CHAPTER VII
ON THE EDGE OF PROPHECY:
Puritan England and the Hope of Israel
IN THE YEAR 1649, the very peak and mid-point of Puritan rule in England, two English Puritans of Amsterdam petitioned the government “That this Nation of England, with the inhabitants of the Netherlands, shall be the first and the readiest to transport Izraell’s sons and daughters in their ships to the Land promised to their forefathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob for an everlasting Inheritance.” The petition further requested that the Jews “may again be received and permitted to trade and dwell amongst you in this Land.”
What moved Joanna and Ebenezer Cartwright, authors of the petition, to ask not only that England assist in the restoration of Israel to Palestine but also repeal Edward I’s act of banishment, which had been in force for some three hundred and fifty years? To understand their motive one must realize the transformation wrought by the Bible acting through the Puritan movement. It was as if every influence on thought exerted today by press, radio, movies, magazines were equaled by one book speaking with the voice of God, reinforced by the temporal authority of the Supreme Court. Particularly the Old Testament, with its narrative of a people unalterably convinced of having been chosen by the Lord to do His work on earth, governed the Puritan mind. They applied its narrative to themselves. They were the self-chosen inheritors of Abraham’s covenant with God, the re-embodied saints of Israel, the “battle-ax of the Lord,” in the words of Jeremiah. Their guide was the prophets, their comfort the Psalms. Their devotion, their obedience, their inspiration were owed not to the Heavenly Father of Jesus, but to Jehovah, the Lord God of Hosts. Scripture, the word of God revealed to His chosen people, was their command, on the hearth as on the battlefield, in Parliament as in church.
In the period covered by previous chapters, up to 1600 let us say, Palestine had been to the English a land of purely Christian associations, though lost to the Christian world through the unfortunate intrusion of Islam. Now it came to be remembered as the homeland of the Jews, the land carrying the Scriptural promise of Israel’s return. Interest now centered on fulfilling the Scripture. Starting with the Puritan ascendency, the movement among the English for the return of the Jews to Palestine began.
The movement was not for the sake of the Jews, but for the sake of the promise made to them. According to Scripture the kingdom of Israel for all mankind would come when the people of Israel were restored to Zion. Only then would the world see the advent of the Messiah or, in Christian terms, the Second Advent. The return was visioned, of course, only in terms of a Jewish nation converted to Christianity, for this was to be the signal for the working out of the promise. Such was the hope that animated the Cartwrights, as they plainly stated: “Your Petitioners being conversant in that City [Amsterdam] with and amongst some of the Izraell race called Jews … by discourse with them and serious perusal of the Prophets, both they and we find that the time of her call draweth nigh; whereby they together with us, shall come to know the Emanuell, the Lord of Life, light and Glory.… For the glorious manifestation thereof and pyous meanes thereunto, your Petitioners humbly pray …” and so follows the passage already quoted.
Re-entry of the Jews into England was proposed for two reasons: First, the Puritans believed that, because their doctrines were closer to Judaism, the Jews, once in contact with Puritanism, would no longer resist conversion. “The English are more gifted to convince them,” Henry Jessey, a prominent Puritan divine, wrote in 1656. Secondly, strict bibliolaters insisted that the Jews could not start on their return to Zion until their scattering to every country was complete. Therefore they must be brought to England before they could get to Palestine.
The Cartwright petition, in embodying these ideas, was not a single eccentricity, but a typical and natural product of its time. England, between the sailing of the Mayflower in 1620 and the restoration of the Stuarts in 1666, was in a fanatical mood, perhaps the only fanatical period in her history. It was the England, in Carlyle’s phrase, of “awful devout Puritanism,” the England of the Great Rebellion, of the regicide that produced such a national sense of guilt as has kept England a monarchy ever since; the England of Oliver Cromwell, ‘like a servant of the Lord with his Bible and his sword.”
With the Puritans came an invasion of Hebraism transmitted through the Old Testament, but distorted by the effort to apply to post-Renaissance England the ethics, laws, and manners native to a Middle Eastern people of more than two thousand years earlier. In their devotion to chapter and verse of the Hebrew testaments the Puritans, undaunted by the mental jump of two millennia, adapted to themselves the thoughts of tribal herdsmen groping their way out of idolatry toward monotheism in the time of Abraham, or of slaves triumphing over Pharoah in the time of the Exodus, or of warriors carving the frontiers of a new state in the time of Saul and David. It did not matter that the narrative of the Hebrews’ struggle to achieve a code for communal living according to law, to become a nation, to withstand enemies, to climb like Sisyphus again and again from the slough of sinfulness to the way of the prophets, was a narrative of fierce and far-off times. It did not matter that it covered a period, from Abraham to Maccabaeus, of nearly a millennium and a half; the Puritans swallowed the whole with equal zeal.
It was not a narrative ideally suited for transplanting word for word, as principle and precedent, to seventeenth-century England. But that was what the Puritans attempted. As early as 1573 one of their articles of faith, according to the indictment of Sandys, Bishop of London, was that “the judicial laws of Moses are binding on Christian princes and they ought not in the slightest degree to depart from them.” They followed the letter of the Old Testament for the very reason that they saw their own faces reflected in it. They too were a group led by God in the struggle against idolators and tyrants. His word, His guidance, His law to fit every occasion was written in the Old Testament, and the more closely they hewed to it the more steely and impenetrable was their conviction of righteousness. “The Lord himself hath a controversy with your enemies,” Cromwell wrote to one of his generals. “In this respect we fight the Lord’s battles.”
The Puritans’ mania for the Old Testament developed directly out of their experience of persecution by the Established Church. The Church hounded and harried them, even to the gibbet, because of their refusal to acknowledge any authority other than the Bible and their own congregation. They hated the episcopacy with the same passion that the first Protestants hated the prelacy of Rome, and for the same reason: that the hierarchy, whether episcopal or papal, were self-anoited intruders between man and his God—intruders whose perquisites and power, all too clearly of human origin, made a mockery of religion. The essence of the Puritan faith was the right of every man to interpret God’s law, as embodied in the Bible and only in the Bible, directly to himself and to appeal to that law over any other, whether temporal or ecclesiastic.
Church and state being one, the Crown necessarily joined the Church in attempting to suppress the Independents; that is, those Puritans who, distinct from the Presbyterians, demanded the right to form self-governing congregations. King James in his famous retort, “No bishop, no King,” recognized their ultimate danger to monarchy before they did themselves. Inevitably, as hatred of monarchy was added to hatred of episcopacy, they were led to republicanism. Their religious principles were the seed and root of their political principles. As, disavowal of the divine right of episcopacy led them to disavow the divine right of kings, so affirmation of the individual’s right to liberty of conscience led them to reaffirm man’s civil liberties. It was but one step, as Macaulay put it, from the belief that “as power in church affairs is best lodged in a synod, so temporal power is best lodged in a parliament.”
Persecution, Macaulay continues, “produced its natural effect upon them. After the fashion of oppressed sects … they imagined that in hating their enemies they were hating only the enemies of heaven.” In the Old Testament “it was not difficu
lt for fierce and gloomy spirits to find much that might be distorted to suit their wishes.” They began to feel for the Old Testament a preference that showed itself in all their sentiments and habits. They paid a respect to the Hebrew language that they refused to the language of their Gospels and of the epistles of Paul. “They baptized their children by the names not of Christian saints but of Hebrew patriarchs and warriors. They turned the weekly festival by which the church had from primitive times commemorated the resurrection of her Lord, into the Jewish Sabbath. They sought for precedents to guide their ordinary conduct in the books of Judges and Kings.”
Macaulay waxes more and more indignant as he lays on with his pen against all the unlovable traits of the Puritan: “His gait, his garb, his lank hair, the sour solemnity of his face,” his prohibition of all innocent merriment, his nasal twang and peculiar cant in which Hebraisms were “violently introduced into the English language and metaphors borrowed from the boldest lyric poetry of a remote age and country were applied to the common concerns of English life.”
Ordinarily too schooled a mind to allow his powerful rhetoric to run away with his prejudices, Macaulay on this occasion does not balance the scales fairly. He tells nothing of the evils of the old system that the Puritans were striving to overcome, or of the ideals that led them on. In this he is unfortunately typical. Because the Puritans were not likable, few have done them justice. As a target for ridicule they are as a barn door to a marksman. Nevertheless they gave permanent underpinning to two principles that are at the basis of democratic society: for one thing, the security of parliamentary government; for another, the right of nonconformity or freedom of worship, as we call it today. The principle of toleration is theirs even if they did not practice it—the principle formulated by Browne and Foxe and Roger Williams that brought the Pilgrim Fathers to America and formed the moral basis of a new society in a new world.
If the Puritans discarded mercy and forgiveness in favor of the more bellicose qualities of the Old Testament, it was because they too were fighting against odds to establish a principle and a way of life. The cry of Joshua’s trumpet suited their circumstances better than the plea to turn the other cheek. In the Old Testament they found not only justification for slaying their enemies, but also exhortation to it. Saul “gathered an host and smote the Amalekites and delivered Israel out of the hands of them that spoiled them.” But when he spared the life of Agag, King of the Amalekites, did not the prophet Samuel seize upon Agag, saying, “As thy sword hath made women childless so shall thy mother be childless among women”? “And Samuel hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord in Gilgal.”
Charles I was Agag, or equally Rehoboam, successor of Solomon, who hearkened not unto the people but answered them roughly, “My father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions,” and upon that the Ten Tribes revolted with the cry, “To thy tents, O Israel!” Charles driving along Whitehall found a paper thrust into his carriage inscribed “To thy tents, O Israel!”
Or Charles and the Royalists might figure as Pharaoh and his host, and the first victories at Marston Moor and Naseby were celebrated in the words of Moses’ song of triumph over the Egyptians: “… Thy right hand, O Lord, is become glorious in power; thy right hand, O Lord, has dashed in pieces the enemy.” Likewise the Royalists were the children of Edom or Moab or Babylon. “Cursed be he that keepeth back his sword from blood,” raged Jeremiah against Moab. “Thou shalt be cut down, O madmen; the sword shall pursue thee.… For thus saith the Lord, I will send the sword after them till I have consumed them.… Behold I will punish the King of Babylon and his land and I will bring Israel again to his habitation … and Babylon shall become heaps, a dwelling place for dragons, an astonishment and an hissing, without an inhabitant.”
The English have never really liked themselves in moods of enthusiasm, and later ages have been almost ashamed of the Puritans. Cunningham in the classic work on English economic history wrote: “The general tendency of Puritanism was to discard Christian morality and to substitute Jewish habits in its stead.” The Puritans, he continued, followed “the letter of an ancient code instead of trusting to the utterances of a divinely instructed Christian consciousness … and there was in consequence a retrogression to a lower type of social morality which showed itself at home and abroad.” Whether Puritan morality as exemplified by the massacre of the Irish at Drogheda and similar unedifying exploits was any lower than the morality exemplified by Henry VIII’s execution of Fisher and More, or by the massacre of the Huguenots on St. Bartholomew’s Eve, or by the tortures and burnings of the Inquisition, all done in response to a “divinely instructed Christian consciousness,” is a comparison that Cunningham does not venture to make.
Certainly the vengeful qualities of the ancient Hebrews that the Puritans chose to emulate were on a lower ethical plane than the ideals of the Sermon on the Mount, just as they were on a lower plane than the Ten Commandments given to Moses on Mt. Sinai. The Israelites in all their ups and downs were no better able to abide unswervingly by the ideals of Mt. Sinai than the Christian world has been able to conduct itself according to the ideals of Jesus. The only trouble with Christian morality is that Christians on the whole do not practice it. Whereas the Ten Commandments represent a code that men can follow if they try, the Sermon on the Mount has been, so far, a code beyond the grasp of society.
Although the Puritans did not by any means reject the New Testament, some of the extremists among them did reject the divinity of Jesus, and some went to the stake firm in that denial. Even the moderate Puritans included as one of their demands in the millenary petition to James I that they be no longer required in church to bow at the name of Jesus. In their effort to “purify” religion of vestments, sacraments, genuflections, and so on, the extremists returned to a belief in a God whose divinity could not be shared, the same belief expressed in the synagogue: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God, the Lord is One.” Truth in religion is not a thing to be argued about. The Independents in their preference for an older form have found few champions. Carlyle alone among English historians found them sympathetic. “The last of all our heroisms,” he called them, “the last glimpse of the God-like vanishing from this England; conviction and veracity giving place to hollow cant and formulism—antique ‘reign of God’ which all true men in their several dialects and modes have always striven for, giving place to modern reign of the No-God whom men name the Devil.”
But Carlyle was an oddity; like the Puritan, a passionate, not a reasonable man. A truer estimate of the Puritan effect on the English mind was made by the man of sweet reasonableness, Matthew Arnold. Puritanism, he wrote in Culture and Anarchy, was a revival of the Hebraic spirit in reaction to the Hellenic spirit that had animated the immediately preceding period of the Renaissance. Arnold’s own bent was to Hellenism, which he defined as “to think right,” in contrast to Hebraism, which was “to do right within the law.” Puritanism, he said, was a reaction to the loss of moral fiber that accompanied the Renaissance. In its yearning for obedience to a law it showed “a signal affinity for the bent which was the master-bent of Hebrew life.” It left a lasting imprint on the nation. “Our race,” Arnold declared, “has yet (and a great part of its strength lies here) … a strong share of the assuredness, the tenacity, the intensity of the Hebrews. This turn manifested itself in Puritanism and has had a great share in shaping our history for the last two hundred years.”
A notable turn in the history of the restoration of Israel took place with the settlement of Puritan refugees in Holland, beginning in 1604. For they said, wrote Daniel Neal, their first historian: “It is better to go and dwell in Goshen, find it where we can, than tarry in the midst of such Egyptian bondage as is among us.”
To Holland also had come during the preceding century the Jewish refugees turned out of Spain and Portugal by the Inquisition. They had a flourishing community in Amsterdam numbering many prosperous merchants who played an important role in the trade of t
he Dutch colonies and the general European trade with the Levant. In Holland the Puritan settlers who walked in the footsteps of the ancient Hebrews became acquainted with modern Jews, and the Jews became acquainted with this odd new variety of Christians who advocated religious freedom for all, including Jews. (So long as they were the persecuted ones, the Puritans believed in toleration; after they came to power they began to see its disadvantages.)
Actually, in doctrine alone as distinct from ritual observance, there was little to divide the Independents from Judaism, a fact recognized by members of both faiths. Sects arose among the extremist Puritans who proclaimed themselves Jews in belief and practice according to Levitical law. Some determined individuals went abroad to study under Continental rabbis and acquaint themselves with Talmudic law and literature. In 1647 the Long Parliament appropriated five hundred pounds to buy books “of a very great value, late brought out of Italy and having been the Library of a learned Rabbi there.”
In the course of the approach of Judaism the Puritans came to include the Jews among those who had a right to protection under the banner of toleration. One of the Amsterdam exiles, Leonard Busher, made this point in his tract Religious Peace or a Plea for Liberty of Conscience, which appeared in 1614 and is the earliest publication advocating full freedom of worship. Roger Williams in a more famous tract, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for the Cause of Conscience (1644), said in his opening statement of principles: “It is the will and command of God that since the coming of his Son the Lord Jesus, a permission of the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish or anti-Christian consciences or worships be granted to all men in all nations and countries.… God requireth not a uniformity of religion to be enacted and enforced in any civil state.… True civility and Christianity may flourish in a state or kingdom notwithstanding the permission of divers and contrary consciences either Jew or Gentile.”
Bible and Sword: England and Palestine From the Bronze Age to Balfour Page 14
