On June 29, 1720, Judah Monis (1683–1764) presented a manuscript to the administrators at Harvard College, describing his work as an attempt “to facilitate the Instruction of Youth in the Hebrew Language” with hopes that it might “be published.”Footnote 1 The faculty were no doubt surprised that a Jew would offer to teach Hebrew at Harvard, but it was clear that Monis’s mastery of the language could not be rivaled by anyone else in New England at that time. It also likely helped that Monis framed his expertise in language familiar to his Christian correspondents: “I think the more acquainted ye Ministers of the Gospel are with the Hebrew Tongues, and so with the old Testament, the Better able they will be to understand the New Testament & so to preach our glorious Lord Jesus Christ who was spoken of by all the old Testament prophets.”Footnote 2 An excited Cotton Mather described Monis’s offer in his diary: “a Jew rarely comes over to us, but he brings treasures with him.”Footnote 3
Unfortunately for Monis, the college was ill-prepared to support him in his endeavors. In addition to his feeling that his salary was “not sufficient to support” his livelihood, there was little follow-up on his request to publish his manuscript textbook. After his students complained that Monis required them to tediously hand-copy his manuscript into their own textbooks, the Harvard board eventually agreed to provide printed copies. What they did not anticipate, however, was the inability of the colonial printing press to produce a text with as extensive an amount of Hebrew as appeared in Monis’s textbook. As Monis recorded, “I thought therefore to facilitate said Instructions, it was necessary to Compose One more full and correct [Hebrew grammar]; But for want of Hebrew Types in these remote parts of the World, it could not be Accomplished till now.”Footnote 4 The Hebrew instructor’s observation sheds light on a continuing problem with the colonial printing press: it was imbued with the weight of Protestant universality to translate the Gospel message to everyone within reach, yet was only ever designed to narrowly produce English texts for Anglo-Protestant readers.
Anglo-American Protestant culture’s constraints on Hebrew publications demonstrates the phenomenon I call Protestant Hebrew. The term captures performances of linguistic difference that imagines entire groups without actually facilitating communication and translating meaning across cultural divides. Its internal-facing logics suggest that Protestant Hebrew was a means for Anglo-American Protestants to fashion themselves as modern successors to Jews and Catholics, narrate their relevance to millennialism, and yoke themselves to broader English colonizing ambitions in the Americas. These internal logics were not new, and they reflected the longer history of European Christian performances of othering in order to reinforce “an anxious Christian identity” across disparate European identities, polities, and cultures.Footnote 5 As Shalom Goldman has observed about Hebrew productions in New England, Puritans created an “original language of the text sacred to [them].” What made that language distinct was its orientalist function. Protestant performances of Hebrew constructed Jews, Goldman argued, as “a primitive people . . . who were of little contemporary relevance except for millennial groups.”Footnote 6 He offered the term “Divinity School Hebrew” to underscore a functional difference from how diasporic, largely Spanish-speaking Jews, relied on Hebrew in manuscript and liturgy as “a necessary instrument for maintaining their identity” in diaspora.Footnote 7 Goldman was responding to a longer history of scholarship on Christian Hebraism, the study of Christian interest in the Semitic origins of their scriptures, which has too readily assumed Hebrew to be a linguistic bridge between Christian and Jewish communities.Footnote 8
In proffering the term “Protestant,” this article builds on Goldman’s observation to describe a religious and cultural phenomenon that extended beyond Puritan educational institutions to include Congregationalist, Anglican, and Quaker publishing contexts in British colonial North America.Footnote 9 It denotes a specific kind of colonial project that imagined a diasporic Hebrew-speaking Jewish population for whom performances of Hebrew could establish the superiority of Anglo-American Protestantism over and against Spanish Catholicism in the greater Americas. Protestant Hebrew also situated Anglo-American Protestants familiar with the language as uniquely capable of facilitating Jews’ conversion through discourse and debate over scriptures. Their performance of Hebrew pointed toward an original, truer, and largely inaccessible scripture, which untrained laity could not interpret without the assistance and direction of those trained in biblical languages.
These dynamics spread widely within colonial society. Harvard alone boasted about 440 graduates trained in the Hebrew language from its inception in the beginning of the seventeenth century until the beginning of the eighteenth century. It was following in the footsteps of the University of Cambridge, which had mandated Hebrew learning since 1534. By the next century, Yale and Dartmouth would similarly require their students to learn Hebrew. Graduates from these programs would become colonial ministers, missionaries, college administrators, poets, and even printers.Footnote 10 Their education in Protestant Hebrew was facilitated by textbooks, dictionaries and grammar books in various languages, and theses that viewed Hebrew as the archetype of all languages—all of which primed students who would become ministers and laity for precisely such performances of authority over the meanings of scripture.Footnote 11
Protestant Hebrew’s ability to signify both religious authority and an imagined people group receptive to conversion would shape the very mechanisms of the printing press itself. As Tracy Fessenden has argued, dominant religious cultures assert their power as “bearers and shapers of a language that makes some forms of discursive experience available while it ignores, excludes, or suppresses others.”Footnote 12 Protestant Hebrew’s material history reveals this co-constitutive relationship between Anglo-Protestant culture and print technology. Since Protestant performances of Hebrew necessitated only the occasional Hebrew type to signal to English readers an inaccessible scriptural text, printers brought from London only the amount of type to meet this particular use. What little Hebrew that appears in the Bay Psalm Book (1640), the earliest text produced in the colonies by Elizabeth Glover’s Cambridge Press, evidenced this dynamic. The text was an English translation of a Hebrew original that retained some key words such as “psalms,” “hymns,” and “blessings,” but never entire sentences or passages. In order to accommodate this hybrid text, the operators of the Cambridge Press, Matthew and Stephen Day, opted to carve specialized wooden Hebrew types rather than import more metal text-types from London. These temporary measures set the stage for the much longer history of frustrations with the colonial printing press to accommodate any text with extensive Hebrew and perhaps prevented Jews’ own printed performances of Hebrew that might have challenged Anglo-Protestant skill in explicating scripture.
The narrow design of the printing press would appear in another example, involving the famed missionary John Eliot. His Indian Library, which consisted of Wôpanâak translations of English texts like the Genevan Bible, was conceived for purportedly Native American use. Linguistic and typographical gaps between English and a phonetic version of Wôpanâak required many accommodations. Eliot had to order an additional eighty pounds of type from London, likely extra Ks and Qs, and specialized “oo” type to capture sounds and consonants more common to spoken Wôpanâak than English. The scale of the project also broke the printing press several times over: according to records, Green charged the New England Company, the primary funder of the project, twice—once in 1662, for “hide for the presse being broken”; and once in 1664, “To expense about the Presse for mending it; making New Chases twenty seven skins for balls &c.”Footnote 13 As it was, the printing press was barely capable of producing any text in transliterated Wôpanâak. These initial moments of accommodation and frustration demonstrate the narrow design and function of colonial printing.
Given the limitations of the printed medium in the seventeenth century, one could expect that the growing print market of the following century would have expanded the technology’s capabilities. However, not much changed. Colonial Jews, instead of relying on local printers and booksellers for their wares, were confronted with a printing press that was incapable of printing in both Hebrew and Spanish in quality and quantity comparable to European productions. Instead, they continued to rely on imported liturgical and literary texts from London and Amsterdam. It remained clear that what few Hebrew text-types were available and whatever skillsets printers had to properly set the type were only ever sufficient for Protestant use. These differences were far from incidental and reflected the embedded Anglo-American Protestant assumptions around the public sphere that mobilized the printing press for its universalizing project but never sought to realize its democratic capabilities beyond English texts, authors, and audiences. Such constraints persisted through the eighteenth century in a way that lends the colonial public sphere its distinctly Anglo-Protestant character.
This analysis also introduces an important overlap between language production, theological discourse, and race. The history of Protestant Hebrew was closely aligned with Euro-American theories about Native Americans as one of the lost tribes of Israel. It was promulgated by the publications of Menasseh Ben Israel in the seventeenth century but popularized within English publishing networks by Thomas Thorowgood’s Jews in America (1660).Footnote 14 These ideas made their way to Roger Williams, who was in regular correspondence with Thorowgood. In his own publication, A Key Into the Language of America, or an Help to the Language of the Natives in that part of America called New-England (1643), Williams observed that “some of [Narragansett] words to hold affinitie with the Hebrew” and that “they constantly anointed their heads as the Jewes did.”Footnote 15 Any affinity between Hebrew and Native languages would be repeatedly dispelled, but their connected histories of testing the limits of the printing press underscore how race shaped the very literary and market imaginaries around colonial printing: namely that Wôpanâak and Hebrew would remain intimately tied to Protestant ministers’ hopes that those languages could signify Natives’ and Jews’ innate capacity for conversion, their readiness to become captive audiences for ministers’ religious performances, and later a reminder of Anglo-American Protestant ministers’ repeated failures to convert them.Footnote 16 It was in this American religious publishing matrix, where interreligious exchange was both imagined and foreclosed, that the production of something like Protestant Hebrew, and its ability to ultimately signify Protestant aspirations, was possible.
In three sections, this article explores the contours of Protestant Hebrew: its original function and audience; their material effects on the linguistic capabilities of the printing press; and subsequent wariness from Jews and frustration from Protestants. Chronologically, the article also charts the process by which a dominant religious culture shaped media technology, which would then set the terms by which marginalized communities would be constrained to voice and represent themselves publicly. The first section explores the earliest seventeenth-century publications, which adorned themselves with the orientalist flair of Hebrew characters, which would come to signify Protestant ministerial skill and training. Rather than communicating or clarifying biblical terms, uses of Hebrew often created interpretive dependencies between ministers and readers. The second section examines the effects of limited Hebrew on colonial Jews. The printing presses’ limited Hebrew ensured that conversion texts like Solomon Franco’s Truth Springeth out of the Earth: That Is, The Truth of Christ Proved out of the Earthly Promises of the Law (1668) could not possibly have been produced in the colonies. The marked absence of Hebrew text-types created tremendous delays, frustrations, and accommodations for instructors like Judah Monis, translators like Joseph Pinto, and even Protestant ministers like Charles Chauncy. The complicated history of Hebrew text-types reveals the extent to which the printing press was ever truly fitted for certain kinds of Anglo-Protestant productions. The last section covers Jewish perspectives on Anglo-American Protestant printing. Publication histories for Haim Carigal’s sermon and Isaac Pinto’s English translation of a prayer book illustrate how questions about linguistic difference, public rhetoric, translations, and audience involve the politics of religious belonging. They also demonstrate how language performances could become crucial sites of power, contestation, and negotiation. These dynamics made even the most public colonial Jews reluctant to view the colonial printing press as simply a technology that facilitated textual reproduction. Instead, it was clearly an extension of Anglo-American Protestant power in shaping the terms of public discourse.
Performing Protestant Hebrew in Print
During the Protestant Reformation, texts written and printed in Hebrew became an important resource for Protestant primitivists trying to locate some original Hebrew Testament that they believed had been untainted by centuries of Catholic or Rabbinic scholarship. An original text held the promise that the earliest version of scripture would best reflect the meaning God had intended for the universal Church. Despite this history, which would suggest immense investment in studying and producing Hebrew, the colonial printing presses’ limited capabilities evidenced a much narrower function for producing the language. Ministers would, on occasion, adorn their texts with the occasional Hebrew, either to create situations of interpretive dependence by aesthetically signaling an imagined, inaccessible ‘original’ text that some readers were not trained to understand, or to assist readers with constructing an image of Jews as an ancient people group lost in time. These origins of Protestant Hebrew explain why, even if Jews sought to publish any text with extensive Hebrew in the seventeenth-century British colonies, it would not have been possible.Footnote 17
The earliest attempts to print Hebrew in the British colonies were centered around Protestant interpretation and authority. The Bay Psalm Book retained, at most, nineteen Hebrew characters on one page of what was largely an English translated text. With such a small amount of Hebrew, it was no wonder that the wooden types sufficed for this project. These characters did more to decorate the text than to communicate some profound meaning to those who could not understand Hebrew.Footnote 18 For example, the ministers who penned the preface showcased specific Hebrew words like “psalms,” “hymns,” “spiritual songs,” “God,” and “blessing,” followed immediately by their English translations. Furthermore, psalms were usually sung in a congregational setting but there was little guidance for Protestant lay readers on how to properly pronounce these Hebrew words out loud. Not only were they untrained in reading the language, but these characters were missing diacritical marks: accents appearing either on top of or below individual Hebrew characters that could function like English vowels to aid with oral pronunciation. Hence, even for those trained in Hebrew, there did not seem to be any intention for these texts to be recited.Footnote 19 Congregants were left relying on ministerial direction for their meaning and proper recitation. These uses of Hebrew, which created situations of interpretive dependence by aesthetically signaling inaccessible meaning, illustrated one of the ways in which the orientalist flair of Hebrew visually signified Protestant ministerial skill and training.
Similar dynamics appeared in print controversies in seventeenth-century Philadelphia. The printer William Bradford controversially published his fellow Quaker George Keith’s The New England’s Spirit of Persecution Transmitted to Pennsylvania (1693). The text was a rebuttal against the accusations by the Quaker governing body against both author and printer: for Keith, it was his religious dissent; for Bradford, it was his willingness to publish for Keith without the approval of the board who hired him.Footnote 20 Bradford had not printed much Hebrew but he had just enough type to accommodate the twenty-three Hebrew characters Keith needed to explain why “impudent rascal” was an appropriate term to use during a public assembly.Footnote 21 Hebrew gave readers the sense that Keith’s position stood on more scriptural, scholarly, and therefore authoritative grounds than that of the board. Keith argued that his accusers made too much of him using the term “impudent rascal” against a fellow Quaker. As part of his defense, he comically presented a brief etymology of the phrase in its Hebrew roots. Scriptural citations appeared throughout the text, but the little Hebrew that was printed appeared only in support of Keith’s case.
A central feature of Protestant Hebrew was that ministers rarely used it to address or speak to Jews most proximate to them. By the 1650s, Jews from Brazil had already settled in New Amsterdam; similarly, Jews from Barbados had settled in Newport, Rhode Island, less than 100 miles south of Boston. Even within New England, where most Jews were not officially permitted to settle, town records evidenced the porousness of Puritan governance: from one instance of “David the Jew,” who was reportedly fined for trading goods and was listed in town records by 1670 as an “inhabitant,” to the mention of a trader named Solomon, a “malatta Jew” who was caught violating the Puritan Sabbath in 1668.Footnote 22 Protestant clergy certainly hoped for their conversion. As the famous Puritan minister Cotton Mather wrote in his journal in a July 1696 entry, “I lifted up my cries: For the conversion of the Jewish nation, and for my own having the happiness. . . to baptize a Jew, that should by my ministry be brought home to the Lord.”Footnote 23 However, given Protestant writings were in English with the occasional Hebrew flair, such texts did not seem to anticipate or expect to actually reach Jews for whom English was not their primary language, nor was the amount of Hebrew printed familiar enough to them to have been in the same genre as texts they would have regularly used.Footnote 24 Hence, it was clear that the primary audience for Hebrew production by Protestant ministers was other Protestants.
Given the disconnect between Protestants’ use of Hebrew and the lived experience of Jews in the Americas, Protestant Hebrew itself performed another important function: it imagined Jews in the Americas for whom the printing of Hebrew in English texts could establish Protestant skill and expertise. The operative word here is “imagine” because the English-speaking Jewish reader whom ministers envisioned would be receptive to Protestant performances of Hebrew was far from representative of the majority of Jews in the colonial Americas. Most Jews whom colonists would encounter had fled the Iberian Peninsula out of fear of persecution by the Inquisition and had made their way to the British colonies through the greater Americas. Most of them spoke either Portuguese, Spanish, or Dutch, depending on whether they had arrived in the Americas directly from the peninsula or had travelled to Holland first before crossing the Atlantic. Merchants had to be fluent in numerous languages, including English and French as well.
Furthermore, what Protestants understood about Hebrew as a biblical language seemed detached from the many lived ways in which Sephardic Jews relied on it to sustain transatlantic communities and networks. Given restrictions on printing Hebrew in the Iberian Peninsula, Jews from Amsterdam circulated and distributed manuscript scriptures, unauthorized prayer books, educational materials, Bible substitutes, and history books, thereby facilitating Hebrew textuality discreetly, away from the watchful gaze of the Catholic church.Footnote 25 These materials assisted local hazzans in the Americas who led liturgical readings in lieu of a rabbi and ensured the survival of proper observances of Jewish services and holidays in North American synagogues like Congregation Shaerith Israel in New York and Congregation Mickve Israel in Savannah, Georgia.Footnote 26 Handwritten scrolls of the law also made their way to communities in the French West Indies, Barbados, and French Guiana.Footnote 27 And educated elites boasted libraries filled with various Hebrew books, commentaries, kabbalistic literatures, and scrolls.Footnote 28
It was within this robust transatlantic Jewish network that, in 1646, Recife rabbi Isaac Aboab de Fonseca (1605–93) authored one of the first Hebrew texts written in the Americas: “Zekher asiti leniflaot El” (Reminded Was I of God’s Miracles). The manuscript poem reflected on the Dutch and Jewish military resistance to the Portuguese Inquisition in Brazil. The loss of the colony to the Portuguese would eventually lead to the migration of Brazilian Jews to North America.Footnote 29 Similar works commemorating Jewish life and survival likely circulated throughout the Atlantic in later decades. One such text from 1785, titled in Dutch and Hebrew, and published in Amsterdam, Beschrijving van de plechtigheden, nevens de lofdichten en gebeden uitgesproken op het eerste Jubelfeest van de Sunagogue der Portugeesche Joodsche gemeente commemorated the hundredth anniversary of the Suriname synagogue Beracha Ve-shalom. This work detailed the festivities around the event itself, noted the local officials that attended, and narrated the history of the congregation to readers.Footnote 30 Many of these productions demonstrate the connective functions of Hebrew alongside Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese for the Jewish diaspora in the early modern period.
Similarly, Sephardic Jewish wills, tombstones, and marriage documents across the Americas deployed Hebrew in varying capacities to express newfound freedoms from the Portuguese and Spanish Inquisitions.Footnote 31 In some of these instances, Hebrew characters were used as a signature to refer to someone’s name, as in the case of Samuel Levy, brother of the New York merchant Moses Levy, who attested to the will of a Joseph Brown in both English and Hebrew.Footnote 32 At times, Hebrew was used to inscribe scriptural passages, as with the tombstone of Esther de Leon (1770–1817), which was adorned with a Hebrew biblical verse accompanied by an epitaph in Spanish, or that of Sara d’Anivia (1750–1803) whose epitaphs bore a Hebrew caption and Portuguese text.Footnote 33 One of the earliest Ketubbah or marriage contracts in America dates to 1751 and was signed between the merchant Hayman Levy and Sloe Myers, both attendees of Congregation Sherith Israel in eighteenth-century New York.Footnote 34 This particular document was written entirely in Hebrew and was likely imported from either London or Amsterdam. These texts reveal the transatlantic networks by which Sephardic Jews across the Americas sustained connections, liturgy, and identity in diaspora.Footnote 35
Hebrew (along with Spanish) also connected different generations from within Jewish communities in the Americas, particularly when second- and third-generation Jews in the Anglophone world were beginning to adopt English as their primary or secondary language. The tensions were apparent in correspondences of migrants like Abigail Levy Franks, a London-born Ashkenazi Jewish woman whose family lived in New York. In her letters, she reminded her son Naphtali about their Jewish roots through linguistic cues. Although she was Ashkenazi, the Sephardic Jewish community in New York nevertheless seemed to influence which languages she associated with her Jewish identity.Footnote 36 In one instance, she quoted a Spanish idiom to her son regarding the death of one of their family friends: “dolor de’ Codo Y: dolor de Esposo Devello mucho mas duro poco” which roughly translates to “a pain in the elbow and the pain for a spouse hurts a great deal, but lasts a short time.”Footnote 37 She also signed off most of her letters with “QDG,” which was a Spanish phrase for “quo Dies guarde” or “whom God protect,” as a way to wish her son well. These cues often accompanied reminders for her son to remember Jewish observances and her own reflections on her Jewish identity. In one letter, sensing that Naphtali had not been keeping to his Jewish dietary restrictions, she reminded him sternly: “I Desire you will Never Eat Anything with [your brother Ashers] Unless it be bread & butter, nor noe where Else where there is the Least doubt of things not done after our Strict Judaiacall method.”Footnote 38
Abigail was also quick to remind him that, although she was strict when it came to their practices, she was fashioning her own sense of identity as an immigrant English-Ashkenazi Jew among more native Sephardic Jews in New York. As someone who “Look Open the Observance Conscientiously,” she began to express more Protestant-like sentiments toward her traditions. She wrote to her son, “I cant help Condemning the Many Superstions wee are Clog’d with & heartly wish a Calvin or Luther would rise amongst Us. . . . for I don’t think religion Consist in Idle Cerimonies & works of Supperoregations, Wich if they Send people to heaven, wee & the papist have the Greatest title too.”Footnote 39 At the heart of these tensions, however, was language, whereby she assured her son that her daughter Phila was learning “Spanish, hebrew, and writing in the morning” and that she was pleased “at her advancement in ye Spanish.” While Spanish was not the primary language of Abigail’s Ashkenazi Judaism, it was nevertheless much more proximate to that sense of identity and belonging than perhaps even English. As the scholar Marcus Jacobs observed: “for among the Sephardim, Spanish had assumed an almost sacred character.”Footnote 40 These lived ways of producing Hebrew, both as a way of connecting with the broader diasporic Jewish community and as a language for narrating their experiences in the Americas, operated independently of the Protestant attempts to use the language to signify their authority over an imagined people group.
Protestant Hebrew’s function—disconnected from Sephardic Jews—as a claim to religious authority, a linguistic performance for Anglo-Protestants, and participating in imagining people groups, was most apparent in Cotton Mather’s failed attempt to convert the Jewish merchants Samuel and Joseph Frazon. Among the New England elite, the Frazon brothers were known for their extensive knowledge about the history of Jews in the Americas. They introduced local ministers to “the Spanish Bible” (which was likely a copy of the Hebrew Testament translated into Spanish called the Ferrara Bible, first printed in 1553) and were recognized as being “Scholar[s] to the learned Yeosuah Da Sylva in London.”Footnote 41 Seizing an opportunity to convert the brothers, Mather composed a Spanish and Hebrew text addressed to the Frazons titled La fe del Christiano and Faith of the Fathers, whereby he hoped to encourage his fellow “Christians in [their] faith” but also to “mightily confound the Jewish Nation.” Reflecting on his renewed ambitions, Mather wrote in his diary: “I this day renewed my Request unto Heaven for [the conversion of Jews]. And writing a short letter to the Jew, wherein I enclosed my Faith of the Fathers, and, La Fe del Christiano, I sent it to [them].”Footnote 42
It is possible that the brothers themselves may have assisted Mather with the necessary Hebrew or Spanish training to compose his works. Nevertheless, Mather’s aggressive opening betrays any attempt at amicability. Faith of the Fathers begins: “Be amazed, O ye Rebellious & Rejected People of our Great Lord Messiah; We Christians, have by the Wonderful Work of God, been brought unto the Faith of the Fathers; but you are fallen from that Faith & under Strong Delusions, you are Pining away in your Iniquities. Return, O backsliding Israel!”Footnote 43 The rest of the twenty-four pages read like a catechism which posed questions ranging in topic from Christian theological enquiries such as “Can there be One God in Three Persons?” to mapping Catholicism onto biblical time: “After the Four Monarchies Exhibited in the Visions of Daniel are Ended, and Particularly the Papal Empire, which is the Fourth, in the Last Form of it, comes to its End, shall the Nation of Israel, be Advanced into a great Condition of Power and Glory?”Footnote 44
Scholars have debated whether Mather’s rhetoric should be understood as either a sincere attempt at converting the Frazon brothers, a model for how Protestants should talk about converting Jews in general, or just a haphazard attempt at ensuring wider circulation among transatlantic Christian networks.Footnote 45 Regardless of his intentions, the Frazons did not convert and, instead, Mather began spreading a false rumor of having had a “Pretended Vision, to have converted Mr. Frazier, a Jew, who had before conceiv’d some good Notions of Christianity.” The embarrassed minister confessed to the act but the damage was done. Mather drove the brothers away and they “would never be persuaded to hear any more of Christianity.”Footnote 46 Despite his failure, Mather’s pretended vision and his linguistic performances for English audiences embodied the logics of Protestant Hebrew to imagine receptive colonial Jews for Protestant performances in their own language.
Hebrew Deficiencies in the Colonial Printing Press
The narrowly Anglo-Protestant aims for Hebrew printing was best reflected in the colonial printing presses’ limited supply of Hebrew text-types. Hebrew availability was shaped by the transatlantic print industry, which imagined missionary organizations and local ministers as the primary audience for such wares. Hebrew types came to North America in three waves, as a result of printers anticipating demand from missionary organizations or divinity schools in North America. The first set arrived with Glover and the Cambridge Press. It was followed in 1660 by an extra set of types after the printer Marmaduke Johnson was recruited to assist with the Eliot Indian Bible. These extra metal sets supplied printers with a cleaner Hebrew type that was used for almanacs and sermons like John Norton’s Three Choice and Profitable Sermons Upon Sevearal Texts of Scripture (1664). By 1684, there was likely a third set of types imported for the Boston printer Samuel Green to assist in publishing the minister Increase Mather’s An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences (1684).Footnote 47
Such histories, however, illustrate that the Hebrew available came strictly out of whatever printers initially brought with them from London as they imagined would be sufficient for missionaries and ministers to use. This was because importing metal-types in any language was not cheap, in part because the best-quality types for colonial printers were produced in Amsterdam, not in London, despite English foundries having been a facet of English printing since the fifteenth century. Type would only become more affordable when the English typefounder William Caslon established his own practice in London, and the popularity of his English types across the Atlantic helped defray the costs of the English types he produced, to the point that a set of English type cost half as much as those in other languages.Footnote 48 As early as 1734, Caslon began advertising that he was also able to print in languages like Hebrew, Greek, and Coptic, targeting primarily missionary organizations such as the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.Footnote 49 Hebrew’s association with ministers’ and missionary interest in Semitic languages meant that deficiency for Jewish use would be a continuing feature of the printing press. At the same time, increased demand for Hebrew among some Anglo-American Protestants would similarly eventually call into question whether or not British colonial Americans truly did care about Hebrew as a language for serious biblical study.
Even though Cotton Mather failed to convert the Frazon brothers, there was another missed opportunity for New England ministers to publish a Jewish conversion narrative. In 1668, the Dutch merchant Solomon Franco published his conversion from Judaism to Protestantism in a London piece titled Truth Springeth out of the Earth (1668). Franco’s publication was not unique in the city since, after London lifted its restrictions on Jewish settlement, printers rushed out several publications by various Jewish-authored conversion narratives to Protestantism.Footnote 50 However, had Franco converted in New England instead, where he had found himself earlier in his career, it would have been an exceptional piece of work and logistically impossible. In 1649, he ran into a payment dispute with Boston officials and, because of that, was allowed “sixe shillings per week out of the treasury” that would allow “for six weeks for his subsistence till he can get passage into Holland.”Footnote 51 He eventually left Boston unconverted and made his way to London, where he would teach Hebrew.Footnote 52 It was not clear if ministers made a concerted effort to convert him but, regardless, Truth Springeth out of the Earth could not have reached the Boston printing press.
Franco relied extensively on Hebrew to make up for what he described as his inability to “attain that fluent Eloquence of the English tongue.” He confessed, “in these plain rude words my Sincerity may be discovered, which is all I aim at present; and also, that the Jews may understand, that it was not without great reason that I embraced Jesus Christ.”Footnote 53 While New England ministers were satisfied to print only an occasional Hebrew word that required, at most, twenty or Hebrew text-types, Franco’s text was replete with entire Hebrew verses and sentences. On just the second and third pages of Truth Springeth (which comprised one print sheet), Franco used approximately 400 Hebrew characters to reference words like “God” or “Princess”, and entire passages from the Hebrew Testament such as Deuteronomy 32:8, Exodus 1:5, Daniel 10:13 and 20, and Isaiah 24:21. The letter “yod,” one of the most commonly used letters of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, alone appeared forty-eight times in this one sheet. To print this sheet (which was mostly in English), would have required at least forty-eight sets of Hebrew type, which would result in a total of 1,056 Hebrew types available for use. Put simply, New England was ill-equipped to meet the publication needs of Jewish converts like Franco who wanted to publish their conversion to Christianity in a more familiar language.
Protestant Hebrew also shaped Hebrew printing across the Americas. In the same way that Jewish communities relied on printers in London and Amsterdam to supply them with texts, English colonists in the Caribbean, such as the minister William Corbin, and the Barbados Assembly relied on printers like Andrew Bradford in Anglican New York for printing. These networks explained why, despite the sizable Jewish population in Kingston, Jamaica, compared to other parts of British North America, the first printing press only brought enough Hebrew text-types to produce almanacs for English consumption, such as James Fannin’s 1776 almanac and Ann Woolhead’s 1779 almanac.Footnote 54 Almanacs used Hebrew characters to occasionally substitute for English names for months but rarely, if ever, to communicate in prose. Using Hebrew in this manner reinforced the ways in which it functioned as a commodity that signified the strange and unfamiliar text of a “primitive people.”Footnote 55 This orientalist aesthetic, which treated Hebrew characters not as legible letters but as images that signified esoteric knowledge alongside astrological signs, shaped how a broader network of printers viewed Hebrew and perpetuated assumptions about its inutility in ways that obscured and overlooked significant populations of Jews in their midst.
The continuing influence of Protestant Hebrew on the publication process was most palpably felt by the first Jewish convert to New England Puritanism, Judah Monis. An Italian Jew of Sephardic descent, Monis followed his arrival as Hebrew instructor at Harvard with a well-publicized baptism that was “attended by a considerable part of the Church in this town, and as numerous an Assembly as the place would admit.”Footnote 56 Newspapers advertised Monis as having been “formerly of Leghorn, Italy and Amsterdam,” and that he was a “rabbi of the synagogue in Jamaica, and afterwards in New York.”Footnote 57 Considering New England ministers’ previous failed attempts to recruit Jewish converts like the Frazon brothers, Monis’s conversion was a godsend. Ministers commemorated the event in a publication titled A Discourse Had in the College-Hall (1722), in which prefaces by the ministers Benjamin Colman and Increase Mather attested to the veracity of Monis’s conversion. The combination of ministerial support for the publication and the tract’s attempt to commemorate the event as important news likely convinced the famed bookseller Daniel Henchman of its salability.Footnote 58 Furthermore, Henchmen was likely aware of the growing market for Jewish conversion narratives in the English Atlantic print sphere and knew that, if one were to come from New England, it would be significant.Footnote 59 He recruited the renowned printers Samuel Kneeland and Timothy Green, both of whom had been publishing sermons for some of Boston’s most esteemed clergy, and thus a conversion narrative of a Jewish convert in New England made its way to print.
In order to validate his conversion, Monis leaned into Protestant conventions and tropes that had been embedded in Protestant Hebrew. First, he recruited anti-Catholic rhetoric as a way of validating his Protestantism. He professed the sufficiency of scripture and that he had learned “not to depend upon the Explication of any Man whatsoever (as the Church of Rome does, i.e. to the Pope)”; he averred that Catholics “deny the Law and the Prophets”; he pointed to “the Manner and Way in which [Jews] have been treated by sundry Princes of Christendom, with Fire and Sword, as in the Kingdoms of Spain and Portugal, contrary to the Laws of Nature”; and he highlighted the way in which “a great Stumbling-Block to the Jewish Nation’s Conversion” had in part been owed to “the worshipping of Images by the Papists.”Footnote 60 Second, Monis participated in the logic of Protestant Hebrew to imagine a beleaguered Jewish community open to conversion, with himself as the projected representative of that community. Throughout the text, he addressed “the Jewish Nation,” as a group that could be addressed in contemporary time but constructed it through the Protestant imaginary of biblical time. The choice to publish the text in English, however, clarified the distinctly Anglo-Protestant audience for the work and betrayed any intention to speak to Spanish-speaking Jews across the British colonies.Footnote 61
While the text was entirely in English, Monis was dissatisfied with the fact that he could not include Hebrew characters in his conversion narrative. To accommodate his Anglo-Protestant readers, he was “obliged to give [the narrative] in English” and, instead of printing Hebrew characters, he provided transliterations in “English letters, as he apprehends will best convey the sound of the Hebrew Word.” However, this only created awkward accommodations since Monis, like Franco, also confessed to barely mastering English. As he mentioned in his narrative, “The Author Hopes that the English reader will afford the following Discourses his Candour, and Excuse any want of Accuracy in the English Idiome, (& punctuation,) considering the English Tongue is what he has not been very long used to, and for that reason does not pretend to be a compleat Master of.” With the double constraints of his limited English and the lack of available Hebrew text-types, the terms of colonial printing made for what Colman could only describe as a “poor performance” in print. Even if Monis had hoped that whatever Hebrew he could muster might be able to address Sephardic Jews across colonial America, the publications were prefaced and tailored by fellow ministers and publishers for Anglo-Protestant English readers for whom Hebrew had a specific function of bolstering Monis’s position as a Hebrew instructor to future Protestant ministers.
Monis’s frustration with the state of Hebrew printing in New England extended into his role as an educator in Hebrew. Dissatisfied with the quality of Hebrew education using Harvard’s imported textbooks from London, Monis opted to teach the language from his own manuscript textbook, titled Dickdook Leshon Gnebreet: A Grammar of the Hebrew Tongue (1735). It would supplant a wide variety of texts imported from printers across Europe. The original Hebrew textbook used was likely Wilhelmi Schickardi’s Horologim ebraeum (London, 1639) which relied on imported Dutch types for its Hebrew and was later supplanted by an Utrecht edition that Increase Mather possessed. The college also relied on various Hebrew grammar books from Swiss printers, including François du John’s Grammatica Hebraeae Linguae (Geneva, 1596) and Johann Buxdorf’s Epitome Radicum et Chaldaicarum (Basel, 1607). In terms of Hebrew Bibles themselves, students relied on Latin translations by the Spanish scholar Arias Montanus (Geneva, 1619) and later that of Menasseh Ben Israel (Amsterdam, 1635). From these texts, Harvard students were required to translate both the Hebrew and Christian testaments from Hebrew and Greek into Latin.Footnote 62 Without direct access to printers, Monis’s methods consisted of asking students to make manuscript copies of lessons in their own blank notebooks. It was only a matter of time before students complained that it was a method “so tedious as to be discouraging to many.”Footnote 63
After the board approved Monis’s request for publication, it became clearer from the cost and difficulties of producing more Hebrew-intensive texts that there was, indeed, an implicitly Anglo-Protestant design behind English colonial printing. In April 1726, the English benefactor Thomas Hollis sent to Harvard “font of Types Greek and Hebrew” for use by the college, with Hollis hoping to see the institution “flourish in all the Sciences and have able Professors and Tutors among [them] well supported,” given that they are “the only one [he] knows of in the World” to be founded on and supported by “congregational discipline.”Footnote 64 However, the types were far from the highest quality nor were there sufficient quantities for Monis’s purposes. He described them as “unhappily proving imperfect” and complained to the board that the project “could not go forward till the Reverend Corporation sent for more Hebrew Types to Complete such a good and desirable design.”Footnote 65 The disconnect between the actual amount of Hebrew Monis needed and Hollis’s seeming generosity to assist New England scholarship only further highlights how much English ministers likely viewed Hebrew as ornamental or somehow less pragmatic than English as a language for religious expression. For a second time, the printing press frustrated Monis’s desire to treat Hebrew as a language that was just as deserving of attention from the publication process as English.
After this second attempt, the college decided to support the project in its entirety. It is not clear what ultimately shifted their stance on the matter, though it was likely helped by the fact that they decided that they would no longer be importing textbooks from London. However, the entire process of producing a Hebrew textbook for a largely English-speaking student body was so demanding that Harvard had to place orders to London of “so many Hebrew Types & Points, as are necessary to compleat ye Sett sent us by ye worthy Mr Hollis, according to the direction of Mr President, Mr Flynt, and Mr. Monis.”Footnote 66 Monis himself surmised that he would require at least 250 types of each of the most common letters in Hebrew for the textbook, especially as some of the charts showing the different tenses for verbs appeared entirely in Hebrew.Footnote 67
With so much financial support behind the project, Harvard also decided to oversee the textbook’s creation. The task wore on for so long that more problems arose. While Monis was able to gain support for importing Hebrew text-types, he was struggling to raise funds for the printing job itself. Furthermore, the text had to undergo so many revisions that the board grew increasingly reluctant to proceed with the project, citing a lack of success on many fronts.Footnote 68 In order to see the project through, Harvard voted “the Treasurer advance to mr Monis so much money as necessary for ye printing a thousand coupes in Quarto, two hundred of ym to be stitched & cover’s with Paper immediately after they are printed; the 1000 copies deliver’d into ye Treasurer’s hands, and yet there be a Computation made of ye prime cost of each book.”Footnote 69 In other words, not only did the board secure the necessary Hebrew types but they also became its main purchasers. By September 9, 1734, the textbook was in the press and the college recommended that every sophomore should purchase it from them. Thus, with the connections and financial support of the college behind him, Monis published the first Hebrew text in the British colonies through the English printing press.
Even with this success, however, reception for Monis’s textbook, Dickdook Leshon Genebreet, evidenced the disconnect between his Hebrew training and the Protestant Hebrew of the British colonies. It was not received well. Extant copies demonstrate frustrations or disagreements on the part of readers, who corrected Monis’s lessons—from grammar to word choice for corresponding vowel sounds between Hebrew and English words. They contained corrections that the “o” sound in the Hebrew hollem should be closer to the “o” in “open” rather than the one in “proper.”Footnote 70 This led to the inclusion of an “errata” notice, whereby Monis asked, “The courteous Learner is desired to correct the following Errors, which accidentally escap’d a timely Observation.”Footnote 71 Stephen Sewall, Monis’s student who would eventually succeed him in teaching Hebrew at Harvard, called his mentor’s grammar “a very bad one,” a stance shared by much of the contemporary scholarship on Monis’s textbook.Footnote 72 With support from the college, Sewall proceeded with the publication of another Hebrew grammar book, titled A Hebrew Grammar, Collected Chiefly from Those of Mr. Israel Lyons, Teacher in the University of Cambridge (1763), which quickly replaced Dickdook Leshon.
Whatever failure could be ascribed to Monis’s work, however, Monis blamed on the project of the book itself: translating Hebrew for English-reading students and faculty. He wrote:
I found in all my Travels, all the Learned in this Tongue that I conversed with, among the Europeans (English excepted) do pronounce it the same way also; and why the English differ from the rest, proceeds only (as I take it) from the various ways they have pronouncing the Vowels, in which the other Nations are more conformed to one another, as it is well known to all observing Travelers and Linguists; and therefore in Conformity to the English Pronunciation ONLY, I have Spelt the Words in English Characters as I have done.Footnote 73
For the multilingual Monis, the primary source of frustration with communicating Hebrew in print was English itself: the manner in which he was expected to transliterate Hebrew simply did not accord with his experience of how Hebrew was spoken and written elsewhere. The frustration that he felt and the students’ increasing lack of interest in learning Hebrew led to the college’s decision to make the language an optional part of the curriculum by 1787.Footnote 74 Attempts to introduce Hebrew to the largely Anglo-Protestant colonies only further clarified the differing functions and expectations between the liturgical Hebrew that Jews practiced and Protestant Hebrew for Anglo-Protestant ministerial performances.
Monis would not be the only author inconvenienced by the state of Hebrew printing in the colonies. Joseph Yeshurun Pinto, the hazzan who presided over New York’s Shearith Israel, worked on an English translation of The Form of Prayer Which Was Performed at the Jews Synagogue in the City of New-York on Thursday October 23, 1760 (1760). The text was a prayer that celebrated the British victory over the French after the Battle of Montreal. It was originally recited in Hebrew but was translated anonymously by one named “a friend to truth.” While the entirety of the text was published in English, the last page included a note: “The foregoing Prayer may be seen in Hebrew, at the Composer’s lodgings.”Footnote 75 The original recitation and the invitation for readers to see it—likely a manuscript—in Hebrew, suggested an intended original audience of Jews. However, the inability of British colonial presses to facilitate even a seven-page prayer entirely in Hebrew required that it be ultimately printed in English.
More studious Protestants similarly expressed disappointment at the absence of Hebrew types in the colonies. On January 24, 1764, a fire destroyed most of Harvard College’s supply of Greek and Hebrew types.Footnote 76 There seems to have been little urgency shown by the college to replace the types, likely aided by the stress of the growing political and economic tensions between the colonies and Britain by the 1770s.Footnote 77 In 1783, the Boston minister Charles Chauncy hoped to publish his more than 900-page text on universal salvation. He was famously known for publishing against the Great Awakening revivals of the 1740s and, despite his largely orthodox record, had been discreetly converting New England ministers from the Calvinism of their Puritan forefathers to Universalism. Believing that scriptural study had not yet been done in a “free, impartial, and diligent manner” in London or the colonies, Chauncy wanted to demonstrate how a truly scriptural study, unencumbered by commentaries and input from early modern Puritan divines, could lead to the conclusion that all of humanity was destined for eternal salvation. Behind this claim, Chauncy implied that rarely was it ever actually the case that ministers exercised scriptural study in the way the Protestant Reformers intended, which is to truly study and examine the text in its original language.
However, without Hebrew types in Boston, Chauncy suffered the inconvenience of printing his manuscripts in London. Relying on contacts overseas, he sent two of the three manuscripts across the Atlantic in early 1784, but by August that year there had been no news of the manuscript.Footnote 78 Some of his colleagues wondered if the London printer Charles Dilly might have sold off “the impression” instead of returning them to Boston.Footnote 79 Unbeknown to Chauncy, his London contact, the minister Richard Price, hesitated to send it for print publication, out of worry that the text might have an “unpromising influence of the morals of the people.”Footnote 80 With the fortunate intervention of theological sympathizers, Price was reassured that it would do more good than harm for its readers. The text eventually reached Boston later that year, but the six-month journey opened the manuscript to many contingencies which Chauncy would not have suffered if Hebrew text-types had been available in the colonies.
Subsequent failed efforts to bring Hebrew types back from London continued to reflect the persistence of Protestant Hebrew’s legacy on the American publishing market. Hoping to match the operations of London printers, the printer Isaiah Thomas procured his own set of Hebrew types after visiting London in 1785.Footnote 81 He ordered thirty-three pica of Hebrew and thirty long primers of Hebrew, which was just enough for the second edition of Sewall’s book in 1802 and for the Dartmouth language professor John Smith’s A Hebrew Grammar, without Points: Designated to Facilitate the Study of the Scriptures of the Old (1803).Footnote 82 The amount that Thomas brought back with him was much more than what had been available before Monis’s efforts, but it was still a tiny amount, which paled in comparison both to London offerings and to the quantity that Monis had originally procured. The fact that he ordered an identical quantity of Greek and Hebrew types is evidence of the explicitly Protestant Hebrew purposes for which he purchased them, since both text-types were useful only insofar as they were used to cite and signify Protestants’ views of their own scriptures and the Semitic languages associated with them. The status of Hebrew in America would not change until the first foundries in the United States to produce “type of every kind,” which included Hebrew, Greek, Samarian, and Arabic fonts. None of these efforts would have significant success until after 1800.Footnote 83 Until then, American Jews did not have Hebrew text-types available to them, and even after the establishment of the first type foundries, it was clear from advertisements that they targeted Protestant audiences.
As illustrated by Harvard’s successful importation of Hebrew text-types, market demand was not the only means by which those types could have made their way into the colonies. Indeed, it was not outside of the realm of possibility that Jews in Newport could have brought their own printer, much like the German pietists did in Philadelphia, or could even have provided the Newport printer Ann Smith Franklin with the means to take on any Hebrew print project. Franklin was proactive in the trade business, operating from her shop in Newport to publish for the Rhode Island General Assembly, and she savvily ran the business on the occasional ministerial sermon by famed local preachers like Cotton Mather. Newport Jews, many of whom were merchants by trade, certainly had the financial means, given that they were able to secure property for a graveyard and construct a synagogue by 1763. Indeed by the eighteenth century, Hebrew prayer books for high holy days had made their way through the Jewish diaspora in the British colonies, and robust published debates among European rabbis had also energized the London markets.Footnote 84 Yet, despite these networks, the impression that colonial printing was an Anglo-Protestant enterprise never truly escaped the minds of colonial Jews.
Translating Hebrew for English Publics
The distinctiveness of Protestant Hebrew appears most readily when contrasted with the ways in which colonial Jews used Hebrew and were attentive to its politics when translating it for English-speaking audiences. Spanish and Hebrew were important linguistic markers that shaped Sephardic Jewish identity in diaspora and sustained connections with communities across the Atlantic in cities like London and Amsterdam. Yet, they were also languages that could communicate better if adapted to the language of the target audience. In other words, whereas Protestant Hebrew relied on its being a marker of inaccessibility to signal ministerial authority, Jewish translations of Hebrew strove to bridge meaning across generations and culture. The process of translation certainly came with problems and was always open to relational asymmetries and power dynamics, as diasporic Jewish leaders regularly worried. It always mattered who was translating and what benefits that conferred on the translator rather than the authors being translated. Questions about how translation relates to Jewish identity and assimilation go beyond the scope of this paper, but Protestant Hebrew will hopefully bring to the fore the kinds of power dynamics at play in Anglo-Protestant productions of the languages of peoples whom Protestants hoped would be objects of conversion.
While Hebrew has facilitated Jewish connections across geographies and generations, Jews have long had to be attentive to the ways in which Christian audiences have both coopted the language (in the case of Christian Hebraist scholars) and relied on its public life to cast Jews as other (in the case of the Inquisition and conversos). These dynamics appeared most readily in Europe, where interreligious printing presses published texts for Christians and Jews in tandem. Some of the earliest beginnings of European Hebrew printing were in Italian cities such as Florence and Venice, where Christian printers like Daniel van Bombergen and Jewish editors and typesetters worked in tandem to produce rabbinic commentaries and Bibles, handbooks, kabbalistic literature, and various other intellectual publications for both Christian and Jewish consumption. Throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Hebrew printing spread in parts of Poland, the Ottoman Empire, Prague, Switzerland, Germany, and later France. For Sephardic Jews, Lisbon had been supplying their need for Hebrew as early as 1489, when Rabbi Eliezer Toledano established the first Hebrew press, which continued until the Inquisition clamped down on Jewish productions. Thereafter, they would turn to Amsterdam, when, in 1626, Menasseh Ben Israel brought Hebrew printing to Holland, which benefited both Protestants and Jews.
With such widespread productions of Hebrew also came growing concerns about the audiences for the works. Attentive to antisemitism from early modern Catholics and later Protestants, Jewish leaders began to implement ordinances against printing without communal and rabbinic consent. One of the earliest attempts came in Ferrera, Italy, whereby rabbis decreed:
Printers shall not be permitted to print any hitherto unpublished book except with the permission of three duly ordained Rabbis, and the consent of the heads of one of the Communities nearest the place of printing. . . The names of the Rabbis and heads of the Communities sponsoring the book shall be printed at the beginning of the volume. Otherwise, no one shall be permitted to buy the book under penalty of a fine of twenty-five scuti. Footnote 85
These phenomena stretched from places like Salonica, while it was under Ottoman rule, to northern Italy, Poland, and even Protestant Germany by the seventeenth century.Footnote 86
Continuing these dynamics into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Jewish leaders in London began grappling with the stakes of translating and publishing anything in English.Footnote 87 Part of their concern traces back to the idea that printing Hebrew texts was a near-guarantee of an Anglo-Protestant English-speaking readership for sacred Jewish texts, especially since it was highly unlikely that there were designated printers and booksellers who would publish strictly to and for Jews in the Anglophone world. Some leaders also worried that entry into the public sphere might invite disputes with Protestants, which might compromise their standing among local authorities. One London synagogue included the following in their constitution: “No Jew may hold dispute or argument on matters of religion with Guim [i.e. Gentiles] nor urge them to follow our holy Law, nor may offensive words be spoken to them against their profession because to do otherwise is to disturb the liberty which we enjoy.”Footnote 88 As with censorship, in London, Jewish leaders’ concerns did not necessarily apply to printing in general, but specifically to the risks that printing invited through the potential to gather Christian audiences.
These concerns affected Moseh Nieto, an attendee of Sha’ar Hashamayim, a synagogue in London, who sought to publish an English translation of a Siddur, a daily prayer book. Controversy ensued. Prior to this point, the congregation’s leaders had had no problems with engaging printers to reproduce texts in Spanish and Hebrew for the local Jewish community to use. Indeed, Moseh’s brother Isaac famously translated Hebrew prayer books for internal purposes: Orden de las oraciones de Ros Ashanah y Kipur (1740) and Orden de las oraciones cotidianas, Rod Hodes Hanuca y Purim (1771). Yet, when the prayer book was published in English, it prompted a public declaration that the congregation cannot “subscribe, give as a present, buy or sell or receive from anyone the printed translated book of our prayers in English.”Footnote 89 The leaders’ worries were not unwarranted, since representations in the public sphere was not a form of neutral expression, nor was it reducible to the expressions of a single author or translator—such works often signified the identity and marker of entire communities.
These concerns similarly appeared in the work of Isaac Pinto, a member of Congregation Shaerith Israel in New York. His English translation of Prayers for Shabbath, Rosh-Hashanah, and Kippur (1776), which drew on Isaac Nieto’s 1740 Spanish translations, reveals similar concerns about the stakes for publishing. He opens his preface with a brief acknowledgment that the primary language of service should be Hebrew: “A Veneration for the Language, sacred by being that in which it pleased Almighty God to reveal himself to our Ancestors, and a desire to preserve it. . . are probably leading Reasons for our performing divine Service in Hebrew.” Yet, for the sake of Jews who were not trained in Spanish or Portuguese, Pinto saw fit to embody the spirit of the first English settlers in New England: “But that [Hebrew] being imperfectly understood by many, by some, not all; it has been necessary to translate our Prayers, in the Language of the Country wherein it hath pleased the divine Providence to appoint our Lot. . . [with] Hope that it will tend to the Improvement of many of my Brethren in their Devotion.”Footnote 90 Reflecting this stance, the text had no Hebrew characters and everything was phoneticized or transliterated into English.
The function of Hebrew as a form of communication that should be translated for different audiences shaped Jews’ publication process in various ways, particularly in North America. The itinerant rabbi Raphael Hayyim Isaac Carigal, who hailed from Palestine, on May 28, 1772, delivered a sermon to the congregation on Newport, Rhode Island. A Congregationalist minister, Ezra Stiles, attended the service and noted that Carigal was preaching in Ladino, a dialect that blended Castilian Spanish with Hebrew colloquialisms.Footnote 91 Although the New England minister had an “affinity of the Spanish and Latin,” he still struggled to understand it. Instead, he relied on whatever Hebrew the rabbi would speak, which allowed him to loosely make out that Carigal was exhorting Newport Jews to “not be discouraged but persevere. . . [that their] sufferings were not Evidence of their being forsaken by God—that Adversity and Judgments were the common Lot of all Nations, Kingdoms, and Countries.”Footnote 92
Even with his training in writing and speaking Hebrew and Greek, Stiles realized that not all spoken Hebrew was the same. Much as Monis had observed about regional variations with Hebrew, Stiles wrote: “I have often found that I can better understand the English pronunciation of Hebrew than Spanish, German, or Polish; every nation pronounces a little differently. I mean that the Jews whose Vernacular Tongue is English pronounce so that I understand it better than when pronounced by a Jew whose vernacular Tongue is dutch.”Footnote 93 These linguistic nuances to Hebrew, which made some Jewish voices accessible and others inaccessible to Protestants like Stiles, indicate the capacity for both language and mediums to constrain their audience and ultimately the community they gather. Regardless of the training Stiles had received to include himself among the congregation of Newport Jews, the orally delivered sermon specifically spoke to a diasporic Jewish community.Footnote 94
In addition to spoken nuances, Carigal paid close attention to distinctions between written and printed forms. By the time he arrived, the congregation—in a fashion similar to their Congregationalist neighbors—had already decided they were going to print his sermon as a way of commemorating the famed rabbi’s visit.Footnote 95 However, when they asked for his permission to translate the text into English and publish it through the printing press, Carigal initially refused. He argued that “none but Rabbies preached, and they usually preached on all the Holidays, but not ever Sabbath, & always without notes.”Footnote 96 Furthermore, the rabbi “had nothing written when he preached at the Synagogue—but that he had sealed [the sermon] first in his head and so delivered it,” which meant that he did not intend for there to be a manuscript for a publisher and that he wanted the oral delivery to be the sole rendition of his performance.Footnote 97 Carigal’s objections stemmed from the way in which he interpreted print’s function beyond mere textual replication. A printed sermon preached outside of the marked time, made material demands of its author that Carigal was reluctant to accept, and likely drew an audience of readers like Stiles, who were never intended to be reached by such words. Carigal’s sermon was eventually printed after much convincing on the part of the congregants, but the episode demonstrated that it mattered how a printed text was made to preach and in what contexts, contrary to the universality that Protestants read into their printed theologies.
Carigal’s printed sermon evidenced notable departures from conventions established by Protestant Hebrew. When A Sermon Preached at the Synagogue in Newport, Rhode-Island, called “The Salvation of Israel”: On the Day of Pentecost or Feast of Weeks was published and sold by S. Southwick in Rhode Island, it gathered a wide array of audiences. The translation to English made Carigal’s sermon more accessible to English ministers like Stiles, despite the original sermon still reflecting Carigal’s direct address to the Jews in Newport. The printed text was also advertised in Newport and New York newspapers, leading some scholars to contend that the publishers likely targeted anglicized second-generation Jews in New York and Newport.Footnote 98 However, the most remarkable omission was that, while there was plenty of spoken Hebrew in the oral sermon, there were no Hebrew characters in the printed edition. For Carigal, Hebrew was no different from Spanish: it was a language that required translation. This stood in stark contrast to conventions established by Protestant Hebrew, whereby claims to public legitimacy and authority relied on Hebrew to function not as a text to be translated but as an object in and of itself that authenticated or signified the legitimacy of the Protestant figure, their education, and ultimately their public authority.
The lack of Hebrew in these instances could certainly be attributed to the absence of Hebrew types or even of Hebrew expertise on the part of the typesetters in the colonies, but these examples also evidence some intention on the part of Jewish writers. Isaac Nieto opted to publish his entire work in Spanish with no Hebrew retained, even though it was published in London, where Hebrew type was readily available. Similarly, Carigal’s connections across the Mediterranean surely could have assisted with the project, but he instead relied solely on Ezra Stiles to translate and print the text in English. In other words, Jewish authors could have adorned their prose with just enough Hebrew to signal some air of familiarity or claim to authority toward English-literate Jews, but they did not. At least from the evidence of the texts that would make their way into print, including an occasional Hebrew word would seem inconsistent with how Spanish and Hebrew functioned for the diasporic Sephardic Jews. Hebrew was treated as a language that blended into vernacular discourse and one that required translating in prose. On the other hand, Protestant Hebrew relied on its general inaccessibility to truly communicate what it was intended to signal: ministerial authority, expertise, and a people for whom they must perform these to ensure their conversion and ultimate salvation.
Conclusion
Protestant Hebrew traces how claims to religious authority could become encoded in language performances and crystalized through the material realities of publishing. The seventeenth-century contexts of how Protestants used limited Hebrew to signal inaccessible scriptures and meaning helped construct ideas about Jews as receptive to and in need of conversion, while also bolstering their own expertise, skill, and authority to accomplish such a feat. Such beginnings set the stage for the limited number of Hebrew text-types that would be a source of frustration for authors like Judah Monis, Joseph Pinto, and Charles Chauncy. The difficulty with which Harvard secured types illustrates the narrowing audience for the productions of the colonial printing press, in a way that shows the persistent Anglo-Protestant ideologies that undergirded the technology. In contrast, when Jewish authors did pursue publication in the colonies, they treated Hebrew as another text to be translated. It was not for lack of Hebrew types, as was the case with Monis, but rather an approach to Hebrew that differed distinctly from the Protestant Hebrew that ensured there were only enough types for Protestant performances of skill and expertise. The story of Protestant Hebrew would continue into the nineteenth century, as the rise of evangelical Protestantism would renew demand for biblical texts and literature. Yet this time Protestant performances of Hebrew was even more possible, with type foundries that could readily supply any Semitic language—strictly for the benefit of Christian education.
Open access
