Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah in Colonial America

My paper will examine uses of Jewish philosophy and kabbalah in eighteenth century colonial American thought. This is an understudied area of reception history that marks an important example of the flow of ideas between the elites of disparate religions and the fluidity of identity that accompanies such a flow of ideas. For example, in his comprehensive Biblia Americana written between 1693 and 1728, the famed Puritan Cotton Mather employs extensive passages from Jewish sources such as the Zohar, Maimonides, and Menasseh ben Israel in his attempt to make sense of the biblical canon. In his address to an audience at Harvard’s College Hall in 1722 upon his baptism, the first full-time Hebrew instructor at Harvard and new convert to Christianity, Judah Monis, invoked his teacher Jacob Sasportas and employed kabbalistic thought in order to make a polemical case for the Trinity. In 1781, the president of Yale College, Ezra Stiles, gave a long and detailed commencement oration detailing the history of Jewish thought, cleverly beginning with Ezra the Scribe and culminating with his own account of significant intellectual exchanges between himself and six rabbis of his own day. It is my contention that an examination of such uses of Jewish thought and such exchanges can help us to better understand not only American religious history, but also some of the forces of modernity as marked by religious liberty, tolerance, individual identity formation and the flow of ideas.