When I say that Americanism equals American Zionism, I am in one sense merely adding up statements by eminent authorities. John Winthrop in 1630: ?“Wee shall finde that the God of Israell is among us.?” Thomas Jefferson in his Second Inaugural address: ?“I shall need . . . the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life.?” (The last phrase is an update of the Bible?’s ?“flowing with milk and honey.?”) Abraham Lincoln declared his wish to be a ?“humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty and of this, His almost chosen people.?”
Hundreds of other statements along the same lines might be gathered from the whole formative period of Americanism, from the early 1600?’s through the Civil War. Among the most striking is one of the earliest, from the famous journal of William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation. Once the Pilgrims had landed in the new world, Bradford writes, ?“What could now sustain them but the Spirit of God and His grace??” And he continues:
May not and ought not the children of these fathers rightly say: ?“Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in the wilderness; but they cried unto the Lord, and He heard their voice and looked on their adversity,?” etc.
Bradford is paraphrasing verses from Deuteronomy (26:5 ff.) that read (in the Geneva Bible of 1560, which Puritans preferred to the King James version): ?“A Syrian was my father, who being ready to perish for hunger, went downe into Egypte. . . . When we cried unto the Lord God of our fathers, the Lord heard our voyce, & looked on our adversitie.?”
The Bible reports that the Israelites were instructed to speak these verses when they brought the year?’s first fruits to the Temple in Jerusalem, there to recall publicly the Lord?’s gift of the promised land. Bradford was equating the arrival of Englishmen in Plymouth with the arrival of the wandering Israelites in the promised land. The same verses play a central role in the Haggadah recited by Jews on Passover to this day?—although Bradford could not have known that. Showing an uncanny tendency to think like a Jew, he singled them out on his own, and put them at the center of his own version of (what we might call) a Pilgrim seder.1
Evidently the historian Samuel Eliot Morison did not realize the Passover significance of these verses, either. His scrupulous edition of Bradford?’s journal is the scholarly standard, with plenty of footnotes?—but none at this point. In other places where Bradford quotes or paraphrases the Hebrew Bible without giving a citation, it is not quite clear whether or not Morison has picked up the reference. Yet you cannot really understand the Pilgrims, or Puritans in general, unless you know the Hebrew Bible and classical Jewish history; knowing Judaism itself also helps. But people with this sort of basic knowledge have rarely bothered to study the Puritans, and those who study the Puritans have rarely bothered to know what the Puritans knew.
Early exponents of Americanism tended to define even their own Christianity in ways that make it sound like Judaism. Thus John Winthrop: ?“the onely way to avoyde this shipwracke [of angering the lord] and to provide for our posterity is to followe the Counsell of Micah, to doe Justly, to love mercy, to walke humbly with our God.?” Lincoln, a profoundly religious man, refused all his life to join a church. But he did make the celebrated assertion that he would join a church whose entire creed was ?“what our lord said were the two great commandments, to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and mind and soul and strength, and my neighbor as myself.?” He was referring to the Gospel passage in which Jesus cites these two verses from the Hebrew Bible as the essence of Christianity.
By Sam Adams of Braintree
Hundreds of other statements along the same lines might be gathered from the whole formative period of Americanism, from the early 1600?’s through the Civil War. Among the most striking is one of the earliest, from the famous journal of William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation. Once the Pilgrims had landed in the new world, Bradford writes, ?“What could now sustain them but the Spirit of God and His grace??” And he continues:
May not and ought not the children of these fathers rightly say: ?“Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in the wilderness; but they cried unto the Lord, and He heard their voice and looked on their adversity,?” etc.
Bradford is paraphrasing verses from Deuteronomy (26:5 ff.) that read (in the Geneva Bible of 1560, which Puritans preferred to the King James version): ?“A Syrian was my father, who being ready to perish for hunger, went downe into Egypte. . . . When we cried unto the Lord God of our fathers, the Lord heard our voyce, & looked on our adversitie.?”
The Bible reports that the Israelites were instructed to speak these verses when they brought the year?’s first fruits to the Temple in Jerusalem, there to recall publicly the Lord?’s gift of the promised land. Bradford was equating the arrival of Englishmen in Plymouth with the arrival of the wandering Israelites in the promised land. The same verses play a central role in the Haggadah recited by Jews on Passover to this day?—although Bradford could not have known that. Showing an uncanny tendency to think like a Jew, he singled them out on his own, and put them at the center of his own version of (what we might call) a Pilgrim seder.1
Evidently the historian Samuel Eliot Morison did not realize the Passover significance of these verses, either. His scrupulous edition of Bradford?’s journal is the scholarly standard, with plenty of footnotes?—but none at this point. In other places where Bradford quotes or paraphrases the Hebrew Bible without giving a citation, it is not quite clear whether or not Morison has picked up the reference. Yet you cannot really understand the Pilgrims, or Puritans in general, unless you know the Hebrew Bible and classical Jewish history; knowing Judaism itself also helps. But people with this sort of basic knowledge have rarely bothered to study the Puritans, and those who study the Puritans have rarely bothered to know what the Puritans knew.
Early exponents of Americanism tended to define even their own Christianity in ways that make it sound like Judaism. Thus John Winthrop: ?“the onely way to avoyde this shipwracke [of angering the lord] and to provide for our posterity is to followe the Counsell of Micah, to doe Justly, to love mercy, to walke humbly with our God.?” Lincoln, a profoundly religious man, refused all his life to join a church. But he did make the celebrated assertion that he would join a church whose entire creed was ?“what our lord said were the two great commandments, to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and mind and soul and strength, and my neighbor as myself.?” He was referring to the Gospel passage in which Jesus cites these two verses from the Hebrew Bible as the essence of Christianity.
By Sam Adams of Braintree