'Jewish Roots of American Liberty' Review: A Hebraic Revolution
On May 3, 1925, President Calvin Coolidge delivered a 3,000-word address at the cornerstone-laying ceremony for the Washington, D.C., Jewish Community Center. The New York Times, which printed the entire speech on its front page the next day, noted that Coolidge’s address recognized “the services of the Jews to the United States in war and peace, from the Revolution to the present, and the influence of their Scriptures in the law, culture and morality of the country since early Colonial days.” Coolidge concluded by echoing a historian’s judgment that “Hebraic mortar cemented the foundations of American democracy.”
“Jewish Roots of American Liberty: The Impact of Hebraic Ideas on the American Story,” edited by Wilfred M. McClay, a professor of history at Hillsdale College, and Rabbi Stuart Halpern of Yeshiva University, includes Coolidge’s speech in a set of wide-ranging essays on the influence of Jewish thought on American identity. Contributors include Eric Cohen, the chief executive of the Tikvah Fund; Jonathan Sarna of Brandeis University; Rabbi Meir Soloveichik of Congregation Shearith Israel; and Tevi Troy, the presidential historian, among others.
Since the colonial period the Hebrew Bible has shaped American political culture—as Rabbi Dov Lerner of Yeshiva University points out in his essay. Noting that John Milton was the most widely read author in 18th-century America, Rabbi Lerner calls him a “breaker of chains” whose rejection of the doctrine of the divine right of kings, invoked for centuries to support royal absolutism, reverberated in such founding documents as the Declaration of Independence. Milton, who “cited both Scripture and the rabbinic sages,” argued that individuals “need not Kings to make them happy, but are the architects of their own happiness; and . . . are not less than Kings,” an idea embodied in the Declaration’s assertion of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Though such Enlightenment ideas informed the American founding, Mark David Hall, a professor at Regent University, argues that “the main reason Americans embraced religious liberty was the influence of the Judeo-Christian tradition.” Religious leaders, from Roger Williams to William Penn, considered that “the Bible and Christian theology require liberty of conscience,” necessary for “true religion to flourish.” Williams drew on the Hebrew prophets to “describe his ideal of a Christian society”; Penn ensured that his colony’s statutes protected religious liberty.
The Hebrew Bible maintained an unrivaled authority in early America, says Daniel L. Dreisbach of American University. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries the Bible was the country’s “most accessible, authoritative, and venerated book.” Mr. Dreisbach notes the powerful importance of the Exodus story of providential liberation and deliverance as the model for Americans’ rebellion against Britain’s pharaonic royalty. It was an idea reflected in Lincoln’s description, as he assumed office in 1861, of Americans as an “almost chosen people.”
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