Introduction: Intersecting Diasporas

Abstract

T SHE theme of has been at the heart of early American history and ethnohistory for two decades. The organizers of the Pennsylvania State-Max Kade German-American Research Institute conference on and Pietists in Dialogue in Enlightenment charged participants with uncovering cultural exchange among two groups not usually studied in this way: Jews and German-speaking colonists.1 The relative scarcity of direct evidence on the issue, although frustrating, encouraged creative approaches as the following essays illustrate. A. G. Roeber, for instance, explores how German pietists in British America reshaped inherited European ideas about the nature and effects of natural law, or law on the heart, in the face of colonial ethnic, religious, and racial pluralism. Seeking to understand the power of natural law among different groups, the pietists established a graded hierarchy. According to this hierarchy, law written on the heart exercised its strongest sway among Christians conversant with revealed Scripture, while touching weakly, if at all, heathen Africans and Native Americans. Jews who embraced the revelation of the Old Testament but not the Gospel, the pietists thought, shared characteristics with both Christians and heathens and so occupied a middle position on the spectrum. Jews served as an important theological category for the pietists, even while leaving comparatively few traces in surviving records of their interactions with German Christians. In contrast to Roeber, Holly Snyder focuses intensively on one of those traces. In 1759, a Lutheran minister in Georgia recorded in his diary that a Jewish shopkeeper encouraged him to read a Berlin rabbi's sermon, translated and reprinted in The American Magazine, a Philadelphia periodical edited by an Anglican clergyman. Snyder undertakes a close interrogation of this single conversation to uncover the pattern of Jewish and pietist religious dialogue in the colony. German-speaking Jews, living in tension with their co-religionists from Portugal, sought out pietists connected to them by language and by shared approval of the present Prussian-British alliance. But these affinities never overcame the strains of disparate faiths and disputes over conversion.