Earlier this week the Wall Street Journal published Rick Richman’s review of Jewish Roots of American Liberty: The Impact of Hebraic Ideas on the American Story, edited by Wilfred McClay and Stuart Halpern and published by Encounter. Professor McClay holds the Victor Davis Hanson Chair in Classical History and Western Civilization at Hillsdale College. Rabbi Halpern serves as senior advisor to the provost at Yeshiva University. Rick Richman’s review appears under the headline “A Hebraic Revolution.”
Here is the opening of the review:
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.
Coolidge’s 1925 “Address at the Laying of the Cornerstone of the Jewish Community Center in Washington, D.C.” was a revelation to me. It appears in the book’s Part III (“American Presidents’ Appreciation of Jewish Contributions”). In the speech Coolidge tipped his hat to the sesquicentennial annivesary of the shot heard ’round the world and offered a timely history lesson in the challenges that confronted us at the moment of rebellion. Has anyone other than Professor McClay and Rabbi Halpern risen to the challenge this year?
Coolidge speaks (in the version of the speech posted by the Coolidge Foundation):
I have recounted these scraps of territorial history because unless we keep them in mind we shall not at all comprehend the task of unification, of nation building, that the Revolutionary fathers undertook when they not only dared the power of Great Britain, but set themselves against the tradition of the subordination to Europe of America. As we look back, we realize that even among the colonies of England there were few and doubtful common concerns to bind them together. Their chief commercial interests were not among themselves, but with the mother country across the Atlantic. New England was predominantly Puritan, the southern colonies were basically cavalier. New York was in the main Dutch. Pennsylvania had been founded by the Quakers, while New Jersey needed to go back but a short distance to find its beginnings in a migration from Sweden.
There were well-nigh as many divergencies of religious faith as there were of origin, politics and geography. Yet, in the end, these religious differences proved rather unimportant. While the early dangers in some colonies made a unity in belief and all else a necessity to existence, at the bottom of the colonial character lay a stratum of religious liberalism which had animated most of the early comers. From its beginnings, the new continent had seemed destined to be the home of religious tolerance. Those who claimed the right of individual choice for themselves finally had to grant it to others. Beyond that-and this was one of the factors which I think weighed heaviest on the side of unity–the Bible was the one work of literature that was common to all of them. The scriptures were read and studied everywhere. There are many testimonies that their teachings became the most important intellectual and spiritual force for unification. I remember to have read somewhere, I think in the writings of the historian [W.E.H.] Lecky, the observation that “Hebraic mortar cemented the foundations of American democracy.” Lecky had in mind this very influence of the Bible in drawing together the feelings and sympathies of the widely scattered communities. All the way from New Hampshire to Georgia, they found a common ground of faith and reliance in the scriptural writings.
I join Rick Richman and recommending Jewish Roots of American Liberty.
