God's Sacred Tongue: Hebrew and the American Imagination Book

In a comprehensive examination of how Christian scholars in the United States received, interpreted, and understood Hebrew texts and the Jewish experience, Shalom Goldman explores Hebraism's relationship to American society. By linking history, theology, and literature from the colonial period through the twentieth century, Goldman illuminates the religious and cultural roots of American interest in the Middle East.

God's Sacred Tongue is structured around a sequence of biographical and intellectual portraits of individuals including Jonathan Edwards, Isaac Nordheimer, Professor George Bush (an ancestor of President George W. Bush), and twentieth-century literary critic Edmund Wilson. Since the colonial period, America has been perceived as a western Promised Land with emotional, spiritual, and physical links to the Promised Land of biblical history. Goldman gives evidence from scholarship, diplomacy, journalism, the history of higher education, and the arts to show that this perception is linked to the role Hebrew and the Bible have played in American cultural history.

The book's final section takes up the story of American Christian Zionism, among whose Protestant adherents political Zionism found much of its strongest support. Religious and cultural figures such as William Rainey Harper and Reinhold Niebuhr are among those who exemplify the centuries-old ties between America, the Land of Promise, and Israel, the Promised Land.

Publishers Weekly

Fascination with the Hebrew language has been a recurring motif in Christian America, and Emory University's Goldman surveys four centuries of American "Hebraists"-Protestant clergy and scholars who specialized in the Hebrew language and scriptures. He also provides nuanced portraits of a few Jewish scholars whose conversion to Christianity gained them access to, but never full acceptance among, university faculties in the 18th and 19th centuries. Among Goldman's recurring and disconcerting themes is how little the study of Hebrew did to prevent anti-Semitism from flourishing. Yet Goldman suggests that Hebraists also laid the groundwork for America's support of Zionism in the modern period-he devotes an intriguing chapter to the late-19th-century Hebraist George Bush, an ancestor of the American presidents of the same name. Unfortunately, this book hardly settles the question of how much difference the study of Hebrew has made in "the American imagination" at large. By focusing so narrowly on scholarly biographies, Goldman cannot avoid giving the impression that Hebraism was a distinctly rarefied field. In the hands of a more skilled storyteller, perhaps a clearer pattern would emerge, but Goldman's writing is prosaic and his narrative is somewhat stilted and sloppily edited-one quotation from John Adams appears, without elaboration, in three different places. Specialists will appreciate Goldman's historical spadework, but outside of the guild this book is likely to have a limited audience. (Mar. 29) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.