Abstract
One of the central expressions of joy in Jewish tradition is through Torah study. The prophetic tradition envisioned this joy as infectious, charging the Jewish people to share the divine wisdom they steward with the rest of the world. This essay traces the influence of classical Jewish wisdom upon the American experiment by examining an extraordinary intellectual friendship between a Hebron-born rabbi and one of the most prominent figures of the American Founding.
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Notes
- 1.
Jonathan Sacks, “The Pursuit of Joy,” Covenant and Conversation (blog), accessed November 29, 2022, https://www.rabbisacks.org/covenant-conversation/ki-tavo/the-pursuit-of-joy/.
- 2.
See BT Ta’anit 30a.
- 3.
See BT Bava Batra 145b, with Rashbam ad loc., and Rabbeinu Gershom ad loc.
- 4.
See BT Eruvin 54a.
- 5.
For Stiles’ letter to Rabbi Carigal, see Beinecke Library, Ezra Stiles Papers, letter to Raphael Haim Isaac Carigal, July 7, 1775. On Stiles’ learned reputation, see Edmund S. Morgan, The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727–1795 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1962), 134. On his acceptance of the post at Yale, then called Yale College, see ibid., 307; on his founding role at Brown, then the College of Rhode Island, see ibid., 204–6.
- 6.
For Stiles’ letter to Franklin see “To Benjamin Franklin from Ezra Stiles, 27 December 1769,” National Archives: Founders Online, accessed November 28, 2022, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-16-02-0172.
- 7.
On the rise of Hebraic scholarship during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 7–16. On the role of the printing press in the Reformation, see Andrew Pettegree, Brand Luther: 1517, Printing and the Making of the Reformation (Penguin Books, 2016).
- 8.
On Luther’s antisemitism, see David H. Price, Johannes Reuchlin and the Campaign to Destroy Jewish Books (Oxford University Press, 2011), 213–20. On Reuchlin’s campaign against the Jewish book pogrom, see ibid., 95–138. On Reuchlin as one of the hasidei ummot ha-olam, see Rabbi Israel Lipschutz, Tiferet Yisrael to Mishnah Avot 3:1.
- 9.
For Reuchlin’s proposal that Jews should loan their books to German universities for Hebrew instruction, see Daniel O’Callaghan, The Preservation of Jewish Religious Books in Sixteenth-Century Germany: Johannes Reuchlin’s Augenspiegel (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 197. On Reuchlin’s study with the Sforno, see Price, Johannes Reuchlin, 66–67.
- 10.
On Stiles’ receipt of a copy of the Zohar, see Franklin Bowditch Dexter, ed., The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles (New York: C. Scribner’s sons, 1901), 370; and see Brian Ogren, Kabbalah and the Founding of America: The Early Influence of Jewish Thought in the New World (New York: New York University Press, 2021), 155. For Stiles’ study session with Rabbi Carigal, see Beinecke Library, Ezra Stiles Papers, journal entry for April 26, 1773. On Stiles’ warm relationship with several rabbis see Arthur A. Chiel, “The Rabbis and Ezra Stiles,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 61, no. 4 (1972): 294–312. In Stiles’ view, however, none of his rabbinic interlocutors could match Rabbi Carigal’s erudition; on which see below.
- 11.
On Yale’s suspension of commencement exercises during the American Revolution, see David Andrew Wilock, “Testing the Elite: Yale College in the Revolutionary Era, 1740–1815” (PhD diss., St. John’s University, 2021), 110. For Stiles’ commencement remarks, see Ogren, Kabbalah and the Founding of America, 246–47. For the Hebrew version, see ibid., 236.
- 12.
See Jonathan Sacks, “Freedom’s Defence,” Covenant and Conversation (blog), accessed November 29, 2022, https://www.rabbisacks.org/covenant-conversation/bo/freedoms-defence/.
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Lamm, A. (2023). Joy and Judaism at the Battle of Bunker Hill. In: Brown, E., Weiss, S. (eds) An Ode to Joy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28229-4_29
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