This is the second part of a four part series.
This column is to be one devoted to history and not to current events, notwithstanding that they are always conjoined. As William Faulkner is often quoted, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Let us recall where Harvard’s history and lived experience have come from, and how integral Harvard’s Jewish history is to its status as in part truly, one might say, a contemporary Jewish institution at the forefront of our national life. The origins of America’s constitutional democracy derive in part from Harvard’s early colonial experience. The ideologies of the authors of the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and other foundational American ideology can be traced in part to Harvard’s Jewish legacy.
Over a century before the “Spirit of Seventy-Six” intoxicated America’s Founders, earlier seeds were planted by the first European settlers in the New World, including at Harvard. The Mayflower Pilgrims, under the spiritual leadership of Elder William Brewster, were Hebrew Bible (Old Testament)-committed Christians. (Brewster, in a typical irony of the American melting pot, is the twelve-times-great-grandfather of the author of this article; but George Washington has a descendant who is a rabbi trained at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati!) Although social realities meant that Brewster knew no rabbis, and the Pilgrims knew few if any Jews, they revered Moses above all as their law-giver. The Exodus modeled their own flight from Christian persecution in Europe. The Pilgrim’s Code of Laws of 1636 was derived from the Hebrew Bible. In their secular government branches of executive, legislative and judicial, they followed the tripartite structure of the ancient Hebrew Commonwealth with its Shofet, Sanhedrin and Knesset years before Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws provided the same structure for eighteenth century political philosophy.
Of course, the Pilgrims and Puritans meant to establish their colonies as Christian societies, but endless dissenters, of whom Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson are only the two most famous, assured very early that no colonial community would have a monopoly in religious or secular rule. The founders of Harvard and of so many other schools, colleges, churches and governments in New England and beyond quickly learned that any sort of theocracy or even autocracy would not work in America. Here, successful governance would not allow a society without reference to the idea of freedom of conscience and independence from tyranny.
After Massachusetts Bay Colony established its first educational institution on this continent in 1636 for the education of the successors to William Bradford in secular governance and to Elder Brewster in religion (and as Isaac Mayer Wise would first do for rabbis 239 years later in founding the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati), Harvard required a thorough knowledge of Hebrew of every student. Harvard education gradually became a font of liberal learning. Also in the same year of Harvard’s founding, Puritans at Harvard began translating the Psalms from Hebrew into English. The first book of lasting importance to be published in North America was the Bay Psalm Book. This book, printed in the house of John Dunster, the first president of Harvard, was used by nearly every congregation and school of New England for decades. (For bibliophiles, this book is far rarer than a Shakespeare First Folio and compares in price to a Gutenberg Bible.)
Well over a century before the Declaration of Independence, in 1655 Harvard established the first chair on the continent in Hebrew. In succession, other early seminaries and colleges, which today go by the names of Yale, Columbia, Dartmouth, Brown, Princeton, Johns Hopkins and the University of Pennsylvania, followed suit mandating literacy in the Hebrew Bible in its original language. At Princeton only a century later, the Father of the Constitution of the United States, a young James Madison, would major in and become completely literate in Hebrew and well-versed in ancient Hebraic literature and law.
The first American Hebrew grammar book was published by the first Jew known to receive a Harvard degree before the nineteenth century, Judah Monis. Born in 1683 in Italy to Portuguese conversos, he was drawn to Harvard, which early sought his skills and gladly welcomed him to the faculty — upon the formality of his Christian baptism, of course, in 1722 under the tutelage of Increase and Cotton Mather, then Harvard’s president. Monis was baptized in Harvard Hall (where, incidentally, British troops were later garrisoned until General Washington tricked them into abandoning their occupation of Boston and where the author of this article took a course, some years later, on the history of Israel taught by an Egyptian Jew). Monis, despite his conversion, nevertheless remained an observant Jew for the rest of his life; the Inquisition could not reach him at Cambridge, and the College did not interfere with his Jewish practice such as his Shabbat observance. When Ezra Stiles became president of Yale in the year following the Declaration of Independence, he not only continued the mandatory study of Hebrew in New Haven but added required study of Talmud in Aramaic and of Kabbalistic mystical texts. (Only in recent years has Hebrew Union College taken Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism seriously, so antithetical has it seemed to the Haskalah-inspired German-Jewish temperament of the Reform Movement.)
This is the second part of a four part series. Stay tuned next week for the next part of the history column.
