An Interreligious Kabbalistic Chavrutah in Eighteenth-Century New England: Rabbi Moses bar David of Apta and Reverend Ezra Stiles of Newport

Between 1759 and 1775, the prominent New England Congregational minister Ezra Stiles, who would go on to become the seventh president of Yale College, met with six different itinerant rabbis to discuss matters of faith and spirituality. Stiles had become increasingly interested in Jewish history and thought, and he wanted to take every opportunity to learn from erudite Jews. While his pursuits were meant to bolster his own vision of an Apostolic-Christianity, they inadvertently led to true friendships and intellectual exchange. It can certainly be claimed that Stiles and his Jewish interlocutors were building bridges between Judaism and Christianity in eighteenth Century New England.

My paper for the World Congress of Jewish Studies will focus on Stiles’ hitherto unexplored month-long dialogue with a certain mysterious kabbalistic emissary named Rabbi Moses bar David of Apta Poland, carried out in 1772. It will be based on some of the findings of my recently published book entitled Kabbalah and the Founding of America; but it will seek to expand on ideas there of comparative mysticisms and a unique form of interreligious hevruta study. Indeed, I plan to bring new materials into the picture by addressing a series of hitherto unexplored diagrams, now housed at the Beinecke Rare Book Library, which Stiles drew up and used in order to decipher and reinterpret Jewish esoteric ideas. This, I will show, marks an unusual early modern occurrence of open Jewish-Christian dialogue, located in British North America, which led to an ultimate re-reading of kabbalistic texts.