ACHSAH GUIBBORY, Christian Identity, Jews, and Israel in Seventeenth-Century England.

Abstract

ACCORDING to the standard narrative of literary criticism, Christianity and Judaism represent one of the greatest examples of binary dualism in early modern England. Yet such an approach collapses the range of English attitudes towards Jews. More recent criticism resists an over-simplified grand narrative in which Jews and Israel were respectively treated as outsiders—the ‘Other’—and without influence in Christian identity. In the past twenty years, then, a number of valuable historical philo-semitic studies have built upon the early work of scholars—including David S. Katz and Kitty Cohen—in order to demonstrate nuanced and complex relationships between Christianity and Judaism. Representing a scholarly shift in this perception is the writing of Jason Rosenblatt, Jeffrey Shoulson, Christopher Hill, and Sharon Achinstein. Achsah Guibbory's Christian Identity, Jews, and Israel in Seventeenth-Century England continues an expanding historiography that is concerned with Christian encounters with Jews. Her book explores the various ways that early modern Christians put to use perceptions of Jews, Judaism, and biblical Israel in an effort to legitimize the nation-state and its institutions. As such, Guibbory's concern is with English engagement with the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament), rather than with rabbinic material, the Semitic languages or the Jewish race. Concepts of Jewishness and Israel became especially resonant following the Reformation: Guibbory argues that, post- Reformation, the Hebrew Bible was ‘foundational to English Protestant Christianity,’ a tool of ‘both the powerful and the powerless—helping to imagine a nation’ and inspire ‘ideals of justice and equality’ (295). This argument may begin to explain why so many early modern sermons, political pamphlets, and texts such as Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan refer, often extensively, to Jewish sources.