Uncovering the Jewish Roots of American Liberty
Almost two centuries ago, in Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville celebrated the harmony that existed in this country between the spirit of liberty and the spirit of religion, in contrast to the situation in his native France. Precisely because of the religious freedom Americans enjoyed, their practice of it was all the more widespread and sincere. And because of our constitutional prohibition on the establishment of a religious sect, Americans perceived a depoliticized religion as a bulwark of morality and hence of political freedom (as founders like Washington and Adams contended). Hence even intelligent atheists, Tocqueville observed, saw it in their collective interest to encourage its practice.
How things have changed. First, a series of Supreme Court decisions has read the First Amendment’s establishment clause in a radical way, completely unintended by its authors, to prohibit any governmental endorsement of religion as opposed to atheism.
Adding to our contemporary political-religious dilemma, of course, is the rise of often-violent attacks on American Jews, and open expressions of anti-Semitism by elected officials, journalists, and podcasters at extremes of both Left and Right, of a sort once thought to have disappeared in this country after World War II.
In this situation, Jewish Roots of American Liberty is most timely. The editors, Wilfred McClay (chairholder in history at Hillsdale College) and Stuart Halpern (a rabbi and official of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University) explain the volume as resulting from a series of programs titled “Restoring the American Story,” aimed chiefly at educators working in Jewish and non-Jewish school settings and educational nonprofits. Its goal was to demonstrate “the closeness and foundational character of the relationship between the American experience and the Jewish experience,” a proximity that “has eluded” both Jews and American “for much of American history.”
Whereas the relationship between Judaism and Christianity was long thought to be “antagonistic,” “the rising challenge of a militant secularism in the West, openly hostile to Israel and to many elements of the traditional Judeo-Christian heritage,” now enables “believing Christians and Jews” to appreciate their underlying commonalities. The volume aims both to remind Jews of their “immense debt” to America, a “generous and welcoming land” that has provided rare opportunities for their flourishing, and to illuminate America’s “profound and incalculable debt to the Jews” for providing the “metaphysical, moral, and anthropological foundation” upon which much of our “experiment in democratic self-government was erected,” as well as their contributions to the subsequent “making and improving” of this country’s “soul.”
Jewish Roots opens with an essay by McClay that reverses the usual order of controversies over the role of religion in education by urging faith-based schools, of whatever denomination (but especially Jewish ones), to incorporate the serious study of U.S. history in their curricula. McClay’s series of arguments, including the Founders’ agreement on the importance of religion as well as the need to unify immigrants of diverse religious backgrounds, culminates in his contention that “in a postmodern world dominated by immense bureaucratic governments” and “transnational business corporations,” neither seeming responsive to individual needs nor supportive of an established, respectable moral code, “religion serves as an indispensable counterweight,” upholding human dignity and rights, thus “counteracting the negative tendencies of even the most benign secular institutions.” To illustrate, he reminds us of the role of nineteenth-century evangelical churches in the abolitionist movement, along with John Paul II’s leadership in overthrowing the Soviet tyranny over central Europe.
The remaining twenty chapters are divided into four parts, respectively addressing “The Influence of the Hebrew Bible on the American Founding,” its influence on “American Culture,” “American Presidents’ Appreciation of Jewish Contributions,” and “The Meaning of Jewish History for Americans.” Focusing first on Part Two, I particularly recommend Halpern’s witty five chapters on the significance that Americans attached to diverse Biblical heroes (David, Esther, Samson, the prophet Elijah, and Daniel).
More extended and serious literary studies that conclude Part Two are McClay’s “Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Hebraic Strain in American Thought” and Ariel Clark Silver’s “The Story of Hagar and American Exile.” Using nineteenth-century critic Matthew Arnold’s distinction between “Hellenism” (which aims to “see things as they really are” and “celebrates man’s capacity for perfection and glory”) and “Hebraism” (which emphasizes “conduct and obedience” and reminds us of our “capacity for ignominy and shamefulness”), McClay treats Arnold’s distinction as a “variant” of the tension or antagonism between reason and revelation identified by Leo Strauss as constituting “the nerve of Western intellectual history.” He then views the dominant spirit of Jacksonian America, exemplified by writers Emerson and Whitman, who “envisioned the ideal American future as a life of radical, unconditional” freedom, as celebrating the rationalistic perspective. (I must note that Strauss did not identify classic philosophic rationalism in quite that manner.)
McClay then turns to Hawthorne, who, he maintains, “propelled by … Hebraic skepticism,” “thr[e]w cold water on” the Jacksonian optimists. Drawing on several of Hawthorne’s early Twice-Told Tales along with The Scarlet Letter, McClay argues that they challenge the “culture of mastery” that accompanies modern “scientific and technological knowledge,” and which “has worked to displace the cultural centrality of Christianity and Judaism” but without being “able to replace them,” since science can neither “instruct us in how to live” nor “relieve” our (inevitable) sense of “guilt.” Hence Hawthorne may induce us to exercise moderation in the use of our technical mastery, while looking beyond it to find meaning in our lives.
Silver’s study addresses the thought of two others among mid-nineteenth-century America’s greatest writers, Herman Melville and Harriet Beecher Stowe, showing how they applied the story of Abraham’s exiled servant wife and son, Hagar and Ishmael, to the situation of American slaves. Melville named the narrator (and sole survivor) of Moby-Dick after Abraham’s dispossessed son, implying a connection between “the plight of Hagar and Ishmael” and what he foresaw as the forthcoming breakup of the Union, following the unjust 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. Ahab, captain of Ishmael’s ill-fated ship, is named after a Biblical king “who acted imperially, supported idolatry, and presided over moral decline.” Like his namesake, however, Melville’s Ishmael “survives by getting out” (having been rescued by a ship named The Rachel, an allusion to the words of the prophet Jeremiah). In turn Stowe, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, depicts the separation of the slaves Aunt Hagar and her son Albert, albeit not only from their household, but from each other.
Part Three includes Washington’s letter on religious toleration to the Jewish congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, along with correspondence with the congregations of Savannah and other cities. But while the section also appropriately includes an analysis of the partly biblical foundation of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, along with the texts of addresses by Theodore Roosevelt and his vice president commemorating the 250th anniversary of Jewish settlement in America in 1905, I particularly call to readers’ attention the extended, learned address given twenty years later by our most-underrated president, Calvin Coolidge, on “Jewish Contributions to American Democracy.” From it I can quote here only Coolidge’s observation that “the Jewish faith is predominantly the faith of liberty,” as he demonstrates by Jews’ political, economic, and military support of our Revolution.
I must single out for partial correction chapters two through four of Part One, each of which, perhaps from a desire to justify this book’s title, unfortunately underestimates the influence on America’s founding of that preeminently rationalistic, liberal thinker John Locke. While Dov Lerner in the chapter titled “John Milton: Breaker of Chains” persuasively demonstrates the influence of the great English poet, republican, and theologian on eighteenth-century Americans’ political thinking, preparing them to overthrow monarchy in favor of liberty, and noting how Founders including Jefferson, Madison, Adams, and Paine all cited him, he provides no evidence that Milton’s writings “lie at the root of the U.S. Constitution.”
In Chapter Three, “The Judeo-Christian Tradition and the Rise of American Religious Liberty,” Mark David Hall similarly attributes Americans’ “embrace of religious liberty” more to “the Judeo-Christian tradition” than to the Enlightenment. While describing the evolution of Americans’ appreciation of religious freedom from the relative sternness of the original colonists, he provides no intellectual explanation for that development.
Finally, in “The Hebrew Bible and the Political Culture of the American Founding,” Daniel L. Dreisbach goes so far as to claim that “[t]he Constitution’s basic design,” including “the separation of powers and checks and balances, reflected an awareness of the Christian doctrine of original sin,” which demonstrated the need to “guard against the concentration and abuse of government powers vested in fallen human nature.” But aside from the fact that the doctrine of original sin and men’s “fallen” nature is not at all part of Jewish theology, Dreisbach unpersuasively cites Madison’s “men are not angels” observation in to illustrate his acceptance of the “Reformed theological doctrine of radical depravity,” even while acknowledging that the Founders “were well aware” of the presence of “ideas like republicanism” in non-Hebraic traditions. He then retreats to contending that the biblical precedent “reassured many pious Americans” that republicanism enjoyed Divine sanction.
Part Four starts with an account by historian Jonathan Sarna on how and why Jews should study their history, with a focus not on “identity formation” but rather on “tensions and continuities within the American Jewish experience,” as well as showing Jewish students their capacity potentially to change history’s “course.” A more substantial chapter on “What Jews Mean to America,” by Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, director of the Straus Center, addresses the reason for the millennia-old hatred of the Jews in the Western world, namely the very persistence of Judaism for so many centuries, even as other nations and empires rose and fell; and the reasons why Jews found a home in America: we are a nation that believed itself to have been chosen by Providence to offer “a new order for the ages,” just as “ancient Israel had been chosen to bring the monotheistic message” (which undergirds the notion of equal human rights) “to humanity.” Today, Soloveichik argues, the fates of America and the Jews are intertwined as never before, along with that of Israel, as “the West [has] lost faith in itself” and “in faith” itself, with the European Union drafting a constitution in 2004 containing a “preposterous preface [that] described the history of Europe without a single mention of Christianity.” No wonder so many Americans of faith support Israel: as journalist Walter Russell Mead observes, “Israel’s story supports faith.”
The concluding essay by Eric Cohen, head of the Tikvah Fund, “The Message from Jerusalem,” elaborates that theme by citing Attorney General William Barr’s 2019 remarks at Notre Dame University addressing the “malaise” and growing “chaos” of American society, as evidenced by “the high incidence of broken families,” soaring rates of suicide, depression, and drug addiction, and an army of “angry and alienated young males.” Barr attributed these ills to the “assault on religion and traditional values” launched by secularists and “progressives.”
To Barr’s query of how to fill Americans’ “spiritual void,” Cohen observes, some Christians have turned to the “pre-Christian understanding of human life and human nature” found in the Hebrew Bible. In cheering “for Jerusalem,” argues Cohen, “religious Christians seem to grasp … that Jews are the clearest evidence and starkest reminder of the Western world’s fighting Hebraic spirit,” despite the endeavors of today’s ostensibly tolerant secularists to stamp out the Judeo-Christian vision as “absolutist.”
Despite the irresolvable theological difference between Judaism and Christianity, Cohen points out, both religions “share a vision of the human person shaped by Abraham’s moral passion,” Mosaic law, “the spiritual yearnings of David, and Hannah’s longing for a child.” And unlike Christian Scripture, the Hebrew Bible, in such books as Exodus, Joshua, Samuel, and Esther, offers a “political realism” that may assist both religions, and hence Western civilization, to survive.