America’s Jewish core

As a yarmulke-wearing summer college intern in Coats’s office at the time, I fondly recall the senator’s warm and sincere enthusiasm for the project, for the Jewish people in general, and for his co-founder, not despite but because he hailed from a different faith community. For his part, Lieberman returned the affection. “When we do not respect and build on the religious impulse that is shared so broadly in this country,” the Sabbath-observing Democrat said at the time, “we are depriving ourselves of one of the great sources of strength and unity and morality that we have.”

In The Jewish Roots of American Liberty, Wilfred McClay and Stuart Halpern’s absorbing and discerning collection of essays about how Jewish ideas, history, and literature animated the emergence and flourishing of freedom and justice in the United States, the spirit of the Coats-Lieberman project lives on. McClay and Halpern’s compendium arrives, however, at a fraught moment, one when animus from the right-wing and the Left toward the Jewish people in the United States has reached heights not seen in generations. 

In their introduction, McClay, of Hillsdale College, and Halpern, of Yeshiva University, helpfully summarize their argument as follows: “Jews owe an immense debt to America, which has been for them an incomparably generous and welcoming land in which they have been permitted to dwell in relative security and have been able to flourish as they have in few other places on the planet.” And yet, “it is equally true that America owes a profound and incalculable debt to the Jews,” who “provided the deep metaphysical, moral, and anthropological foundation upon which much of the American experiment in democratic self-government was erected.”

Indeed, this foundation long predates the founding itself. In a learned literary essay, Dov Lerner, a congregational rabbi and university lecturer, chronicles how John Milton reconfigured the Adam and Eve story away from Greek motifs of tragedy and the visual to Jewish notions of understanding and the aural. Per Lerner, Milton, who lost his eyesight in middle age, “made the case that true happiness and human flourishing are found not through sight but insight.” And when Milton found himself engulfed in the Cromwellian revolution, he insisted that “all Men naturally were born free, being the image and resemblance of God himself” and that “they in whomsoever … virtues dwell eminently, need not Kings to make them happy.” 

This fervent anti-monarchical tradition, and the Hebrew Bible in general, deeply informed the political culture of the American colonies, as Daniel Dreisbach of American University demonstrates. “The Bible,” Dreisbach writes, “was useful for nurturing the civic virtue that gives citizens a capacity for self-government,” and “some Founders saw in the Hebrew Scriptures political and legal models — such as republicanism and due process of law — that they believed were favored by God and, thus, worthy of emulation in their polities.” One historical survey found that, among early American political literature, the Book of Deuteronomy is cited nearly twice as often as Locke. And the story of the Exodus — of a nation fleeing bondage to settle the Promised Land — resonated deeply: Thomas Jefferson concluded his second inaugural address by musing that God “led our forefathers, as Israel of old, from their native land, and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life.”

More specifically, religious tolerance infused colonial views, as Regent University’s Mark David Hall documents in his contribution. Seventeenth-century luminaries such as Roger Williams of Rhode Island, invoking Isaiah and Micah, declared that “then shall none hurt or destroy in all the Mountains of my Holinesse,” while William Penn asserted that “force makes hypocrites; ’tis persuasion only that makes converts.” Freedom of conscience for Jews and Christians alike improved religion and state alike; as Hall notes, “by the end of the Revolutionary era, every state offered significant protection of religious liberty,” as, of course, did the U.S. Constitution. 

In the essay Halpern himself contributes, he explores how various Jewish Biblical figures became folk heroes in the United States. In 1779, amid the War for Independence from the British colossus, the Continental Congress drew inspiration from David’s “staff and sling,” used to slay Goliath, his “gigantic adversary.” Sojourner Truth, fighting for women’s rights, proclaimed at a rally that “Queen Esther come forth, for she was oppressed, and felt there was a great wrong, and she said ‘I will die or I will bring my complaint before the king.’” Jefferson, John Brown, and Frederick Douglass invoked Samson; John Adams and William Jennings Bryan quoted Elijah’s prophecies; and an imprisoned Martin Luther King found comfort in Daniel’s travails in the lion’s den. 

In his own essay, McClay carefully documents how Nathaniel Hawthorne “became a distinguished representative of the Hebraic strain in American thought,” a religious Jerusalem that has long struggled with a secular Athens for dominance over the American trajectory. Guilt, sin, history, allegory, and moral dilemmas inflect his short stories and novels, which evince hostility toward the progressivism of writers like his friend Emerson. Hawthorne, McClay reckons, represented “a Hebrew prophet, a throwback to the Isaiah who reviled the hardened and self-satisfied hearts of his contemporaries.”

Tevi Troy’s contribution examines how our presidents have read and invoked the Bible, beginning with Washington’s famous admonition in a Newport, Rhode Island synagogue that “the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.” Lincoln possessed only a few books, which he reread frequently, but among them was the Bible, “the best gift God has given to man.” More surprisingly, presidents who found solace in the Good Book included Garfield, Coolidge, and Truman, who, in recognizing the nascent State of Israel, fancied himself a modern-day Cyrus. Twenty-three of the last 30 inaugurals featured Biblical quotes.

RURAL HUNGARY’S PROPHET OF DECAY WINS NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

Some chapters, like one on the Book of Psalms and another on teaching secular history in religious schools, struggle to find an appropriate place in the book, and the correspondence between various presidents and the Jewish community has previously been reprinted in numerous places.

But McClay and Halpern have done yeomen’s work in assembling a sparkling array of literary and historical offerings at an especially, unfortunately, salient moment for questions of the relationship between Jewishness and Americanness. “The Jewish faith is predominantly the faith of liberty,” Coolidge professed at the 1925 dedication of Washington, D.C.’s Jewish Community Center, “and Hebraic mortar cemented the foundations of American democracy.” The Jewish Roots of American Liberty reminds Americans of both Judeo and Christian origins of this crucial and timely truth.

Michael M. Rosen is an attorney and writer in Israel, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of Like Silicon From Clay: What Ancient Jewish Wisdom Can Teach Us About AI