Milton's 'Christian Talmud'

Abstract

This essay argues that Milton's divorce tracts recuperate Hebraic thought as a means of challenging prevailing orthodoxies of the Christian intellectual tradition. By siding with Hebraic interpretations of divorce law, Milton seeks to expand the social liberties of contemporary Christians beyond Christian scriptural precedent. The domestic liberty to divorce on grounds of intellectual incompatibility further implies a radical displacement of political as well as exegetical legitimacy from established institutional sites of authority. Milton gives voice to a notoriously complex relation to authority by means of his investigation of pedagogy as the biblical trope for Christian inheritance and succession from Jewish tradition. Education is therefore presented as an interpretive principle, which is best illustrated by the example of Rabbi Jesus as he confronts the Pharisees on the question of divorce. In this context, the individual's vexed relation to tradition illustrates the urgent need to historicize Christianity in order to recover a truly Christ-like iconoclasm. Thus this essay sets Milton's appropriations of rabbinic thought in the broader Reformation context of resistance to human traditions while also showing how the curious marriage, divorce and reconciliation of Judaism to Christianity lies at the heart of Milton's knowing but at times contradictory intervention into intellectual history.