time soon.” In no way then am I suggesting that the rhetorical strategy Milton puts in Jesus’ mouth in Paradise Regained translates into a straightforward expression of philoSemitism on the part of the poem’s author. Indeed, by keeping Guibbory’s argument in mind, I would hope that my reader could come away from my essay with a better sense of how and why this “cherished notion of the liberal Milton” came to function within modern Anglo-American culture as a complex site of contestation. To that end I would suggest that although we already see this rhetorical tradition in play as early as the Romantic era, it is not until the so-called 24

25

26

I use the term “symbolic fiction” as Slavoj Zizek defines it in his essay “‘I Hear You with My Eyes’; or, The Invisible Monster,” Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, eds. Renata Salecl and Slavoj Zizek (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 90–126. A symbolic fiction “acts as an appendix of his symbolic title, that is, it is the big Other that acts through him” (p. 111). Saurat’s Milton is, after the rise of liberal ideology, precisely the prime embodiment of the big Other’s rules, and as such illustrates how the big Other constitutes and is constituted by the aesthetics of anti-Semitism. Saurat’s blunt account needs now to be read not as idiosyncratic but instead as the culmination of the cultural development that enshrines a certain vision of the Jew as the symbolic fiction, that “‘castrated’ bearer-medium of public authority” (p. 111). Jonathan Freedman, The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 51. Freedman, pp. 61–2.

116

mat t hew biberman

Milton controversy that the utilization of Milton as a figure to represent “the Jew” becomes ubiquitous, surfacing in multiple guises as it undergoes manipulation in the hands of various critics intent to deploy it to their own ends. One of the first and most important of these critics is Denis Saurat who announced in his powder keg of a book Milton: Man and Thinker that “roughly speaking, the whole of Milton’s philosophy is found in the Kabbalah,” and in Saurat’s hands, what this amounted to was a Milton who was about as progressive and free-thinking a fellow as a contemporary fellow-traveler could happen upon.27 Milton and Christianity? Milton’s God is “properly speaking, identical with the Absolute of nineteenthcentury philosophy.”28 Milton and feminism? Women, Saurat presciently tells us, “have much to forgive Milton. They even have to forgive him about being in the right about them.”29 Milton and Nietzsche? In an audaciously totalizing reading of Samson Agonistes, Saurat dispenses with Christianity altogether long before William Empson arrives and gives us a Milton who in his identification with the blind Hebrew renounces even “the idea of Salvation through Christ,” renounces indeed any “attempt to find a solution” and settles instead for “psychology” alone, without “dogma.”30 A pronounced reaction to Saurat’s thesis, published in 1925 under the imprimatur of the Dial Press, was almost immediate as Saurat comes to figure prominently in the work of Eliot, Lewis, and Empson, as well as a host of eminent Milton specialists including J. Holly Hanford, Harris Fletcher, and Robert Adams. Reading the record now, it appears as if Saurat’s work contributes to two critical cruxes. In Eliot’s strictures, Saurat’s characterization is put forward as evidence in support of Eliot’s contention that Milton suffers from what today’s pundits call a character issue. While Eliot plays out his vilification and the Milton controversy falls under the glare of the spotlight, a line of Milton scholarship rapidly emerges offstage, intent on discrediting the radicalized, jazz-age Milton conjured by Saurat. These two critical debates capture quite starkly how a certain kind of high modern cultural poetics uses racial anti-Semitic elements as a central medium through which to articulate a forceful and quite visible conflation of aesthetics and politics. The later half of this thesis has already received intense scrutiny from John Guillory and Carl Freedman who have both written on the Milton controversy. Their accounts focus on Eliot, Lewis, and Leavis, and both suggest that an analysis of this localized debate goes far in illuminating the logical contradictions informing the New Criticism. Yet neither Guillory 27 28

Denis Saurat, Milton: Man and Thinker (New York: Dial Press, 1925), p. 231. 29 Ibid., p. 141. 30 Ibid., p. 199–200. Ibid., p. 93.

T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and the Milton Controversy

117

nor Freedman register the presence of Saurat’s argument and so pass over the issue Douglas A. Brooks has christened as the question concerning Milton and the Jews. Through retrieving this backstory to the Milton controversy, I hope to reintroduce the subject of the philo- and anti-Semitic valences in play during this discussion. The displacement of Saurat’s Jew-coded Milton begins almost immediately with the appearance in 1926 of Harris Fletcher’s book, Milton’s Semitic Studies. In this learned volume Fletcher models for us the measured tones of how this issue shall be henceforth discussed within the hallowed groves. Milton’s interest in Hebrew, for instance, is to be understood not as behavior indicative of an individual flirting with Jewish beliefs, but foremost as a sign of general Renaissance erudition, another token of why he is “the most scholarly of all the English poets.”31 Nor is the subject matter of Paradise Lost to be seen as Semitic because here Milton is to be understood as working with, in the felicitous phrasing of Fletcher – material that is “overlarded and overlaid with strata which represented the accumulated deposits of preceding ages, so that the originally Semitic treatment and material were no longer directly Semitic at all.”32 After stipulating such qualifications, Fletcher illustrates how the discussion of Milton and the Jews is to proceed. In Fletcher’s hands, the issue is understood to be appropriately handled through the application of traditional scholarly methods; specifically, it is to be made legible within the established genre of source study. In this approach, Semitic elements are understood to be restricted to overt allusions, textual bits that in their essential foreignness reveal themselves to be Semitic. Here is how Fletcher frames the issue: In these detailed embellishments, in these filigree works which ultimately constitute and support the beautiful grandeur of the poem, here it is that Semitic influence appears, in many instances brazenly, as if to ask, ‘What are you going to do about my being here?;’ in others, subdued, almost submerged, so as to be unnoticed by casual investigation.33

By way of conclusion, Fletcher provides two detailed readings, a pair to illustrate his two types of Semitic influence in Milton. First he argues that clusters of light imagery studding the famous passages of invocation in Paradise Lost imbue that veritable object of critical adoration, “the muse of Milton’s song” with an essence that though uniquely Miltonic, can only find its “nearest approach . . . in the Jewish Shekinah.”34 Fletcher then offers an example of the more subdued application of Semitic influence in his 31 32

Harris Fletcher, Milton’s Semitic Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1926), p. vii. 33 Ibid., p. 115. 34 Ibid., p. 115, p. 122. Ibid., p. 113.

118

mat t hew biberman

argument that Paradise Lost features discrete, episodic, narrative elements that are to be understood as derived from Semitic sources (e.g., “the jealousy motive [informing Satan’s actions], but also the subtlety of the serpent’s approach to Eve, the purpose imputed to the Creator in forbidding the fruit, the touching of the tree, with the resultant outcry, [and] the soliloquy of Eve before touching the fruit”35 ). In passing, Fletcher also finds Saurat’s suggestion that Milton read esoteric texts such as the Zohar to be something of a stretch, and prefers instead to view Milton as working with more conventional theological material, principally rabbinic commentary, and Fletcher goes on to consolidate this position with the publication of his Milton’s Rabbinical Readings in 1930. There he will argue that Milton most likely relied on a late edition (circa 1620) of Buxtorf’s Hebrew Bible, a volume replete with rabbinical commentary.36 In significant ways, Fletcher’s approach established the parameters for critical discussion of this question concerning Milton and the Jews, because his work features both elements of the subsequent debate: first the question concerning the presence of Semitic influence is admitted as plausible but underplayed in importance, and second, an inspection of a previously cited Semitic source (in this instance the Zohar) is placed in doubt as legitimate. In his Milton Handbook, J. Holly Hanford glosses Saurat’s claims as provocative but, given Fletcher’s work, finally unpersuasive.37 After Fletcher and Hanford’s diplomatic and decorous handling of the matter, George Conklin proceeds to mount a vigorous argument against both suppositions, maintaining that Milton by temperament would never have read the rabbinic sources espoused by either Fletcher or Saurat.38 The emergent lines of the reaction against Saurat’s thesis solidifying here are made explicit in the work of Robert Adams, who stridently casts his project as a desperately needed rescue effort performed on a Milton who is in danger of being forever cast into an “imbecilic role” as a thinker under “rabbinic influence,” trafficking in the “elaborate mass of mumbo jumbo” and “puerile legends” found in such Judaic texts as the Zohar.39 Here we gain a striking impression of Anglo-American academic culture at mid-century as it reacts to 35 36 37

38 39

Ibid., p. 137. See Harris Fletcher, Milton’s Rabbinic Readings (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1930). In A Milton Handbook, Fourth Edition (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1946), James Holly Hanford writes, “The claims which M. Saurat has made for Milton’s obligations to the body of Jewish mystical philosophy known as the Zohar, though plausible, must be regarded as unproved” (p. 245). See George Conklin, Biblical Criticism and Heresy in Milton (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1949). Robert Adams, Ikon: John Milton and the Modern Critics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1955), p. 140.

T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and the Milton Controversy

119

the burgeoning influx of Jews, of that world in which a senior professor at Berkeley baited Stephen Greenblatt with “boorish” observations about the essential sterility of Jewish minds, repeating Matthew Arnold’s dictum that culture rode on a confluence of Greek brains and Hebrew heart.40 In Adams the prejudice is stark and the stakes are high: the dilemma is a staging of the Temptation to Athens scene where we are once again faced with a choice between a) Christian humanist sources or b) Semitic sources, and the other residents present in those Semite sources for Adams are multiple and uncannily spot-on. In “mumbo jumbo” lies that rich conflation of black, Jew, and Arab. In Adams and Conklin, the Semitic sources are ruled out through the application of a character test for Milton, where the test has been rigged to ensure Milton’s passage. Structuring the issue as such brings the additional advantage that Milton’s critics need not engage with the Semitic sources, though there was the matter of their provenance, because there were, as Fletcher noted, all those Hebraic and Judaic filigrees. Yet despite such problematic loopholes, after Adams, the issue had been pigeonholed in such a way as to largely defuse it. In order to reopen the matter now, the individual would have to possess considerable credentials in English and Judaic studies. Eventually Leonard Mendelsohn (1972) and Samuel Stollman (1978) take up the matter and report that the references to rabbinic texts in Milton are hazily inaccurate, and the import of the Hebrew meaning suspiciously garbled and misunderstood.41 In their work a picture emerges of an England where Hebrew books are scarce and the ability to fluently read anything but biblical Hebrew extremely rare indeed. Milton’s facility with Biblical Hebrew remained viable, but no longer was it reasonable to see him as possessing the skills of a seventeenth-century rabbi. He could not read rabbinical commentary (except perhaps for the Mishnah and other texts very close to Biblical Hebrew), most especially he could not read such arcane and demanding texts as the Talmud and the Zohar. Through the workings of this critical discourse, the perceived Jewish element in Milton is first contained and then largely erased. This process appears driven initially as an effort to keep Milton Christian, and, as we shall see in a moment, the demand that Milton pass this litmus test is deeply implicated in the Milton controversy. This project of erasing Milton’s hypothetical Jewish identity is then completed by subsequent generations of literary critics (including, in 40

41

Stephen Greenblatt, “What is the History of Literature?,” Critical Inquiry 23 (Spring 1997), pp. 460– 81, p. 460. See Samuel Stollman, “Milton’s Rabbinical Readings and Fletcher.” Milton Studies 4 (1972), pp. 195– 215, and Leonard Mendelsohn, “Milton and the Rabbis: A Later Inquiry.” Studies in English Literature 18 (1978), pp. 125–35.

120

mat t hew biberman

addition to Stollman and Mendelsohn, Jason Rosenblatt, Golda Warman, and now, most recently, Jeffrey Shoulson), though this second wave of dejudaizing Milton features an attitude that this action needed to be done, in large measure, out of respect for the specialized skills of rabbis, and also to invest professors of Jewish studies with cultural capital.42 As the discussion of Milton’s Semitic sources disappears into increasingly specialized scholarly channels, its absence contributes to the erosion of Milton’s cultural capital within the larger academic community. One senses a kind of bewilderment in William Kerrigan’s “disappointment with the contribution of intellectual history to Milton studies . . . [and in particular] its relative lack of interest in articulating his [Milton’s] position with respect to subsequent philosophy, despite the impressive start made in this direction by one of the early triumphs of modern Milton criticism, Denis Saurat’s Milton, Man and Thinker.”43 At the same time that critics have been left wondering just how this broader conversation got shut down, Milton has largely ceased to operate as a sign of Jewishness among nonspecialists, who, in their effort to breathe life into Milton studies, are more intent on viewing him through the various lenses of theory. The ironic outcome of this history is that the image of Milton currently in circulation includes the notion he is a reified anti-Semite.44 By now returning to the Milton controversy, we are in a position to see how the backstory of Milton’s Semitic sources supplies the cultural logic for the connection Eliot makes between a certain set of politics and an aesthetic philosophy. In his fine essay “How to Do Things with Milton: A Study in the Politics of Literary Criticism,” Carl Freedman has read Eliot’s aesthetic judgments of Milton and found this seemingly apolitical literary jargon to be a code for conveying Eliot’s very detailed politics. Disavowing the ideal of objective (liberal) criticism, Freedman offers his analysis as an admirably tendentious project that recursively confirms his animating belief, namely that “Milton is to be read as primarily a revolutionary and regicide, as a prophet of liberty, as one whose deepest affinities across the ages are with such later revolutionaries as . . . the entire Marxist tradition which includes 42

43

44

See Golda Werman, Milton and Midrash (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995); Jason Rosenblatt, Torah and Law in Paradise Lost (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) and his Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi: John Selden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006; and Jeffrey Shoulson, Milton and the Rabbis: Hebraism, Hellenism, and Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). William Kerrigan, “Milton’s Place in Intellectual History,” in The Cambridge Companion to Milton, ed. Dennis Danielson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 261–76, 264. As documented in my essay “Milton’s Tephillin” (Milton Quarterly, Volume 31.4 [December 1997]: 136–45), contemporary editors typically annotate Jewish references in Miltonic texts with commentary that includes the judgment that Milton was anti-Semitic.

T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and the Milton Controversy

121

Eagleton (and me).”45 After professing adherence to this meta-commentary so that his readers cannot mistake his bias, Freedman characterizes Eliot as a “poet-critic whose essential Tory loyalty to the traditional English ruling elite was slightly complicated by attraction toward Continental forms of clerical fascism.”46 Demonstrating a fine ear, Freedman here adopts the decorous tones Eliot himself uses to dismantle Milton. Freedman’s conclusion on this subject is that Eliot’s comments on Milton are to be understood as “a partisan hatchet job” and “no intelligent understanding of Eliot’s anti-Miltonism is feasible unless the most directly and crudely political factors are given due weight.”47 Extending Freedman’s reading, I now happily employ his definitions in order to disclose both the theological register linking Eliot’s two master discourses of politics and aesthetics and the cultural logic dictating the antiSemitic figures that prominently speckle Eliot’s aesthetic code. Freedman identifies the Eliotic aesthetic code’s master theme as an argument about the poverty of Milton’s “form and versification.”48 Moreover, though Freedman doesn’t rehearse the august genealogy of Milton’s detractors for us on this point, Eliot’s argument here is in fact the same argument Johnson makes; in fact, it is a form of the argument that has been made against Milton since there has been Milton criticism. The argument is that Milton’s style is bad because it is rhetorical in the extreme, a language largely empty of content. As Eliot puts it in his 1947 essay, “The emphasis is on the sound, not the vision, upon the word, not the idea.”49 Eliot is expansive on this figuration: Milton’s style is “a personal style” and not derived from “plain statement”; “the foreign idiom, the use of the word in a foreign way or the meaning of the foreign word from which it is derived rather than the accepted meaning in English, every idiosyncrasy is a particular act of violence which Milton has been the first to commit.”50 (And Freedman is also correct to gainsay those Eliot’s defenders who maintain that the 1947 essay is a retraction of the pre-Auschwitz essay: Eliot “has done nothing substantial to impair or disarm the anti-Milton case adumbrated by him in 1936.”51 ) Even in 1947 Eliot will continue to cite Saurat’s vision of a Milton whose “theology was highly eccentric,” as the setup for his declaration of “antipathy towards 45

46 49

50

Carl Freedman, “How to Do Things With Milton: A Study in the Politics of Literary Criticism,” in Critical Essays on John Milton, ed. Christopher Kendrick (New York: G. K. Hall, 1995), pp. 21–44, 23. 47 Ibid., pp. 24–5. 48 Ibid, p. 25. Ibid., p. 24. T. S. Eliot, “Milton,” in Milton Criticism, ed. James Thorpe (New York: Collier Books, 1950), pp. 310–32, 323. 51 Freedman, p. 27. Ibid., p. 320.

122

mat t hew biberman

Milton the man.”52 Neither Fletcher’s Arnoldian compromise, nor Lewis’ strident pronouncement that Saurat “pressed his case too far,”53 will sway Eliot from dropping the name. In the wake of Saurat, Eliot’s aesthetic critique of Milton was a rather explicit expression of cultured anti-Semitism, an ideology made more determinate by Eliot’s decision to apply Fletcher’s methodology upon those “detailed embellishments” in Paradise Lost that would appear to indicate “Semitic influence.”54 With the work of Fletcher in mind, it becomes clear that Eliot’s characterization of Paradise Lost’s “visual imagery” as a “shifting phantasmagory” reflects his vision of Milton as precisely what Saurat said he was – a blind lapsed Christian who had turned Jew, a reading that Eliot locks in place when he links Milton to Joyce, each writing “a language of his own based on English.”55 Eliot’s mixed judgment concerning the extraneous bits within Milton’s vision is also a flat Fletcherian reading. After Eliot complains that he is “not too happy about eyes that both blaze and sparkle” on Milton’s hell lake, he then qualifies his negative criticism, offering that though Milton is indeed inconsistent, such inconsistency allows for “the happy introduction of so much extraneous matter” an observation that is a clear allusion to Fletcher’s assertion that Milton’s work possesses brazen Semitic filigree. Introducing Fletcher’s paradigm enables Eliot to frame Milton as a fine example of precisely that kind of marginal detail work, “a kind of inspired frivolity, an enjoyment by the author in the exercise of his own virtuosity.”56 Such language illustrates how Eliot’s anti-Semitism is (in Jameson’s terms) transcoded57 into his aesthetics. I can only read Eliot’s reference to Johnson’s characterization of Paradise Lost as a text written in “a Babylonish dialect” and the product of a man “desirous to use English with foreign idiom” as a particularly sharp elbow to the ribs to ensure that even the drowsy in the room are made aware that the type of literary genius under discussion here is quite specifically the Semite.58 Eliot’s desire to condemn Milton’s verse as falling outside of common English in its adoption 52 53 54 57

58

Eliot, p. 313. C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (London: Oxford University Press, 1942), p. 81. 55 Freedman, pp. 322–3. 56 Ibid., p. 329. Fletcher, p. 115. To transcode is to “set about measuring what is sayable and ‘thinkable’ in each of these codes on idiolects and compare that to the conceptual possibilities of its competitors” (Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism [Durham: Duke University Press, 1991], p. 394). Eliot, p. 319. It is also likely that the phrase ‘Babylonish dialect’ is a nod to Butler’s Hudibras, where its eponymous hero is characterized as speaking a ‘Babylonish dialect, / Which learned Pedants much affect. It was parti-colour’d dress / Of patch’d and pyball’d Languages; / ‘Twas English cut on Greek and Latin, / Like fustian heretofore on Sattin’ (First Part, Canto One, p. 6) This allusion helps richen and solidify the linkage between republican-minded Protestants and Jews for several reasons. First, Butler overtly draws the connection in his satiric poem when he suggests a few lines earlier

T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and the Milton Controversy

123

of “foreign idiom” has to be read through such work as Notes Towards the Definition of Culture and The Idea of a Christian Society. It is clear that Eliot and Saurat’s positions are in agreement in reading Milton as, in effect, the Jew in the English canon. Where they diverge is in their evaluation of that phenomenon, and when this context is reintroduced, the effect on Eliot’s Milton essays is to reveal them to be clear examples of genteel anti-Semitism within the Anglo-American elite. Reading Eliot’s Milton criticism as an expression of his anti-Semitism allows us to develop a line of inquiry recently advanced by John Guillory in his study Cultural Capital. Guillory’s work documents how a certain brand of very influential modernism came to endorse Shakespeare as the ideal artist who creates without succumbing to the temptation “to assert personality at all.”59 In the process, Guillory examines Eliot’s use of the pair of Shakespeare and Milton as symbolic figures in “a certain fantasy: the reinstitution of a ‘Christian Society.’”60 In Eliot’s hands, Milton is presented as the unwelcome conspiratorial power figure who must be dislodged in favor of the true royal line of English literature, a rival minor tradition featuring Dryden, the metaphysicals, and the Jacobean playwrights, in tandem, of course, with Eliot himself and his “high modern” cohort. Guillory does not, however, comment on how this complex, multi-pronged Eliotic critique rests on an understanding of Milton as the sign of the collapse of Christian society into Judaism. For Eliot Milton is the phantasmatic Jew doing violence to the English language, effectively causing a “dissociation of sensibility” in which “while the language became more refined, the feeling became more crude.”61 The result is a vision of the modern author as a technically proficient but soulless wordsmith. As Daniel Itzkovitz has demonstrated in his study “Passing Like Me,” this combination was readily identified in Anglo-American modern culture as “Jewish linguistic excess,” a

59

60 61

that Hudibras speaks of ‘Hebrew Roots’ so often that ‘some think him circumcis’d: / And truly so perhaps, he was / ‘Tis many a Pious Christians case” (First Part, Canto One, p. 5). Second, the factual inspiration for the Quixotic knight Hudibras was a West Country Knight, who served in the Parliamentary Army while lodging with Butler (Wasserman, p. 46). Finally, in his youth, Butler is reputed to have worked for Elizabeth Grey, Countess of Kent, and as George Wasserman observes, through that association Butler was likely to have come into contact with Grey’s intimate associate, John Selden, the foremost Hebraist of the period, and the logical inspiration for some of the more weighty aspects of Hudibras’ character. In sum then, Butler’s influential verse satire both documents and contributes to the phenomenon that is the object of this study: the conflation of the Jew with the political liberal in Anglo-American culture. John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 145. Ibid., p. 152. T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Farrer, Strauss, 1975), pp. 59–67, 64.

124

mat t hew biberman

trope representing “the dangerous extreme of consumer society.”62 In Eliot’s genealogy, Milton functions as the now-vanished conduit for this malaise. This thesis – that is, the thesis that Milton has come to function as the canonical figure that forces the literary critic into a confrontation with what we might as well call “the Jewish question” – gains additional credence when we add – along with Guillory’s research – the work of James Shapiro. In Shakespeare and the Jews, Shapiro convincingly argues that the cultural myth of Shakespeare perpetuates the belief that Elizabethan England – Shakespeare’s England – was a land free of Jews. As Shapiro puts it, this myth endures among the English because it lies in the midst of “a satisfying narrative of their national past,”63 a story embraced as a marker against which to measure both the advance of the Enlightenment and the rise of proper racist anti-Semitism. Shapiro artfully details this central cultural myth and explains how it has coalesced into a cherished image of “Shakespeare untarnished by a single line expressing toleration of the Jews.”64 The cultural poetics of the Anglo-heritage industry that Shapiro critiques also constructs an image of Milton, one where he is positioned quite precisely as the sign of the end of Shakespeare’s England, that Jewless, lost paradise. Shapiro notes all the contributing factors behind this reading of Milton, including “the complicated ways in which Jewishness and republicans were conflated by royalists,” and the equally persistent belief that Cromwell legally readmitted the Jews, a claim Shapiro finds to possess “strong elements of fiction.”65 He even sagely predicts that additional work will appear on “the ways in which Jewish practices shaped English and social practices,”66 but he does not reference Milton, an omission that, from my position, comes as a fortuitous one. It allows me the opportunity to fill these lacunae by offering a reading of Milton that finds him yoked with Shakespeare in a binary where the constituting logic reinscribes the dualism of Jew/Christian. Thus the dominant myth of a pure Elizabethan Christianity that finds its expression in Shakespeare works also to construct 62

63 64 65

66

Daniel Itzkovitz, “Passing Like Me,” South Atlantic Quarterly 98:1/2 (Winter/Spring 1999), pp. 35–57, 48. James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 55. Ibid., p. 82. Ibid., p. 226. As David Katz explains, Cromwell’s government did not facilitate the readmission of the Jews; rather, the participants of the 1655 Whitehall Conference on the subject came to the conclusion that though there had been an edict of Expulsion (in 1290) “‘there is no Law that forbids the Jews return into England ’”(Philo-Semitism, p. 243). The recognition of this loophole enabled first Cromwell and then Charles II to pursue a program of readmission in which immigrating Jews were processed as ‘tradesmen’ (p. 244). Ibid, p. 226.

T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and the Milton Controversy

125

a complementary myth of Jewish contamination that is figured in John Milton. This anti-Semitic aesthetic also informs Eliot’s revision of the now infamous footnote concerning the regulation of “culture-contact” between Jews and Gentiles in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. In 1962 Eliot writes, “It seems to me highly desirable that there should be close culture-contact between devout and practising Christians and devout and practising Jews. Much culture-contact in the past has been in those neutral zones of culture in which religion can be ignored, and between Jews and Gentiles both more or less emancipated from their religious traditions.”67 In the opinion of Maud Ellmann, “Unpleasant as it is, the second footnote cannot be accused of anti-Semitism, but merely of a general distrust of laxity.”68 On the susceptibility of this text to the accusation of anti-Semitism I take issue with Ms. Ellmann. For Eliot, what must not go lax are the reification of the Semite and Saxon, the us and the them. Eliot understands that the objection comes not when you stipulate this distinction, but when you animate that distinction into a dualism (where one is good and the other bad). Therefore in his final theorization he simply refuses to tip his hand. However, in the silence the pair’s implied dualism stands forth. In the faint praise of Eliot’s pronouncement that when Milton “violates the English language he is imitating nobody, and he is inimitable” lies the Jew as constructed by the cultural logic of genteel anti-Semitism. The Jew is that “nobody” queerly present as the unnamed original in whose place the Christian imitation now stands. The negative formulation of the definition itself conforms to what the Jewish essence is understood to be: the vanished figure, the past, the 67

68

Quoted in Maud Ellmann, “The Imaginary Jew: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound,” in Between “Race” and Culture: Representations of “the Jew” in English and American Literature, ed. Bryan Cheyette (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 84–101, 86. Eliot’s note comes off of the following sentence in the text: “In certain historical conditions, a fierce exclusiveness may be a necessary condition for the preservation of a culture: the Old Testament bears witness to this,” Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1949) p. 70. The initial wording of the note read “Since the diaspora, and the scattering of Jews amongst peoples holding the Christian Faith, it may have been unfortunate both for these peoples and for the Jews themselves, that the culture-contact between them has had to be within those neutral zones of culture in which religion could be ignored: and the effect may have been to strengthen the illusion that there can be culture without religion” (70, n. 2). The revision is also discussed in Denis Donoghue, Words Alone: The Poet T. S. Eliot (Yale University Press, 2000), p. 216. In Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections in Life and Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), Ronald Schuchard states that Faber’s 1962 reissue of Eliot’s Notes had a print run of “15,800,” but that few of these copies made their way to America; indeed, Schuchard has only located a single copy in an American research library (that being the one in Harvard’s Widener Library) (p. 214). Ellmann, p. 87.

126

mat t hew biberman

absent, the denial of the Messiah, the perpetual negative, the “no.” Eliot’s underscoring of the command to be not like what is at first praised encodes anti-Semitism into this logical construction, and the suppleness with which Eliot plays with this rhetorical effect reflects the aesthetic satisfaction this ideology possesses for him. Eliot understands Joyce as another Milton, the Christian who presents himself as a convert, erasing the distinction so that the Jewish “no” flows into Molly Bloom’s “yes” to Leopold. Instead Eliot articulates a Christianity in which the Jew is the blind remnant whose only hope is conversion. Such a belief is simply anti-Judaism, what Pollefeyt calls the “theology of substitution”: “Christians assumed that, thanks to their belief in Jesus as the Messiah, the election of the Jewish People had been transferred definitively and exclusively to them. The Church had taken the place of Judaism (or: had ‘substituted’ itself for it) for all times and completely.”69 It is this proposition – that Eliot’s rigorously traditional Christianity contains at its base an equally traditional anti-Judaism – that his defenders refuse to address. Denis Donoghue, for example, repeatedly dodges this straightforward claim throughout his argument that to accuse Eliot “of antiSemitism” is “an injustice.”70 Donoghue maintains that Anthony Julius’ indictment of Eliot is invalid because it adopts a stance that relies on “guilt by association” and “holds Eliot personally and morally responsible for every anti-Semitic prejudice in Europe in the twentieth century.”71 In hindsight the publication of Julius’ book stands now as a defining moment for the reevaluation of Eliot (though it is important to note that Julius does not discuss the linkage between certain strands of modernist aesthetics and anti-Semitism). To the extent that Julius lapses into such indiscriminate generalizations this observation is merited, but I find Donoghue engaging in the same sort of strawman argument when he complains that criticism of Eliot reflects a climate in which “It is now not only permissible but almost obligatory, in intellectual circles, to attack Christianity and to deride any Christian’s faith – and the attack is regularly made by people who claim to be appalled by anti-Semitism. To hate Christianity is not deemed to reflect badly upon the hater.”72 Donoghue is right to insist on the acknowledgment that Eliot is not Hitler and that there is variation in anti-Semitism. At the same time, it is unjust to refuse to acknowledge that the two are in some sense related. In the same way, I must insist that though Christianity is 69

70

Didier Pollefeyt, “Jews and Christians after Auschwitz: From Substitution to Interreligious Dialogue,” in Jews and Christians: Rivals or Partners for the Kingdom of God? In Search of an Alternative for the Theology of Substitution (Louvain: Peeters Press, 1997), pp. 10–37, 17. 71 Ibid., p. 225 72 Ibid, p. 224–5. Donoghue, p. 225.

T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and the Milton Controversy

127

not a monolith it does have normative beliefs, and one of them, generally considered to derive from key passages in the Pauline corpus, is an antiJewish orientation. As Steven T. Katz explains: Judaism, Jewish law, Torah, Israel’s covenant with God are all, according to Paul, “a dispensation of death, carved in letters of stone . . . a dispensation of condemnation . . . which fadeth away [2 Cor. 6–11].” Judaism is dark, carnal, deadly, unredeemed, unredeeming. This is Paul’s fateful, radical indictment of Judaism – all seeming counterevidences in the Pauline corpus notwithstanding – that lies at the heart of nearly all subsequent Christian teaching as evidenced by the church’s rejection of the entire regimen of mitzvot, the core of Hebraic religiosity. The obligations and prohibitions of the Torah themselves become prohibited by God as His will is revealed through the saving events of Christ’s death, a sacrificial death required precisely because of the adverse soteriological consequences of the pre-Christian biblical epoch.73

My contention is simply that it is a prima facie fact that Eliot did not renounce his youthful cultural anti-Semitism after entering the Anglican Church. Instead he gave it a theological foundation, and he also articulated it through his literary and cultural criticism. Donoghue comes closest to admitting the truth of this position when he writes that the problem with Julius is that he “does not understand that one of the common attributes of Eliot’s generation – which later generations have lost – was the maintenance of friendships, person to person, despite what we would regard as lethal ideological differences between them.”74 The translation of this sentence would seem to be ‘Yes, even as a mature thinker Eliot’s ideology included anti-Semitism, but he never practiced this ideology in his dayto-day dealings with people.’ Although I hope Donoghue’s assessment of Eliot’s character is correct, I can’t speak to it. What I can speak to is the work, and I have come to the conclusion that it would be an injustice to Eliot not to recognize the anti-Semitism. I think you must always give it its proper weight while tracing its effects, but to ignore it is to misread both Eliot and the Milton controversy. 73

74

Steven T. Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context. Vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 240. Donoghue, p. 225.

c h a pter 7

A Metaphorical Jew: The Carnal, the Literal, and the Miltonic Linda Tredennick

Sin and her incestuous partner Death pose one of the most tenacious problems in Milton criticism. Samuel Johnson pronounced them “one of the greatest faults of the poem.”1 The problem is twofold. First, as obvious allegorical personifications, they seem inconsistent with the rest of poem. Maureen Quilligan believes that the allegorical passages in books three and ten “bracket” the heavenly and edenic scenes as a way of signaling that these passages are themselves mediated and not as directly mimetic as they might otherwise appear.2 Stephen Fallon cleverly asserts that Milton uses personification as a figure for the theological belief that evil is the privation of good, based on the assumption that personifications have no “ontological status.”3 Catherine Gemelli Martin believes that the interweaving of personification awith verisimilar representation is analogous to the conflict occurring in the seventeenth century between the medieval worldview, based on accordances, and more modern empiricism, and that it adds to the “chiaroscuro” of Milton’s baroque allegory.4 Of all these critical treatments, only Martin is willing to entertain the idea that Sin and Death are at least a part of Paradise Lost’s spectrum of representation and therefore not wholly inconsistent with the rest of the poem. In order to make this argument, however, she must posit that seventeenthcentury allegory generally and Paradise Lost specifically is a radically new genre, bearing little relationship with what she calls the “normative” allegory of Spenser.5 In this argument, Sin and Death are throwbacks, representatives 1

2

3

4

5

Samuel Johnson, “Life of Milton,” in Milton Poetry and Prose with Essays by Johnson, Hazlitt and Macaulay, ed. A. M. D. Hughes. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), p. 21. Maureen Quilligan, Milton’s Spenser: The Politics of Reading (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 129–52. Stephen M. Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 168–93. Catherine Gimelli Martin, The Ruins of Allegory: Paradise Lost and the Metamorphosis of Epic Convention. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 8–10. Martin, The Ruins of Allegory, pp. 31–80.

128

A Metaphorical Jew: The Carnal, the Literal, and the Miltonic

129

of straightforward allegory in which the linguistic material of the text is a translucent, nearly transparent veil for an immaterial abstraction. We can measure the sophisticated complexities of the rest of Milton’s poetics against Sin and Death’s schematic dualism. The problem with this argument is that Sin and Death are anything but straightforward. Herein lies the second way that Sin and Death are seen as problematic figures: they do not work the way other allegories work. Johnson himself is a proponent of this position; he goes on to say that to give such figures “any real employment, or ascribe to them any material agency, is to make them allegorical no longer, but to shock the mind by ascribing affects to non-entity.”6 Gordon Teskey argues that they are structured less like allegorical personifications than Homeric deities.7 What I would like to suggest in this essay is that Sin is in fact not a problematic figure in either context. Far from being inconsistent with Paradise Lost’s poetics, Sin provides a blueprint for Miltonic figuration, a figuration recognizably within the tradition of Christian allegory but that also registers the effect of reformation theology on that tradition. When critics like Martin or Fallon ask why Sin is unlike other “characters,” such as Eve, they are asking the wrong question. Instead, they should be asking why “characters” like Eve are so similar to Sin. However, what has a discussion of Sin and Death to do with the topic of this collection, the relationship between Milton and the Jews? The answer to this question lies in the fundamental structure of Christian thought, a structure that consistently organizes categories of experience, metaphysics, and hermeneutics into parallel dualities.8 Perhaps the earliest and most persuasive formulations of Christian thought comes from Paul, whose “entire thought and expression” is governed, as Daniel Boyarin argues, by a series of analogical ratios including Letter versus Spirit, Law versus Gospel, carnal versus spiritual, and literal versus allegoric.9 The master relationship controlling all these ratios is Jew versus Christian: what happens in the relationship between Christians and Jews in Christian identity politics also 6 7 8

9

Johnson, “Life of Milton,” p. 20. Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca: Cornell, 1996), p. 42. The underlying, dualistic structure of Christian thought on which my argument depends has been discussed extensively and from the vantage of many disciplines, and it would be excessive to attempt to trace that discussion fully here. Nonetheless, cf. Danial Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) for biblical interpretation; Paul Ricouer, “Preface to Bultmann,” trans. Peter McCormick, The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), pp. 381–401; Teskey for the role allegory plays in this structure; and Jill Robbins, Prodigal Son/Elder Brother: Interpretation and Alterity in Augustine, Petrarch, Kafka, and Levinas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) for a discussion of the intersection of Jewish identity and Christian dualism. Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew, p. 30.

130

linda tredennick

happens in the relationship between the literal and the allegoric in Christian writing. It is my contention that the enormous yet sometimes subtle changes in identity politics and in poetics during the early modern period, changes that (arguably) culminated in the English Civil War and in Paradise Lost, respectively, are not merely concurrent but independent phenomena attributable to an era of great change and turmoil. Instead, they are different manifestations of a single structural revision in Christian thought, a revision caused by the reformation. How Milton felt about the Jews and how he constructed the figure of Sin are structurally related and parallel. Indeed, Sin is a felicitous subject for exploring the relationship between figuration and Protestant attitudes toward the Jews, because the advent of sin is a necessary precursor to both allegorical writing and Protestant identity. The core concept of all Protestantisms, including Milton’s beliefs and the radical Puritanisms of his time, is an absolute conviction of human degeneracy and inefficacy.10 To put this another way: sin is the natural state of man, a state that cannot be altered without divine assistance in the form of grace. Sin, for Protestants, is not a behavior or series of actions that ought to be avoided. Faith becomes a state of mind, the certainty or “assurance” of being saved with a concurrent knowledge of one’s own abject sinfulness, with which comes the appropriate gratitude for God’s mercy in bestowing Grace. The mechanism set in place to come to this recognition and gratitude is the Law. In this core concept, Milton is (unusually) conventionally Protestant. He writes: “We are made aware of sin and are forced towards an acceptance of Christ’s grace merely by knowing the law, not by obeying it; for as scripture constantly reminds us, we do not draw nearer to Christ by the works of the law but wander further away from him.”11 We must know the law and feel its disastrous consequences, the awareness of sin, before we can be fully aware of ourselves as the passive canvas for God’s grace and be appropriately grateful. Therefore, the Protestant way to be Christian is to feel oneself under a law impossible to fulfill. This is the same 10

11

Richard Strier has argued that Milton’s approach to the issue of sin has more in common with classical ethics than with the theology of Luther and Calvin: Milton holds that “the will of Man, after the Fall, was not (as Luther and Calvin thought) bound to sin. Sin plays remarkably little in Christian Doctrine” (269). As I hope to prove in this essay, I believe that Milton’s poetics do not consistently reflect such a lack of interest in Sin and in fact are indebted to the Protestant context and mindset created by the theology of Luther and Calvin even as his own explicit theology moves away from Luther and Calvin. Richard Strier, “Milton against Humility,” in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed. Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) pp. 258–86. Complete Prose Works of John Milton (CPW ), ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1953–82), 6:534–5. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from the prose works are from this edition; citations to the CPW will hereafter be given in the text.

A Metaphorical Jew: The Carnal, the Literal, and the Miltonic

131

position Milton, and Protestants generally, attributed to the Israelites: the Law’s “aim was to make the Israelites have recourse to the righteousness of the promised Christ, through a recognition of their own depravity” (CPW 6:516).12 In other words, rather paradoxically, the way to be Christian was to feel oneself in the same position as the Israelites. It is important to notice that this is not a conversion narrative, in which one progresses from a state of Jewishness toward Christianity, but rather a consistent tension between desire to overcome one’s Jewish sinfulness and the Christian recognition that this desire must remain unfulfilled. This paradoxical identification between Christians and Jews is metaphorical shorthand for the seminal Protestant theological move, and we can find its origin in the originary moment of Protestantism itself. The young, monastic Luther13 was driven to despair by his own inability to do enough good to assure his own salvation. According to Roland Bainton, no extremes of pious, monastic behavior could assure him of his salvation: “All such drastic measures gave no sense of inner tranquillity. The purpose of his striving was to compensate for his sins, but he could never feel that the ledger was balanced.”14 Luther’s great epiphany was that no amount of doing could compensate for his sins because sinfulness was his nature. He translated this personal epiphany into general, theological terms in his 1519 Commentary on Galatians: “We rightly call the spiritual understanding of the Law the understanding by which one knows that the Law requires the spirit, and which convinces us that we are carnal”15 (LW 27: 313). In other words, the Law, as emblematic of a code of behavior that will lead inexorably to salvation, exists solely so that we will experience our inability to uphold that standard, to create the knowledge in all of us that we are inadequate on our own and require God’s grace. It is surprising – especially for those familiar with Luther’s later and virulently anti-Semitic writings – but not 12

13

14

15

I’m cutting a theological corner here that Milton does not. He believes that the Mosaic Law was for the Israelites alone and not effective for Christians. The law he discusses in this passage is, technically, the natural law, which was created to be rhetorically parallel to the Mosaic law: “Thus the law of nature has been given to all those who are not yet regenerate for the same reason as the Mosaic law was given to the Israelites”; i.e., to create a knowledge of sin and their own degeneracy (CPW 6: 519). Luther’s influence on Milton, and indeed on the course of the Reformation in England by the seventeenth century, is indirect. I turn to him instead of Calvin because, as Lisa Freinkel in Reading Shakespeare’s Will: The Theology of Figure from Augustine to the Sonnets (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002) persuasively argues, Luther sets the philosophic and poetic structure of all Reformation thought. Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1950), p. 46. Luther’s Works, American Edition (LW ), ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, vols. 1–30 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1955–1976), 27:313. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Luther are from this edition; citations to the LW will be given in the text.

132

linda tredennick

accidental that this seminal insight is expressed in terms associated with Jewishness: legality, literalness, carnality. These “Jewish” qualities are no longer opposed to Christian behavior and identity; they are not things Christians are not. Instead, they are things that Christians are, however much they want to be their opposite. What this means is that Jewishness is not just a historical phase that humankind, collectively, had to go through to prepare itself for Christ’s arrival, but is instead a process that all individuals have to go through and continually overcome. Lisa Frienkel makes this point clearly, observing that “what the Law reveals [for Luther] in place of a teleological narrative from Judaism to Christianity and from dead letter to living spirit is an essential and ceaseless ambivalence – a restless shuttling back and forth between mutually exclusive alternatives: flesh/spirit, law/gospel, damnation/salvation, slavery/freedom.”16 We are all Jews unless or until God converts us via grace, and even then our human nature remains recalcitrantly Jewish.17 Once Luther has expanded the category of “Jew” in this way, it is only consistent with his conviction of the importance of original sin to search for and find “Jewishness” in the Christian community and within himself. Oberman begins to make this argument in The Rise of Anti-Semitism, pointing out that “what is said literally of them [the Jews], namely, that they are obstinate, holds true in an extended, allegorical sense for all ‘refractory Christians’ and refers tropologically or ethically to the stubborn capacity for sin that inheres in man.”18 Furthermore, “the Jews are a clear example of how clinging fast to one’s own righteousness leads to contradiction, resistance, and finally to rebellion against God.”19 Oberman concludes this line of thinking with the elegant formulation: “Luther does not upgrade the Jews; he indicts the Christians.”20 However, merely claiming that bad Christians, or Christians when they act in an unchristian way, fall into the category of “Jewishness” does not state the case forcefully enough. Elsewhere, Oberman observes that the category of Jew-like Christians in fact includes all Christians: “In the mirror of Jewish history Luther discovered ‘us wretched Christians,’ who are also links in the threatening chain of evil. Through the Jews he found out who we actually are; by nature always heathens and enemies of God, hypocrites like the Jews when, before 16 17

18

19

Freinkel, p. 138. The psychological importance of the Law, for Luther and for Milton, does not mean that Christ did not fully abrogate the Law. The Law is dead for Christians, according to Luther, insofar that Christians should not believe that the Law has the power to damn them. Heiko A. Oberman, The Rise of Anti-Semitism in the Age of Renaissance and Reformation, trans. James I. Porter (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981), p. 104. 20 Ibid., p. 107. Ibid., p. 106.

A Metaphorical Jew: The Carnal, the Literal, and the Miltonic

133

God, we rely on good pedigree, law and works.”21 Internally, naturally, all Christians are Jews. Francis Watson identifies this idea “that every man has a ‘legalistic Jew’ in his heart”22 as central to Luther and Lutheran readings of Paul, an idea that attacks “not simply Judaism but, by implication, the universal human error of trying to earn salvation by one’s own efforts.”23 Instead of something to be rejected, Jewishness has become central to the definition of Christianity. Elizabeth Sauer demonstrates the prevalence of this construction of Christian identity and the commonness in Protestant and Puritan theology and sermons of the trope of “the Jew within.”24 “The Jew within” is a metaphor for human sinfulness and is, therefore, the theological equivalent of the figure of Sin in Paradise Lost. Up to this point, my discussion of “the Jew within” has made it look like a conventional metaphor. It is, as Oberman says, true for Christians in an “allegorical sense.” Jews and Christians are distinct categories that nonetheless share a common trait: Jews are bad, we are bad, and therefore we are Jews. What I would like to suggest, however, is that on closer inspection, the figure of “the Jew within” is much more structurally complicated, and complicated in ways that, first, are typical of Protestant thinking in general and, second, consistent with the structure of “Sin,” the allegorical figure. When Protestant theologians internalize Jewishness, they destroy the analogic ratios of Pauline thought. Once the experience of being Jewish is part of the definition of being Christian, then it is no longer possible to define Christian identity as being not Jewish. Instead, Christian identity is being Jewish with a difference, being Jewish with Grace. The relationship is no longer dichotomous but dialectical, no longer mutually exclusive but additive. Ultimately, I believe that “the Jew within” illustrates how Protestant theology is responsible for the demystification of metaphorical idealism as well as allegory’s transformation into the literary figure that Paul de Man champions as the poststructural genre par excellence. Sin (and not Romantic symbolism, as de Man argues) is the representative figure of this distinctly modern, self-conscious, and disjunctive allegory.25 21

22

23 24

25

Heiko A. Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil, trans. Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 297. Francis Watson, Paul, Judaism and the Gentiles, Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 56 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 14. Watson, Paul, Judaism and the Gentiles, p. 13. Elizabeth Sauer, “The Jew Within.” Milton and the Jews, MLA Convention, Sheraton, New Orleans, 30 Dec. 2001. Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, second ed. rev. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 187–228.

134

linda tredennick

This new relationship and new figuration is not limited to Luther but is in fact a core belief shared by all the various Protestantisms. What is true for early Luther, when he still believed partly in the efficacy of good works, is also true for Calvin’s pure predestination. On our own, no mortal is saved, which is to say truly Christian, except by God’s grace. This means that being Christian is different from being Jewish only because of God’s actions, and that the Christian experience is much like the Old Testament Jewish experience, dependent on God’s choice and waiting for the fulfillment of signs at the apocalypse. Barbara Lewalski has carefully and brilliantly documented this theological shift from the Catholic quid agas of good works to the Reformer’s opus Dei of grace, concluding that Protestants saw their personal lives as parallel to or recapitulations of the Israelite experience: Of course, the Protestant exegetes declared that Christ has fulfilled the types, and they insisted, none more vigorously, that Old Testament ceremonies and practices have been abrogated. Yet, partly because of their doctrine of the sacraments as signs rather than conduits of special grace, Protestants saw the spiritual situation of Christians to be notably advantaged by the New Covenant but not different in essence from that of the Old Testament people, since both alike depend on signs which will be fulfilled in Christ at the end of time.26

The belief that the difference between the Old and New Testament signs is one of degree instead of kind is not merely a hermeneutic position, but one that asserts the more extreme collapse of Christian and Jewish experience into the sense of internal Jewishness that we saw in Luther. The political ramifications of this debate are enormous. James Shapiro’s Shakespeare and the Jews has reminded us of the centrality of the ChristianJewish relationship to Renaissance conceptions of nationality, race, and individuality. Christians and the English are what they in part are because they are not Jews; to see how they represent their Other tells us how they envisioned themselves.27 If it is accurate to say that these representations tell us almost nothing about actual Jews or real Jewishness, then that is the nature of the asymmetric binaries such as self/Other and Christian/Jew. It is also the nature of such binaries that the less stable the dominant category, the more contested and vexed the boundary line between categories. This fact accounts, according to Shapiro, for the disproportional importance Jews had in the Christian imagination during the period in England bookended by the Reformation and the revolution, a period when there were 26

27

Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 125–26. James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 7.

A Metaphorical Jew: The Carnal, the Literal, and the Miltonic

135

very few if any practicing Jews within England. Identity politics, he claims, were thought through in response to Jews, who “confound and deconstruct neat formulations.”28 It is at this point that Shapiro and I diverge, because I contend that this is not the logic of binary thinking. The need to construct stable identity politics creates a need for stable formulations. Protestant theology’s move to “confound and deconstruct” the border between Christian and Jew destabilizes both identities; the traditional Christian identity, that which the Reformers associated with Rome, looks like Judaism, while Judaism starts to look like a new form of Christianity. In other words, Protestantism employed the category of “Jewishness” (I use quotation marks to emphasize that this category is a structural value holder only and does not consist of actual human beings) not to stabilize their own identities but to destabilize the existing Christian identity, thus opening space for a new formulation of Christian identity, a reformed or “true” Christian identity. The formulation of “the Jew within” is central to the entire project of reformation. We are now in a position to understand that many of the early modern trends that David Katz associates with an increased tolerance for Jews are in fact symptoms of this internalization.29 What looks like tolerance in fact has very little to do with actual Jews and is, not surprisingly, about the category of Christian identity. The humanist-inspired philological interest in the text of the Old Testament directly led to an increased interest in learning Hebrew, which in turn led to interaction with and respect for Jewish scholars and scholarship. The renewed respect for the literal meaning of the Old Testament led to several more sectarian beliefs usually considered Jewish, such as Sabbatarianism and the Calvinist iconoclasm derived from an increased respect for and literal interpretation of the second commandment. Even more widespread and important (at least to literary studies, as my earlier discussion of Lewalski indicates) is the identification that many Protestants felt with both individual Jewish figures and the condition of Old Testament Jewish existence that came with the rejection of medieval, fourfold exegesis in favor of what is commonly called “typology.” This personal identification is matched by a national identification of revolutionary England with Old Testament Israel as the land of God’s chosen people. What I would suggest is that, while the role of Jewishness within Protestant identity is extraordinarily complicated, it is complicated in a structurally consistent way. Jewishness is associated with the worst aspects of 28 29

Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, p. 171. David S. Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England 1603–1655 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982).

136

linda tredennick

our fallen state: our carnalness, our corporeality, and our natural apostasy. It is also associated with the most Protestant of Christian experiences: reading Scripture as a literal document, waiting for God to act for and through you. Given the widespread millenarian belief that the conversion of the Jews was a preordained and immanent historical event, all Jews were “potential Christians,” to borrow a phrase from Shapiro.30 Antithetically, given the vigilance against apostasy of all kinds in oneself and others, all Christians are potential Jews. What is consistent in Protestant theology is that Jewishness has been internalized as a necessary part of Christianity. What “the Jew within” is to the structure of religious politics, Sin is to the structure of allegory. The connection is less arbitrary than it might initially appear. The relationship between Christian and Jewish identity has always been grounded in hermeneutic differences. The difference between Christians and Jews – according to the Christian tradition that spans from Paul through Augustine to Luther and Milton – is that Jews read literally while Christians read allegorically. For a touchstone of this tradition, let us look at the locus classicus for the association of allegory with veils: Paul’s interpretation of the veil Moses wore over his face while communicating God’s laws to the Israelites. According to Paul, Moses had to veil his face not to shield the Israelites from the glow emanating from his face but instead to hide that the glow was fading. The veil thus comes to represent the Jewish inability to understand that the Mosaic Law was itself temporary and would be abrogated by the coming of Christ: “[The Jews’] minds were hardened; for to this day, when they read the old covenant, that same veil remains unlifted”31 ; “And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled only to those who are perishing” (2 Cor. 4.3). The Jews are Jews because they read the old covenant literally, because they do not read the new covenant enacted by Christ, and because they are obstinate in their inability to see the new covenant through the old. Christians are Christians because they see both the veil, the literal level of the Mosaic Law, and they see beyond the veil to the spiritual meaning of the Law. It is not just that Jews are to Christians as literalness is to allegory. Jews are what they are because they see only the veil, because they are literal; Christians are what they are because they see the veil for what it is, because they are allegorical. When the Reformers take up this argument, however, literality is redefined, just as Jewishness has been redefined. They associate themselves with 30 31

Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, p. 7. The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Revised Standard Version, ed. Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 2 Cor. 3.14. Unless otherwise noted, all biblical references will be to this edition, and will be given within the text.

A Metaphorical Jew: The Carnal, the Literal, and the Miltonic

137

literality and condemn Catholicism and Scholasticism for inventing a veil not actually present in the scriptural text. The famous Reformation attack on allegorical reading looks a good deal like a rebuttal of Paul and Augustine from the Jewish position.32 Of course, the literal meaning for a Protestant was typological and Christological, and hence a literal, Protestant reading is a very different thing than a literal, Jewish reading. Tyndale articulates this difference that looks like sameness: “Thou shalt understand, therefore, that the scripture hath but one sense, which is the literal sense. [ . . . ] Nevertheless, the scripture useth proverbs, similitudes, riddles, or allegories, as all other speeches do; but that which the proverb, similitude, riddle, or allegory signifieth, is ever the literal sense.”33 Tyndale does more than merely reverse Paul’s terms. Whereas Paul would say that the Jews are Jews because they read literally and Christians are Christians because they read figuratively, Tyndale does not say that true Christians are Christians because they read literally. Instead, what Tyndale says is that true Christians read the figurative as if it were literal; they see straight through the veil as if there is no veil at all. Literality has been made integral to allegory in precisely the same way that Jewishness has been made integral to Christian identity. Literary critics, when they take Tyndale at his word and assume that he actually rejects allegorical reading and allegory, overlook that he is no more rejecting allegory then Luther is rejecting Christianity. Tyndale is, in fact, reforming and resuscitating allegory, not rejecting it, and he does so by making the exclusive opposition that had defined allegory as not literal into an additive relationship: allegory is literality plus, just as the image of “the Jew within” means that Christianity is Judaism plus. That “plus” is, as it always is in Christian sign theory, the Logos, the presence of the divine. When a Christian reads scripture with the Holy Spirit in his breast, according to Tyndale, even ambiguous figurative language is as clear as the most literal of description. When a sinful, carnal, legalistic heart has been granted Grace, he is a Christian. However, when that completing presence is absent – either withheld or not yet given – then Protestant images look peculiarly modern. Instead of shutting down or foreclosing the significance of an image, its incompleteness instead opens infinite possibilities of significance. Jacques Derrida, who argues that such 32

33

Robbins would of course rightly object that what I am blithely calling “the Jewish position” is a Christian fiction that ultimately supports the Christian/Jew dichotomy and offers no liberating potential for true Jewish alterity. Because I am writing about Christians operating from a Christian position, this doesn’t invalidate my point, but it is important to keep in mind that the discourse that I am engaging is always in control of the structure of the debate. Tyndale, William. The Work of William Tyndale, ed. G. E. Duffield (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1965), p. 340.

138

linda tredennick

infinite ambiguity is the structure of language and in fact the structure of Western metaphysics, describes what happens to images when completeness or totalization is no longer a possibility: This field is in effect that of play, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite, that is to say, because instead of being an inexhaustible field [ . . . ] there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions. One could say [ . . . ] that this movement of play, permitted by the lack or absence of a center or origin, is the movement of supplementarity. One cannot determine the center and exhaust totalization because the sign which replaces the center, which supplements it, taking the center’s place in its absence – this sign is added, occurs as a surplus, as a supplement.34

Within Judeo-Christian sign theory, God’s presence is the center that grounds the play of substitutions. With it, symbols have meaning and efficacy. In the doctrine of images articulated at Nicea, images point toward that center. For Protestants like Luther, Calvin, and Milton, God’s presence turns an image into a symbol. With His grace, a Christian is a Christian, a member of the elect. Without God’s presence, an image is either an idol or empty ceremony. Without God’s grace, a Christian is not a Christian, is in fact the opposite of Christian, which is to say a Jew. Without God’s presence, then images can and do mean anything. The logic of the supplement underlies Tyndale’s definition of the literal in Scriptures. A true Christian, reading God’s word with the inner light of God’s grace, has access to the one true meaning, the literal meaning of the words even if that meaning is communicated via riddles and enigmas. Without God’s help, that meaning is lost in a sea of possibilities. Figurally, Sin is a Derridean supplement. She is so not because Milton is a proto-deconstructionist, but because Milton’s hell is structurally parallel to Derrida’s philosophy. She is an image cut off from divine presence, the structural equivalent of “the Jew within” without the addition of divine grace. Her separation from the divine is the beginning also of Fallon’s reading of Sin, but where for Fallon this absence leads to a lack of ontological presence – her diminution into an allegory that means nothing except absence – I would argue that this absence leads to a superabundance of meanings. Sin is, as several critics have noted, overtly a sign, one that is both specifically Protestant and peculiarly susceptible to modern semiology.35 34

35

Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 289. Cf. Marshall Grossman, Authors to Themselves: Milton and the Revolution of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 43–46; Quilligan, Milton’s Spenser, pp. 85 and 92; and R. A.

A Metaphorical Jew: The Carnal, the Literal, and the Miltonic

139

What interests me, however, is not that she is a sign, but what kind of sign she is. In the words of the not yet fallen followers of Lucifer when they witness her parthenogenesis, she is “a sign / Portentous.”36 She is a portent in that she is a sign of the coming evil of the war in Heaven and the fall of Lucifer and his cohorts. However, she is also a portentous sign, one whose significance is yet to come, in the future. At that moment, the first moment when Lucifer withdraws himself from the direct presence of God, Derrida’s logic of the supplement begins to replace Protestantism’s logic of the symbol and significance begins to become ungrounded. The description of Sin as half-woman, half-serpent locates her within a long literary tradition, which includes St. John Chrysostom, who turned the myth of Scylla into a symbol of Christian sin, and Spenser, who used Chrysostom as the basis for his personification of Error.37 Milton asserts that his description, although it is the latest in the history of the image, is in fact the original: “Far less abhorr’d than these / Vex’d Scylla” (PL 2.659–660). Sin is the template for Scylla and Scylla is an imperfect shadow of Sin. In Teskey’s phrase, Sin (and Death) “are not signs pointing to forces that are more real than they are; they precede and are the causes of what their names tell us they are.”38 Sin is the origin both of a series of images, a typology of sinful and dual female figures, and of sinfulness itself. The split between Sin and her father, Lucifer, replicates the originary split between Lucifer and his Father, and that split will be endlessly reiterated until the Father reassumes his presence at the end of time. She is a portentous sign in that her meaning will always be yet to come, always yet to be completed. Indeed, this particular, forwardlooking construction is typically Miltonic; it is shared by the fallen angels who become the pagan deities that they resemble. Sin as “a sign portentous” is constructed very differently than an allegorical figure in a typical, late medieval allegory. In such an allegory, a figure is a temporal manifestation of an atemporal idea or truth. Thus, while the figure may appear to exist in place and time, that appearance is illusory and meaningless, divorced from the significance of the figure. On the other hand, Sin’s temporality – her portentousness – is indivisible from her meaning, because part of what she indicates is the fact that meaning, once it is separated from God, is replaced with process, specifically with

36

37

Shoaf, Milton, Poet of Duality: A Study of Semiosis in the Poetry and the Prose (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 23–29. John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Odyssey, 1957), Paradise Lost (PL) 2.750–761. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Milton’s poetry are from this edition; citations will be given in the text. 38 Teskey, Allegory and Violence, p. 43. Hughes note to Book II lines 649–660 (247).

140

linda t redennick

open-ended process. Marshall Grossman agrees that Sin’s temporal structure is a departure from the allegories that have preceded it: What has been introduced into the allegorical discourse is precisely a temporal dimension. The evaluative hierarchy of obscure sign and luminous truth that characterizes atemporal allegory gives way, in Miltonic allegory, to a temporal ordering in which the narrative of events presents the founding moment of a historical revision. Sin and Death enter the world as allegorical figures and are disseminated in time as repeating patterns of action. This temporalization of allegory shares significantly the historicizing function of typological hermeneutics. Meaning is not traced to another scene, to an atemporal world in which universal truths are universally enforced, but rather to a historically situated action. The locus of meaning is no longer elsewhere, but later.39

The figure of Sin differs from previous allegories because it insists that all of its levels of meaning are temporal and historical. Although Grossman is correct in saying that the figural structure of Sin is related to typology, he does not explore the equally important differences between her structure and typology. Typology, as the historical manifestation of Christian allegory, claims to unify past and present as equal signifiers of eternal providence. Christianity’s narrative of fulfillment, however, inevitably means that the present is more equal than the past, that the New Testament sign is closer to its spiritual signifier than its Old Testament equivalent. Because of this unidirectionality, there is always a sense of projected completion; we know that the story will end when signs and signifiers perfectly match. In other words, typology looks forward to its completion, its wholeness, in the eschaton. The temporal structure of the Scylla/Sin image specifically denies such closure. Sin is the beginning of a temporal structure that gains its unity retrospectively; it looks backward, toward its origin, rather than forward, toward its telos. Sin, in effect, reverses the temporal direction of typology, so that Sin foreshadows, is a portent for, Scylla instead of Scylla foreshadowing her meaning, her fulfillment as Sin. Like Luther’s theology of sinfulness and grace, this is not a conversion narrative based on progress, on working one’s way toward grace and completeness. Instead, this is a structure of continuing tension, of desire thwarted until it is completed by the addition of something external to the structure.40 39 40

Marshall Grossman, Authors to Themselves, pp. 43–44. Of course, typology’s eschaton is also external to its historical manifestations and, accordingly, also obeys Derrida’s logic of the supplement. The difference between Sin and the eschaton is in their placement vis a` vis that temporal structure. Sin is before her images; the eschaton is either after them or is outside temporality altogether. Sin’s position as precursor emphasizes the open-ended endlessness of the structure she initiates.

A Metaphorical Jew: The Carnal, the Literal, and the Miltonic

141

Whereas Sin’s portentous structure is not a conversion narrative, it is a familiar narrative of another kind, a narrative of origin. The structure of the “sign portentous” and the logic of the supplement are grafted onto Sin’s “life” story: a Goddess arm’d out of thy head I sprung: amazement seiz’d All th’ Host of Heav’n; back they recoil’d afraid At first, and call’d me Sin, and for a Sign Portentous held me; but familiar grown, I pleas’d, and with attractive graces won The most averse, thee chiefly, who full oft Thyself in me thy perfect image viewing Becam’st enamor’d, and such joy thou took’st With me in secret, that my womb conceiv’d A growing burden. (PL 2.757–766)

Sin’s story takes her from being a sign portentous to a member of Lucifer’s society, one who not only “pleases” but also is able to conceive and give birth. Thus, Sin moves from being a clearly marked allegorical figure, a personification of the theological concept called “sin,” to a character, invested with the illusion of identity and subjectivity. She feels recognizably (if perhaps comically understated) human emotions: she is “pensive” when she finds herself pregnant and alone; she is “dismay’d” by her son’s bad behavior; she feels “sorrow infinite” for the bad end her children/grandchildren have come to (PL 2.777, 793, 797). Her life story is gruesome, horrifying, and a perverse parody of Eve’s promise of healthy reproductivity, but it is also a familiar, even common, life story. It is, as Grossman describes it, “the generic tale of a woman seduced and abandoned by a soldier.”41 Indeed, it is not until she is “familiar grown,” treated as a purely mimetic character, that she seems a disruption of the poetics of the poem as a whole. This is, of course, reading somewhat against the grain: Sin as the daughter/lover of Satan is not what bothers most readers, but rather Sin’s extra-mimetic significance, her obvious status as figure, which seems out of place. Sin disrupts the poem because she is a character, like Satan and Adam, but with a difference. If she were purely different, if she belonged entirely to a different strategy of figuration, then she could be easily accounted for as a self-conscious aberration from Milton’s “normal” mode of representation. It is the fact that she combines her status as figure so successfully with her role 41

Grossman, Authors to Themselves, p. 46.

142

linda t redennick

as a character, that she makes figurality an integral part of being a character, which allows her to disrupt the text. She is unsettling not because she makes us ask how she is unlike the rest of the poem, but how the rest of the poem is like her. Once we grow “familiar” with Sin, her strangeness infects our sense of the familiar. Even more unsettling, her success as a character – the vivid physicality of the passage, her recognizably human emotional responses to betrayal and pain – makes us ask how our own experience of our lives is like her experience of her figural, allegorical existence. What the story of Sin suggests is that the process an incomplete sign undergoes as it struggles to become complete is the same process that results in the creation of a mimetic character and a certain type of narrative, the open-ended narrative of birth and generation. Sin is not a straightforward personification; rather, she is a figure that desires to communicate one transcendent meaning but succeeds only in proliferating her meanings, a figure that struggles to make itself whole and unified but succeeds only in extending its incompleteness and emphasizing its disjuncture. She is, in this, not unlike the young Luther struggling to earn his salvation but succeeding only in learning of his inability ever to do so. There is something rhetorically strained in talking about a literary figure who desires and struggles, but part of what makes Sin so difficult is that she illustrates how a figure of speech turns into a figure in a narrative, a character, once the divine presence that would have given it meaning is absent. Sin therefore illustrates a type of desire that, while frustrated from being ultimately fulfilled, is productive. Sin’s desire, or rather Satan’s desire for Sin, is almost always read as a cautionary tale against narcissism. Sin is an image of Satan, and therefore his desire for her is actually a desire for himself. The outcome of such incestuous self-love is not only monstrous but also, ultimately, a closed circuit. Sin and Satan produce Death; Sin and Death produce hell-dogs that return to Sin’s womb and consume her.42 Of course, this analysis is true; Sin and Satan’s desires do not produce what we want such desire to produce, neither meaning nor healthy children. I would like to suggest, however, that Sin’s desire is the normative desire of Paradise Lost. It is the desire of Eve and it is the desire that fuels the structure of Milton’s figures. It is, furthermore, the only human desire possible within Protestant theology. Eve’s first experience is of a narcissistic desire parallel to Sin’s. On first waking up to consciousness, Eve looks at her own reflection in a pond 42

See Grossman pp. 43–46; Linda Gregerson, The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 198–262. Shoaf ’s deconstructive analysis unfolds in similar terms, pp. 85–100.

A Metaphorical Jew: The Carnal, the Literal, and the Miltonic

143

and is “pleas’d” by exchanging with her reflection “answering looks / of sympathy and love” (PL 4.465–566). Critics interested in distinguishing Eve’s desire from Sin’s stress that Eve herself almost immediately rejects that first relationship as “vain desire” and, with one moment of backsliding upon seeing the naked Adam, soon learned “how beauty is excelled by manly grace / And wisdome, which alone is truly fair” (PL 4.490–491). Her return to Adam thus signals a rejection of Sin-like narcissism and a turn toward a reproductively viable desire for Adam. I would argue that Eve’s new and improved desire for Adam does not, in fact, constitute a rejection of narcissism. First, Eve is cajoled away from her own image by a seemingly authoritative voice who entices her, not with the promise of difference, but with the promise of improved sameness, saying: What thou seest, What there thou seest fair Creature is thyself, With thee it came and goes; but follow me, And I will bring thee where no shadow stays Thy coming, and thy soft imbraces, hee Whose image thou art, him thou shalt enjoy Inseparably thine, to him shalt bear Multitudes like thyself, and thence be call’d Mother of human Race. (PL 4.467–475)

The voice promises to bring Eve to another, better image of herself, one in which no shadow can interpose itself between her and herself. Of course, what makes this new image superior is not that it is more like her than the image in the water, but that it is her original: Adam, “hee / Whose image thou art.” The result of this narcissistic embrace will be even more images of herself, “multitudes like thyself.” Furthermore, with the coming of these copies of herself, the voice promises Eve a coherent identity; she will be “Mother.” Eve responds, “what could I do, / but follow straight?” (PL 4.475–6). However, upon catching sight of Adam, Eve feels as if she has been the victim of a bait and switch. Adam is not an image of herself, but is instead “less fair, / Less winning soft, less amiably mild / than that smooth wat’ry image” (PL 4.478–480). She initially rejects Adam as too different, an unacceptable image, and returns to her original narcissism. Adam is only able to convince her to return by reaffirming his sameness with her: Return fair Eve, Whom fli’st thou? Whom thou fli’st, of him thou art, His flesh, his bone; to give thee being I lent

144

linda t redennick Out of my side to thee, nearest my heart [. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .] Part of my Soul I seek thee, and thee claim My other half. (PL 4.481–484, 487–488)

Adam’s argument is that he does not merely look like her, but that he actually is her, or more precisely, that she is him. He offers a narcissism that is more substantial, promises a completion more concrete than mere reflection. From within the logic of Adam’s argument, it is only logical that he “claim” her; when he seizes her hand, he is really seizing his own hand. It is worth noting that, although Eve “yields” to Adam’s claim, there is no indication she does so because she has accepted his argument as that she capitulates to his superior position. At this moment, Eve’s agency and original desire is subsumed into her role as wife and potential mother. This moment cements Eve’s identity as a supplement: herself incomplete, she opens up the potential for proliferating “play” – offspring – in the structure that we now call humanity, while she also reveals Adam’s basic incompleteness. Because Eve’s identity as Derridean supplement is prelapsarian and grounded by the authoritative voice, joining with Adam does stabilize and complete them as a couple; as long as Adam’s superior position is unchallenged. Without him, she is “without end” (PL 4.441); with him she is his “sole partner and sole part of all these joys” (PL4.411), a part that is part of a whole. The difference between Adam’s prelapsarian version of this desire and Eve’s version is that Adam’s desire is attainable, whereas Eve’s is destined to be perpetually unfulfilled. However, the Fall itself occurs because Satan challenges Adam’s position and reignites Eve’s initial desire for a way for her to be complete in herself and not just the supplement that completes the couple. Instead of being a “sole partner and sole part,” Satan calls her “sole Wonder” (PL 9.534), replacing the synecdochic promise of wholeness of the symbol with a more perfect, less divisible completeness. He also addresses her as the “fairest resemblance of thy Maker fair, / Thee all things living gaze on” (PL 9.538–539). Her image is not an inferior shadow that needs another, Adam, to complete it, but is sufficient in itself, a sufficiency illustrated by the gaze of all creation looking to her. As such, Satan merely reignites Eve’s initial desire, a desire that reopens the foreclosed logic of the supplement. He reawakens her “eager appetite” for her own image, and the result of the fall is that that desire can never be satisfied, and that the images she will produce will not be multitudes like herself, reasserting her wholeness, but children, different from her and reasserting

A Metaphorical Jew: The Carnal, the Literal, and the Miltonic

145

her incompleteness. Both the fallen Eve and the soon-to-be-fallen Adam implicitly recognize that the Fall has opened up this process of proliferating differences when they fear her disobedience will lead to “another Eve” (PL 9.828, 911). Sin’s desire to join with Satan, of whom she was once a part and from whom she engenders images of herself, is also Eve’s desire to join first with herself and then with Adam, her origin and her mirror. It is also Milton’s desire. Milton voices a longing for a unified cosmos – of which he himself is a part – in his ode to correspondence, organic connection, and material monism. This ode is Raphael’s organic simile for all creation, created from “one first matter all, / Indu’d with various forms, various degrees / of substance” (PL 5.472–474): So from the root Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves More aery, last the consummate flow’r Spirits odorous breathes: Flow’rs and thir fruit Man’s nourishment, by gradual scale sublim’d To vital spirits aspire, to animal, To intellectual, give both life and sense, Fancy and understanding, whence the Soul Reason receives, and reason is her being, Discursive, or Intuitive; discourse Is oftest yours, the latter most is ours, Differing but in degree, of kind the same. (PL 5.479–490)

Merritt Y. Hughes believes this passage is the heart of all of Paradise Lost, “a kind of microcosm of the whole poem,” containing a concise schemata of the relationship that unites all things in God’s plan.43 Proliferation and difference are, for Raphael, uncomplicated markers of the unity of all things, from inanimate substance to plants and animals to discourse and thought, within the all-encompassing category of creation. In the cosmos Raphael describes, the differentiation and incorporation of proliferating images typical of Sin’s figuration are not monstrous hellhounds but instead, like Eve’s projected, unfallen offspring, multitudes that reaffirm the essential unity of their origin. Because of the presence of God, these unlimited differences are not the field of figurative play. Instead, they all mean the same thing: God. Raphael’s simile offers a prelapsarian fantasy of unity and coherence that subsumes everything, all which can be experienced or thought, into monolithic significance. 43

Hughes, “Introduction to Paradise Lost” in John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, p. 194.

146

linda t redennick

However, for both Eve and Milton, this unity and totalization is a prelapsarian fantasy never to actually exist. Their desire is destined to have the same outcome as Sin’s desire: proliferation without closure. Eve will find that becoming the Mother of human race does not complete her but is instead transformed into a sign of her sinfulness, her need to be completed. Like Sin, Eve becomes the origin of a typology chain that will not, cannot be finished until the end of history, when God’s presence is reasserted. Milton’s version of this open-ended desire is most famously expressed in the allegory of the absence of the divine from Areopagitica: Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine Master, and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on. But when he ascended, and his apostles after him were laid asleep, then straight arose a wicked race of deceivers, who, as that story goes of the Egyption Typhon with his conspirators, how they dealt with the good Osiris, took the virgin Truth, hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces, and scattered them to the four winds. From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris, went up and down gathering up limb by limb as they could find them. We have not yet found them all . . . nor ever shall do, till her Master’s second coming. (CPW 2: 549)

Truth in God’s presence is whole. Truth without God’s presence is “in a thousand pieces.” It is the desire of all fallen intellects to reassemble that whole, but the result is only to find more pieces that reassert their own incompleteness, signify only God’s absence. Truth joins “the Jew within,” Sin, and Eve as figures that are incomplete in themselves and that signify structural incompleteness. Their function, like the function of the Law, is to create the awareness of incompleteness. The structure shared by all these figures, based on the logic of the supplement, is also the structure of the most distinctive aspect of Miltonic poetics: the Miltonic simile. Like standard similes, in that they promise to clarify through analogy, but also distinctive, in that the meaning is always complicated rather than clarified, Miltonic similes create the expectation of and desire for synecdochic inclusivity but do so only to deny that desire and open seams of Milton’s discourse. It is typical of these most Miltonic of images to come with their own, independent narratives that are both tangential to and temporally and topologically disjunctive with the primary epic plot line. For a prime example, we need read no farther than the poem’s first major simile: floating on the Sea of Hell, Satan is “in bulk as huge as” (PL 1.196) Leviathan, which God of all his works Created hugest that swim th’Ocean stream: Him haply slumb’ring on the Norway foam The pilot of some small night-foundered Skiff,

A Metaphorical Jew: The Carnal, the Literal, and the Miltonic

147

Deeming some Island, oft, as Seamen tell, With fixed Anchor in his scaly rind Moors by his side under the Lee, while Night Invests the Sea, and wished Morn delays. (PL 1.201–208)

What begins as a simple simile quickly evolves into a sailor’s tale roughly contemporary with the composition of the poem (as opposed to the scene within the poem). This tale in turn invokes another narrative, Isaiah’s prophecy, which links Satan and Leviathan together through a shared logic of serpent imagery and divine punishment. As with Sin, the figure first differentiates itself from its source, establishing the dual structure that makes it a figure and not merely a description. Anne Ferry argues that Milton’s epic similes are used “to add variety to the poem, to widen its range of reference and to ornament its poetic surface” as well as their more important task of characterizing the narrative voice, of enriching his tone, of insisting on his presence and enlarging his role as our interpreter and guide. The similes elaborate and sustain the pattern of contrasts between the world of ‘things invisible to mortal sight’ and our fallen world which controls the mood and meaning of the poem.44

Such similes, then, inject our fallen, human experience into a narrative controlled by the divine. Stanley Fish expands on Ferry’s insight, arguing that Milton’s similes suggest a correspondence that they then negate in order to establish the experience of difference: “Milton is able to suggest a reality beyond this one by forcing us to feel, dramatically, its unavailability.”45 This is how both Sin and the fallen Eve function, desiring likeness but in doing so producing an ever-growing chain of differences. In other words, the simile establishes the desire for unity, which the scene Milton is describing is a synecdochic part of our experience. The Miltonic twist is that that desire for unity in fact only communicates our separation from that scene. What begins as a gesture toward inclusivity and wholeness is always actually a gesture of exclusion and fragmentation, of alienating the reader from the text and the text from its own ultimately ineffable subject.46 44

45

46

Anne Davidson Ferry, Milton’s Epic Voice: The Narrator in Paradise Lost (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 68–69. Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 27. Peter Herman has recently documented the distinctive pattern of the Miltonic simile to “regularly create a Gordian knot of contrary resonances,” p. 42. Although Herman and I agree that this pattern is the essence of the Miltonic, we disagree as to its origin and purpose. Herman sees this pattern as a response to the unraveling of the Milton’s political principles, whereas I see it as part of his theological convictions. Peter Herman, Destabilizing Milton: Paradise Lost and the Poetics of Incertitude (New York: Palgrave, 2005).

148

linda t redennick

My argument, in its simplest form that is also its most global, is that Paradise Lost figurally enacts the battle between symbol and allegory, or rather the desire for symbol that always results in allegory. Paul de Man’s definition of symbol, taken from Coleridge, is structurally parallel to both Luther’s and Calvin’s semiology of divine presence, although de Man replaces what in the theological discourse is the structural position of God with God’s creation, the Natural world: The symbol is the product of the organic growth of form [ . . . ]. Its structure is that of the synecdoche, for the symbol is always a part of the totality that it represents. Consequently, in the symbolic imagination, no disjunction of the constitutive faculties takes place.47

Similarly, his definition of allegory is recognizably the structure of Sin: It remains necessary, if there is to be allegory, that the allegorical sign refer to another sign that precedes it. The meaning constituted by the allegorical sign can then consist only in the repetition [ . . . ] of a previous sign with which it can never coincide.48

De Man argues that the great insight of early Romantic authors is that the symbol can never take precedence over the allegorical sign, that the allegorical sign offers a demystified relationship with its meaning. Ultimately, for de Man, what allegory demystifies is the self’s “desire to coincide,”49 which is the desire of Sin, of Eve, even of Milton. Allegory, however, “prevents the self from an illusory identification with the non-self, which is now fully, though painfully, recognized as a non-self.”50 For de Man, while the articulation of this insight is historically specific to the early Romantic period, the insight itself is a constant, a linguistic and aesthetic truism. I would argue, however, that the moment of insight occurs first within Luther’s monastic cell, when he recognizes that he himself is an inferior copy, a “Jew within” of the Christian that he desires to be. Luther, in essence, identifies himself as a non-self, separated from his true self by the fall and awaiting reunion with the advent of grace. This allegorical insight is not a constant, but is instead historically specific. It is the early Romantics who mystified it, turned it into an eternal, aesthetic truth by removing it from its theological context. Finally, I would contend that the greatest aesthetic product of this “insight” is the writing not of Wordsworth and Rousseau, but of Milton. The belief that Paradise Lost’s greatest Romantic hero, struggling against insurmountable fate, is Satan is a misunderstanding of Milton’s great poetic project. It 47 49

De Man, “Rhetoric of Temporality,” p. 191. 50 Ibid., p. 201. Ibid., p. 208.

48

Ibid., p. 207.

A Metaphorical Jew: The Carnal, the Literal, and the Miltonic

149

is Milton who desires to create a lasting, unifying symbol of God’s justice but instead writes an allegory of the fall, the story of our futile desire to coincide with our prelapsarian origins. The Protestant tradition from Luther to Milton creates the poststructuralist definition of allegory as the trope that most clearly registers language’s connotative shortfalls, a conception of allegory that illustrates the idea of “representation as built upon its own undoing,” to borrow Stephen Greenblatt’s phrase.51 De Man writes that “allegory is the purveyor of demanding truths, and thus its burden is to articulate an epistemological order of truth and deceit with a narrative or compositional order of persuasion. In a stable system of signification, such an articulation is not problematic.”52 The problematic history of even the definition of allegory is, for de Man, evidence that the demanding truth allegory purveys is that persuasion, rhetoric, pleasure – the realm of poetics – is no longer the stable system it was for medieval authors, and is now incommensurate with the realm of meaning. Joel Fineman similarly suggests that allegory is “an increasingly futile search for a signifier with which to recuperate the fracture of and at its source, and with each successive signifier the fracture and the search begin again.”53 These theorists share a belief that allegory (at least postmedieval allegory) registers the failure of metaphorical idealism, a failure that de Man attributes to an epistemological shift to empiricism and skepticism and that Fineman attributes to the basic structuralism of logocentrism. The structure of Milton’s poetics also registers such a failure of metaphor and of unity, but this failure is enabled by his theology, his conviction that fallen man cannot ascend on his own. Milton’s poetics illustrate the post-structuralist theory of these critics so well not necessarily because they are universally accurate, but because Protestant theology makes possible the linguistic and philosophic environment they inhabit. It may seem odd that an argument that began with reformation identity politics concludes with a discussion of the origins of post-structuralist theory. However, this essay has been interested in telling and in fact coordinating two stories: both poetics and politics, the question of Sin and “the Jewish question.” However distant, both historically and discursively, the literary theories of Derrida, de Man and Fineman are from Reformation attitudes toward Jewishness, both share a same fundamental impetus: a desire to uncover and perhaps undo institutional wrongs. Perhaps then it is 51

52 53

Stephen J. Greenblatt, “Preface” to Allegory and Representation, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), p. vii. Paul de Man, “Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion,” Allegory and Representation, p. 2. Joel Fineman, “The Structure of Allegorical Desire,” Allegory and Representation, p. 45.

150

linda tredennick

not so surprising to find similarities between such theories and the Protestant concept of “the Jew within,” itself apparently a platform for tolerance, a value frequently associated with Milton himself. There can be no place for intolerance toward the Jews when we are all Jews just under the surface. Such at least appeared to be the belief of John Traske. He was an early seventeenth-century puritan who acted on the belief that the lines between Christianity and Judaism were literally and practically blurred, that being a good Christian meant being a good Jew. He observed Saturday Sabbath, followed Jewish dietary laws, and circumcised himself. The fatal flaw of perhaps all liberal idealism is witnessed by the extraordinarily harsh response to Traske’s Judaizing. He was nailed to a pillar through his ear, the letter “J” was branded into his forehead, and he was put in jail on a diet of only bread and water (although he was offered all the pork he could eat) until he recanted his heresy.54 Traske’s fault is that he mistook the metaphorical “Jew within” for real Judaism, a mistake that robs the figure of its “reforming,” Christianizing desire. Just as Sin is an allegory that wants to be a symbol, Reformation Protestants saw themselves as Jews that wanted to be Christians. “The Jew within” valorizes things Jewish but leaves actual Jews at best allegorical vehicles to be used and then discarded. As Milton’s silence on the question of Readmission testifies, the structural revision I have been outlining changes everything for metaphors of Christian identity and for Christian metaphors, but leaves Jews themselves “things indifferent.” 54

Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, pp. 23–24.

c h a pter 8

“The people of Asia and with them the Jews”: Israel, Asia, and England in Milton’s Writings Rachel Trubowitz

The Hebraic and Judaic aspects of Milton’s writings have long fascinated and perplexed his readers. The last fifty years or more have seen the publication of numerous studies exploring Milton’s rabbinical readings, his knowledge of Hebrew, and his interest in Kabbalah among related concerns.1 Two recent studies, Jason P. Rosenblatt’s Torah and Law in “Paradise Lost” and Jeffrey S. Shoulson’s Milton and the Rabbis, however, have given the subject of Milton’s Hebraism new vigor and rigor.2 What is especially exciting about both studies is the ways that they bring the debates about biblical and rabbinical hermeneutics from within a Jewish-studies framework to bear upon issues crucial to Milton’s understanding of liberty, history, human relationships, and sexuality. Building on the important rapprochement that Rosenblatt and Shoulson have created between Milton studies and Jewish studies, this essay attempts to approach the subject of “Milton and the Jews” from a slightly different but closely interrelated vantage point: that of Milton’s perceptions of Asia. Milton drew his knowledge of the Orient from a variety of European sources, including Jesuit accounts of Chinese history and culture and the

1

2

A shorter version of this essay was presented at the MLA Division Session on “Early Modern Orientalism,” chaired by Paul Stevens, December 2000. I would like to thank Sandhya Shetty for her insightful comments on earlier drafts of this essay. See Harris F. Fletcher, Milton’s Semitic Studies and Some Manifestations of Them in His Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1926) and Milton’s Rabbinical Readings (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1930); Harold Fisch, “Hebraic Styles and Motifs in Paradise Lost,” in Language and Style in Milton, ed., Ronald D. Emma and John T. Shawcross (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1967), pp. 39–64; Leonard R. Mendelsohn, “Milton and the Rabbis: A Later Inquiry,” Studies in English Literature, 18 (1978): 125–35; Cheryl H. Fresch, “The Hebraic Influence Upon the Creation of Eve in Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies, 13 (1979): 181–99, and “‘As the Rabbines Expound’: Milton, Genesis, and the Rabbis,” Milton Studies, 15 (1981): 59–79; Samuel Stollman, “Satan, Sin, and Death: A Mosaic Trio,” Milton Studies, 22 (1986):101–20, among many others. Jason P. Rosenblatt, Torah and Law in “Paradise Lost” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) and Jeffrey S. Shoulson, Milton and the Rabbis: Hebraism, Hellenism, and Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).

151

152

rachel t rubowitz

travel writings of Samuel Purchas.3 These wide-ranging early modern texts helped to constitute the emergent discipline of Orientalism, so powerfully and influentially critiqued by Edward W. Said in his landmark volume.4 Orientalism, as Said has taught us, allowed Europe’s fears and fantasies about the Eastern “Other” to acquire scientific precision and historical validity. For Jonathan Boyarin, Said’s critique of the discipline of Orientalism offers an important starting point for renewing the question of Jewish difference. Praising Orientalism as “a powerful model for the archaeology of cultural and biological racism in the service of nationalism at home and colonialism abroad,”he nevertheless questions Said’s exclusive focus on “the Other outside of Europe.”5 Boyarin argues that, although Said identifies the Eurocentric vision that informs the discipline of Orientalism as “‘the idea of white Christian Europe,’” “nowhere does he direct his attention to those inside Europe who were not Christian.”6 Responding to this omission, he asserts that “the Other within” Europe cannot be easily dissociated from “the Other without” Europe.7 Milton’s writings, I suggest, offer an important arena in which to explore the implications of Boyarin’s response to Orientalism and to Said’s own 3

4 5

6 7

On Milton’s Orientalism, see John Michael Archer, Old Worlds: Egypt, Asia, India, and Russia in Early Modern Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), chapter 2, and Robert Markley, “‘The destin’d Walls / Of Cambalu’: Milton, China, and the Ambiguities of the East,” in Milton and the Imperial Vision, ed. Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999), pp. 191–213. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979). Orientalism has been challenged on a variety of fronts. For a thoroughgoing indictment of Said’s book, see Bernard Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1982). Robert J. C. Young perceptively critiques Orientalism’s disabling contradictions in White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London and New York: Routledge, 1990). Young questions how Said can argue that “‘the Orient’ is just a representation,” if he also claims that “‘Orientalism’ provided the necessary knowledge for actual colonial conquest.” For Young, Orientalism is even more seriously impaired by Said’s commitment to the Western humanist tradition, which was “produced by the very same culture that constructed not just anti-humanist Orientalism, but also, as Said himself points out, the racist ideology of the superiority of the ‘White Man’ whose rhetoric of Arnoldian ‘high cultural humanism’ was defined against the intellectual and cultural depravity of the colonies” (128, 130). Most recently, Jonathan Burton has questioned “Said’s sense of a discursive consistency to describe English attempts to compensate for Eastern power,” in Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579–1624 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), p. 12. Shoulson, Milton and the Rabbis, p. 79 Jonathan Boyarin, Storm From Paradise: The Politics of Jewish Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), pp. 79, 78. Following Said, studies addressing the subject of Milton and Asia have tended to overlook the crosscurrents between Milton’s vision of the Orient and his perception of Jews and/or his investment in Mosaic history. See Robert Ralson Cawly, Milton and the Literature of Travel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951); Pompa Panerjee, “Milton’s India and Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies, 37 (1999); Balachandra Rajan, “Banyan Trees and Fig Leaves: Some Thoughts on Milton’s India,” in P. G. Stanwood, ed. Of Poetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and His World (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995).

“The people of Asia and with them the Jews”

153

acknowledgment in “Orientalism Reconsidered” of the close relations between Europe’s formulations of the Orient and its perceptions of Jews, which he describes as “nourished at the same stream.”8 Although Milton’s conception of Jewish and Asian affinities is anything but consistent, his perception of the Jews as a people, his global sense of Jewish history and diaspora, and his vision of Judaism’s relationship to Christianity and its presaging of a salvific Anglo-Christian future are nevertheless significantly inflected by his Orientalist perceptions of Asia. Building on Rosenblatt’s and Shoulson’s perceptive analyses of the ways in which biblical and postbiblical Hebraic/Judaic thought informs Milton’s writings, this essay takes an alternative but, I believe, equally important route through Asia to the subject of “Milton and the Jews.” Milton’s response to “the Jewish Question,” I argue, cannot be understood in isolation from his mappings of East-West relations or from the new global consciousness that shapes his interlocking perceptions of “the people of Asia and with them the Jews” (CPW, 3.202).9 English responses to the new flow of information about Asia ranged from admiration to contempt, but most often, they expressed a confused mixture of fear and praise. For Joseph Hall in The History of the New World (1608), for example, news of China’s advanced civilization, and its impressive arts, learning, wit, and manners, raises unsettling doubts about the centrality of Europe’s and England’s position in the world. Hall’s series of rhetorical questions reinforce his bewildered astonishment at China’s marvelous achievements. Encountering China inspires wonder but also the melancholic recognition that Europe’s and England’s assured sense of itself as a global power is seriously skewed. In the face of China’s much more advanced civilization, the West’s hitherto unquestioned presumption of cultural superiority seems risible: “There is men, perhaps more ciuill then wee are, who ever expected such wit, such gouernment in China? such arts, such of all cunning? we through learning had dwelt in our corner of the world: they laugh at vs for it, and well may.” 10 8

9

10

Edward W. Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” Literature, Politics, and Theory: Papers from the Essex Conference, 1976–84, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen, and Diana Loxley (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), p. 220. All quotations from Milton’s prose are taken from John Milton, Complete Prose Works, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82) and noted in the text. Poetry quotations are from John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey, 1957). Joseph Hall, The Discovery of the New World or a Description of the South Indies. Hitherto Unknowne. (London: 1609), sig. A4r.

154

rachel t rubowitz

However, if the idealized picture conveyed by travel narratives and Jesuit histories of China’s never-ebbing abundance and perfect dynastic order, dating from before the Flood produced dismay and an unsettling sense of dislocation, it also sparked compensatory commercial fantasies of China as a new paradisal market, to which access might be gained through trade.11 Milton was intrigued by the new commercial opportunities that China presented. As Robert Markley observes, the poet saw China’s plentitude as a possible solution to Europe’s scarcity – a way to fulfill his larger hope of achieving a more just distribution of worldly goods. This bright vision of the global future, however, was soon darkened by the poet’s recognition that, as an alternative Eden and as an exceptional nation possessed of a written history that, in its antiquity, rivaled Hebrew scripture, China presented a serious threat to the moral and narrative coherence of the Mosaic account of the Fall and the privileged status of Hebrew scriptural history, to which the poet had an “ironclad” commitment. Further complicating Milton’s response to China was that, by the seventeenth century, English fascination with things Chinese had become almost entirely a Stuart affair. China became an “intellectual rallying point” for supporters of the Stuarts; English translators of the Jesuit commentaries – texts whose political and theological motives Milton deemed suspect – were “to a man, ardent monarchists.”12 To defend the providential election of the new postdynastic Israel/England that he believes is heralded by Hebrew scripture, Milton questions the political and commercial motives at work in the Jesuits’ and their Stuart translators’ accounts of China’s prosperity and its ancient, unbroken dynastic history, thereby preserving the integrity and elect status of Mosaic history. His Anglo-Judaic view of historical progress and national redemption is predicated on his disavowal of China’s undeniable natural abundance and cultural achievements.13 Milton thus repudiates Stuart fantasies about China’s paradisal prosperity to preserve his alliance of Hebrew scripture and Judaic separateness with England’s election and salvific future. However, at the same time, he also reinforces his anti-Chinese/Stuart vision of England as the new Israel by conflating the old Israel with Asia. The divinely inspired liberty that he had hoped the English people might achieve is opposed to the infidel slavery that he sees as characteristic of both Asians and Jews, ancient and modern. 11

12 13

See Robert Markley, “‘The destin’d Walls / Of Cambalu’: Milton, China, and the Ambiguities of the East,” in Milton and the Imperial Vision, ed. Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999), pp. 191–213. Markley, “‘The destin’d Walls,’” p. 198. Markley, “‘The destin’d Walls,’” pp. 193, 192, 198. 210.

“The people of Asia and with them the Jews”

155

In The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Milton maintains that: “the people of Asia, and with them the Jews also, especially since the time they chose a King against the advice and counsel of God, are noted by wise Authors, much inclinable to slavery” (CPW, 3. 202–203). Similarly, in the first Defence of the English People, Milton, citing Aristotle and Cicero, asserts that “the Jews and Syrians were born for . . . slavery” (4, 1.343). While Milton defends the elect status of Mosaic history in order to protect the providential election of republican government against royalist celebrations of an imperial Far East exempt from the consequences of the Fall, he nevertheless insists, drawing support from “wise Authors,” that England’s emancipation from custom, tradition, and kingship must be understood in opposition to the ungodly slavishness that he sees as an inborn feature of the Asian and Jewish character. On the one hand, Milton’s attacks on the Jesuits and their English translators are designed to protect the Israel of Hebrew scripture from being subsumed by the more ancient history and superior civilization of China presented in such works as Gaspar da Cruz’s A Treatise of China.14 On the other hand, Milton in The Tenure and elsewhere establishes an ethnic identity between Jews and Asians through the native slavishness he believes is shared by both peoples. With the anointing of Saul, not only does Israel’s inborn inclination toward slavery become more pronounced, but it also assumes a conspicuously Oriental character. For Milton, then, Hebrew scripture, Israel, and the Jews all stand with and against England, on both sides of the East-West divide. Neither fully Occidental nor fully Oriental, the Jews hover between slavery and emancipation, damnation and regeneration – and between absence and presence as well. The oblique angle that Milton cuts into Israel from Asia recapitulates the Fall’s reduction of Hebrew scripture to the Old Testament and the race of Abraham to a disappearing and dying people. If pointed “forward” along a western trajectory, the Jews, like the shadowy types of the Old Testament, can gain a redemptive presence in the new Anglo-Christian era; but, if facing “backward” in time and space toward the unregenerate and infidel East, they threaten to sink into historical oblivion. Milton’s perception of Jews and Asians as equally “inclinable to slavery,” in short, allows him to map his typological understanding of Judeo-Christian history along an East-West axis. In part, this imaginary geography reflects the notable reorientation of early modern attitudes toward antiquity and the East that followed upon 14

Gaspar da Cruz, A Treatise of China, abridged in Samuel Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrims, or Hakluytus Posthumus, 20 vols. (London, 1625), 3:175.

156

rachel t rubowitz

Europe’s encounters with the New World. The discovery of the New World did not weaken or diminish Europe’s almost obsessive fascination with the Orient. As John Archer observes, “In a period that venerated the past as a source of invention as well as tradition, the Old World remained a vital, and even novel and unsettling, space throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”15 Nevertheless, although the New World heightened Europe’s sense of wonder and its desire for marvelous possessions, the newness of the Old World ushered in “a season of profound instability,”16 as John Hall’s aforementioned response to China suggests. To stabilize its as-yet unsecured place in a newly expanded globe comprised of both the New and Old Worlds together, Europe imagined its “rise” in the new world order against Asia’s “fall.”17 Milton’s perception of Asia is shaped by this emergent Orientalist discourse of Eastern decadence and decline: Asia was at once “a holy land, the seat of human community and civilization, but also a land condemned to a perpetual cycle of imperial rise and fall heralded by the primal Fall.”18 While the Stuarts and their supporters looked to China to justify their vision of English imperium sine finum, Milton “locates the decadence of empire in the East, while simultaneously criticizing the imperial ambitions of the restored Stuart monarchy in the growing metropolis of London.”19 Just as a mixture of veneration and disdain for the past inspires Milton’s anti-Stuart discourse of Oriental decadence, an analogous ambivalence toward historical and cultural precedent shapes his perceptions of Hebrew scripture and the Jews as a godly people. Milton intellectually depends upon both Hebraic scriptural mores and postbiblical Judaic thought and personally identifies himself and all reformed Christians with the Hebrew prophets, especially Moses and Jeremiah, and the Jews as a chosen people, but, at the same time, he also rejects the Hebraic/Judaic past and people as outmoded and “Old,” and hence incapable of renewal and regeneration. On the one hand, as Rosenblatt observes, Milton is able to do what St. Paul could not: “feel and record the saving power of Pentateuchal law.” But, on the other hand, in Paradise Lost, “After the Fall, Torah becomes a captive text, the Old Testament, and the narrator who has been holding back, lets go, degrading our first parents, the law, and like Paul, bankrupting the world for the sake of Christ.”20 Shoulson similarly focuses on “Milton’s anxiously ambivalent embrace of Hebrew and Jewish precedent.” This ambivalence centers for Shoulson on “the body of the Jew.” Although Milton’s typology 15 18 20

16 Archer, Old Worlds, p. 5. Archer, Old Worlds, p. 2. 19 Archer, Old Worlds, p. 65. Archer, Old Worlds, p. 65. Rosenblatt, Torah and Law, pp. 64, 63.

17

Archer, Old Worlds, p. 7.

“The people of Asia and with them the Jews”

157

evacuates the presence of Jewish bodies, his profound sympathy for Jewish suffering allows him to acknowledge “the body of the Jew” and to identify himself with the suffering Jewish diaspora.21 Achsah Guibbory also traces Milton’s ambivalence about the Jews and Hebraic/Judaic precedent to his ambivalence about the body, but, unlike Shoulson, she argues that Milton’s association of the Jews with carnality and bondage ultimately leads him to repudiate the Jewish past. She observes that while Milton grounds his ideas of political order and poetic authority in Hebrew scriptural models, he nevertheless insists that the English must break “from the pattern of the Jewish past and become unlike the Jews, who are for Milton associated with the carnal, the unredeemed body, and hence with bondage and slavery.”22 Milton’s ambivalent sympathy towards and denunciation of the Oldness of the Old Testament mixes and mingles with his conjoint admiration and disdain for the Old World. These mergers are highly motivated: the emergent discourse of Oriental decadence offered Milton new means for containing his anxieties about Hebrew and Jewish precedent, which he ambivalently embraces. By identifying the Jews before but “especially after the time since they chose a King,” with “the people of Asia” (CPW, 3. 202–203), Milton can fold Israel into Asia’s “perpetual cycle of imperial rise and fall.”23 Rather than ascend into the regenerate postdynastic future, “the people of Asia and with them the Jews” will conjointly sink into the decadent, self-erasing, self-consuming history of Asian empire. Israel, as the focus of Milton’s millennial vision of the future, resides in the West, where it opposes the imperial paradise of the Far East celebrated by the Jesuits, the Stuart intelligentsia, and other royalist Orientalists. However, at the same time, the Jews’ native inclination toward slavery – manifested by their recurrent backsliding toward Egypt – underscores both the ethnic likeness between the unregenerate children of Israel and “the people of Asia” and their conjoint descent into historical oblivion. For Milton, the Jews’ dedication to Pentateuchal law enhances their susceptibility to Asian slavery, imperial decadence, and historical obsolescence. While the law is a sign of Israel’s special status as sacred to God and different from all other nations, the law also makes Israel, above all other nations, most vulnerable to the Oriental threat of bondage and degeneration, both from within and without. Milton’s understanding of Pentateuchal law is complex and ever evolving, as Rosenblatt makes clear. Whereas in the 21 22

23

Shoulson, Milton and the Rabbis, pp. 89, 80. Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Hebert to Milton: Literature, Religion and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 184–86. Archer, Old Worlds, p. 7.

158

rachel t rubowitz

middle books of Paradise Lost and the tracts of 1643–45, Milton “felt and recorded what Paul never did, the saving power of Pentateuchal law,” in the last two books of the epic, and elsewhere in his writings, Milton devalues the law in Pauline terms as a form of bondage. Rosenblatt observes that, for Milton, as for Paul, “the period of the entire Mosaic law was meant to be a temporary time of slavery, lasting only until the appearance of Christ.”24 Milton’s “negative Pauline conception of the law” finds especially clear expression in De doctrine (1:27), which defines the law as “the dead letter,” opposed to Christ’s “living spirit” and “the free custody of his love.” Although Milton, in the divorce tracts, writes sympathetically of the life-affirming and emancipating implications of Jewish law, his Pauline equation of the law with bondage and death shapes his view in The Tenure of the likeness between “the people of Asia” and both pre-Christian biblical Israel and the postbiblical Jews who, “after the appearance of Christ” refuse to embrace gospel over law, thereby sentencing themselves to Oriental bondage and historical erasure.25 Given the centrality of slavery to Milton’s affiliation of Jews and Asians, it is important to pause at the juncture to consider, however briefly, the variety of meanings that accrue to this term in Milton’s writings. The passage from The Tenure reflects an anthropological understanding of slavery as an ethnic and cultural characteristic. Yet Milton also deploys slavery as a metaphor for ethical or spiritual states of bondage. As Sharon Achinstein observes, Milton’s “robust Christianity” and the stoical notion that “true liberty was an inner condition” profoundly shape his conception of slavery. “For Milton,” Achinstein observes, “slavery was both a sign and a consequence of moral degeneration.” “Much of Milton’s writing,” she states, “was concerned about the difficulties and temptations of moral or spiritual slavery.”26 Milton’s concern with the moral consequences of slavery, however, cannot easily be dissociated from his ethnographic assessment of Asians and Jews as equally “inclinable to slavery.” The inborn slavery of Jews and Asians, for Milton, is a particular ethnic manifestation of the “inner slavery” that afflicts all fallen individual, regardless of their ethnicity, race, gender, or social status.27 Although Milton describes slavishness as a native characteristic of Asians and Jews, he also sees slavery as the natural or inborn state of all peoples unable to keep their base or morally degenerate cravings 24 26

27

25 Rosenblatt, Torah and Law, pp. 64, 43. Rosenblattt, Torah and Law, p. 43. Sharon Achinstein, “Imperial Dialectic: Milton and Conquered Peoples,” in Milton and the Imperial Vision, ed. Rajan and Sauer, p. 73. Guibbory’s observation that the Jews’ “unredeemed body” externally manifests their idolatry and inner bondage is relevant here, Ceremony and Community From Herbert to Milton, p. 184.

“The people of Asia and with them the Jews”

159

for kingship and other forms of human bondage in check. As Benedict Robinson astutely observes in his essay in this volume, “‘Race’ . . . becomes Milton’s concept for all of the subjective forces that resist republican freedom, becomes even his explanation for the failure of the republican project in England.” In Eikonoklates, Milton accuses his backsliding countrymen of being “not fitt for that liberty which they cri’d out and bellow’d for” (CPW, 3:581) of being “by nature slaves” (emphasis added). Just as he sees Asians and Jews as especially “inclinable to slavery,” Milton also suggests that slavery is both the natural and moral, inborn and inner condition of all fallen people. On the one hand, after the Fall, the human mind enslaves itself by allowing its base appetites to master reason and deny freedom of the will. In Paradise Lost, the narrator states that, after the Fall, “Understanding” and “the Will” are “both in subjection now / To sensual Appetite” (9.128– 29). Yet, on the other hand, after the Fall, human procreation biologically transmits “inner slavery” from generation to generation, making all fallen peoples “by nature slaves” – and hence, metaphoric Judeo-Orientals as well. In Paradise Lost, Adam laments that his future progeny will damn him for the evil that he will biologically pass on to them, naturally impairing their moral character: “For what can I increase / Or multiply, but curses on my head? / Who of all Ages to succeed, but feeling / The evil on him brought by me, will curse / My Head” (10.731–35). The sliding significance of slavery in Milton’s writings can be partly explained as an expression of the all-inclusive scope and synthesizing nature of his reformist worldview. As James Holstun and Bruce McLeod observe, Milton traveled in circles and, indeed, was at the center of a literary and political culture that sought new means for reconciling every aspect of experience, natural and spiritual, ethical and ethnographic, into one unifying system along the lines of Bacon’s Novum Organon.28 These synthesizing ambitions informed reformist projects in a wide range of intellectual and political arenas, from the search for a universal language, to cartography and travel writing, reformed pedagogy, and utopian proposals for rationalizing all aspects of human culture and society. Achsah Guibbory observes that Milton’s sweeping vision of the enslaving influence of idolatry finds especially vivid expression in the polemical prose of the 1640s and 1650s and in his late poems. n the 1630s and 1640s, Milton “wanted to purify the English church, to save it from the threat of a pagan-Catholic idolatry 28

James Holstun, A Rational Millennium: Puritan Utopias of Seventeenth-Century England and America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) and Bruce McLeod, “The ‘Lordly Eye’: Milton and the Strategic Geography of Empire,” in Milton and the Imperial Vision, pp. 48–66.

160

rachel t rubowitz

threatening to infiltrate it from outside.” However, Milton came to see that his opposition of outside to inside could not adequately account for idolatry’s widespread power to enslave. Milton “discovered that idolatry was not simply located in church worship and was not a foreign import; it was part of the very fabric of English social experience, of human nature – present in the private bed of marriage, the intercourse of print, and the relations between governors and governed.”29 Rather than see idolatry and slavery only as “foreign import[s],” Milton begins to probe these issues from the inside out (as a function of the moral degeneration that follows upon the Fall) as well as from the outside in, as a function of an “other” ethnicity and nature. Both Milton’s sweeping critique of idolatry and slavery and his allinclusive vision of universal reform drew considerable energy from the period’s broadly circulated theories about the worldwide dispersal of the ten lost Hebrew tribes. David S. Katz documents that the global migration of the vanished Israelites and their infiltration in and spawning of diverse cultures all over the world was a subject of enduring interest to Milton and his contemporaries.30 Heightened mid-seventeenth-century millennial expectations, however, gave speculation about the global dispersion of the lost tribes enhanced urgency. James Holstun, building on the work of Richard Popkin, notes “the strange and strained ecumenical appeal of this anthropological fiction, which was essentially eschatological: the reunion of Israel was to have been a sign of the imminent arrival of the millennium (for Christians) or of the Messiah (for Jews).”31 As Katz, Holstun, Popkin, and Peter Toon detail, agitation for Jewish readmission produced a surprising collaboration between Christians and Jews, the most notable of whom was Rabbi Menasseh Ben Israel of Amsterdam.32 At this moment of heightened millennial expectations, speculations about the reunion of scattered world Jewry and their descendants in all parts of the world profoundly shaped Milton’s and his culture’s global consciousness. For Milton and millenarians such as John Eliot and John Dury, the reunion of Israel anticipated the postapocalyptic unity of all places, histories, and peoples 29 30

31 32

Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton, p. 186. David S. Katz, Philo-Semitism and The Readmission of the Jews to England, 1603–1655 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), Chapter 4. Holstun, A Rational Millennium, p. 112. See Katz, Holstun, Richard H. Popkin, “Jewish Messianism and Christian Messianism,” in Culture and Politics from Puritanism to the Enlightenment, ed. Perez Zagorin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 67–90, and Peter Toon, “The Question of Jewish Immigration,” in Puritans, the Millennium and the Future of Israel: Puritan Eschatology, 1600–1660, ed. Peter Toon (Cambridge: Clark, 1970), pp. 115–25.

“The people of Asia and with them the Jews”

161

in Christ’s millennial kingdom. With the end of history, the globe would regain its original integrity, destroyed by the Fall and Babel. Within this apocalyptic global imaginary, the Jews stand at the threshold between East and West. Whereas they are poised to enter the Common Era and the world community of Christians to be ushered in at the imminent millennium, the Jews, by clinging to their separateness and particularity, risk lapsing forever into Oriental bondage and oblivion. On the one hand, the dispersal of Jews throughout the globe confirms Milton’s perception of the slavish, degenerating, or, in a word, Asian character of the world’s population and, by extension, the universal scope of Judeo-Oriental slavishness as a sign and consequence of the Fall. On the other, the global dispersion of the Jews signals the imminence of the Apocalypse and the ultimate triumph of the righteous Christian West over the infidel East, the new Israel or England over the old Israel of Hebrew scripture. Although the worldwide dispersal of the Jews both creates and confirms the world’s degenerating and self-erasing Oriental character, Jewish presence in every part of the globe, including (or especially) China, is nevertheless crucial to the universal rejuvenation to take place at the end of time, when East becomes West and Old becomes New – an enabling contradiction that shapes Milton’s ambivalence toward the Jews. As we shall soon see, however, while Milton writes vividly about both the universal scope of human degeneracy and its specific Jewish and Asian implications, he is, unlike such friends and allies as Moses Wall and John Dury, mostly silent about the crucial role that Jewish reunion and conversion was thought to play in the drama of Apocalyptic transformation. A correlative set of ambivalences concerning the global implications of Jewish-Oriental decadence and Jewish absence and presence can be detected in Samuel Purchas’ redaction of Jesuit historian Matteo Ricci’s accounts of China in Purchas his Pilgrimage, in which Purchas includes a story concerning Jewish assimilation in China. Purchas’s story centers on Ngai, a “Jewe . . . borne at Chaifamfu, the Mother-citie of the Prouince Honan,” who “neglecting Judaisme, had addicted himselfe to the China studies.” Ngai exemplifies the growing trend toward Jewish assimilation in China. Through Ngai and other Jews’ neglect of Hebrew and their immersion in Chinese language, culture, and religious rituals, Judaism in China was by degrees wearing out. Purchas, however, cannot refrain from detailing the affluence of the Chinese Jews, despite the fact that his detailed evidence of Jewish spending power undermines his efforts to prove that Judaism was disappearing in China. Purchas notes that Ngai, the assimilated Jew, was told that “in Chaifamfu, were ten or twelue Families of Israelites,” and

162

rachel t rubowitz

“a faire Synagogue, which had lately cost them ten thousand Crownes, therein the Pentateuch in Rolls, which had bin with great veneration preserued fiue or six hundred yeers.” Ngai pursues his “China studies,” nonetheless.33 In his insightful commentary on Purchas’ tale, Markley observes that “Ngai’s assimilation to a prosperous and virtuous culture marks a limit to the power of Judeo-Christian monotheism in the Far East,” a limit that Milton cannot accept. However, the implications of Purchas’ tale are not quite so clear-cut. Although Purchas’ tale of Jewish assimilation in China does suggest “a limit to the power of Judeo-Christian monotheism in the Far East” that is unacceptable to Milton, Purchas’ interest in Jewish-Chinese sympathies is also motivated by religious interests akin to those shaping Milton’s affiliation of Jews and Asians, including the Chinese, as “inclinable to slavery.” To a considerable degree, Purchas’ interest in the fading of Judaism in China is energized by his anti-Catholicism. By way of undermining Ricci, his Jesuit source, Purchas represents the Chinese as a proto-Catholic people, slavish worshippers of “Popish Images” (which, as Markley observes, is “a sentence interpolated by Purchas”).34 China, in this construction, represents a formidable but routine, OrientalRoman Catholic threat to Protestantism’s (ultimately triumphant) JudeoChristianity. Although the Chinese context adds an exotic touch, Ngai in Purchas’ story represents the typical backsliding Jew / Englishmen, who prefers novel “Popish Images” to “the Pentateuch, in scrolls,” preserved with great veneration for five or six hundred years. Moreover, while Purchas’ depiction of the Jews’ easy passage into Chinese culture highlights the limiting power that Chinese culture exerts over the Jews, it also strongly underscores China’s openness toward and toleration of its prosperous Jewish population. Fueled by his anti-Catholic sentiments, Purchas’ depiction of the Jew-loving Chinese and their Jewish admirers as kindred lovers of profane images is not at all incompatible with Milton’s perception of Jews and Asians as ethnically and morally kindred peoples, “inclinable to slavery.” Finally, Purchas’ account of Jewish life in China provides important evidence of the global scope of the Jewish diaspora. This kind of empirical evidence bolsters his vision of both the universal scope and distinctively Asian and Judaic character of human sinfulness. It also supports his admittedly short-lived and highly ambivalent recognition of the important role that the Jews’ presence in every corner of the globe was to play in the universal 33 34

Samuel Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrims, or Hakluytus Posthumus, 3:399–40. Markley, “‘The destin’d Walls,’” p. 210.

“The people of Asia and with them the Jews”

163

rejuvenation to occur at history’s endpoint – a point to which we shall soon return. The same apocalyptic vision and its attendant ambivalences concerning Jewish-Asian–Chinese relations animate Milton’s comparison of Satan to “a Vulture on Imaus bred” in Book 3 of Paradise Lost. As described in Bartholmaeus’ Book of Nature (1582), the vulture was thought, as Hughes notes, to be “able to scent its prey across whole continents.”35 In this instance, the “whole continent” is Asia, whose decaying corpse is scented by its native scavenger, the Satan-like vulture born on Mt. Imaus in the Caucasus. The continental scope of the Asian vulture’s scenting of death sets him on a course descending from the “snowy ridge” that “the roving Tartar bounds” to “the springs of Ganges or Hydaspes” (3.431–36). On the way, he lights “on the barren plains / Of Sericana, where Chineses drive / With Sails and Winds thir cany Waggons light” (3.438–39). Unlike the paradisal China that captures the Jesuit and Stuart imagination, Milton reduces China to the Gobi desert, a wasteland within a disappearing and dying Asia, figured as a decaying body over which a Satan-like vulture flies. As McLeod points out, this picture of Asia as more dead than alive, more absent than present is reinforced by the “erasing mobility” of its nomadic, ruinating peoples: the “roving Tartar” and the ephemeral “Chineses,” aloft in their “cany wagons light” and set in perpetual motion upon a discordant terrain, a “windie Sea of land,” that mirrors their own unsettled elemental nature. Both stand in stark contrast to the unequivocal rootedness of Hebraic Adam, formed from his sacred native soil. By placing Adam against the “roving Tartar” and the sand-sailing Chinese, and by opposing the fecund Garden of Eden to a discordant and barren China embedded in the large vacuity of the Asian continent, which gives off the scent of death, Milton retaliates against the threat that Stuart constructions of a paradisal Far Eastern empire posed to the integrity and authority of the Mosaic books.36 At the same time, however, in identifying the “drive”-ing Chinese with “the roving Tartar,” Milton establishes an identity between the “erasing mobility” of “the people of Asia” and the vanished Israelites. Informed by his extensive knowledge of Muscovite and Central Asian history and geography as his History of Muscovia attests, Milton’s allusion to the Tartars is anything but a casual reference – and one that significantly bears on Milton’s undifferentiated, negative perception of “the people of Asia and with them the Jews.” As Katz’s study makes clear, the Tartars had come to 35 36

Merritt Y, Hughes, ed., John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, n. 431, p. 268. McLeod, “The ‘Lordly Eye,’” p. 60.

164

rachel t rubowitz

assume a central position in European speculation about the location and postbiblical history of the vanished Israelites. Noting that “the belief that the ten lost tribes have survived as a secret, hidden nation in some far-off corner of the globe has a long history,” Katz writes that by the late Middle Ages, this hidden Israel had come to be associated with “the peoples behind the Caucasus and the raiding hordes of Central Asia.”37 It is this belief that Marco Polo was to echo when he claimed that in “Georgianna there is a King called David Melic, which is as much to say [in Hebrew] ‘David King’; he is subject to the Tartars.”38 Giles Fletcher, the Elder, argued that the Tartars were Jews, although no longer divided into tribes. As evidence he pointed to similarities between Tartar and Hebrew names, the common practice of circumcision, and the fact that the Tartars had a fort named “Mount Tabor.”39 English travelers to the East helped strengthen Fletcher’s argument. An anonymous travel narrative of 1611 claims that those “Tartars who are far situated from the residue, and inhabit that remote Scithian promontory . . . wandering vp and downe the country” had “retained the name of their tribes, the title of Haebrewes, and circumcision. In al other rites they follow the fashions of the Tartarians.”40 George Sandys agreed that the lost ten tribes were “planted, as some say, beyond the Caspian Mountains: from whence they never returned.”41 Speculations that the Tartars were the direct descendants of the vanished Israelites were, however, contested by the fairly widespread theory of the Hebraic origins of the American Indians. Roger Williams notes that women in both Indian and Jewish culture are quarantined during their “monthly sickness.”42 Edward Winslow makes reference to this common practice, noting as well “their manifold daily expressions bewailing the loss of that knowledge their ancestors had about God and the way of his worship, the general deluge, and of one man only that ever saw God, which they hold forth to be a long time since . . . which certainly I believe to be Moses.”43 As Katz, Holstun, and Lee Huddleston Eldridge, among others, have documented, Renaissance theories of the Hebraic origins of the 37

38 39

40 41 42

43

Katz, Philo-Semitism, p. 128–29. My account of the Tartar-American Indian debate about the lost ten tribes of Israel closely follows Katz. The Book of Ser Marco Polo, ed. H. Yule (London, 1929), cited in Katz, Philo-Semitism, p. 130. The English Works of Giles Fletcher, the Elder, ed. L. E. Berry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), pp. 307–31. Cited in Katz, Philo-Semitism, p. 137. George Sandys, Sandys Travels (London, 1673), p. 111. Roger Williams, Key into the Language of the Indians of American in The Complete Writings of Roger Williams, 7 vols. (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963), 1. 84. Cited in Holstun, A Rational Millennium, p. 112.

“The people of Asia and with them the Jews”

165

American Indians, which originated in the sixteenth century, flourished during the years of the Commonwealth, invigorated by the 1644 account of a secluded Jewish colony in Ecuadorian Andes reported by Aaron haLevi alias Antonio de Montezinos, a Portuguese marrano.44 Katz notes that, testifying under oath before Menasseh Ben Israel, Montezinos swore that he had met Israelites of the tribe of Reuben in the interior of the Quito Province. Having been released from prison in Cartagena, where he was imprisoned by the Inquisition, Montezinos confessed to an Indian companion that “I am an Hebrew of the tribe of Levi, my God is Adonoy,” whereupon his Indian friend supplied him with instructions that would lead him to a secret community, whose inhabitants repeated the Shema.45 Menasseh published Montezinos’ report in his book, The Hope of Israel, in Latin and Spanish in 1650, and at London in an English edition translated by Milton’s friend, Moses Wall. The widely accepted credibility of the Montezinos report strengthened the American Indian against the Tartar side of the lost ten-tribe debate. John Sadler describes Montezinos as a “Grave, sober man, of [the Jews’] own Nation, that is lately come from the Western World.”46 Through Menasseh, the report attracted the attention of the English clergyman and Commonwealth supporter, John Dury, who, as Holstun observes, was a strong advocate of John Eliot’s missionary work among the Algonquians. As Holstun documents, Dury apparently recognized that, by shoring up the American Indian theories about the ten tribes, the Montezinos report would increase support for Eliot’s conversionary efforts in New England; he put Menasseh in touch with Thomas Thorowgood, whose own study, Jews in America, was in manuscript. When Thorowgood published his study in 1650, he included Menasseh’s account of Montezinos’ story in an appendix.47 One suggestive resolution to the Tartar-American Indian debate about the fate of the ten tribes came from Edward Brerewood, the first professor of astronomy at Gresham College, who proposed a compromise position between the Tartar and the American Indian theories. Brerewood argues that the Tartars were descended from the Israelites and that the American Indians were descendants of the Tartars of eastern Asia, given the accepted 44

45 46

47

See Katz, Holstun, Lee Eldridge Huddleston, Origins of the American Indians: European Concepts, 1492–1729 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967). See Katz, Philo-Semitism, p. 143. John Sadler, Rights of the Kingdom (London, 1649), p. 40. On Sadler’s millenarianism, see Katz, Philo-Semitism, pp. 103, 140–41, 194–5. Holstun, A Rational Millennium, p. 112.

166

rachel t rubowitz

fact that “the West side of America, respecting Asia, is exceeding much better peopled than the opposite or East side, that repecteth Europe.”48 Brerewood’s theory is notable, among other things, for its blurring of EastWest distinctions. For Brerewood, the Tartars, descendants of the Israelites, had drifted so far to the East that they ended up in the West, specifically, in “the West side of America, respecting Asia,” where they became the progenitors of the American Indians. Although they reside in the West, the American Indians are, for Brerewood, an Eastern not a Western people. Equally noteworthy, Brerewood’s account implicitly refutes Montaigne’s utopian view, delivered by Gonzalo in The Tempest, of the American Indians as a race of “noble savages,” immune from the vices of the so-called civilized world. Brerewood’s theory of the Indians’ Hebrew and Tartar ancestry makes the New World peoples similar to rather than different from those in the Old World, and, by extension, subject to rather than exempt from the slavish desires and inclinations of both their specific Israelite and Asian forbears and of the general fallen character human nature as well. The New World is as such not really “New” at all, but rather a missing piece of the Old World, with all its manifold defects. Rather than define the American Indians as the primitive other, Brerewood treats the Indians as newly discovered Hebraic Asians, related to rather than distinct from the Old World’s fallen populations, and afflicted by rather than immune from Judeo-Oriental slavishness and, more generally, the moral degeneration of fallen human nature. Milton’s allusion to the American Indians in Book 9 of Paradise Lost is in many ways compatible with Brerewood’s account. Not unlike Brerewood, Milton does not see the Indians as a special race of noble savages, immune from the effects of the Fall. Rather he compares the newly fallen Adam and Eve, girding their genitals, as “if to hide / Thir guilt and dreaded shame” (9.1113–14), to “th’American”: “O how unlike / To that first naked Glorie. Such of late / Columbus found th’American so girt / With feathered Cincture, naked else and wild” (9.1114–15). Adam’s and Eve’s shameful impulse to cover their naked bodies highlights their likeness to the American Indians.49 The same shame also reveals the Asian character of their fallen 48

49

Edward Brerewood, Enquiries Touching The Diversity of Languages, and Religions (London, 1614), pp. 96–7. See Paul Stevens, “Milton and the New World: Custom, Relativism, and the Discipline of Shame,” in Milton and the Imperial Vision, pp. 90–111. Taking Milton’s reference to the American Indians in Book 9 as his starting point, Stevens astutely explains “the function of shame in the process of defining the nation as a godly community, protecting its integrity, and, most importantly, inhibiting any kind of engagement with cultural alterity,” p. 93.

“The people of Asia and with them the Jews”

167

state. Adam and Eve take the fig leaves from which they fashion their first garments from a banyan tree, “such as at this day to Indians known / In Malabar or Decan,” whose “Armes / Braunching so broad and long” create a “Pillard shade / High overarch’t.” “There oft,” as the narrator expounds, “the Indian Herdsman shunning heate / Shelter in coole” (9. 1103–1110). In his note on this line, Roy Flannagan points out that, the word, “overarch’t,” “echoes the Vallombrosa simile (1.303–304), which also suggests the potential for shade in which to hide sin (9. 1102–1109).”50 Yet if they are like “the Indian,” West and East, in their “guilt and dreaded Shame,” the shameful Adam and Eve also resemble Samson: “so rose the Danite strong / Herculean Samson / From the Harlot-lap / of Philistean Dalilah, and wak’d / Shorn of his strength, they destitute and bare / Of all their vertue . . . ” (9. 1059–1063). The quick slide from the shorn Samson of Hebrew scripture, to the shady “Indian Herdsman,” to the “wild” American Indian as analogues to the guilty Adam and Eve creates the sense of a close affinity among all these fallen figures, not unlike that delineated by Brerewood’s Hebrew-Tartar-American Indian genealogy. John Eliot’s account of Hebrew-Asian-American Indian interrelations also bears significantly on Milton’s compressed allusions to the American Indians, Asian Indians, and ancient Hebrews as analogues to the fallen Adam and Eve in Book 9. Deploying scriptural evidence, Eliot sets out to prove that “fruitful India are Hebrewes, that famous civil (though Idolatrous) nation of China are Hebrewes, so Japonia, and these naked Americans are Hebrewes, in respect of those that planted first these parts of the world.”51 In The Christian Commonwealth, he traces the ancestry of both American Indians and Asian Indians, along with the Japanese and the Chinese, to Eber, a descendant of Shem, a son of Noah, who moved eastward after the Flood. For Eliot, Eber and his fellow Hebrews roamed throughout Asia, settling India, China, and Japan, arriving finally in America. Eliot’s account, like Brerewood’s, both underscores the American Indian’s Hebrew origins and affiliates America with Asia. America is the final destination in Eber’s eastern swing through the Asian continent. It represents the obscure threshold where East becomes West, where roving Hebrews and Asians are remade as nomadic American Indians. Like Milton and Brerewood, Eliot does not see the Indians as a noble race of natural men, radically different from their counterparts in the civilized world, but rather as “a missing link in scriptural history and anthropology.” As Holstun observes, for Eliot, “The 50 51

Roy Fannagan, ed., The Riverside Milton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), p. 619, n. 312. Cited in Katz, Phlo-Semitism, p. 155.

168

rachel t rubowitz

discovery and conversion of the Indians signify an ultimate (or penultimate) unity of peoples of history.”52 The Indians, in short, confirm the Hebraic character of all of the world’s diverse populations. They also, I would add, point up the universal Asian-ness of the fallen globe, as suggested by the Eastward drift of Eber and his descendants, in Eliot’s account, or that of the Hebrew Tartars in Brerewood’s. As Eliot and Brerewood make clear, just as the Jews are everywhere, so too is the East, even, or especially, on “thWest side of America.” (Brerewood, 96–97). If the entire globe is, in effect, both Oriental and Judaic, a Christianizing move to the West cannot be made in geographical terms. Rather, as Eliot’s missionary work with the Algonquians implies, Christian access to the truly New World of the West must be gained spiritually, through conversion, or, in Miltonic terms, by a conscious, self-willed act of individual resistance to Oriental degeneracy, which the ancient Hebrews, in Milton’s view, failed to make – hence, his equation of Asians and Jews as equally inclinable to slavery. By staging such an individual act of resistance, England could renew Israel’s lost distinction as separate from all other nations. The discovery of the American Indians thus confirms the Hebraic character and, by extension, the Asian nature of the entire globe. However, as we have seen, the very same perceived unity of all peoples as descended from the ancient Israelites was taken as a joyful sign of the imminent arrival of the millennium and its sweeping transformations. The conversion of the Jews was to follow upon the reunion of the scattered Israelites, announcing the advent of the Apocalypse, as Katz, Christopher Hill, and other scholars have documented.53 “There wants, methinks but the Conversion of . . . the Jews, for the accomplishing of the Kingdom of Christ,” writes Abraham Cowley in 1656.54 Katz notes that “the belief that the end of the world was imminent, and that the [calling of] the Jews [was] destined to play a major role in this final drama, was wide-spread in England during this period.”55 This belief helped to build up support for Jewish readmission and toleration. As Shoulson points out, “With very few exceptions, seventeenth-century Englishmen and women who called for the readmission and religious 52

53

54

John Eliot, The Christian Commonwealth: Or, The Civil Policy of the Rising Kingdom of Jesus Christ. Written Before the Interruption of the Government (London, 1659). Holstun, A Rational Millennium, p. 113. I am greatly indebted to Holstun’s adept analysis of Eliot’s interest in Jewish matters in A Rational Millennium, Chapter 3. Katz discusses Eliot in Philo-Semitism and The Readmission of the Jews to England, 150–51. See Katz, Philo-Semitism, Chapter 3 and Christopher Hill, “‘Till the Conversion of the Jews,” in Religion and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), pp. 269–300. 55 Katz, Philo-Semitism, pp. 88–89. Abraham Cowley, Poems (London, 1656), sig. B2v.

“The people of Asia and with them the Jews”

169

toleration believed that this change in attitude and behavior was the most effective means of achieving their conversion.”56 The eschatological importance of “the calling of the Jews” also made the work of converting the Indians all the more pressing. As Holstun observes, “these millennial speculations energized the New England missionaries [such as John Eliot] and their supporters.”57 Unlike his friend Roger Williams, Milton appears to have no interest in New England missionary work among the Indians. As Achinstein notes, “Milton did not treat the topic of native American peoples in any extended way in his writing; in fact, he seems hardly to have mentioned them.”58 Milton is also silent on the question of Jewish readmission, although he does explicitly refer to the calling of the Jews, in Observations Upon the Articles of Peace, De doctrina, and in Paradise Regained. In Observations, Milton writes: “And yet while we detest Judaism, we know our selves commanded by St. Paul, Rom.11 to respect the Jews, and by all means to endeavor thir conversion” (CPW, 3:326). This brief comment, written in 1649, in the heady moment of heightened millennial expectations, echoes the sentiments of those advocates of Jewish readmission as a way to achieve Jewish conversion (and erasure), and hence to hasten the imminent Apocalypse. However, Milton’s energetic if ambiguous commitment to Jewish conversion “by all means” (by force as well as by toleration and readmission?) was not long lasting. If in 1649, Milton energetically supports Jewish conversion, he, in his two other explicit allusions to the topic, does not treat the “calling of the Jews” with the same kind of enthusiasm. As Shoulson observes, in De Doctrina, he lists the “calling of the Jews” as but one among many other portents of the Parousia: “Some authorities think that a further portent will herald this event, namely, the calling of the entire nation not only of the Jews but also of the Israelites.” Milton’s most complex allusion to “the calling of the Jews” appears at the end of Book 3 of Paradise Regained, where Jesus refuses Satan’s offer of David’s throne and scornfully dissociates himself from his Hebrew “brethren,” so-called by Satan, “as thou call’st them” (3.404). Jesus admires the Hebrews who “in the land of captivity / Humbled themselves, or penitent besought / The God of thir forefathers,” although he observes that even they “died / Impenitent” (3.420–24). Nevertheless, he has nothing but contempt for “those captive Tribes, themselves were they / Who wrought their own captivity” (3.414–15). As in The Tenure, Milton in Paradise Regained 56 58

Shoulson, Milton and the Rabbis, p. 30. Achinstein, “Imperial Dialectics,” p. 70.

57

Holstun, A Rational Millennium, p. 112.

170

rachel t rubowitz

underscores the slavishness and idolatry that allies the Israelite tribes with their Asian neighbors, negating Israel’s sacred status as different from all other nations. Jesus maintains that the Israelites are “distinguishable scarce / From Gentiles but by Circumcision vain, / And God with Idols in their worship joined.” “Should I,” retorts Jesus, “of these the liberty regard, / Who freed, as to their ancient Patrimony, / Unhumbl’d, unrepentant, unreform’d, / Headlong would follow, and to their Gods perhaps / Of Bethel and of Dan?” (3.424–31). Jesus answers his own rhetorical question with a resounding, “No.” “Let them serve / Thir enemies, who serve Idols with God” (3.431–32), he proclaims. It is at this juncture that Jesus alludes to “the calling of the Jews” as a vague future possibility, that God “at length, time to himself best known,” “May” (or may not) yet effect: “Yet he . . . / Rememb’ring Abraham, by some wond’rous call / May bring them back repentant and sincere” (3.433–35). Folding Israel into Asia, Jesus resists the temptation “to reign as / David’s true heir” (3.405), just as he will, in Book 4, resist the Oriental allure of the empires of Parthia, Greece, and Rome. The Israelites are not exempt from but rather fully implicated in Asia’s imperial degeneration. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Milton does not see Jewish regeneration as central to Jesus’ mission or directly relevant to the Christian future. Rather “the calling of the Jews” is an issue that God may or may not address in “his due time and providence.” Whereas such friends and associates as Samuel Hartlib, Moses Wall, John Dury, among others, who, in the 1640s and 1650s, agitated for Jewish toleration as a means of converting the Jews, Milton, like the Jesus of Paradise Regained, sees Jewish conversion as a divine rather than a worldly matter, best left to God’s jurisdiction rather than to man-made laws or civil policy, such as the Readmission Act. However, if Milton has little interest in converting the Jews, he is, by contrast, deeply invested in converting the English people, the “true Jews.”59 For Milton, the ancient Israelites voluntarily gave up their chosen status when they gave into their native slavishness in choosing a king, thereby spawning the ethnic kinship between modern-day Jews and Asians and inaugurating Israel’s Oriental self-erasure, its insertion in Asia’s self-erasing history as a “perpetual cycle of imperial rise and fall,” to recall Archer’s point. By contrast, England, the new Israel, by resisting its own conjoint fallen Hebrew-Asian inclinations toward slavery, could answer “the calling of the Jews,” even if the Jews could not, and, 59

On the Church’s view of its members as “true Jews,” see Yeshayahu Leibowitz, cited in Rosenblatt, Torah and Law, p. 62. Leibowitz observes that “The Church could be reconciled to the continued existence of the Jewish people only to the extent that this existence was severed from the proper existence of mankind, that of the Christian world, whose members as the ‘true Jews.’”

“The people of Asia and with them the Jews”

171

in this way, prepare the fallen world for its western course toward the Apocalypse. To answer the call, England must win its freedom not only from its Sinophilic and Eastern-inclining kings but also from the ungodly Oriental despotism that, for Milton, (mis)governs every site of human experience, from the inner recesses of the mind, the private marriage bed, the domestic hearth, to the public stage. By performing this comprehensive and thoroughgoing act of resistance, England would simultaneously renew Israel’s chosen separateness, firmly plant itself in the West, and usher in the millennium. Before the Fall, Paradise formed the capital seat of the prelapsarian Earth. After the Fall, England’s reformed “garden-state,” as Andrew Marvell famously terms it, represents the single bright spot in an otherwise dark but perversely alluring postlapsarian world, “all places else / Inhospitable appear and desolate,” as Adam’s hill-top vista of the fallen world reveals (PL, 11.306). In his early tracts, Milton places England at the vanguard of reformation: in Of Reformation, the nation is poised to become the center of the postdynastic Christian world order that at the Apocalypse would redeem the world from the imperial decadence and native slavishness of the East, which, as noted, extended from Israel to America in the imaginary geography of Milton and his contemporaries. In Paradise Lost, however, as McLeod observes, Milton’s “mapping out of history from its origins and ascribing sovereignty to the elect” is based on “a recognizable colonial world with England and the heroic, rational individual at its center.”60 With its global scope and powerful allure, the vast Judeo-Oriental periphery presents a formidable threat to the tiny elect English center. Only the specially chosen, heroic few, the new and true Israelites, are fit to resist the powerful, totalizing pull of the Judaic East – those possessing the strength of a Samson. Samson, I contend, represents the “sincere and repentant” or true Hebrew, who, unlike his fellow Israelites, is chosen by God to answer the call by performing precisely the individual but comprehensive act of strong resistance to ungodly despotism that would deliver Israel / England from both Philistine bondage and its own inner servitude. Through this heroic feat, Samson fulfills his prophesied role as Israel’s “great Deliverer” (l.280) and secures his own and Israel’s redemption, anticipating the conversion of the Jews, which ushers in the Apocalypse. Many of the issues noted earlier – Israel’s “love [of] Bondage,” or slavish, Oriental inclinations, the all-encompassing nature of ungodly, Oriental slavery, from the marriage bed to the public stage, the apocalyptic implications of Samson’s 60

McLeod, “The ‘Lordly Eye,’” p. 58.

172

rachel t rubowitz

violent razing of Dagon’s temple and self-obliteration, and so forth – are all present in Samson. Although it is impossible to do justice to a work as complex and as highly contested as is Samson Agonistes in the short space that remains, I would nevertheless like to note, by way of bringing my argument to conclusion, some of the very striking ways in which Samson dramatizes Milton’s, and his culture’s, politically freighted perceptions of “the people of Asia and with them the Jews.”61 More than any other Miltonic text, Samson offers insight into how Milton turns his conflation of Hebrews/Jews and Asians to both literary and ideological use. By conflating the Philistines with the Hebrews, or the “uncircumcis’d” with the “circumcis’d,” Samson obliterates the scriptural Israel’s special distinction as separate from all nations. Yet Milton’s tragedy also inwardly translates the biblical Israel’s mark of distinction to Samson as Israel’s savior.62 By resisting the natural conjugal and filial ties that bind him to Dalila and Manoa and by proving that the Law can be best fulfilled by righteous acts of transgression, Samson subjectively recreates the sacred space of difference that the biblical Israel once occupied, but which it voluntarily gave up when it gave in to the natural inclination to slavery that makes Hebrews into Asians – and all fallen peoples into Judeo-Orientals.63 Acting on “my own accord” (1643), Samson breaks away from all that naturally and historically precedes him, including the ties that bind him to Israel and the Law. Rather than slide further and further into Oriental bondage and degeneration, Samson is poised to cut an alternative path to

61

62

63

For the last two decades, scholars have debated whether or not Milton redeems Samson in Samson Agonistes or presents the hero as an example not to follow. See Joseph A. Wittreich’s groundbreaking volume, Interpreting Samson Agonistes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), as well as his recent study, Shifting Contexts: Reinterpreting Samson Agonistes (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2002). In her essay in this volume, Elizabeth Sauer comments on the importance of the biblical trope of the circumcision of the heart in Quaker and other dissenting seventeenth-century discourse. She argues that for Milton election “is reserved . . . for those who have become heart-circumcised Christians (i.e. Gal. 5.6), or in the language of seventeenth-century dissenters to whose thinking Milton subscribes, it is bestowed on those who have become “Jews inward.” As I have argued elsewhere, in “‘I was his nursling once’: Nation, Lactation, and the Hebraic in Samson Agonistes,” Milton and Gender, ed. Catherine Gimelli Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), Milton’s erasure of the difference between the circumcised Hebrews and uncircumcised Philistines is informed by his Pauline paradigm (especially Galatians 2:26) of reformed subjectivity. For Milton, the new Christian self transcends and nullifies all ethnic, gender, class, and other embodied or outward signs of particularized identity. See also Robinson in this volume, who argues that early modern views of circumcision depend “on a Pauline discourse of faith as inward, secret, and spiritual, an orientation of the mind and the soul that render superfluous any particular set of outward, worldly or bodily practices.”

“The people of Asia and with them the Jews”

173

the godly future of the emancipated Christian West, thereby fulfilling his role as Israel/England’s great deliverer.no citation Time and again, in Samson Agonistes, Milton emphasizes the likeness between the Philistines and Hebrews, despite the enduring hostilities between the two peoples. Whereas the sanctity of Israel resides in its difference from all other nations, Israel, despite (or because of ) its dedication to the Law resembles its idolatrous Philistine overlords more than it differs from them. The Chorus observes that, despite Samson’s “just” efforts to “provoke / The Philistine, the Country’s Enemy” (237–9), Israel remains under ungodly Philistine rule; to which Samson responds by faulting not only “Israel ’s Governors, and Heads of Tribes” (242) but also the Hebrew nation as a whole, for loving “Bondage more than Liberty” (270). Samson narrates how he “willingly on some conditions came / Into [Judah’s] hands” (258–9), but “the men of Judah” (256), preferring “Bondage with ease” to “strenuous Liberty” (271), joined forces with the Philistines, and “gladly yield[ed] [him] / To the uncircumcis’d a welcom prey” (260–61). When she betrays her spouse, Dalila replicates “the men of Judah[‘s]” (256) betrayal of Samson, their divinely appointed champion, underscoring once again the cunning resemblances between the Hebrews and their Philistine enemies. Having cajoled Samson into revealing the secret of his strength, Dalila, like the “men of Judah” (256) gladly yields her Hebrew husband to the Philistine rulers, as a “welcom prey.” Moreover, just as Dalila resembles the “men of Judah” (256) through her betrayal of Samson, she also parallels Manoa when, seeking Samson’s forgiveness, she offers to intercede with the Philistine overlords, “not doubting / Thir favourable ear” (920–1) to release him to the custody of her private home, “where my redoubl’d love and care / With nursing diligence, to me glad office / May ever tend about thee to old age” (923–4). Dalila’s lines echo Manoa’s earlier report to Samson: “I already have made way / To some Philistian Lords, with whom to treat / About thy ransom” (482–4). Toward the end of the play, Manoa poignantly expresses his willingness to give up his “whole inheritance” and “To live the poorest in my Tribe” rather than see his son “in that calamitous prison left” (1474–80). Just as Dalila echoes Manoa, so the Chorus echoes Dalila’s proffer of “nursing diligence” when praising Manoa for his paternal nurture. Manoa, they state, “car’st how to nurse thy Son” (1488). In addition, just as Dalila describes her private nursing of Samson as “to me glad office,” so Manoa also happily looks forward to caring for Samson at home: “It shall be my delight to tend his eyes, / And view him sitting in the house” (1490–1).

174

rachel t rubowitz

It is true that the play establishes the difference between the Hebrews and Philistines by repeatedly invoking the binary of “uncircumcis’d” and “circumcis’d,” “foreskinn’d” and “unforeskinn’d,” and by contrasting the Hebrews’ dedication to the Law with the idolatry and lawlessness of the Philistines. However, at the same time, the multiple parallels between Dalila, Manoa, and “the men of Judah” (256) and suggestive echoes heard in the Chorus’, Dalila’s, and Manoa’s lines undercut this presumption of difference. Of special relevance is that the issues of slavery and bondage form the common thread among these Hebrew-Philistine parallels and echoes. The “men of Judah” (256) demonstrate that, like their idolatrous Philistine overlords, they “love Bondage more than Liberty,” when they betray God’s champion. Not dissimilarly, Dalila’s and Manoa’s proffers of love and nurture, however genuine or not they might be, both embed a seductive promise of “Bondage with ease” (271). Dalila, in particular, makes bondage appear alluring and inexorable, and, for this reason, Samson’s divorce from Dalila represents a pivotal event in the poem. “Dalila’s visit,” as Guibbory observes,” is the turning point for Samson.” In divorcing Dalila, Samson proclaims his freedom and asserts his independence not only from his Philistine wife but also from his fellow Hebrews who, unlike Samson, do not possess sufficient strength to master their Oriental inclinations toward slavery. As Guibbory observes, “Samson’s iconoclasm is closely bound up with his divorce from Dalila, which is its necessary precondition and symbol.” In rejecting Dalila, “Samson embodies the proper stance against idolatry.”64 Pointing Guibbory’s insightful observations in a slightly different direction, I would add that, in rejecting Dalila, Samson also “embodies the proper stance” against both the East and his own innate, Asian proclivity toward slavery. As Mary Nyquist demonstrates, Milton’s Orientalist conception of Asia finds especially clear expression in Dalila.65 An ensnaring, but “stately Ship / Of Tarsus” (714–5), Dalila is associated with Tarshish, a symbol of pride in Psalm 48, and the city on the River Cydnus where Cleopatra meets Antony. Suggestive of “the inborn disrespect for lawful, ‘civilized’ relations, as Nyquist observes, Dalila as a “stately Ship,” like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra in her barge, epitomizes the decadence of Oriental government, in which (Roman, republican) discipline, or “tackle trim” (718), is covered over by the exotic, amberscented perfume of Oriental (Philistine, Stuart) degeneracy and effeminate slackness. Dalila’s “Ship” is “Courted by all the winds that hold them 64 65

Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Hebert to Milton, pp. 221, 223. Mary Nyquist, “‘Profuse, proud Cleopatra’: ‘Barbarism’ and Female Rule in Early Modern English Republicanism,” Women’s Studies 24 (1994): esp. pp. 113–17.

“The people of Asia and with them the Jews”

175

play, / An amber scent of odorous perfume / Her harbinger” (719–21, emphasis supplied). Beyond its local application to the restored Stuart court, however, the “odorous perfume” in the line above also draws Dalila’s “stately Ship” (714) into the global arena by bringing into range the “spicy Drugs” to which Milton, time and again alludes in Paradise Lost, as when, for example, Satan in “solitary flight” from Hell is compared to the fleet of merchant ships sailing westward across the Indian Ocean: As when far off at Sea a Fleet descri’d Hangs in the Clouds, by Equinoctial Winds Close sailing from Bengala, or the Isles Of Ternate and Tidore, whence Merchants bring Their spicy Drugs; they on the Trading Flood Through the wide Ethiopian to the Cape Ply stemming nightly toward the Pole. So seem’d Far off the flying Fiend. (2.636–43)

Balachandra Rajan aptly observes that the “spicy Drugs” alluded to in this passage function as “a synecdoche for the entire range of conspicuous consumption” that Milton condemns.66 Milton’s figuration of Dalila as a trading ship places her among the merchant fleet with which Satan is associated by epic simile, inviting us to read her proffer of love and “nursing diligence” (925) in terms of the conspicuous consumption for which “spicy Drugs” is a synecdoche. As the “stately Ship / From Tarsus” (714– 15), Dalila associates Philistine misrule with the Orientalized decadence of an effeminate Stuart court, but the same metaphor also represents her as an adventuring merchant ship “with all her bravery on” from Tarsus, the port on the Guadalquivir in Spain, headed East, bound for “th’isles / Of Javan or Gadire” (715–6), the Greek islands, and the Phoenician city of (modern) Cadiz.67 In addition to its anti-Spanish, anti-Stuart nuances, this metaphor prompts us to insert the gifts Dalila bears, “her nursing diligence” (924) and “enchanted cup” (934) within the framework of Oriental trade and its luxurious currency of spice, tea, exotic medicinals, and other Asian imports to England. In rejecting Dalila, Samson orients himself away from the East, demonstrating the incredible strength of will required to resist the 66 67

Rajan, “Banyan Trees and Fig Leaves,” p. 217. See Elizabeth Sauer’s insightful reading of Dalila in “Religious Toleration and Imperial Intolerance,” Milton and the Imperial Vision, pp. 224–6. For Sauer, Samson Agonistes demonstrates the ways in which “toleration and exclusion operate side by side in the intersecting identities of the Hebrews and the Philistines,” p. 214.

176

rachel t rubowitz

intoxicating tastes and scents of Oriental decadence and bondage, naturalized by England’s importation and conspicuous consumption of the East’s “spicy Drugs.” Through Dalila and her exotic “odorous perfumes,” Milton demonstrates the overwhelming allure and pleasure of the enthralling East, and why it is that Israel can “love Bondage more than Liberty” (270). Upon rejecting Dalila’s Oriental garden of ensnaring delights, her “fair enchanted cup” (934), and “warbling charms” (934), and “sorceries” (937), Samson would seem to reassert his Nazarite discipline and Hebraic separateness. However, Samson faces another, even subtler threat to his independence, self-possession, and freedom from Manoa, who, not unlike Dalila, wants to redeem his son through “nursing diligence” (925). However different Dalila’s eroticized offer of “leisure and domestic ease” (916) might be from Manoa’s self-sacrificing gift of fatherly nurturance, it is impossible to ignore that Manoa’s efforts to care for Samson are paired with Dalila’s Oriental proffers of love and nurture. Just as Dalila’s spicy and perfumed domestic attentions would render Samson “in most things like a child,” compelling him to “live uxorious to [her] will / In perfect thraldom” (940, 945–6), Manoa’s sincere desire to “nurse [his] son” would preserve Samson comfortably but abjectly in a premature state of old age, to which his blindness had delivered him. As the Chorus says of Manoa: “Sons are wont to nurse their Parents in old age / Thou in old age car’st how to nurse thy son / Made older than thy age through eyesight lost” (1487–9). Although they underscore Manoa’s generosity and tenderness, these lines also underscore that, rather than free Samson from Philistine bondage and supply him with agency, Manoa’s desire to care for his son would instead recreate his Oriental enslavement to Dalila in a kinder, gentler Hebraic form, even more difficult to overcome. To free himself and Israel, Samson must reject both Dalila and Manoa, both Philistine and Hebrew. The dual nature of this rejection is crucial. In rejecting Dalila and Manoa, Samson manifests the submerged identity between the seemingly opposed Philistine and Hebrew nations: both are equally “inclinable to slavery”(CPW, 3.203). No longer either Dalila’s husband or Manoa’s son, but a wholly independent agent, a man truly separate to God, Samson in an act of tremendous strength, resists the powerful pull of the Judeo-Orient, both from within and without. The space of freedom and holy separateness once occupied by the Israel of Hebrew scripture is projected westward onto the new Israel of the Anglo-Christian future, but it is also the space that Samson subjectively regains when, unlike Adam in Book 9 of Paradise Lost, he breaks “The Bond of Nature” (PL, 9. 956) – the natural conjugal and filial ties that bind him to Dalila and Manoa and the

“The people of Asia and with them the Jews”

177

natural inclination to slavery that unites “the people of Asia and with them the Jews.” Acting on “his own accord” (1643), Samson breaks away from all that naturally and historically precedes him – a space-clearing that he repeats when he destroys both the Philistine rulers and himself as a Hebrew by tearing down the walls of Dagon’s temple. No longer subject to Oriental decline or imprisoned in the outmoded dispensation of the Law, Samson’s sacrificial death spiritually emancipates him – he becomes a “repentant and sincere” Hebrew – and points the way West toward Israel/England’s future regeneration, fulfilling his prophesied role as his nation’s great liberator. More than any other text perhaps, Samson Agonistes most clearly reflects the close conceptual proximity between Milton’s Orientalism and his embrace and rejection of Hebraic law and scripture, Hebraic/Judaic precedent, and the Jews as a chosen but suffering and displaced people. Rosenblatt and Shoulson have shown us how closely Milton identified with his Hebraic/Judaic sources – and how sharply he distanced himself from them as well. As Samson demonstrates, the emergent discourse of Oriental decadence provided Milton with a highly effective new means for managing his acutely ambivalent embrace/repudiation of the Hebraic and the Judaic. In Samson and elsewhere in Milton’s writings, we can begin to locate the stream that, as Said observes, nourishes both Europe’s formulations of the East and its perception of the Jews. Milton’s writings provide an important arena in which to explore the crosscurrents between “the Other within” Europe and “the Other without” Europe, and to bring Jewish studies and postcolonial studies into meaningful dialogue not only with one another but with the study of Milton as well.

c h a pter 9

Returning to Egypt: “The Jew,” “the Turk,” and the English Republic Benedict S. Robinson

In his commentary on Galatians 4.8–9, Luther describes Judaism, Islam, Catholicism, and even radical Protestant sectarianism as outwardly different but in fact identical ceremonial religions, differing from each other only in things indifferent: “There is a difference of the persons, the places, rites, religions, workes and worshippings: notwithstanding there is all one and the same reason, the same heart, opinion, and cogitation in them all.”1 Luther insists that these faiths differ only in the particular ceremonial laws they think themselves enjoined to fulfill, but not in the essential doctrine of salvation by the fulfillment of the law. “The Jewes imagine this to be ye will of God, if they worship him according to the rule of Moses lawe,” he writes; “the Turke if he obserue his Alcoran: the Monke if he kepe his order and performe his vowes. But all these are deceaued.”2 All are idolaters, making an idol of the law of God – a more sophisticated idolatry than the worship of golden calves, and all the more subtly dangerous for that reason. Yet it is idolatry nevertheless, “a very dreame, a bewytching and illusion of the heart” (P6r). A version of the Pauline discourse of inward faith here renders superfluous all outward, worldly, or bodily practices: it nullifies all distinctions between different ritualisms, in the service of the one difference that matters, the difference of works from faith, circumcusion from the “circumcision of the heart.”3 1

2 3

A Commentarie of M. Doctor Martin Lvther vpon the Epistle of S. Paul to the Galatians (London, 1575), 2A4v; this translation was taken from the Latin edition of 1538: see Philip S. Watson, ed., A Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians (London: Clarke and Co., 1953), p. 2. Watson’s text is excerpted in John Dillenberger, Martin Luther: Selections from his Writings (New York: Anchor, 1962), though most of the passages I discuss are not included by Dillenberger. Jaroslav Pelikan, on the other hand, offers a new translation from the Latin edition of 1535: see Luther’s Works, ed. Pelikan, vols. 26 and 27 (St. Louis: Concordia, 1963 and 1964). 2A6r. See also 2A4r: “it is all one, whether he be called a Monke, a Turke, a Jew or an Anabaptist.” On the circumcision of the heart, see Romans 2.28–9, and James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), chapter 4. On the Pauline discourse of difference, see

178

Returning to Egypt

179

Luther aims his arrows at several targets. He writes that he has undertaken this commentary because of the danger that “the devil may take away from us the pure doctrine of faith and may substitute for it the doctrines of works,” that is, the danger that convinced reformers will relapse into error, a danger he identifies both with the Catholics and with the “false brethren” among the evangelicals.4 This threat of backsliding provides the impetus behind his commentary on Paul’s letter to the backsliding Galatians, who in Paul’s view were in danger of relapsing into error by believing themselves enjoined to follow Jewish observances. Over the course of his reading of Galatians, Luther makes it clear that to seek holiness through the Catholic sacraments, through a radical Protestant repudiation of those sacraments, or through a Muslim devotion, is the same as to seek holiness in Jewish rituals: it is all the same “illusion of the heart” that finds value in what is valueless, that fetishizes outward acts and reposes its trust in them rather than in the pure promise of the heart.5 In Luther’s reading of Galatians, “the Jew” – as stubborn adherent to a law superseded by the advent of Christ – becomes the model for Catholic, radical Protestant, and Islamic forms of false belief: the “Jew” models all forms of religious recalcitrance, all fleshly literalisms, all refusals of the pure doctrine of faith.6 Such a reading of Paul’s texts offered powerful strategies for making sense of the chaotic religious topography of the early modern period, a world of ongoing religious wars, of increasing contact with a powerful and culturally diverse Islam, of new contacts with the Jews in the east and a new Jewish migration to the west,

4

5

6

Julia Reinhard Lupton, “Othello Circumcised: Shakespeare and the Pauline Discourse of Nations,” Representations 57 (Winter 1997): 73–89. There is a large recent literature on Paul; see especially Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); and Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). Luther, trans. Pelikan, p. 3. For a reading of the 1531 lectures on Galatians in the context of Luther’s ongoing conflicts with the “false brethren,” see Mark U. Edwards, Luther and the False Brethren (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), chapter 5. This article in some ways expands my earlier thinking about the ways in which anti-Catholic and anti-Islamic discourses inflect each other, in English Protestant texts. See my book, Islam and Early Modern English Literature: The Politics of Romance from Spenser to Milton (New York: Palgrave, 2007), especially chapter 1. Stories of the life of Muhammad emphasize the complicity of Jew and Turk: “The Iewes,” as Samuel Purchas wrote, “were forward Mint-masters in this new-coyned Religion of Mahomet,” Purchas his Pilgrimage (London, 1626), 2A1r. An extension of the same strategy enables Purchas to assimilate Catholicism to both Judaism and Islam, as another version of the same misplaced trust in outward rituals. “Their Religion,” Purchas writes of the Muslims, “is almost altogether in rites, like the other” – that is, like Catholicism (2E3r–2F1r).

180

benedict s. robinson

of multiplying sects and often violent debate over the nature of Christian identity.7 A re-reading of Paul promised to render this chaos intelligible by reducing it to the fundamental difference of the world and God, body and spirit. All other distinctions could be overridden in the service of this one difference. In this essay I will suggest that we need to be more attentive to the strange conflations produced by Luther’s text. If we are, we will learn something important not only about the ways in which Protestant identity was fashioned through the confrontation with multiple forms of religious and racial difference, but also about how those forms of difference were themselves defined as complexly overlapping, supplementary, mutually constitutive – not necessarily or even usually, as in Luther, by way of an absolute and relentless conflation, but certainly through sometimes surprising intimacies. I will be primarily concerned to show how connections between discourses about the Jews and discourses about the Turks shape John Milton’s religious politics, but I want to begin by using Luther’s commentary to raise the general problem of different discourses of difference. Luther’s text is unsettling, insofar as it at once pushes the issue of religious difference to the foreground and at the same time strangely nullifies it in ways that must be troubling to any modern reader: on the one hand, we want to read Luther for the dynamics of difference that consolidate his conception of the true faith; but on the other hand, what we find when we do so is a vision that seems to annihilate all actual differences, throwing us into a pure binary of belief and unbelief – translated now as “faith” and “works” – that seems wholly abstract, removed from the world. Luther’s text also threatens the autonomy of what are, now, two separate lines of inquiry, two separate academic conversations: we have books and articles about encounters with “the Turks,” and books and articles about anti- and philo-Semitism, but very few attempts to make connections between the two. Even the terms I am using reveal how these two conversations speak past each other. As James Shapiro has argued, in the early modern period “Jewishness” could signal either a religious or a racial difference; but to speak of “the Turks” in early modern English, on the other hand, was to speak of religion in the language of race, elevating to a universal term for the vast, multi-ethnic Islamic world the name of a single ethnic minority in that world, and thereby in some sense refusing to engage Islam 7

See Jonathan I. Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism 1550–1750 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), esp. chaps. 2–5, and David S Katz, The Jews in the History of England 1485–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), esp. chaps. 1–4.

Returning to Egypt

181

as a religion at all.8 The incongruity between “Jew” and “Turk” signals the lack of fit between these two critical conversations, even as it hints at the role of the Jew and the Turk in shaping early modern thought about categories of religion and race and the intersections and disjunctions between them.9 Such work, conducted in isolation, artificially partitions the terrain of early modern discourse: early modern texts themselves, while they obsessively imagine the otherness of “Jews” and “Turks,” only sometimes insist on the differences between them. The point is not to suggest that all “others” are substitutable, or that we can attribute no distinctive cultural work to the specific English encounters with Jews and Turks. Far from it. However, neither are these discourses of difference fixed or stable in their distinctive cultural content. Rather, they exist in complexly shifting relations to each other and to various, contested versions of Englishness. In particular, I will suggest that the paired discourses of Jewish and Turkish difference enabled early modern authors to think about the intersections of theology, politics, and race. In theological controversy, “Turkishness” was frequently modeled on Jewishness, collapsed into it as part of one and the same supposed error, itself explained by reference to Paul; but when forms of religious identity were linked to modes of being in the world and especially to forms of political life, then Turkishness begins to exert a counterpressure: the otherness of the modern Turks, theorized in terms of Aristotle’s Politics and identified with a kind of political regime supposedly grounded in racial characteristics – so-called “oriental despotism” – was folded into readings of scriptural texts about Israel’s relations with the eastern kingdoms surrounding it. The result was a complex way of thinking about religion, politics, and racial identity. In particular, I want to demonstrate that, by tracing the shifting relations between the figure of the Jew and the figure of the Turk in Milton’s thought, we can register the deep, internal connection between his politics and the emergence within the ambit of that political thought of a certain conception of race. That is, I hope to demonstrate that a concept of race emerges in 8

9

Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, esp. chapter 6. The early modern word “Turk” could mean either “Turk” or “Muslim”; in this, it shared space with a series of other, related and yet distinct words in the early modern and late medieval lexicon, including perhaps most importantly “Saracen” and “Moor.” On this, see my book, Islam and Early Modern English Literature, introduction. When I was revising this essay, Milind Wakankar called my attention to Gil Anidjar’s The Jew, The Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). Anidjar cogently argues that the separation of these discourses signals an effort to separate questions of religious difference from questions of politics, and, further, that the failure to connect these discourses of difference enables an occlusion of any possible relationship between religion and politics.

182

benedict s. robinson

Milton as a kind of supplement to, and a direct consequence of, his political thinking, and not as an externally imposed limit to that thinking, a mere acknowledgment – like the one often made in discussions of Areopagitica, when the question of Catholicism is raised – that “well, of course that doesn’t apply to some people.” As I trace the evolving discourses of Jewishness and Turkishness in Milton’s works, I hope to show how a certain notion of biologically inflected disposition, of a biologically inherited constraint on the possibility of freedom, develops as the other face of Milton’s republican commitments, especially after the Restoration. Finally – and this is in some ways the most crucial point, now – these discourses of Jewish and Islamic difference inflect each other, even as they enable the articulation of particular and deeply interested versions of what it means to be English or European. The problem of “the Turk” needs to be linked to the problem of “the Jew,” if we want to understand how Europe constituted itself at the intersection of theological, racial, and political discourses, and, in the process, shaped these paired, mutually exclusive but reciprocally dependent categories, Jewishness and Turkishness, imagined sometimes as deeply antagonistic, sometimes as secretly identical, but always in close relation each to the other. The Jew and the Turk need each other: or, more accurately, Europe has at once needed and disavowed both of them, in their various supposed relations and differences. To approach these questions in Milton, I will first return to Luther. Luther’s inclusion of the Turks within a Pauline framework signals a shift or a break between theology and politics, in his text. Luther presents liberty of conscience as fundamental to true faith: a religion that understands salvation to be based on faith must circumscribe a region of inward liberty in which faith can operate. However, he is careful to insist that this liberty is inward, without reference to the world of political relations: “This is that libertie whereby Christe hath made vs free: not from an earthly bondage, or from the Babylonicall captiuitie, or from the tyrannie of ye Turkes, but from Gods euerlasting wrath.”10 The “hypocrites & false brethren” among the Protestants have dared to politicize Paul, but in so doing they have shown themselves to be Turks, Jews, and papists in another form (P5r). For Luther, the gospel has freed us from the tyranny of the law; political tyranny, on the other hand, remains untouched, because the absoluteness of Luther’s conception of faith removes faith from politics entirely. All that 10

2E4r, commentary on Galatians 5.1. Pelikan’s translation removes the Babylonians and Turks: “This is the freedom with which Christ has set us free, not from some human slavery or tyrannical authority but from the eternal wrath of God.”

Returning to Egypt

183

is required of us is patience and heroic martyrdom in the face of Babylonian and Turkish tyranny. Luther’s words suggest not one but two contrasting relationships between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam: in the first case, Christianity confronts both Judaism and Islam as forms of false faith; in the second, the captive Jew under the Babylonian empire, like the captive Christian under the Turkish empire, models a passive Protestant resistance to the tyranny of Babylonians, Turks, and Popes alike. On the one hand, the modern, postBiblical Jew is a figure of spiritual blindness, persisting in adherence to a lapsed covenant just like the Turks or Catholics, figures who also think to find God by fulfilling meaningless laws. However, on the other hand, the references to Babylonian captivity and “the tyranny of the Turks” introduce another meaning as well, in which the Jew who maintains faith in God even while living under a Babylonian captivity is invoked as a model for the Protestant faithful living under the rule of the Popes, and for Christians living under the Ottoman sultans.11 In this way, Luther’s discourse about the Jews produces an insight not only into true religion but also into how the faithful should conduct themselves in the world, showing the difference between freedom in the world and the inward freedom of the believer: we do not believe like the Jews, Luther seems to say, but we imitate the Jews insofar as they model for us a collective – and divinely ordained – suffering at the hands of the Babylonians, the Catholics, and especially the Turks, those utterly alien figures in whom outward political tyranny is mirrored by an inwardly tyrannical religion that has no space for faith but consists only in ritual actions. The identity of Turk and Jew clarifies the meaning of faith; the antagonism between them marks the separation between the realm of the spirit and the realm of politics. In part, the doubleness in Luther’s text embodies a doubleness at the heart of Christian discourse about the Jews. This doubleness is perhaps nowhere more strikingly visible than in the seventeenth century, the “philo-Semitic” moment, as various historians have described it. A reader turning from the title to the contents of David Katz’s Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England is likely to experience the sense of a waning promise, as the emergence of “a positive, philo-Semitic view of contemporary Jewry” 11

The model becomes explicit in Luther’s Babylonian Captivity of the Church: under the Catholics, forbidden to use communion of both kinds, “we should bear ourselves just as if we were prisoners among the Turks and not allowed to use either kind.” The point of the paragraph is to disavow political resistance – “I am not arguing that force be used to seize both kinds” – but it also collapses Catholic rule with Turkish rule, and shadows both in the captivity of the Jews under the Babylonians. See Dillenberger, ed., p. 264.

184

benedict s. robinson

(7) in the seventeenth century recedes into the stalemate and uncertainty of the December 1655 Whitehall Conference.12 The motives of readmission seem to have had all too little to do with a new “tolerance” – in any case a word of only limited generosity – but have variously been construed as economic or millenarian: either (in Edgar Samuel’s interpretation) the Jews would be readmitted to invigorate the English economy, or (according to Katz) they would be readmitted in preparation for their imminent conversion.13 If there was an English philo-Semitism in the mid-seventeenth century, in other words, it was a philo-Semitism that was not “for” the Jews. Thus Jason Rosenblatt’s detailed study of the Hebraism of Paradise Lost finally acknowledges how that poem turns its back on the Hebrew texts with which it has traveled for so long to end with a typological vision in which Jewish history can only have meaning as a prefiguration of Christian history, and Jeffrey Shoulson’s evocative exploration of the parallels between rabbinic Judaism and the post-Restoration Milton, although it enables a richly deepened sense of the paradoxes of typology, nevertheless recognizes as the bottom line of philo-Semitism the story of replacement.14 Philo-Semitism, while it draws energy from Hebrew scripture and traditions of Jewish interpretation of scripture, and while it acknowledges in the ancient Israelites a model for the Christian faithful, paradoxically but necessarily enacts a fundamental displacement: to imagine England as the new Israel and the English godly as the new Israelites requires the expulsion – even if only rhetorical or figurative – of actual Jews.15 The Christian community at once imitates and negates the Jew, who functions for the Christian world simultaneously as model and cautionary tale. The appropriation of the legacy of the ancient Israelites leaves the modern Jews figuratively homeless, deprived of their relationship to the divine.16 12

13

14

15

16

David S. Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England 1603–1656 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982). As Jason P. Rosenblatt has succinctly noted, “The content of Katz’s study . . . subverts the optimism of the title.” See Torah and Law in Paradise Lost (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 80. On Milton and the readmission of the Jews, see especially Achsah Guibbory, “England, Israel, and the Jews in Milton’s Prose, 1639–1660,” in this volume. Jeffrey S. Shoulson, Milton and the Rabbis: Hebraism, Hellenism, and Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), esp. pp. 221–39. As Shoulson asks, “Can one be said to accord Jews and Judaism a new respect, when the motivation for this new respect is ultimately the elimination of Jews and Judaism as such?” (31). See Shoulson, Milton and the Rabbis, chapter 1. The paradox of English philo-Semitism opens directly onto the problem of the worldly embodiment of the true church and of the new community of the faithful: will the Christian elect manifest themselves in an earthly community, as the ancient Israelites did? Or will this new community remain “invisible,” bearing only a metaphorical relationship to the Israelites – and thus, as Shoulson has argued, suggesting the model not of the ancient but the modern, diasporic Jews? On this, see especially Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought 1600–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Returning to Egypt

185

This distinction between the ancient Israelites and the modern Jews underlies Luther’s text on Galatians; but Luther expresses that difference not simply as the story of a lapsed or violated covenant, but through a relationship to modern Turkishness. This same relationship pervades some of the central texts of English republicanism, in the philo-Semitic moment of the 1650s – although in the service of a politics antithetical to Luther’s. What I hope to show is how John Milton and James Harrington read key scriptural narratives as suggesting a complex set of relationships between the ancient Israelites, the modern Jews, and an “oriental” world encompassing at once ancient Egypt and the contemporary Ottoman Empire. I will look first at Milton’s reading of Exodus; then I will argue that he folds into this narrative a wider world of differences. In Book 12 of Paradise Lost, Milton describes how the Israelites travel toward Canaan “not the readiest way,” Lest ent’ring on the Canaanites alarm’d War terrify them inexpert, and fear Return them back to Egypt, choosing rather Inglorious life with servitude. (12.216–21)

Milton describes the covenant God establishes with the Israelites as at once religious and political: God’s laws are “part such as appertain / To civil Justice, part religious Rites / Of sacrifice” (12.230–2), and the establishment of these laws accompanies a political reorganization, in which the Jews “found / Thir government, and thir great Senate choose / Through the twelve Tribes, to rule by Laws ordain’d” (12.224–6). The desire to return to Egypt – in Paradise Lost articulated only as a possibility – signals a retreat from both faith and republican freedom, as – in marked distinction to Luther – Milton reads Exodus as a narrative at once about religion and politics, about a religion and a politics that are indissolubly linked to one another. This description of the flight from Egypt – as various critics have recognized – revises a passage from The Ready and Easy Way, the concluding paragraphs of which associate the imminent restoration of the monarchy with the backsliding Israelites, who according to Numbers 11:5 desired to return to the prosperous and easy life of servitude in Egypt: If . . . after all this light among us, the same reason shall pass current to put our necks again under kingship, as was made use of by the Jews to returne back to Egypt and to the worship of thir idol queen, because they falsly imagind that they then livd in more plenty and prosperitie, our condition is not sound but rotten, both in religion and all civil prudence; and will bring us soon . . . to those calamities which

186

benedict s. robinson

attend always and unavoidably on luxurie, all national judgments under forein or domestic slaverie.17

Republicanism is not only a political virtue but also a divine command: to fail in this is to become like those Israelites who desire to return to Egyptian slavery, or who abandon their God to worship eastern idols.18 A “free Commonwealth,” Milton writes, is not only “the most agreeable to all due libertie and proportiond equalitie,” but is also “planely commended, or rather enjoind by our Saviour himself, to all Christians, not without remarkable disallowance, and the brand of gentilism upon kingship” (CPW 7.424). Monarchy is a “heathenish government” (7.424), and Milton goes on to call it a form of idolatry, as he had done in Eikonoklastes, writing that the people “are prone ofttimes not to a religious onely, but to a civil kinde of Idolatry in idolizing thir Kings” (CPW 3.343). To embrace monarchy, Milton emphasizes in his reading of 1 Samuel 8, is to abandon God. It is also to adulterate one’s own racial identity: political change, in Milton’s imagination, is figured through an act of what might be called racial mimesis. Asserting that republicanism was enjoined by God, Milton cites God’s known denouncement against the gentilizing Israelites; who though they were governd in a Commonwealth of God’s own ordaining, he only thir king, they his peculiar people, yet affecting rather to resemble heathen, . . . clamourd for a king. (CPW 7.449–50)

To reject the “Commonwealth of God’s own ordaining” is not to reject republicanism but God, or rather, to reject God by rejecting republicanism. Above all, it is a temptation, a false desire, a seduction: God’s people are seduced into “gentilizing,” into mimicking the eastern peoples around them. “Affecting” an eastern imitation, tempted by the promise of ease and luxury and by the outward ostentation of an earthly king, the Israelites are seduced into an oriental mimicry. Paradise Lost expresses this dynamic of temptation through a wideranging orientalist poetics. The east pervades the figurative language of Paradise Lost through a series of allusions that link the narrative of Milton’s poem to scripture, to romance, and to history, and thereby evoke a monolithic, transhistorical “orient,” the constant site of empire and slavery, and 17

18

Quoted from the second edition of The Ready and Easy Way, as printed in the Complete Prose Works of John Milton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 7.462. Subsequent citations to this edition will be abbreviated “CPW.” In the prose text, anything but a direct route to freedom signifies dallying with servitude and idolatry; in the poem, the circuitous path has its own merits. We can see in this difference the changed circumstances of post-Restoration England. See David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 306.

Returning to Egypt

187

a constant source of temptation for the godly. When Satan and his architect Mammon remodel hell in Book 1, the building they construct – both palace and temple – seems to have been built according to the baroque aesthetics of the new St. Peter’s in Rome; but, at the same time, it outdoes both ancient and medieval eastern empires in its glory: Not Babylon, Nor great Alcairo such magnificence Equall’d in all thir glories, to inshrine Belus or Serapis thir Gods, or seat Thir Kings, when Egypt with Assyria strove In wealth and luxury.19

Imperial wealth and magnificence, associated in this world with a sublime but perverse orient, have their origins in Satan’s effort to mimic, and to usurp, the glory of heaven. Earthly monarchy is itself a usurpation on the true claims of the one and only king, and so all monarchy is “oriental,” that is, magnificent and luxurious, but empty, falsely glorifying a king who lives only “to pageant himself up and down in progress among the perpetual bowings and cringings of an abject people, on either side deifying and adoring him” (CPW 7.426). The beauty of kingship is an outward show that imposes on those who see it a fascination that is itself debased, tyrannical, and idolatrous, encouraging the abjection rather than the virtue of a people, demanding self-abasement, not freedom.20 At the beginning of Book 2, Satan sits inside Pandemonium like an eastern king: High on a Throne of Royal State, which far Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind, Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand Show’rs on her Kings Barbaric Pearl and Gold. (2.1–4) 19

20

Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 1.713–22. For the suggestion that Pandemonium resembles the Vatican, see Marjorie Nicholson, John Milton (New York: Noonday, 1963), pp. 196–8. Compare Spenser’s orientalization of papal regalia in his description of Duessa, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (New York: Longman, 1977), 1.2.13. In his commentary on Isaiah, Luther famously wrote that “Rome is the true Babylon.” Quoted from James Nohrnberg, The Analogy of The Faerie Queene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 238. A number of critics have intuited the importance of an aesthetics of the sublime in English republican authorship: Annabel Patterson, Reading between the Lines (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), chap. 7, “The Good Old Cause”; David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 5 and esp. pp. 137–41; and Stephen Zwicker, Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649–1689 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 17–36. The link between sublimity and politics, it seems to me, could still be further theorized – and the question of an “oriental sublime” would need to be a part of this thinking.

188

benedict s. robinson

The ancient scriptural site of Babylon gives way to an east associated at once with the fabulous orient of romance and with the more prosaic but still lucrative east of the East India Company, the “Ind” from which it derived its name, and the “Ormus” that the East India merchants helped the Persians wrest from Portuguese control when Milton was fourteen.21 Satan’s dominion over the fallen angels is still more firmly linked this modern orient in Book 10, when the devils come out of Pandemonium to greet his successful return from earth: “Forth rush’d in haste the great consulting Peers, / Rais’d from thir dark Divan” (10.456–7). Milton conflates multiple orients in his vision of Satan’s rule in hell. When Satan summons the fallen angels from the lake of fire in Book 1, we see them ascend into the air like locusts flying “o’er the Realm of impious Pharaoh,” then descend at a signal from “th’ uplifted Spear / Of thir great Sultan” (1.342; 347–8): the cluster of explicit and implicit images – Egyptian locusts, Pharaoh’s armies, modern Islamic sultans – hints at historical correspondences that seem to deny any significance to the passage of time. The east, we are apparently to think, has been this way throughout human history.22 All of these orients are, at the end of Book 1, folded into the timeless oriental elsewhere of romance in a gesture that reveals this east as eternally the same, a static representation tied not to history but to the seductive and exotic sites of a literary fiction: the gates of Pandemonium open onto a “spacious Hall” like a cover’d field, where Champions bold Wont ride in arm’d, and at the Soldan’s chair Defi’d the best of Paynim chivalry. (1.761–5)

The generic affiliation of Milton’s hell with romance orientalism is signaled even in the orthography: “Paynim” was an archaism in the seventeenth century familiar only in romance, and “Soldan” offers a medieval or perhaps Spenserian form of the word that Milton had given its modern spelling earlier in the same Book. The whole narrative of seduction into orientalism is thus revealed as a pointed rescripting of the story told and retold in Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser, of the crusading knight bewitched by a beautiful eastern sorceress.23 21

22

23

On English ambitions for a trade route into central Asia and the 1620 assault on “Ormus,” see Samuel C. Chew, The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England During the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1937), 214–9, 312–3, and 323–4. See, famously, Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), and Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World-History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). See chapter 5 of my book Islam and Early Modern English Literature, “Pleasure and Terror.”

Returning to Egypt

189

The east of Paradise Lost is an imperial scene, a scene of power, wealth, magnificence, and luxury, a scene of misplaced human ambition and false human heroism. This east is finally altogether literary and metaphorical: a set of orientalist allusions drawn from an impossibly wide array of moments and sources are grafted onto a story in which there are no Saracens or Egyptians, a story in which Islam and Egypt do not yet exist, and in which the only real eastern site is that most equivocal place, Eden, the site of both paradise and the Fall.24 This orient is, finally, one of Milton’s most conspicuous emblems for temptation and for the seductions of worldly glory, the very sign of the ruin wreaked by human choices. These allusions at once depend on a set of conventional assumptions about the east and subject that east to a metaphorical displacement: the true east, it turns out, is a place we can all create within and around ourselves, just as the transhistorical east is itself a ruined product of sin and error. In this, the orientalist imagery of Paradise Lost renders poetically concrete, even sensuous, a process Milton had theorized in a passage in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. In that passage, Milton has been arguing that an English king has no more right to rule England tyrannically than a king of Spain has to rule England at all – thereby tapping into the rich vein of English hatred for Catholic Spain and using it to gild his defense of the right of tyrannicide. “The title and just right of raigning or deposing,” he writes, is “visible onely in the people, and depending meerly upon justice and demerit” (CPW 3.211). The argument justifying tyrannicide at this point comes to depend on the concept of “the people”: within a constituted community, the right of making and unmaking kings belongs to the community as a whole, and the community is imagined as a discreet thing unto itself. But what constitutes that community? For a moment, Milton teeters on the edge of a truly global vision: “Who knows not that there is a mutual bond of amity and brother-hood between man and man all over the World, neither is it the English Sea that can sever us from that duty and relation?” But he quickly qualifies this global vision, subordinating this “bond” to the closer and stronger bonds between “fellow-subjects, neighbours, and friends” (3.214). Community, in other words, seems to mean local or national community, fantasized here for a moment – despite years of civil war – as a collectivity of good neighbors. 24

Milton is quite specific about the location of Eden: see 3.208–14, describing the geography of Eden, and 3.268–85, where he negates other possible locations of paradise, all of them “wide remote / From this Assyrian Garden.” Given this geography, the description of Eden’s brooks “Rolling on Orient Pearl and sands of Gold” (3.238) surely suggests the kind of eastern pleasure garden described in so many medieval and early modern travel narratives.

190

benedict s. robinson

Milton almost immediately qualifies this vision, making the principle of national community itself dependent on another form of community whose principle is political, and whose logic inverts that of national identity: Nor is it distance of place that makes enmitie, but enmity that makes distance. He therfore that keeps peace with me, neer or remote, of whatsoever Nation, is to mee as farr as all civil and human offices an Englishman and a neighbour: but if an Englishman forgetting all Laws, human, civil and religious, offend against life and liberty, . . . though born in the same womb, he is no better then a Turk, a Sarasin, a Heathen. (CPW 3.215)

In effect, the opposition of “English” and “other” is recapitulated within England itself: the true Turks and heathens are those who have fought for tyranny and idolatry, violating all laws “human, civil and religious.” With these there is no neighborhood, and to fight them is – like deposing and executing a tyrant – not only a right but a duty. “This is Gospel,” Milton writes, “and this was ever Law among equals.” In this passage, something like a global cosmopolitan vision, which sees no distinctions of place or difference, finds expression through a metaphorical displacement of the terms of national, racial, and religious identities. Milton moralizes the difference of Turkishness from Englishness: “Turkishness” means nothing, if it doesn’t mean embracing tyranny and idolatry, fighting for a king who married a Catholic and made Laud archbishop of Canterbury. The otherness of the Turks is evacuated of independent meaning. First reduced to mere “distance,” it is then revealed to be the carrier of meanings that are in fact political, if properly understood. By the end of the passage, “Turkishness” means nothing more or less than “royalism.” Milton was not the first English poet to metaphorize “the east” in this way: sonnets 90 and 104 of Fulke Greville’s Caelica, published in 1633 along with Greville’s two Ottoman dramas, perform a very similar re-reading of Englishness and Turkishness.25 Like Milton, Greville uses the putative tyranny of the Turks to suggest a critique of monarchy closer to home, turning “Turkishness” into a metaphor for tyranny. Yet, for both Greville and Milton, this metaphorical process depends on accepting the more literal claim that tyranny was natural to the Turks. Milton’s reading of the story of Samuel in The Ready and Easy Way suggests that identity is shaped first and foremost by conscious political choices; but by using the language of human difference to express this, Milton suggests that such identities are also in some sense constitutive and constraining, that we are not perfectly 25

On Greville, see chapter 3 of Islam and Early Modern English Literature.

Returning to Egypt

191

free to choose but inherit in our being tendencies or proclivities that shape us profoundly. In the paragraph just preceding his interpretation of Samuel, Milton references the possibility that “monarchie of it self may be convenient to som nations” (CPW 7.449). He does not specify what nations might find monarchy “convenient,” though the phrase “som nations” may echo the text of Samuel: there, in the Authorized Version, the Jews demand to have a king “like all the nations.”26 At this point, Milton has just referred to Aristotle’s Politics, a book that was recognized throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a primary source for arguments that sought to naturalize particular forms of political life to particular peoples and regions. Aristotle wrote in the Politics that “there is one rule exercised over subjects who are by nature free, another over subjects who are by nature slaves.” This seemingly abstract distinction encodes a geographical and racial difference: the “barbarians,” Aristotle asserts, “are a community of slaves.”27 Government is naturalized into people by the operation of climate, so that those who live in cold Europe are “full of spirit, but wanting in intelligence,” and therefore are free, but have “no political organization, and are incapable of ruling over others,” whereas the Asians are “intelligent and inventive” but “wanting in spirit” and “always in a state of subjection and slavery.” Only the Greeks are both “high-spirited and intelligent,” and therefore “the best-governed of any nation.”28 Renaissance political theorists repeatedly rewrote Aristotle, always shifting the location of the temperate zone, but always agreeing that race or geography – or some combination of race and geography – marked out some people as fit for nothing but tyranny. Montesquieu would call this “oriental despotism”; the Renaissance called it “Turkish tyranny.” The unspecific “som nations” of The Ready and Easy Way, in other words, are apparently also to be identified with Aristotle’s Asians, and, through Aristotle, with the modern east.29 26

27

28 29

In what follows, I will not attempt to distinguish between racial and national identity, largely because Milton’s own texts seem to me to slide between the two terms. The thing that interests me here, and seems to inhere in Milton’s conception of either race or nation, is the notion of forms of identity that are fixed and given at birth. In the early modern lexicon, notoriously, “race” and “nation” exist in close relationship to each other: the OED gives as one early modern definition of the word race, “a tribe, nation, or people, regarded as of common stock,” and as one early modern definition of the word nation, “a group of people having a single ethnic, tribal, or religious affiliation, but without a separate or politically independent territory.” The Politics, ed. Stephen Everson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), Book 1 section 7 and section 2. The Politics, Book 7, section 7. Implicitly, Milton collapses all monarchies into Aristotle’s much narrower category of “despotism”: for Milton, there is ultimately no real difference between forms of kingship, since all represent an embrace of servitude and a turning away from the republican political order instituted by God.

192

benedict s. robinson

Milton’s use of Aristotle in The Ready and Easy Way suggests an essentializing vision, in which the choice of political freedom is conditioned by an aptitude for freedom that is itself grounded in racial or national character.30 A similar doubleness is apparent in The Tenure as well. In that text, Milton takes up the categories of proximity and difference and subjects them to a critical analysis that reveals human identity to be radically malleable, dependent on the quality of our will rather than on the place of our birth or on the nations or races to which we belong. This radically voluntarist understanding of human identity in turn impacts Milton’s understanding of the history of the Israelites, and the difference he perceives between the people who wandered with Moses in the desert and the modern diasporic Jews. Elsewhere in The Tenure, Milton asserts a double relationship between Jewishness and the orient. On the one hand, like Paradise Lost, The Tenure opposes the gentilism of monarchy to the republican liberty of the Mosaic law. To this end, Milton insists that he will prove the right of deposing a tyrant “out of the midst of choicest and most authentic learning, . . . Mosaical, Christian, Orthodoxal, and . . . Presbyterial” (CPW 3.198). The close proximity of those first terms, “Mosaical” and “Christian,” emphasizes that the Jews, so long as they remained within the covenant offered them by God, represent the model of true and divine polity for Christians as well, and further suggests that even for Christians the Mosaic law continues to have real power and truth.31 A few paragraphs later, Milton even aligns the secular insights of “Aristotle and the best of Political writers” with the understanding revealed to the Jewish prophets and embodied in the primitive Christian church: “the Titles of Sov’ran Lord, natural Lord, and the like,” Milton argues, “are either arrogancies, or flatteries, not admitted by Emperours and Kings of best note, and dislikt by the Church both of Jews, Isai. xxvi.13 and ancient Christians.”32 Classical political theory and the beliefs and practices of both the Jews and the first Christians all seem to corroborate each other, establishing the freedom proper to Jews and Christians and even enlightened pagans, against the alien figure of “a Turk, a Sarasin, a Heathen.” “Our Saviour himself,” Milton writes in 30

31

32

In Aristotle, arguably, this aptitude is not necessarily essentialized, or is essentialized into climatic regions rather than human races. However, Milton seems in this passage to forget about climate in favor of racial or national identity. On race and climate theory, see Mary FloydWilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). This sense of the continuing value of the Mosaic law – “the perfect, the pure, the righteous law of God” (CPW 2.284) – lies at the heart of Milton’s argument in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. CPW 3.202. In the King James version, Isaiah 26:13 reads, “O Lord our God, other lords besides thee have had dominion over us; but by thee only will we make mention of thy name.”

Returning to Egypt

193

words he would later echo in The Ready and Easy Way, “how much he favourd Tyrants, and how much intended they should be found or honourd among Christians, declares his mind not obscurely; accounting thir absolute autority no better then Gentilism” (CPW 3.216–7). However, the same passage that begins by aligning the churches of the Jews and of the ancient Christians ends by drawing a radical difference between the ancient Israelites and the modern Jews, suggesting that the freedom to shape their own identity offered to the former has been denied to the latter. The titles of “sovereign lord, natural lord” are arrogance or flattery, and yet there are those to whom such arrogance and flattery come naturally: “generally the people of Asia, and with them the Jews also, especially since the time they chose a King against the advice and counsel of God, are noted by wise Authors much inclinable to slavery” (CPW 3.202–203). This is Milton’s most explicit endorsement of the Aristotelian theory of a natural predisposition to slavery, and it draws into its purview not only “the people of Asia” but the Jews also, “especially since the time they chose a king.” The fall into tyranny is a fall into orientalism. The Jews made themselves just like the other peoples of the east, accepting an Egyptian and Babylonian bondage and marking out their descendants as children of slavery just like the Turks and Saracens.33 But what does that “much inclinable” mean? How constraining is this inclination to slavery that seems to be inherited now, either biologically or culturally? Who has freedom? And, once lost, how is it to be reclaimed? The orientalization of the modern Jews looks like the place where Milton seeks to reconcile an ethics of freedom with some concept of racial or national identity, predicating the emergence of that identity on a past moment of choice. “Since the time they chose a king,” the Jews seem, according to Milton, to have condemned themselves to a malign repetition, falling again and again into both tyranny and idolatry; this inclination, this proclivity, seems to transmit itself through the generations, as though in the blood, obliterating the former differences between the Jews and the “nations” and leaving both Jews and “orientals” vulnerable to their own errant desires. The story of Samuel and the orientalization of the Jews attempts to solve the apparent contradiction between the literal and metaphorical readings of “Egypt” and “Israel” by imagining an etiology of becoming that is also the story of how racial or national identity emerges from, supplements, and complicates political choice. 33

On this point, see especially Rachel Trubowitz, “‘The people of Asia and with them the Jews’: Israel, Asia, and England in Milton’s Writings,” in this volume.

194

benedict s. robinson

Virtually the same emphasis is given to the story of Samuel by James Harrington in his Oceana, a text that asserts an absolute theoretical difference of English from Turkish forms of monarchy, and then tries to show that Tudor England made itself Turkish, without recognizing the consequences. For Harrington, the Turks are the prime example of absolute monarchy, what he calls “monarchy by arms,” a state in which the monarch’s control is maintained by the military, as opposed to a “monarchy by nobility,” in which an aristocratic class mediates between people and king. England had been a monarchy by nobility until Henry VIII broke the power of the barons. At that point, the social basis of English politics was irrevocably altered. However, the political form of the state had yet to adapt to its changed economic and social circumstances. In Harrington’s view, the English at this point had only two options: if they persisted in monarchy, it could only be in a monarchy of arms like the Turkish state; otherwise, they must refuse monarchy altogether and adopt a republican government, without king or barons. For Harrington, the choice was simple: “If riches and freedom be the end of government, and these men propose nothing but slavery, beggary, and Turkism, what need more words?”34 For Harrington, the Ottoman Empire summed up and epitomized a political form that he saw repeated across the eastern world throughout history: The Babylonian, Persian and (for aught appears to the contrary) the Chinese policy is summed up and far excelled by that at this day of Turkey; and in opening this I have opened them all, so far from neglect that I everywhere give the Turk his due, whose policy I assert to be the best in this kind, though not of the best kind.35

Monarchy is itself eastern, and the difference between monarchy and commonwealth recapitulates the difference between the chosen people of Israel and the eastern empires that persecuted them. Israel, Harrington argued, was originally both theocracy and republic.36 The Israelites were thus 34

35 36

The Prerogative of Popular Government: A Political Discourse in Two Books (London, 1658), quoted from The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 400. See also Valerius and Publicola, Or the true Form of a Popular Commonwealth (London, 1659), quoted from Pocock’s edition, p. 785: “Publicola. . . . [T]here are royalists who derive the original right of monarchy from the consent of the people. Valerius. There are so. Publicola. And these hold the king to be nothing else but the representor of the people and their power. Valerius. As the Turk. Publicola. Yes, as the Turk. Valerius. The people’s power at that rate comes to the peoples slavery.” The Prerogative of Popular Government, quoted from The Political Works, ed. Pocock, p. 400. For the description of “the fabric of the commonwealth of Israel,” see Oceana, ed. Pocock, pp. 174–7; see also Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 398: “a republic is a theocracy; it is that realm of which Christ is King.”

Returning to Egypt

195

exempt from the condemnation applied to all other eastern peoples: “The people of the eastern parts, except the Israelites . . . , having been such as scarce ever knew any other condition than that of slavery.”37 It was to the Israelites that Harrington traced the origin of republicanism, the “ancient prudence, first discovered unto mankind by God himself in the fabric of the commonwealth of Israel, and afterward picked out of his footsteps in nature and unanimously followed by the Greeks and Romans.”38 Nevertheless, the Israelites subsequently demanded a king, and this weakness condemned them to an “oriental” tyranny. Whereas the other nations of the east were fit for nothing but monarchy, the Israelites were chosen for republican rule and yet forsook it; as Harrington writes, though of the Isrealites God saith: They have set up kings, and not by me; they have made princes, and I knew it not, yet to the small countries adjoining unto the Assyrian empire he saith: Now have I given all these lands into the hand of the king of Babylon my servant . . . Serve the king of Babylon, and live.39

The act of accepting a king Harrington understands as deposing God, who himself was the “civil magistrate” and “legislator” of the Israelite commonwealth. This is how Harrington interprets the words of 1 Samuel 8:8, when God comforts Samuel by telling him, “They have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them.”40 To acknowledge a king is to forsake the one true king.41 For the English to choose to return to a monarchy is to repeat the error of the Israelites, and willfully to choose an Egyptian or a Turkish subjection: To follow the pedantical pride of Moses, Lycurgus, Solon, Romulus, were with us downright folly; but to follow the humble and learned Mahomet or Ottoman, in whose only model the perfection of the Babylonian, Persian, Egyptian policy is consummated, is ancient prudence! Exquisite politicians! Egregious divines for the leading of a people into Egypt or Babylon!42

In their choice of a king, the Israelites fell into orientalism, and since that time the Jews – as Milton wrote – have been “much inclinable to 37 38 39

40 41

42

Oceana, ed. Pocock, pp. 189–90. See also Pocock’s introduction, p. 49. Oceana, ed. Pocock, p. 161. The Art of Lawgiving in Three Books (London, 1659), quoted from The Political Works, ed. Pocock, p. 605; Harrington cites Jeremiah 27:6 and 27:17. Oceana, ed. Pocock, p. 175. As J. G. A. Pocock writes, “having presented the republic as the order of nature, it was a logical step for [Harrington] to present it as the kingdom of grace as well.” See The Political Works of James Harrington, intro., p. 73. The Prerogative of Popular Government, ed. Pocock, p. 400.

196

benedict s. robinson

slavery” (CPW 3.202–203). Like Luther, Milton and Harrington pursue the possibility of a genuinely Protestant politics by thinking through the relationships of those two prime others of Christianity, the Jews and the Turks; but they do so in the service of a politics antithetical to Luther’s insistence on separating worldly from spiritual purposes. The political imagination of English republicans like Milton and Harrington was profoundly shaped by these intertwined discourses of Jewish and Turkish difference, discourses that, in their intersections, focus our attention on the problem of identity, for a politics of choice. I want to conclude by suggesting that Milton’s interpretation of Samuel can be read as a theory of racial and national identity. It is never absolutely clear whether the inclination to slavery Milton attributes to the modern Jews should be thought of as racial or cultural or national, and we should certainly expect seventeenth-century texts to manifest something that looks from a contemporary perspective like imprecision or confusion around the concept of race: we are dealing, as any number of critics have pointed out, with a cultural moment before the science of genetics, and before a fully biological conception of race.43 Nevertheless, I do want to suggest that, in the material I’ve been discussing, Milton is trying to think about the nature of racial identity and its place within his political project, especially after the Restoration. “Race,” I want to suggest, becomes Milton’s concept for all of the subjective forces that resist republican freedom, that disqualify or prevent the subject from pursuing freedom. This concept of “race” even becomes Milton’s explanation for the failure of the republican project in England. Milton’s reading of Samuel is an etiology of race that attempts to position it in relation to an ideal of the political self freely molded: the Jews could have been free, but they chose not to be, and that choice has left them alienated from themselves. After Samuel, Jewish selfhood can no longer fashion itself according to its own desires, but inherits an inclination to slavery. The story tells of a moment of choice, but more crucially of the world after that choice, a world in which the individual is subject to forms of identity that destroy or compromise agency, forms of identity that – in one way or another – are inherited: identity is no longer malleable but given externally, and given in 43

Etienne Balibar has described what he calls a contemporary “neo-racism,” which evades the name of racism by naturalizing cultural difference as nineteenth-century racism naturalized biological difference. This culturalist racism turns out to be at once very new and very old: “in many respects,” Balibar writes, “the whole current of differentialist racism may be considered, from a formal point of view, as a generalized anti-Semitism.” “This consideration is especially important,” he adds, “for the interpretation of contemporary Arabophobia.” See “Is There a ‘Neo-Racism?’” in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 1991), 17–28.

Returning to Egypt

197

such a way that the continuing struggle for freedom must first be a struggle against ourselves. This point seems to me to provide a way of thinking about the Restoration Milton, about Milton in an England that has made the choice to return to Egypt. That England is precisely in the situation of the modern Jews, as Milton understood it: like the Jews, the English could have enjoyed a special relationship to the divine, could have established a godly republic on Earth and could thereby have put themselves as a nation directly under the rule of “he who is our only King, the Root of David ” (CPW 3.256). However, also like the Jews, the English have instead chosen earthly kings and “a captain back for Egypt” (CPW 7.463), leaving them now “fitted and prepar’d for new slaverie” (CPW 7.422). At this point in their history, can the English still reclaim the moment of choice? If an internal unreadiness has led them to embrace outward servitude, and if servitude in turn degrades and ruins that inward self, is there any way out of this vicious circle? One place to look, in thinking about Milton’s ambivalent relationship to Englishness, would certainly be his History of Britain, which David Loewenstein calls “a failed national saga,” and Gary Hamilton calls “another version of losing paradise”: “when God hath decreed servitude on a sinful Nation, fitted by their own vices for no condition but servile, all Estates of Government are alike unable to avoid it,” as Milton writes in the History – about the Saxons, not the English, and yet the parallel to The Ready and Easy Way and the rhetoric of the return to Egypt is striking.44 This alienation from an England following the path of the straying Jews can surely also provide a perspective on Milton’s decision to relate primarily the stories of Hebrew scripture in Books 11 and 12 of Paradise Lost. These books, as Jeffrey Shoulson has argued, demand an ambivalent identification with both the ancient Israelites and the modern Jews: the English are asked to identify with the Jews precisely insofar as the Jews are imagined to have fallen away from the divine.45 In this, the books stage a conflict between a freedom whose sphere seems to be purely internal, purely spiritual – the “paradise 44

45

CPW 5/1.259. This national judgment is explicitly imagined as repeating the events leading up to the Saxon victories over the Britons. Compare pp. 130–1 and p. 183. See Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 86; also, p. 82: The History “begins, like an epic story, with the myth of Brutus and then charts a tragic pattern of failed deliverances in national history, with numerous references made to the troubles of Milton’s own age.” Gary D. Hamilton, “The History of Britain and its Restoration Audience,” in David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner, eds., Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 244. Shoulson writes that “Milton’s conception of English election begins with ambivalence and concludes, in later years, with dismissal” (33). Even in the passage about “a Turk, a Sarasin, a Heathen” in The Tenure, Milton shows himself suspicious of the rhetoric of national identity.

198

benedict s. robinson

within” – and an outward compulsion manifested in the erring community: “All shall turn degenerate, all deprav’d, / Justice and Temperance, Truth and Faith forgot; / One Man except” (11.806–809). In this way Milton – through Michael – offers a typological reading of the story of Noah, and reminds us of the similar resistance of Abdiel, who alone remains faithful among the revolted multitudes of the fallen angels. We can no longer hope that the community will do well: instead, we must prepare ourselves to resist that community, to remain separate from it. But this requires in turn a separation from ourselves, or from that part of the self that is decisively shaped by its insertion into forms of cultural, national, and racial community. After the Restoration, the English cannot embrace their Englishness, because it is only the history and the sign of failure. They must be alienated from that identity, in order to remake themselves as God’s children. The logic of the Hebrew stories, as Michael shows them to Adam, is above all one of separation: the sheep will be separated from the goats, the people of the plains from the people of the hills. Within the narrative, this separation is first presented to us in racial terms. The faithful and the faithless have mingled, producing a mixed race, “the product / Of those ill-mated Marriages” in which “good with bad were matcht” (11.683–5); the process of history will be to segregate them so that final judgment can be rendered. We are subsequently invited to spiritualize this story, to move “from shadowy Types to Truth, from Flesh to Spirit” (12.303) and recognize that the problem here is only figuratively a problem of bad marriages and mixed blood. But the apparent contradiction between the two is clearly valuable to Milton. The purification of the political and religious community must be based on the inward purification of the individual believer; and yet the corruption of the community, the failure of the project of reform and revolution, necessarily compromises that individual believer, leaving him or her “much inclinable” to slavery, like the orientalized, diasporic Jews. What blocks our capacity to pursue political freedom, it seems, is an aversion to freedom inherited in our bodies and our world, and associated especially with the Turks and the modern Jews, as the putative examples of those whose own desires have supposedly left them unfit for freedom. The concept of race, in other words, emerges as a theoretical determination of the concept of freedom, not as an external limitation or circumscription of that concept; this is what I mean by claiming to describe the etiology of race in republicanism. A certain racism is integral to the development of the central concepts of Milton’s political thought, not an external imposition on them, a mere historical datum that we can look through, as though it were not there. If this is an accurate assessment of the racial dynamic

Returning to Egypt

199

in Milton’s thought, it means that a fundamental duplicity about race is structured into English republicanism: a republican politics is founded on racial concepts such as “oriental despotism,” even as republicanism fantasizes itself as the genesis of a sort of deracialized, universal, autonomous self, a subject that looks already very much like the supposedly universal subject of reason. It is a subject that, in the work of Milton and Harrington, is still struggling to free itself from the specter of its others, the Jew and the Turk: what these texts make clear is, first of all, the dependence of republican freedom on its supposed counterexamples or negations, the “Jew” and the “Turk”; and, secondly, the mutual interdependence of “Jew” and “Turk,” in the fantasy life of early modern Europe. An intimate relationship, but also a struggle, between the Jew and the Turk: this is the scene from which European political thought attempts to extricate itself in the early modern period.

Select Bibliography

Achinstein, Sharon. “Imperial Dialectic: Milton and Conquered Peoples.” In Milton and the Imperial Vision, ed. Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999. . “John Foxe and the Jews.” Renaissance Quarterly 54 (2001): 86–120. Adams, Robert. Ikon: John Milton and the Modern Critics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1955. Allington, John. The Grand Conspiracy of the Members against the Minde, of Jewes against their King. London, 1653. Altmann, Alexander. “William Wollaston (1659–1724), English Deist and Rabbinic Scholar.” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 16 (1945–51): 185– 211. An Endeavour after the reconcilement of that long debated and much lamented difference between the godly Presbyterians, and Independents; About Church-government. In a discourse touching the Jews Synagogue. London: John Bellamy, 1647. Archer, John Henry. The Personall Reign of Christ Upon Earth. London: Benjamen Allen, 1642. Archer, John Michael. Old Worlds: Egypt, Asia, India, and Russia in Early Modern Writing. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935. Assmann, Jan. Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Auerbach, Erich. “Figura.” In Scenes from the Drama of European Literature. Trans. Ralph Manheim, 11–76. New York: Meridian Books, 1959. Augustine. The City of God. Trans. Gerald G. Walsh, Demetrius B. Zema, and Grace Monahan, ed. Vernon J. Bourke. New York: Doubleday, 1958. . The City of God. Trans. Henry Bettenson. Ed. David Knowles. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. . On Christian Doctrine. Trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr. New York and Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958. Bacon, Francis. The Advancement of Learning and New Atlantis. Ed. Arthur Johnston. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974. Bainton, Roland H. Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther. New York: AbingdonCokesbury Press, 1950. 201

202

Select Bibliography

Barbour, Hugh. The Quakers in Puritan England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964. Barker, Arthur J. Milton and the Puritan Dilemma. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1942. Barnard, T. C. “Crisis of Identity among Irish Protestants, 1641–1685.” Past and Present 127 (May 1990): 58–77. Barrera, Julio Trebolle. The Jewish Bible and the Christian Bible: An Introduction to the History of the Bible. Trans. Wilfred G. E. Watson. Leiden: Brill Eerdmans, 1998. Berry, L. E. The English Works of Giles Fletcher, the Elder. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964. Bhabha, Homi K. “Introduction: Narrating the Nation.” In Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha. New York: Routledge, 1990. Biberman, Matthew. “‘The Earth is All Before Me’: Wordsworth, Milton, and the Christian Hebraic Roots of English Republicanism.” In Romantic Generations: Essays in Honor of Robert Gleckner, ed. Ghislaine McDayter, Guinn Batten, and Barry Milligan. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2001. 102–28. . “Milton, Marriage, and a Woman’s Right to Divorce,” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 39.1 (Winter 1999): 131–53. . “Milton’s Tephillin.” Milton Quarterly Vol. 31.4 (December 1997): 136– 45. Bloom, Harold. A Map of Misreading. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Boyarin, Daniel. Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. . A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Boyarin, Jonathan. Storm from Paradise: The Politics of Jewish Memory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Brayne, John. The New Earth. London: 1653. Brerwood, Edward. Enquiries Touching the Diversity of Languages and Religions, Through the Chief Parts of the World. London: Samuel Mearne, John Martyn, and Henry Herringman, 1674. Brotton, Jerry and Lisa Jardine. Global Interests: Renaissance Art Between East and West. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. Broughton, Hugh. Daniel his Chaldie visions and his Ebrew. London: William Young, 1596. . A reuelation of the holy Apocalyps. [Middelburg]: [Richard Schilders], 1610. Bruce, F. F. The English Bible: A History of Translations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961. Bruns, Gerald L. “Midrash and Allegory.” In The Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode, 625–46. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987.

Select Bibliography

203

Burgers, Cornelius. A Sermon Preached to the Honourable House of Commons Assembled in Parliament, At their Publique Fast, Novem.17. 1640, 3rd ed., 1641. Burton, Henry. England’s Bondage and Hope of Deliverance a Sermon Preached before the Honourable House of Parliament at St. Margaret’s in Westminster. June 29, 1641. Buxtorf, Johannes the Elder. Biblia Sacra Hebraical Chaldiaca Cum Masora, quae Critica Hebraeorum. . . . Textus Chaldaicus qui Targum dicitut. Basel: Ludovic Konig, 1619. Calamy, Edmund. Gods Free Mercy to England. Presented as a Pretious and Powerfull motive to Humiliation: In a Sermon before the Honourable House of Commons, at their late solemne Fast. Feb. 23. 1641. Calvert, Thomas. The Blessed Jew of Marocco. York: 1648. Campbell, Mary B. The Witness and the Other World: European Travel Writing, 400–1600. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. Capp, B. S. The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study of Seventeenth-Century English Millenarianism. London: Faber and Faber, 1972. Carey, John. “Introduction.” In John Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana in the Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe, vol. 6, 3–116. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973. Carroll, James. Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Cawly, Robert Ralson. Milton and the Literature of Travel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951. Certaine briefe treatises: written by diverse learned men, concerning the ancient and moderne government of the church: wherein both the primitive institution of episcopacie is maintained, and the lawfulnesse of the ordination of the Protestant ministers beyond the seas likewise defended. Oxford, 1641. Chew, Samuel C. The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England During the Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1937. Cheynell, Francis. Sions Memento, and Gods Alarum. In a Sermon at Westminster before the House of Commons on the 31 st of May 1643, the solemne day of their monethy fast. London: 1643. Christianson, Paul. Reformers and Babylon: English Apocalyptic Visions from the Reformation to the Eve of the Civil War. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978. Cohen, Jeremy. Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Conklin, George. Biblical Criticism and Heresy in Milton. New York: King’s Crown Press, 1949. Crowley, Weldon. “Erastianism in the Westminster Assembly.” Journal of Church and State 15 (1973): 49–64. de Man, Paul. “Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion.” In Allegory and Representation, ed. Stephen Greenblatt. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981.

204

Select Bibliography

. “The Rhetoric of Temporality.” In Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed., 187–228. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” In Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Dillenberger, John. Martin Luther: Selections from his Writings. New York: Anchor, 1962. Dobranski, Stephen and John P. Rumrich. “Introduction: Heretical Milton.” In Milton and Heresy, ed. Dobranski and Rumrich, 1–17. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Donne, John. Sermons. Ed. Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter. 10 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953–62. Donoghue, Denis. Words Alone: The Poet T. S. Eliot. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Douglas, Mary. In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of Defilement in the Book of Numbers. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Papers, 1993. Dury, John. A Case of Conscience, Whether It Be Lawful to Admit Jews into a Christian Common-Wealth. London: 1656. Eden, Kathy. Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. Edwards, Mark U. Luther and the False Brethren. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975. Edwards, John. A Complete History or Survey of all the Dispensations and Methods of Religion, 2 vols. Cambridge: Daniel Brown, 1699. Edwards, Thomas. Gangræna, 2nd ed. enlarged. London: Ralph Smith, 1646. Eliot, John. The Christian Commonwealth or, the Civil Policy of the Rising Kingdom of Jesus Christ. London: Livewell Chapman, 1659. Eliot, T. S. “The Metaphysical Poets,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode, 59–67. New York: Farrar, Strauss, 1975. . “Milton.” In Milton Criticism, ed. James Thorpe, 310–32. New York: Collier Books, 1950. . Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1949. Ellmann, Maud. “The Imaginary Jew: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.” In Between “Race” and Culture: Representations of “the Jew” in English and American Literature, ed. Bryan Cheyette, 84–101. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Empson, William. Milton’s God. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Epstein, Louis. Jewish Marriage Contract. Boston: The Century Press, 1927. Fallon, Stephen M. “‘Elect above the rest’: Theology as Self-Representation in Milton,” In Milton and Heresy, ed. John Rumrich and Stephen Dobranski, 93– 116. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. . Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in SeventeenthCentury England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.

Select Bibliography

205

. “The Spur of Self-Concernment: Milton in his Divorce Tracts.” Milton Studies 38 (2000): 220–42. Fell, Margaret. An Evident Demonstration to Gods Elect. London: 1694. . For Manasseth-Ben-Israel: The Call of the Jews out of Babylon. London, 1656, in A Brief Collection of Remarkable Passages and Occurrences Relating to . . . Margaret Fell, but by her second Marriage M. Fox. London: J. Sowle, 1712. . “The Testimony of Margaret Fox Concerning her Late Husband George Fox; Together with a brief Account of some of his Travels, Sufferings and Hardships endured for the Truth’s sake.” A Journal or Historical Account of the Life, Travels, Sufferings, Christian Experiences and Labour of Love in the Work of the Ministry, of . . . George Fox. London: 1694. Ferrers, Edmund. An Abstract of a Commentarie By Dr. Martyn Luther, upon the Galathians. London: Henry Atkinson, 1642. Ferry, Anne Davidson. Milton’s Epic Voice: The Narrator in Paradise Lost. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963. Fine, Lawrence. “Kabbalistic Texts.” In Back to the Sources: Reading the Classic Jewish Texts, 305–59. New York: Summit Books, 1984. Fineman, Joel. “The Structure of Allegorical Desire.” In Allegory and Representation, ed. Stephen Greenblatt. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. Fisch, Harold. “Hebraic Styles and Motifs in Paradise Lost.” In Language and Style in Milton, ed. Ronald D. Emma and John T. Shawcross, 39–64. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1967. Fish, Stanley. Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1989 . Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963. . “Wanting a Supplement: The Question of Interpretation in Milton’s Early Prose.” In Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose, ed. David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner, 41–68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Fisher, Samuel. The Scorned Quakers True and honest account, both why and what he should have spoken . . . before the Protector etc. London, Sept. 17, 1656. Fixler, Michael. Milton and the Kingdoms of God. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Fletcher, Harris Francis. The Intellectual Development of John Milton. Volume II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961. . Milton’s Rabbinic Readings. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1930. . Milton’s Semitic Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1926. . The Use of the Bible in Milton’s Prose. New York: The Gordon Press, 1972. Flusser, David. Judaism and the Origins of Christianity. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1988. Fox, George. An Answer to the Arguments of Jews. London: 1661. Foxe, John and George Townsend. Actes and Monuments. Vol. 1. New York: AMS Press, 1843, 38, 524.

206

Select Bibliography

Freedman, Carl. “How to Do Things with Milton: A Study in the Politics of Literary Criticism.” In Critical Essays on John Milton, ed. Christopher Kendrick, 21–44. New York: G. K. Hall, 1995. Freedman, D. N. et al., editors. The Anchor Bible Dictionary, 6 vols. New York: Doubleday, 1992. Freedman, Jonathan. The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Freinkel, Lisa. Reading Shakespeare’s Will: The Theology of Figure from Augustine to the Sonnets. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Fresch, Cheryl H. “‘As the Rabbines Expound’: Milton, Genesis, and the Rabbis.” Milton Studies, 15 (1981): 59–79. . “The Hebraic Influence Upon the Creation of Eve in Paradise Lost.” Milton Studies 13 (1979): 181–99. Fuller, Samuel. A Pisgah-Sight of Palestine. London: John Williams, 1650. Gager, John G. Reinventing Paul. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Gardiner, Judith Kegan. “Margaret Fell and Feminist Literary History: A ‘Mother in Israel’ Calls to the Jews.” In The Emergence of Quaker Writing, ed. Thomas Corns and David Loewenstein. London: Frank Cass, 1995. Gayton, Edmund. “Uppon Rabbi Manasses ben Izrel.” In Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England 1603–1655, ed. David S. Katz. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition. Intro. Lloyd E. Berry. Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969. Gibbon, Edward. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Ed. David Womersley. London: Penguin, 1994. Giddens, Anthony. The Nation-State and Violence. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Gillespie, George. Notes of the Debates and Proceedings of the Assembly of Divines and Other Commissioners at Westminster February, 1644 to January 1645. Ed. David Meek. Edinburgh: Robert Ogle and Oliver and Boyd, 1846. Glassman, Bernard. Anti-Semitic Stereotypes without Jews: Images of the Jews in England, 1290–1700. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975. Grabbe, Lester L. Wisdom of Solomon. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997. Grafton, Anthony. The Footnote: A Curious History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Greenblatt, Stephen. “Preface” to Allegory and Representation. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1981. . “What is the History of Literature?” Critical Inquiry 23 (1997): 460–81. Gregerson, Linda. The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Grossman, Marshall. Authors to Themselves: Milton and the Revolution of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Grotius, Hugo. De Jure Belli et Pacis: The Rights of War and Peace, Including the Law of Nature and of Nations. Trans. C. C. Campbell. David J. Hill, intro. New York: M. Walter Dunne, Publishers, 1901.

Select Bibliography

207

Guibbory, Achsah. Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Guild, William. Moses Vnuailed. London: John Budge, 1620. Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Halbertal, Moshe and Avishai Margalit. Idolatry. Trans. Naomi Goldblum. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. Hale, John. “England as Israel in Milton’s Writings,” Early Modern Literary Studies: A Journal of Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Literature, 2(2): 54 paragraphs, 1996. Halkett, John. Milton and the Idea of Matrimony. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970. Haller, William. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation. London: Pyramid Books, 1968. Hamilton, Gary D. “The History of Britain and its Restoration Audience.” In Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose, eds. David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Hanford, James Holly. The Milton Handbook. Fourth Edition. New York: Appleton- Century-Crofts, 1946. Harrington, James. The Art of Lawgiving in Three Books. (London, 1659) in The Political Works of James Harrington. Ed. J. G. A. Pocock. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. . The Prerogative of Popular Government: A Political Discourse in Two Books. (London, 1658) in The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. . Valerius and Publicola: or, The true form of a Popular Commonwealth. London: H. Fletcher 1659. Haskin, Dayton. Milton’s Burden of Interpretation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1994. Hastings, Adrian. The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; reprint 1999. Hechter, Michael. Containing Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. . Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British Nation Development, 1536–1966. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. Hegel, G. W. F. Hegel’s Lectures on Philosophy of Religion. Ed. and trans. E. B. Spiers and J. Burdon-Sanderson. London: Routledge, 1974. Helgerson, Richard. Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Heller, Ricki. “Opposite of Wifehood: Eve and Dalila.” Milton Studies 24 (1988): 187–202. Hill, Christopher. The English Bible and the Seventeenth-century Revolution. New York: Penguin Press, 1993. . Milton and the English Revolution. New York: Viking Press, 1977.

208

Select Bibliography

. “Till the Conversion of the Jews.” In Religion and Politics in SeventeenthCentury England. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986. Holstun, James. A Rational Millennium. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. The Holy Bible [KJV]. London: Robert Barker, 1612. The Holy Bible: An Exact Reprint Page for Page of the Authorized Version, Published in the Year 1611 [KJV]. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1833. Huddleston, Lee Eldridge. Origins of the American Indians; European Concepts, 1492–1729. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967. Hume, David. The History of England, Vol. 5. London: Liberty Classics, originally published 1778. Hunter, William. “The Provenance of the Christian Doctrine.” Studies in English Literature 32 (1992): 129–42. Israel, Jonathan I. European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism 1550–1750. Oxford: Clarendon, 1985. Itzkovitz, Daniel. “Passing Like Me.” South Atlantic Quarterly 98:1/2 (Winter/Spring 1999): 35–57. Jaeger, Werner. Paidea: The Ideals of Greek Culture. Trans. Gilbert Highet. 3 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1943–45. Jameson, Frederic, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Johnson, Samuel. “Life of Milton.” In Milton Poetry and Prose with Essays by Johnson, Hazlitt and Macaulay, ed. A. M. D. Hughes. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925. Julius, Anthony. T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Justinian: The Civil Law [Corpus Juris Civilis] Trans. S. P. Scott, 17 volumes. Cincinnati: The Central Trust Company, 1870. Kaplan, Aryeh. Made in Heaven: A Jewish Wedding Guide. Brooklyn, New York: Moznaim Publishing Corp., 1983. Katchen, Aaron L. Christian Hebraists and Dutch Rabbis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. Katz, David S. The Jews in the History of England 1485–1850. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985. . “The Phenomenon of Philo-Semitism.” In Christianity and Judaism: Papers Read at the 1991 Summer Meeting and the 1992 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. Diana Wood, 327–61. London: Blackwell Publishers, 1992. . Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England 1603–1655. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. Katz, Steven T. The Holocaust in Historical Context. Vol. 1. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Kermode, Frank. The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979. Kerrigan, William. “Milton’s Place in Intellectual History.” In The Cambridge Companion to Milton, ed. Dennis Danielson, 261–76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Select Bibliography

209

. The Prophetic Milton. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1974. King James Bible. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House Co., 1978. Kittel, Gerhard. Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. 10 vols. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1951–76. Knell, Paul. Israel and England Paralleled. London, 1648. Knoppers, Laura. “Late Political Prose,” in The Blackwell Companion to Milton, ed. Thomas Corns, 310–25. London: Blackwell, 2001. Kunze, Bonnelyn Young. Margaret Fell and the Rise of Quakerism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Lee, Samuel. Orbis Miraculum, or The Temple of Solomon. London: 1659. Leslie, Henry. The Martyrdome of King Charles. The Hague, 1649. L’Estrange, Roger. No Blinde Guides. London: 1660. Lewalski, Barbara K. The Life of John Milton. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. . Milton’s Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning and Art of Paradise Regained. Providence: Brown University Press, 1966. . “Milton and De Doctrina Christiana: Evidences of Authorship.” Milton Studies 36 (1998): 203–28. . “Milton on Women – Yet Once More.” Milton Studies 6 (1974): 3–20. . Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. . Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. Lewalski, Barbara K. and John Shawcross , “Forum: Milton’s Christian Doctrine.” Studies in English Literature (1992): 143–62. Lewis, C. S. A Preface to Paradise Lost. London: Oxford University Press, 1942. Liddell, H. G. and R. Scott. A Greek-English Lexicon. Ed. Sir Henry Stuart Jones et al. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–30. Lightfoot, John. Horae Hebraicae et Talmudicae. 6 vols. Cambridge: Edward Story, 1658–77. . In Evangelium Sancti Mattæi Horæ Hebraicæ et Talmudicæ. Cambridge: Edward Story, 1658. . “A Sermon Preached Before the Natives of Staffordshire, November 25, 1658.” In The Whole Works of the Reverend John Lightfoot, ed. John Rogers Pitman, Vol. 6, 209–73. London: J. F. Dove, 1822. . The Temple; Especially as it Stood in the Dayes of our Saviour. London: Andrew Crook, 1650. Loewenstein, David. Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. . Representing Revolution in Milton and his Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Lull, David J. “‘The Law Was Our Pedagogue’: A Study in Galatians 3:19–25.” Journal of Biblical Literature 105 (1986): 481–98.

210

Select Bibliography

Lupton, Julia Reinhard. “Othello Circumcised: Shakespeare and the Pauline Discourse of Nations.” Representations 57 (1997): 73–89. Luther, Martin. A Commentarie . . . vpon the Epistle of S. Paul to the Galathians. Anonymous trans. London: Thomas Vautroullier, 1575. . Luther’s Works. American Edition, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, vols. 1–30. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1955–76. . “A Sermon . . . concerning them that be vnder the Law, and them that be vnder Grace.” In Special and Chosen Sermons. Trans. W. G. London: Thomas Vautroullier, 1578. Luxon, Thomas H. Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Reformaion Crisis in Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Macaulay, Thomas B. “Milton.” In Select Essays of Macaulay: Milton, Bunyan, Johnson, Goldsmith, Madame D’Arblay, ed. Samuel Thurber, 1–54. New York: Allyn and Bacon, 1891. . “Jewish Disabilities [1833 Parliament Speech on the Jew Bill].” In Selected Writings, eds. John Clive and Thomas Piney, 181–92. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972. MacCallum, H. R. “Milton and Figurative Interpretation of the Bible.” University of Toronto Quarterly 31 (1962): 397–415. MacKeller, Walter and Edward Weesmiller, eds. A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton. Vol. IV. New York: Columbia University Press, 1975. Maimonides, Moses. “The Book of Civil Laws.” In The Code of Maimonides, Book XIII. Trans. Jacob J. Rabinowitz. Yale Judaica Series, Volume II, 1949. . “The Book of Judges.” In The Code of Maimonides, Book XIV. Trans. Abraham M. Hershman. Yale Judaica Series, Volume III, 1949. . “The Book of Offerings.” In The Code of Maimonides, Book IX. Trans. Herbert Danby. Yale Judaica Series, Volume IV, 1959. . “The Book of Acquisition.” In The Code of Maimonides, Book XII. Trans. Isaac Klein. Yale Judaica Series, Volume V, 1951. . “The Book of Women.” In The Code of Maimonides, Book IV. Trans. Isaac Klein. Yale Judaica Series, Volume XIX, 1972. . De Idololatria. Trans. Dionysius Vossius in Gerardus Vossius. De Theologia Gentili, 3 vols. Amsterdam, 1641; rpt. New York and London: Garland, 1976. . The Guide of the Preplexed. Rrans. Shlomo Pines, intr. Leo Strauss. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. Markley, Robert. “‘The destin’d Walls / Of Cambalu’: Milton, China, and the Ambiguities of the East.” In Milton and the Imperial Vision, eds. Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer, 191–213. Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1999. Marlowe, Christopher. Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays. Ed. J. B. Steane. New York: Penguin Press, 1969.

Select Bibliography

211

Marshall, Stephen. Meroz Cursed, or, A sermon preached to the honourable House of Commons at their late solemn fast, February 23, 1641. London: Samuel Gellibrand, 1645. Martin, Catherine Gimelli. The Ruins of Allegory: Paradise Lost and the Metamorphosis of Epic Convention. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Martyn, J. Louis. Galatians. The Anchor Bible. New York: Doubleday, 1997. Matar, Nabil I. Islam in Britain 1558–1685. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. . “Milton and the Idea of the Restoration of the Jews,” Studies in English Literature 27 (1987): 109–24. . Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. McColley, Diane Kelsey. Milton’s Eve. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983. McEachern, Claire. The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590–1612. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. McLeod, Bruce. “The ‘Lordly Eye’: Milton and the Strategic Geography of Empire.” In Milton and the Imperial Vision, ed. Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer, 48–66. Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1999. Menasseh ben Israel. To His Highnesse the Lord Protector of the COMMONWEALTH of England, Scotland, and Ireland. London: 1655. Mendelsohn, Leonard R. “Milton and the Rabbis: A Later Inquiry.” Studies in English Literature 18 (1978): 125–35. Milton, Anthony. Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought 1600–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Milton, John. An Apology Against a Pamphlet call’d a Modest Confutation of the Animadversions upon the Remonstrant against SMECTYMNUUS. London: John Rothwell, 1642. . Areopagitica. London: [n.p.], 1644. . Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al., 8 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82. . The Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd ed. London: Longman, 1997. . The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. In Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Ernest Sirluck, Vol.2, 217–356. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959. . Paradise Lost. Ed. Alastair Fowler. London: Longman, 1998. . The Oxford John Milton. Eds. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. . Of Reformation. London: [n.p.], 1641. British Library shelfmark E.208. . The Riverside Milton. Ed. Roy Flannagan. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 1998. . Samson Agonistes. In Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. New York: Odyssey Press. 1957. .Tetrachordon. In Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Ernest Sirluck. Vol. 2, 571–719. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959.

212

Select Bibliography

Muskin, Miria. “Wisdom by Adversity: Davidic Traits in Milton’s Samson.” Milton Studies 14 (1980):233–55. Nardo, Anna K. “Academic Interludes in Paradise Lost.” Milton Studies 27 (1992): 209–41. The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Revised Standard Version, ed. Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Nicholas, Edward. An Apology for the Honorable Nation of the Jews, and All the Sons of Israel. London: John Field, 1648. Nicholson, Marjorie. John Milton. New York: Noonday, 1963. Oberman, Heiko A. Luther: Man between God and the Devil. Trans. Eileen Walliser- Schwarzbart. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. . The Rise of Anti-Semitism in the Age of Renaissance and Reformation, trans. James I. Porter. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981. The Oxford History of Christianity. Ed. John McManners. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Pagden, Anthony. Lords of all the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c.1500–c.1800. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Pareus, David. In Genesin Mosis Commentarius. Frankfurt: 1609. Parker, Patricia. “Preposterous Conversions: Turning Turk, and its ‘Pauline’ Rerighting.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 2.1 (2002): 1–34. Parker, William Riley. Milton’s Contemporary Reputation: Replies to the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1971. Patterson, Annabel. “No meer amatorious novel?” In Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose, ed. David Loewenstein and J. G. Turner, 85–101. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Penn, William. “The Preface . . . of the Divers Dispensations of God to Men.” A Journal or Historical Account of . . . George Fox. London: 1694. The Petition of the Jewes For the Repealing of the Act of Parliament for their banishment out of England. London: George Roberts, 1648. Pollefeyt, Didier. “Jews and Christians after Auschwitz: From Substitution to Interreligious Dialogue.” In Jews and Christians: Rivals or Partners for the Kingdom of God? In search of an alternative for the theology of substitution, ed. Pollefeyt, 10–37. Louvain: Peters Press, 1997. Polo, Marco. The Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian. Ed. Henri Cordier and Sir Henry Yule. London: J. Murray, 1903. Poole, Matthew. Annotations upon the Holy Bible wherin the Sacred Text is Inserted and Various Readings Annex’d (Synopsis Criticorum) London: R. Roberts for Thomas Parkhurst, D. Newman, etc., 1688. Popkin, Richard H. “Hartlib, Drury, and the Jews.” In Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation, ed. John Leslie, Mark Greengrass, and Timothy Rayler, 118–36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. . “Jewish Messianism and Christian Millenarianism.” In Culture and Politics from Puritanism to the Enlightenment, ed. Perez Zagorin, 67–90. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.

Select Bibliography

213

. “Some Aspects of Jewish-Christian Theological Interchanges in Holland and England 1640–1700.” In Jewish-Christian Relations in the SeventeenthCentury: Studies and Document, ed. J. Van den Berg and Ernestine G. E. VanderWall, 3–32. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988. Popkin, Richard H. and Gordon M. Weiner. Jewish Christians and Christian Jews: From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994. Prynne, William. Anglo-Judaeus or the History of the Jews whilst here in England. London: Thomas Heath, 1656. . A Looking-Glasse for all Lordly Prelates. London: 1636. . A New Discovery of the prelates tyranny. London: 1641. . A Quench-Coale. Amsterdam: Richt Right Press, 1637. . A Short Demurrer to the Jewes. London: Thoman, 1656. Purchas, Samuel. Hakluytus posthumus, or, Purchas his Pilgrimes. Glasgow: J. MacLehose and Sons, 1625. Quilligan, Maureen. Milton’s Spenser: The Politics of Reading. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983. Quint, David. Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Radzinowicz, Mary Ann. Milton’s Epics and the Book of Psalms. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Ragussis, Michael. Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Rajan, Balachandra. “Banyan Trees and Fig Leaves: Some Thoughts on Milton’s India.” In Of Poetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and His World, ed. P. G. Stanwood. Bingham, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995. Ricouer, Paul. “Preface to Bultmann.” Trans. Peter McCormick. In The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneuti, ed. Don Ihde, 381–401. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974. Robbins, Jill. Prodigal Son/Elder Brother: Interpretation and Alterity in Augustine, Petrarch, Kafka, and Levinas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Robertson, William, ed. The Hebrew Text of the Psalmes and Lamentations but Published (for to encourage and facilitate Beginners in their way) with the Reading thereof in known English Letters. London: H. Robinson, A. Crook, L. Fawn, S. Thomson, G. Sawbridge, 1656. Rosenberg, Joel. King and Kin: Political Allegory in the Hebrew Bible. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Rosenblatt, Jason. “Eden, Israel, England: Milton’s Spiritual Geography.” In All Before Them: Attitudes to Abroad in English Literature 1660–1780, ed. John McVeagh, 49–63. London: Ashfield, 1990. . Torah and God in Paradise Lost. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. . Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi: John Selden. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

214

Select Bibliography

Rosenblatt, Jason and Winfried Schleiner. “John Selden’s Letter to Ben Jonson on Cross-Dressing and Bisexual Gods [with text].” English Literary Renaissance 29 (1999): 65–67. Ross, Alexander. Pansebeia, or A View of All Religions in the World. London: W. Freeman, 1655. Roth, Cecil. A Life of Menasseh ben Israel: Rabbi, Printer, and Diplomat. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1934. Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of AntiSemitism. New York: Seabury Press, 1979. Sadler, Lynn V. “Coping with Hebraic Legalism: The Chorus in ‘Samson Agonistes.’” Harvard Theological Review 66 (1973): 353–68. Sadler, John. Rights of the Kingdom or Customs of our Ancestors. London: J. Kidgell, 1682. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. Samuels, Peggy. “Dueling Erasers: Milton and Scripture.” Studies in Philology 96 (1999): 180–203. Sandys, George. A Relation of a Journey Begun An: Dom: 1610. London: W. Barrett, 1615. . Sandys Travels. London: John Williams, Jr., 1673. Sauer, Elizabeth. “The Jew Within.” Milton and the Jews, MLA Convention, Sheraton, New Orleans, 30 December 2001. . “Religious Toleration and Imperial Intolerance.” In Milton and the Imperial Vision, ed. Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer, 214–30. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999. Saurat, Denis. Milton: Man and Thinker. New York: Dial Press, 1925. Schwartz, Regina M. “From Shadowy Types to Shadowy Types: the Unendings of Paradise Lost.” Milton Studies 24 (1988): 123–38. Remembering and Repeating: On Milton’s Theology and Poetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Selden, John. De Diis Syris. London: 1617. . De Jure Naturali et Gentium Juxta Disciplinam Ebraeorum. London: Richard Bishop, 1640. . Uxor Ebraica seu de nuptii et diortix ex jure civil [The Hebrew Wife). Basel, 1659. Trans. Jonathan Ziskind, Ziskind intro. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990. Shakespeare, William. 1 Henry IV. Ed. A. R. Humphreys. New York: Routledge, 1988. . Othello. Ed. E. A. J. Honigmann. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997. Shapiro, James. Shakespeare and the Jews. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Shawcross, John T. John Milton: The Self and the World. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993. Shoaf, R. A. Milton, Poet of Quality: A Study of Semiosis in the Poetry and the Prose. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Shoulson, Jeffrey. “The King and I: The Stance of Theodicy in Midrash and Paradise Lost.” Milton Studies 36 (1998): 59–85.

Select Bibliography

215

. Milton and the Rabbis: Hebraism, Hellenism and Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Silver, A. H. A History of Messianic Speculation in Israel. Boston: Beacon Press, 1927. Smith, Nigel. “John Perrot and the Quaker Epic.” In Literature and the English Civil War, ed. Thomas Healy and Jonathan Sawday. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. . “The Uses of Hebrew in the English Revolution.” In Language, Self, and Society: A Social History of Language, ed. Peter Burke and Roy Porter, 51–71. Oxford: Polity Press, 1991. Sommerville, J. P. “John Selden, the Law of Nature, and the Origins of Government.” The Historical Journal 28 (1984), 437–47. Speiser, E. A. Genesis. The Anchor Bible. New York: Doubleday, 1962. Spencer, John. De Legibus Hebraeorum Ritualibus et earum Rationibus. Cambridge: Richard Chiswel, 1685. Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Ed. A. C. Hamilton. New York: Longman, 1977. Stern, David. Parables in Midrash: Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. Stevens, Paul. “Milton and the New World: Custom, Relativism, and the Discipline of Shame.” In Milton and the Imperial Vision, ed. Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer, 90–111. Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1999. . “Milton’s Janus-faced Nationalism: Soliloquy, Subject, and the Modern Nation State.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 100.2 (2001): 247–68. Stollman, Samuel. “Milton’s Dichotomy of ‘Judaism’ and Hebraism,” PMLA 89 (1974): 105–12. . “Milton’s Rabbinical Readings and Fletcher.” Milton Studies 4 (1972): 195–215. . “Satan, Sin, and Death: A Mosaic Trio.” Milton Studies 22 (1986): 101–20. Tayler, Edward W. Milton’s Poetry: Its Development in Time. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1979. Tesky, Gordon. Allegory and Violence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. Toon, Peter. “The Question of Jewish Immigration.” In Puritans, the Millennium and the Future of Israel: Puritan Eschatology, 1600–1660, ed. Peter Toon, 115–25. Cambridge: James Clarke, 1970. Tuck, Richard. Natural Rights Theories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. . Philosophy and Government 1572–1651. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Tumbleson, Raymond D. Catholicism in the English Protestant Imagination: Nationalism, Religion, and Literature, 1660–1745. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Twersky, Isadore. Introduction to the Code of Maimonides (Mishneh Torah). New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980. Tyndale, William. The Work of William Tyndale. Ed. G. E. Duffield. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1965.

216

Select Bibliography

Ullmann, Walter. “This Realm of England is an Empire.” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 30 (1979): 175–203. Vitkus, Daniel. “Turning Turk in Othello: The Conversion and Damnation of the Moor.” Shakespeare Quarterly 48 (1997): 145–76. Von Rooden, Peter. “Conceptions of Judaism as a Religion in the SeventeenthCentury Dutch Republic.” In Christianity and Judaism: Papers Read at the 1991 Summer Meeting and the 1992 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. Diana Wood. London: Blackwell Publishers, 1992. Wall, John N. Jr. “The Contrarious Hand of God: ‘Samson Agonistes’ and the Biblical Lament.” Milton Studies 12 (1978):117–39. Warner, James. The Devilish Conspiracy, Hellish Treason, Heathenish Condemnation, and Damnable Murder, Committed and Executed by the Iewes Against the Anointed Lord. London: 1648. Watson, Francis. Paul, Judaism and the Gentiles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Werman, Golda. Milton and Midrash. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995. Williams, Roger. The Fourth Paper presented by Major Butler, with other papers edited and published by Roger Williams. London: Printed for Giles Calvert, 1652. . The Complete Writings of Roger Williams. 7 vols. New York: Russell and Russell, 1963. Williamson, Arthur H. “Latter Day Judah, Latter Day Israel: The Millennium, the Jews, and the British Future.” In Chiliasmus in Deutschland und England im 17. Jahrhundert, ed. Martin Brecht, et al. G¨ottingen: Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988. Wittreich, Joseph, ed. The Romantics on Milton. Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1970. . Interpreting Samson Agonistes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Woodward, Hezekiah. The Kings Chronicle: In two Sections: wherein We have the Acts of the wicked and good Kings of Judah. London: George Miller and Thomas Underhill, 1643. Ziskind, Jonathan R. John Selden on Jewish Marriage Law. Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1991. Zizek, Slavoj. “‘I Hear You with My Eyes’; or, The Invisible Monster.” In Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, ed. Renata Salecl and Slavoj Zizek, 90–126. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.

Index

Abbott, W. C., 44 Abraham, 25, 30, 46, 52, 56, 68, 71, 77, 155, 168, 170 Achinstein, Sharon, 17, 74, 79, 158, 169 Adam, 52–55, 67, 86, 87, 90–96, 98, 100–104, 141, 143–145, 159, 163, 166, 167, 171, 176, 198 as Israelite nation, 53 conversion of, 55 Adam and Eve, 86, 87, 93, 95, 100, 102–104, 166, 167 Adams, R. M., 109 Adams, Robert, 8, 116, 118, 119 Agamben, Giorgio, 179 Alcoran, 178 allegorical reading, 128–130, 132, 133, 136, 137, 139–142, 148, 150 allegory, 11, 24, 128–130, 133, 136–140, 146, 148–150 Allen, Hannah, 42 American Indians, the, 165, 167–169 as Jews, 43, 164–168 Amsterdam, 18, 29, 42, 43, 63, 67, 160 ancient Israel, 8, 15, 19, 20, 37, 38 ancient Israelites, the, 14, 18, 24, 49, 55, 168, 170, 184, 185, 193, 197 Anglesey, 59 Anglia Judaica. See Tovey, D’Blossiers Anglican Church, the, 127 anonymous Cry of the Royal Blood, 22 anti-Catholicism, 162 anti-Miltonism, 121 anti-nomianism, 107 anti-prelatical tracts Hebraism of, 19 anti-semitic aesthetics, 111 anti-Semitism, i, 8, 9, 10, 17, 57, 61, 105, 115, 122, 124–127, 132, 196 Apocalypse, the, 161, 168, 169, 171 apocalypticism, 43

Apocrypha, the, 85, 96, 97, 101 Archer, John, 34, 40, 56, 156, 170 Archer, John Michael, 152, 156, 157 Ariosto, Ludovico, 188 Aristotle, 27, 155, 181, 191, 192 Arminian dissidents, 74 Arminianism, 38, 70 Arnold, Matthew, 113, 114, 119 asceticism, 39 Asia, 11, 27, 151–158, 163, 165, 167, 170, 172, 174, 177, 188, 193 Asians and Jews, 158, 159, 162, 168. See Asians, the, 26, 27, 154, 158, 159, 162, 167, 168, 172, 191 Astoreth, 87, 99 Augustine, Saint, 92, 129, 131, 136, 137 Auschwitz, 121, 126 Aveling, Francis, 107 Ayre, John, 112 Baal priests of, 23 Babel, 161 Babel, Tower of, 32, 50 Babylon, 4, 20, 40, 44, 45, 106, 187, 188, 195 Babylonian captivity, the, 6, 15, 32, 183 Babylonian empire, the, 183 Bacon, Francis, 96, 100, 114 Advancement of Learning, The, 96, 100 New Atlantis, 96, 101 Novum Organon, 159 Badiou, Alan, 179 Bainton, Roland, 131 Balaam, 20 Baldwin, Edward C., 4 Barbour, Hugh, 44 Barker, Francis, 153 Barnard, T. C., 44 Barrera, Julio Trebolle, 97 Bartholomaeus, Anglicus, 163 Bass, Alan, 138

217

218

index

Ben Israel, Menassah, 13, 29–31, 42–46, 54, 62–66, 160, 165 Hope of Israel The, 29, 42 Bernasconi, Robert, 67 Berry, L. E., 164 Bhabha, Homi K., 36 Biberman, Matthew, 4, 6, 8, 9, 11, 105 biblical Israel, 14, 19, 20, 23, 31, 158, 172 biblical Jews, 14, 22, 25, 28, 34, 158, 183 biblical nationalism and Protestantism, 56 Birch, Thomas, 62 Boniface of Savoy, 35 Book of Proverbs, the, 89–91, 95, 97, 100, 104 King James version of, 92 Boyarin, Daniel, 1, 129, 179 Boyarin, Jonathan, 152 Boyle, Robert, 62, 64 Brayne, John, 28 Brereton, William, 72 Brerewood, Edward, 165–168 Brooks, Douglas A., 1, 48, 117 Browning, Andrew, 59 Bruce, F. F., 97 Bunyan, John, 102 Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, 92, 102 Burges, Cornelius, 15, 17, 18 Burroughs, Jeremiah, 40–42 Burton, Henry, 14, 15 Burton, Jonathan, 152 Bush, Douglas, 109 Butler, Samuel, 122 Buxtorf’s Hebrew Bible, 118 Calamy, Edmund, 14, 15, 17, 18 calling of the Jews, the, 29, 33, 40, 42, 169, 170 Calvin, John, 69, 130, 131, 134, 138, 148 Calvinism, 38, 74 Calvinist iconoclasm, 135 Calvinist orthodoxy, 69 Campbell, Gordon, 63 Canaan, 23, 26, 32, 52, 185 as England, 22, 23 capitalism, 115 Carey, John, 1, 70, 85 carnality, Jewish, 16, 33, 132, 136, 157 Carroll, James, 18 Cartwright, Joanna, 29 Cartwright, Thomas, 111, 112 Catholicism, 50, 137, 178, 179, 182 Catholics, the, 78, 179, 183 Cavalier Parliament, the, 78 Cawly, Robert Ralson, 152 Charles I, 19–23, 49, 89, 99

as Ahab, 20 as Baal, 23 as Balak, 20 as Davidic king, 21 as Eglon, tyrant king of Moab, 21 as evil king of Isreael, 21 as good king of Judah, 21 as Israel’s enemy, 26 As Pharaoh, 20, 23 as saint, 22 Milton’s demonizaton of, 22 regicide of, 7, 14, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25 Charles II, 31, 58, 78, 124 as King David, 32 Chemos, 87, 99 Cheyette, Bryan, 125 Cheynell, Francis, 15 China, 11, 153–156, 161–163, 167 as alternative Eden, 11 England’s fascination with, 11 English fascination with, 154 Chinese history, 151 Chinese Jews, 161 Chinese, the, 154, 162, 163, 167 as Jew lovers, 162 as proto-Catholics, 162 Chmielnicki pogroms, the, 67 chosen people, the, 19, 23, 24, 27, 32, 36, 135, 156, 170, 177, 194 Christian eschatology, 24, 41 Christian identity, 5, 31, 129, 133, 135, 137, 150, 180 Christian Israel notion of, 23 Christian Kabbalah, the, 43 Christian sign theory, 137 Christianity, 1, 4, 9, 13–18, 29, 31, 32, 37–39, 48, 64, 67, 68, 70, 75, 84, 87, 108, 110, 113, 116, 120, 124, 126, 131–133, 135–137, 140, 150, 153, 158, 162, 183, 196 self-definition of, 11, 16 Christology, 77 Chrysostom, St. John, 139 Church of England, the, 19, 33, 60 Church of Rome, the, 15, 34 Cicero, 27, 155 circumcision, 45, 46, 48, 164, 170, 172, 178 as sign of election, 46 Claydon, Tony, 80 Clayton, Robert, 72 Cleopatra, 174 Clive, John, 114 Coffey, John, 74 Cohen, Jeremy, 29 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1, 148

Index colonialism, 152 Commonwealth of God, the, 32, 186 Conklin, George, 118, 119 Constantine, 18, 108 Conventicles Act, the, 9 conversos, 67 Corinthians, Paul’s letter to, 76 Corns, Thomas, 33, 45 Cossacks, the, 39 Cowley, Abraham, 168 Cromwell, Oliver, 7, 11, 13, 18, 28, 29, 44, 49, 60, 62, 63, 65, 85, 124 Cromwellian court, the, 65, 66 Cromwellian policy, 70 Cromwellian toleration, 60 Crowley, Weldon, 113 Curtyn, Anne, 7 Da Cruz, Gaspar, 155 Dalila, 85, 87, 172–176 Daniel, book of, 39, 43 Danielson, Dennis, 93, 120 Darbishire, Helen, 77 Dati, Carlo, 57 Daughters of Jerusalem, the, 76 David, King, 47, 85, 89 Davidic monarchy, the, 25 Davis, P. D. L, 74 De Bruyn, Frans, 61, 80 De Forest, George, 81 De Man, Paul, 133, 148, 149 De Montaigne, Michel, 166 De Montezinos, Antonio, 165. See Ha-Levi, Aaron Derrida, Jacques, 137–140, 144, 149 diaspora, the, 39, 51, 125, 153, 157, 162 Dillenberger, John, 178, 183 Divine Providence, 37 Dobranski, Stephen, 72 Donne, John, 92 Donnelly, Phillip, 71, 76, 81 Donoghue, Denis, 125–127 Dring, John, 78 Dryden, John, 123 Duffield, G. E., 137 Dury, John, 31, 43, 54, 62, 63, 160, 161, 165, 170 Eagleton, Terry, 121 Earl of Warwick, the, 65 East India Company, the, 188 Ecclesiastes, book of, 97, 100, 101 Eden, 38, 51, 90, 93, 98, 101, 103, 154, 163, 189 Edward I, 5, 30

219

Egypt, 4, 11, 16, 20, 22, 26, 29, 32, 49–50, 52, 83, 97, 157, 178, 185, 187, 189, 193, 195, 197 Egyptians, the, 189 Ehud, 21 Eigen, Sara, 67 Eikon Basilike, 20, 23 Eldridge, Lee Huddleston, 164, 165 election, 49 concept of, 38, 50 Elijah Eliot, John, 122, 160, 165, 167–169 Eliot, T, S., 2, 11, 105, 116, 120–127 Ellmann, Maud, 125 Ellwood, Thomas, 55 Emma, Ronald D., 151 Emmanuel College, 65 Empson, Sir William, 116 England as chosen nation, 24 as Israel, 22–24, 26, 32, 154, 170 as Regnum Christi, 10 Israelite identity of, 19 English Civil War, the, 130 English, the as “foolish Israelites”, 25 as apostate Jews, 32 as biblical Jews, 25 as Hebrew bondslaves, 26 as idolatrous Jews, 23 as Israelites, 22, 23, 26, 184 as Jews, 25, 33, 88, 197 Englishness, 181, 190, 197 Ephesians, Paul’s letter to, 51 Episcopal Church of England, the, 15, 25 Erastianism, 112, 113 European Jewry, 39, 58, 180 Eve, 40, 85–87, 90, 93–95, 99, 101–103, 118, 129, 141–148 Exodus, book of, 22, 25, 37, 51, 87, 185 Expulsion, edict of, 124 Ezekiel, 41 prophecies of, 47 Faithorne, William, 73 Fall, the, 4, 11, 76, 130, 144, 145, 154–156, 159–161, 166, 171, 189 Fallon, Stephen M., 72, 128, 129, 138 Fannagan, Roy, 167 Far East, the, 155, 157, 162 Fell, Margaret, 44–47, 50 Ferguson, Margaret W., 95 Ferry, Anne, 147 Fifth Monarchy, the, 44 Fineman, Joel, 149

220

index

Fisch, Harold, 151 Fish, Stanley, 1, 2, 9, 147 Fisher, Samuel, 44 Fixler, Michael, 19, 40, 50 Flannagan, Roy, 167 Fletcher, Giles, 164 Fletcher, Harris F., 4, 84, 85, 97, 116–119, 122, 151, 164 Flood, the, 154, 167, 175 Flusser, David, 108 Fowler, Alastair, 76, 81 Fox, George, 45–47 Foxe, John, 15, 17–19 Acts and Monuments, 15, 18 Freedman, Jonathan, 115–117, 120–122 Freinkel, Lisa, 131, 132 French, J, Milton, 58, 72, 73 Fresch, Cheryl H., 151 Frienkel, Lisa, 132 Froula, Christine, 95 Fuller, Thomas, 37, 53, 54, 56 Galatians, Paul’s letter to, 77, 131, 172, 178, 179, 182, 185 Gardiner, Judith Keagan, 45 Gayton, Edmund, 44 Genesis, Book of, 47, 77, 95, 98–100 Geneva Bible, The, 48, 97 Giddens, Anthony, 35 Gillespie, George, 113 Gilman, Sander, 9 Ginzberg, Louis, 3 Glimpse of Sions Glory, A, 40, 47 Goldberg, Jonathan, 105, 112 Goldie, Mark, 59 Goodwin, Thomas, 17, 18, 40, 62 Greece, 106, 107, 109, 170 Greeks, the, 28, 31, 32, 109, 191, 195 Greenblatt, Stephen, 119, 149 Greengrass, Mark, 62, 64 Gregerson, Linda, 36, 142 Gresham College, 165 Greville, Fulke, 190 Grey, Elizabeth, 123 Grossman, Marshall, 138, 140–142 Grosvenor, Sir Richard, 72 Grotius, Hugo, 69 Guibbory, Achsah, 10, 13, 16, 38, 45, 50, 86, 88, 109, 110, 115, 157–160, 174, 184 Guillory, John, 116, 123, 124 Gulden, Ann Torday, 94 Haak, Theodore, 72 Hale, John, 19, 38 Ha-Levi, Aaron

aka Antonio de Montezinos, 165 Hall, Joseph, 65, 153, 156 Hall, Moses, 42, 43, 54, 121 Haller, William, 19 Hamilton, Gary, 187, 197 Hanford, J, Holly, 116, 118 Harrington, James, 12, 185, 194–196, 199 Commonwealth of Oceana, The, 12, 43, 194, 195 Hartlib, Samuel, 10, 62–66, 170 circle of, 13 Haskin, Dayton, 14, 109 Hastings, Adrian, 35 Hawkes, Stephen M., 72 Healy, Thomas, 44 Hebraic Asians, 166 Hebraic God, the, 87 Hebraic knowledge vs, Hellenic knowledge, 11 Hebraic poetics, 83 Hebraic tradition, the, 42 Hebraism, 2–4, 10, 19, 32, 39, 50, 71, 84, 113, 114, 184. See Hebrew Milton’s knowledge of, 4, 84, 151 Hebrew Bible, the, 4, 10, 14, 17, 19, 20, 24, 25, 27, 28, 51, 64, 75, 76, 82, 96, 100 Hebrew commonwealth, the, 107 Hebrew prophecies, 41 Hebrew prophets, the, 3, 16, 17, 23, 25, 34, 41, 50, 88, 111, 156 Hebrew scripture, 10, 11, 24, 44, 83, 85, 87, 89, 154–156, 161, 167, 176, 184, 197 Hebrews, book of, 52, 55, 71 Hebrews, the, 36, 96, 167–169, 172–174 as distinct from Israelites, 24 elect status of, 52 Hechter, Michael, 35 Helgerson, Rchard, 36 Helleneism, 32 Hellenism, 4, 13, 37, 38, 64, 84, 110, 113, 120 Heller, Ricki, 85 Henrietta Maria as Jezebel, 20 Henry VII, 6 Henry VIII, 35, 194 Herbermann, Charles, 107 Herman, Peter, 147 Hill, Christopher, 14, 19, 33, 38, 52, 168 Hitler, Adolph, 2, 126 Hobart, Sir John, 78 Holocaust, the, 9 Holstun, James, 159, 160, 164, 165, 167–169 Holy Roman Empire, the, 35 Holy Spirit, the, 137

Index Homes, Nathaniel, 42 Hudibras, Sir, 122, 123 Hughes, Merritt Y., 15, 49, 51, 86, 128, 139, 145, 153, 163, 187 Hulme, Peter, 153 Iberian Christianity, 67 idolatry, 17, 18, 23, 27, 28, 32–34, 51, 54, 87, 89, 99, 103, 158–160, 170, 174, 178, 186, 190, 193 Ihde, Don, 129 incest, 142 Inderwick, F. A., 61 Ingram, William, 68 Inner Temple, the, 58, 61 Inns of Court, the, 78 Inquisition, the, 68, 165 Isaiah, 16, 24, 37, 41, 69, 147, 187, 192 visions of, 41 Islam, 152, 178–180, 183, 189 Israel and idolatry, 51 as England, 22 Israel, Jonathan, 67 Israelite tribes, the, 170 Israelites, the, 11, 14, 17, 20–29, 32, 38, 39, 43, 51, 52, 69, 87, 131, 136, 160, 161, 163–166, 168–171, 184–186, 192, 194, 195 conversion of, 40 Itzkovitz, Daniel, 123, 124 Iversen, Margaret, 153 Jacobean playwrights, 123 Jameson, Fredric, 122 Japanese, the, 167 Jebusites, the, 21 Jenkins, Leoline, 59 Jeremiah, 32, 156 Jerusalem, 16, 20, 21, 37, 39–41, 47, 108 Jessey, Henry, 42, 62 Jesuits, 11, 151, 154, 155, 157, 161–163 Jesus, 11, 40, 46, 47, 52, 70, 75, 76, 105–112, 115, 126, 168–170 Jew Bill, the, 114 Jew inward, a, 45, 55 Jew inward, the, 48, 56 Jew versus Christian, 129 Jew within, the, 133, 135–138, 146, 148, 150 Jewish academics, 9 Jewish and Asian affinities, 153 Jewish and Islamic difference, 182 Jewish and Turkish difference, 181, 196 Jewish church, the, 74 Jewish identity, 7, 54, 55, 119, 129, 136 Jewish idolatry, 18, 25

221

Jewish, legality, 132 Jewish, literalness, 132, 136 Jewish messianism, 13, 33, 67 Jewish Miltonists, 8, 9 Jewish Ordinances, the, 64 Jewish question, the, 10, 14, 59, 124, 149, 153 Jewish self-hatred, 9 Jewish studies, 120, 151, 177 Jewish-Christian relations, 36, 54 Jewishness, 11, 32, 36, 120, 124, 131–137, 149, 180, 181, 192 Jewishness and Turkishness, 182 Jews, the, 182–184, 191, 193, 196, 197 and Amerindians, 43 and Asians, 26, 27 and Christian identity, 5 and Gentiles, 125 and orientalism, 12 and slavery, 26, 27, 157 and Turks, 180, 181, 183, 199 apostasy of, 50 as a nation, 68 as child abductors, murderers, and cannibals, 5 as Christ killers, 5 as diaspora, 50 as offspring of the devil, 18 Christian discourse of, 183 conversion of, 13, 14, 33, 34, 62, 69, 71, 72, 136, 168–171 hostility to, 8 imgaginary notions of, 6, 8, 10 instrumentalizing of, 57 racialist notions of, 6 readmission of, 10, 19, 29, 33, 34, 37, 42–44, 49, 57, 58, 60, 62, 63, 65, 67, 72, 124, 150, 168, 169, 184 John Gospel of, 70 Johnson, Samuel, 2, 9, 81, 122, 128, 129 Jones, Norman, 72 Jonson, Ben, 61, 81 Joyce, James, 122, 126 Judah kingdoms of, 23 Judaic East, the, 171 Judaic studies, 119 Judaism, 1, 5, 8–10, 15–18, 24, 31, 34, 38, 44, 45, 50, 56, 57, 61–63, 67, 68, 71, 84, 87, 97, 108, 111, 114, 123, 126, 127, 132, 133, 135, 137, 150, 153, 161, 162, 169, 178, 179, 183, 184 and English Protestant identity, 5 as deferred presence, 56 Judaizer, as epithet, 112, 113

222

index

Judaizing Presbyterians, 74 Judaizing Protestantism, 61 Judeo-Christian history, 155 Judeo-Christian monotheism, 162 Judeo-Christian sign theory, 138 Judeo-Christian tradition, 39, 46, 103 Judeo-Orientals, 159, 172 Judeophobia, 5 Julius, Anthony, 126, 127 Junius-Tremellius Bible, the, 97 Kabbalah, 39, 116, 151 Kabbalists, 39 Kaplan, Yoseph, 67 Karaite sect, the, 67 Katz, David S., 6, 8, 13, 18, 29, 30, 44, 60, 62–64, 67, 68, 111, 112, 124, 135, 160, 163–165, 167, 168, 180, 183, 184 Katz, Stephen T., 127 Keeble, Neil, 79 Kelsey, Frances W., 69, 86 Kendrick, Stephen, 121 Kermode, Frank, 123 Kerrigan, William, 120 King James Bible, The, 37, 83, 97 kingdom of God, the, 39, 54 kingship, 11, 27, 32, 155, 159, 185–187, 191 Knight, G. Wilson, 2 Knight, Mark, 78 Knoppers, Laura, 33 Kollmeier, Harold, 68 Kunze, Bonnelyn Young, 47 L’Estrange, Roger, 54 Lamont, William, 58 Land of Promise, The, 41, 47 Larrimore, Mark, 67 Laud, Archbishop, 15, 21, 190 Laudian bishops as descendants of the Jews, 16 Laudian Church, the, 15, 17 Laudian prelates, 15 Laudians, 21, 33, 34, 40 as Jews, 16 Law, the, 4, 6, 14, 15, 17, 19, 29, 41, 45, 46, 52, 54, 55, 64, 69, 71, 72, 75, 83, 84, 86, 88, 107, 109, 120, 124, 129–132, 136, 146, 172–174, 177, 190 Leavis, F, R., 116 Lee, Samuel, 41, 42, 48 Temple of Solomon, The, 7 Leibowitz,, Yeshayahu, 170 Leimberg, Inge, 7 Leonard, John, 93 Leslie, Michael, 62

Leviathan, 146, 147 Lewalski, Barbara, 90, 92, 100, 109, 134, 135 Lewis, Bernard, 152 Lewis, C. S., 116, 122 Lightfoot, John, 37, 50, 112, 113 Loewenstein, David, 45, 197 London, 156 Loxley, Diana, 153 Lucifer, 139, 141 Luke, Gospel of, 75, 76 Lupton, Julia Reinhard, 179 Luther, Martin, 130–134, 136–138, 140, 142, 148, 149, 178–180, 182, 183, 185, 187, 196 and Jewishness, 11 Luxon, Thomas H., 24, 44 Lyly, John, 36 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 114, 128 Mack, Maynard, 81 MacKeller, Walter, 109 Malcolm, Noel, 73 Maltzahn, Nicholas von, 10 Mammon, 187 Manoa, 172–174, 176 Marco Polo, 164 Markley, Robert, 152, 154, 162 Marlowe, Christopher, i Marranos, 7 Marshall, Stephen, 21 Martin, Catherine Gimelli, 45, 128, 129, 172 Marvell, Andrew, 79, 171 Matar, Nabil I., 34, 40, 49, 56, 62, 70, 71 Maton, Robert, 34 McBride, Frans, 80 McColley, Diane Kelsey, 86, 87, 103 McCormick, Peter, 129 McEachern, Claire, 36, 130 McLeod, Bruce, 159, 163, 171 McNeill, John T., 69 McVeagh, John, 38 M´echoulan, Henry, 64, 65, 67 Mede, Joseph, 65 Meek, David, 113 Melton, Frank T., 62, 72 Mendelsohn, Leonard, 119, 120, 151 Messiah, the, 47, 52, 81, 106, 108, 126, 160 messianism, 39, 42, 66 messianists, 39, 42, 54 Michael, Archangel, 51–55, 103, 198 Midrash, 39, 53, 76 Midrash, the Palestinian, 84 Midrashim, rabbinic, 84 millenarian philo-semites, 64

Index millenarianism, 13, 14, 28, 29, 33, 34, 35, 39, 42, 44, 56, 61–65, 68, 69, 136, 165, 184, millenarians, 37, 40, 44, 54, 62, 65, 67, 68, 160 Millennial history, 40 Miller, Leo, 69 Milton controversy, the, 2, 11, 111, 116, 117, 119, 120, 127 Milton, Christopher, 61 Milton, John Aeropagitica, 8, 26 and philo-semitism, 70 anti-monarchical tracts, 19, 21 anti-prelatical tracts, 10, 14, 16–19 as userer, 10, 72, 73 attitude towards Jews, 14, 17 attitude towards readmission of Jews, 13 Brief History of Muscovia, A, 163 Comus, 111 De Doctrina Christiana, 50, 69, 73, 77, 88, 89, 114, 130, 158, 169 Defence of the English People, A, 22, 26, 27, 28, 88, 89, 99, 155 Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, The, 74, 88, 192 Eikonoklastes, 20, 22, 23, 25, 26, 49, 50, 96, 159 History of Britain, The, 197 Lycidas, 79 Observations Upon the Articles of Peace with the Irish Rebels, 69, 72, 169 Of Education, 62, 78–80, 97 Of Prelatical Episcopacy, 16 Of Reformation, 14, 16, 48, 171 on England as Israel, 22 Paradise Lost, 8, 38, 39, 51–55, 71, 73, 75–77, 79–82, 84–88, 90–93, 95, 99–104, 117, 118, 122, 128–130, 133, 141–145, 148, 156, 158, 159, 163, 166, 171, 175, 176, 185, 186, 189, 192, 197 Paradise Regain’d, 10, 33, 56, 57, 69–71, 77, 99, 104–111, 115, 169, 170 Poemata, 80 Poems (1645), 79 Poems (1673), 78–82 Psalms, translations, of 2, 57 Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, The, 28, 31, 32, 50, 54, 98, 112, 185, 190–193, 197 Reason of Church Government, The, 17, 23, 27, 41, 92 Samson Agonistes, 1–3, 8, 10, 57, 71, 85, 104, 105, 114, 116, 172, 173, 175, 177 Second Defence of the English People, The, 22, 23, 28

223

Sonnet XVIII, 49 Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, The, 20, 21, 26, 63, 96, 155, 158, 169, 189, 192, 197 Treatise of Civil Power, A, 66 Milton’s Hebraism, 82, 151 Milton’s rabbinical readings, 151 Milton’s semitic sources, 120 Miltonic poetics, 146 Miltonic similes, 146 Mishnah, the, 63, 119 modern Jews, the, 28, 184, 185, 193, 196–198 Mohamed, Feisal G., 1, 2 Moloch, 87, 99 monarchy, 20, 22, 23, 25, 28, 31, 34, 40, 49, 54, 96, 185–187, 190–192, 194, 195 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de, 191 More, Thomas, 35 Mosaic history, 152, 154, 155 Mosaic Law, 27, 68, 74, 75, 83, 108, 131, 158, 192 and the English church, 16 Moses, 17, 45, 52, 85, 112, 136, 156 Mozley, J, H., 81 Mt. Imaus, 163 mysticism, 39, 44 Nahon, G´erard, 29, 64, 65, 67 narcissism, 142, 143 Nardo, Anna K., 90 national election, 37, 39 nationality, Early Modern conceptions of, 68 Nazi Germany, 2 New Covenant, the, 134 New Criticism, the, 116 New Eden, the, 41 New Israel, the, 50, 56 New Jerusalem, the, 41, 51 New Testament, the, 2, 23, 36, 41, 52, 55, 59, 70, 76, 82, 112, 133, 134, 140 New World, the, 153, 156, 166, 168 Newsham, Thomas, 58 Ngai the assimilated Jew, 161, 162 Nicaea, 138 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 116 Noah, 167, 198 Numbers, Book of, 185 Nyquist, Mary, 95, 174 Oberman, H, A., 132, 133 Old Testament, the, 3, 7, 14, 19, 27, 45, 51, 52, 61, 63, 71, 82, 83, 85, 97, 108, 111, 125, 134, 135, 140, 155–157 Old World, the, 156, 157, 166

224

index

Orgel, Stephen, 105, 112 Orient, the, 151–153, 156, 176, 186–189, 192 Oriental decadence, 156, 157, 161, 176, 177 Orientalism, 151–153, 177, 188 Orientalist discourse, 156 Osiris, 146 Oster, Malcolm, 64 Ottoman Empire, the, 183, 185, 190, 194, 195 Owen, John, 62 Owens, W. R., 92 Pagden, Anthony, 35 Panerjee, Pompa, 152 papists, 109, 182 Parker, William Riley, 58, 65 Parliament, 6, 14, 15, 17, 18, 20, 21, 28, 29, 38, 40, 41, 43, 49, 66, 69, 97, 114 Paul, Saint, 4, 24, 30, 36, 40, 42, 50, 63, 69, 76, 127, 129, 133, 136, 137, 156, 158, 169, 178–182 Pauline Dilemma, the, 107 Pauline hermeneutics, 83, Pauline supersessionism, 15, 19 Pelikan, Jaroslav, 131, 178, 179, 182 Pell, John, 72, 73 Penn, William, 46–48 Pentateuch, the, 105, 162 Pentateuchal law, 156–158 Perrot, John, 44 Peter, Hugh, 43 Peter, Saint, 48 Pett, Sir Peter, 59 phantasmatic Jew, the, 123 Pharisaism, 75 Pharisees, the, 16–18, 66, 72, 73, 75 Philips, John, 73 The Splendid Shilling, 73 Philistines, the, 172–175, 177 philo-semitic moment, the, 185 philo-semitism, vii, 10, 57, 68, 115, 180, 184 phylacteries, 114 Pincus, Steven, 80 Piney, Thomas, 114 Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer. See Vorstius, Willem Pisgah-Sight, 52, 54 Plato, 90, 109 political liberalism, 114 Pollefeyt, Didier, 126 Pollizzotto, Carolyn, 64 Popish Images, 162 Popkin, Richard H., 13, 29, 62, 65, 160 Porter, James L., 132 Pound, Ezra, 2, 3, 125 Powell, Mary, 58, 61, 88, 89 Powell, Richard, 10, 58, 59, 61

predestination, 38, 70, 134 prelapsarian, 84, 86, 90, 93, 98, 102, 144–146, 149, 171 Presbyterian ministers as cowardly, 21 as inhabitants of Meroz, 21 Presbyterians, the, 21, 74, 78, 113 Milton’s relation to, 73 primitive Christianity, 39 primitive church, the, 47, 56 Protestant identity, 88, 130, 135, 180 Protestant sectarianism, 178 Protestant theology, 11, 133, 135, 136, 142, 149 Protestantism, 5, 56, 67, 80, 92, 109, 130, 131, 135, 139, 162 Prynne, William, 15, 18, 30, 58–60, 73, 74 Short Demurrer against the Jewes, 18, 58 Purchas, Samuel, 152, 155, 161, 162, 179 Puritan ministers, 14, 24 Puritan theology, 133 Puritanism, 74, 130, 160 Puritans, the, 3, 15, 44, 111 as God’s chosen, 19 identification with Israel, 19 Pythagoras, 106 Quakers, the, 44, 46–48, 50, 60 Quilligan, Maureen, 128, 138 rabbinic texts, 3, 4 rabbinical tradition, the, 39, 67 Radzinowicz, Mary Ann, 79–81, 83–85 Rajan, Balachandra, 44, 152, 154, 158, 175 Randolph, Thomas, 61 Ranelagh, Lady, 64 Raphael, Archangel, 81, 86, 90–96, 98–102, 145 Rastall, Thomas, 58 Raylor, Tim, 62 Readmission Act, the, 170 Reformation, the, 2, 10, 14–17, 23, 24, 26, 35, 36, 38, 40, 41, 44, 48, 49, 56, 62, 64, 74, 130, 131, 134, 137, 149, 150 Reformers, the, 40, 135, 136 Regnum Christi, 14, 37, 40, 50 republicanism, 26, 28, 107, 114, 174, 185, 186, 195, 198, 199 Restoration, the, 18, 31, 34, 40, 47, 49, 50, 56, 58, 60–62, 69, 73, 78, 79, 182, 184, 186, 196–198 Revelation, book of, 14, 39–41, 76 Ricci, Matteo, 161, 162 Ricks, Christopher, 93 Ricouer, Paul, 129 Robinson, Benedict S., 11, 12, 159, 172, 178

Index Rogers, John, 28, 112 Roman Babylon, 40 Romans, the, 28, 31, 32, 195 Paul’s letter to, 44, 64, 69, 70, 77 Romantic era, the, 114, 115 Romantics, the, 3, 111, 148 Rome, 20, 32, 50, 70, 107, 109, 135, 170, 187 as Babylon, 24 Rosenblatt, Jason P., 4, 5, 9, 14, 19, 38, 46, 47, 51, 52, 54, 55, 64, 75, 77, 83, 84, 86, 102, 110, 120, 151, 153, 156–158, 170, 177, 184 Ross, Alexander, 30 Roth, Cecil, 30, 31 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 148 Royalist Orientalists, 157 Royalists, 19, 20 Ruether, Rosemary Radford, 17, 18 Rumrich, John, 72, 88 Sabbatarianism, 60, 135 Sabbatarians, 111 Sadler, John, 63, 165 Rights of the Kingdon, The, 63 Said, Edward W., 152, 153, 177, 188 Salecl, Renata, 115 Salmasius, Claudius, 21, 22 Defensio Regia pro Carolo Primo, 21, 89 Samson, 1, 2, 4, 71, 72, 78, 85, 105, 111, 167, 171–177 as true Hebrew, 171 Samuel, 23, 48 Milton’s identification with, 25 Samuel, books of, 25, 26, 28, 96, 186, 195 Samuel, Edgar, 184 Sandys, George, 164 Sanhedrin, the, 112 sapientia, 92, 95 Saracens, the, 189, 193 Satan, 11, 70, 73, 101, 105–107, 110, 118, 141, 142, 144–148, 151, 163, 169, 175, 187, 188 Sauer, Elizabeth, 8, 10, 19, 26, 35, 44, 45, 133, 152, 154, 158, 175 Saul, 155 and the Amalekites, 21 Saurat, Denis, 4, 84, 85, 115–118, 120–123 Sawday, Jonathan, 44 Saxons, the, 197 Schoeps, Hans, 67 Scholasticism, 137 Schuchard, Ronald, 125 Schwartz, Regina, 52, 53, 83, 100 scientia, Scylla, myth of, 139, 140

225

Second Coming, the, 36, 47, 48, 68, 69 Selden, John, 4, 5, 84, 110, 112, 113, 120, 123 semiology, 138, 148 semitic-centrism, 105, 106 Sensabaugh, George, 109 Sephardic Jews, 7 Shakespeare, William, i, 4–8, 31, 37, 123, 124, 174 Shapiro, James, 5–7, 31, 124, 134–136, 150, 178, 180, 181 Shawcross, John T., 55, 61, 88, 151 Sheils, W. J., 59, 60 Shekinah, the, 110, 117 Shell, Susan M., 67 Shem, 167 Shetty, Sandhya, 151 Shoaf, R. A., 139, 142 Shoulson, Jeffrey S., 4, 5, 9, 13, 14, 19, 24, 26, 32, 33, 37, 38, 50, 53, 56, 64, 75, 76, 84, 88, 110, 120, 151, 153, 156, 157, 168, 169, 177, 184, 197 Shuger, Deborah, 130 Shylock, 61 Sibelius, Caspar, 43 Sikes, George, 64 Silvae. See Statius, Publius Papinius Silver, A, H., 39 Simpson, Evelyn, 92 Sin, 11, 45, 128–130, 133, 136, 138–143, 145–151 Sin and Death, 128, 129, 140, 142 slavery, 22, 26–28, 32, 80, 96, 132, 154, 155, 157–160, 162, 168, 170–172, 174, 176, 182, 186, 191, 193–196, 198 Smith, Lacey Baldwin, 35 Smith, Nigel, 44 Socinian dissidents, 74 Socrates, 90 Sodom and Gomorrah, 77 sola scriptura, 67 Solomon, King, 11, 83, 85–93, 95–104 Solomonic texts, 86 Song of Deborah, 21 Song of Solomon, 87, 103 Spain, 35, 175, 189 Spencer, Edward, 30, 42, 43, 54 Spenser, Edmund, 8, 36, 37, 128, 139, 142, 187, 188 St. John, Elizabeth, 65 Stanwood, P. G., 152 Starkey, John, 78 Statius, Publius Papinius, 81 Stedall, Jacqueline, 73 Sterne, Laurence, 68

226

index

Sterry, Peter, 62, 65 Stevens, Paul, 24, 36, 151, 166 Stollman, Samuel S., 24, 34, 38, 50, 71, 72, 119, 120, 151 Strier, Richard, 130 Stuart Court, the, 175 Stuart kings Davidic associations with, 21 Stuart monarchy, the, 33, 156 Stuarts, the, 154, 156 supersessionism, 70, 71, 75, 77, 80 Sutcliffe, Adam, 67 Swaim, Kathleen, 68 Swedish-Polish war, the, 67 Swetschinski, Daniel M., 69 Synagogues of Satan, 46 Talmud, the, 119 targum, the, 47 Tarshish, 174 Tartars, the, 163–166, 168 Tasso, Torquato, 188 Tempest, The, 166 Temptation to Athens, the, 11, 105, 106, 110, 111, 113, 119 Teschke, Benno, 68 Teskey, Gordon, 129, 139 theological anti-Judaism, 18 Thirty Years’ War, the, 39, 68 Thomas, M. G, Loyd, 73 Thorowgood, Thomas, 165 Thorpe, James, 121 Tillyard, E. M.W., 109 Toon, Peter, 160 Torah, the, 4, 14, 19, 46, 52, 54, 55, 64, 69, 75, 83, 84, 86, 120, 127, 151, 156 Tovey, D’Blossiers, 6, 7 Traske, John, 7, 150 Tredennick, Linda, 11, 128 Trevor, Douglas, 10, 83 Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 62, 74 Trubowitz, Rachel, 11, 151, 193 true Church, the, 15, 184 Truth, allegorical figure of, 26, 45, 52, 146, 198 Tumbleson, Raymond D., 36 Turkish empire, the, 183 Turkish tyranny, 183, 191 Turkishness, 181, 185, 190 Turks, the, 11, 42, 180–183, 190, 193, 194, 196, 198 Turnbull, George H., 62, 63 Tyndale, William, 137, 138 Typhon, 146 typological hermeneutics, 140

typology, 24, 42, 45, 52, 53, 57, 64, 75, 76, 82, 135, 139, 140, 146, 156, 184 Ullmann, Walter, 35 Ulreich, John, 93 Ulverston, 45 ur-Protestants, 49 usury, 10, 61, 72, 73 Milton and, 57 Van den Berg, J., 13 Van Rooden, Peter, 67 VanderWall, Ernestine G, E., 13 Vane, Sir Henry, 64–66 Violet, Thomas, 58–60 Petition against the Jewes, 58 Von Maltzahn, Nicholas, 57, 78, 79 Vorstius, Willem, 84 Wall, Moses, 13, 29, 30, 43, 64–67, 161, 165, 170 friendship with Milton, 64 Wasserman, George, 123 Watkins, W. B. C., 109 Watson, Francis, 133, 178 Watson, Wilfred G. E., 97 Weiner, Gordon M., 13 Weismiller, Edward, 109 Werman, Golda, 3, 4, 9, 76, 84, 85, 120 Whitehall Conference, of 1655, the, 6, 7, 18, 29, 31, 44 Whitgift, John, 111, 112 Williams, Roger, 30, 64, 164, 169 Winslow, Edward, 43, 164 Wisdom, Book of, 92–94, 97, 98, 100, 101, 104 Wittreich, Joseph, 2, 3, 95, 111, 172 Wolf, Lucien, 30, 31, 42, 43, 59, 63 Wolfe, Don M., 13, 15, 37, 38, 58, 63, 71, 85, 106, 130, 153 Wollebius, 69 Wood, Diana, 67, 68 Woodward, Hezekiah, 21 Woolrych, Austin, 66 Worden, Blair, 60 Wordsworth, William, 3, 111, 114, 148 Young, Robert J. C., 152 Zagorin, Perez, 160 Zechariah, 41, 47 Zion, 41, 42, 46 Ziskind, Martha, 113 Zizek, Slavoj, 115 Zohar, the, 9, 118, 119