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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 July 2025
This article examines the place of colonial Jews and Judaism in the Protestant imagination through the history of Hebrew printing in early America. While scholarship in Christian Hebraism has emphasized points of commonality and interreligious dialogue through shared texts between Judaism and Christianity, this study explores treatments of Hebrew that foreclosed collaboration and conversation between the two groups. The essay offers the term “Protestant Hebrew” to describe how colonial Anglo-American Protestants performed Hebrew to support ministerial authority and to imagine a receptive English-speaking captive Jewish audience for their works. In contrast, diasporic Sephardic Jews treated Hebrew as a necessary instrument for sustaining identity and communication networks across the Atlantic. This disparity was most evident through the publishing culture around Hebrew text types. Colonial printing presses carried just enough Hebrew type for Protestant productions to occasionally adorn their text with Hebrew characters, but never enough to treat it as its own language. Limited types would become a point of frustration for Jewish and Protestant authors who had to rely on printers overseas or on manuscript circulation to publish in Hebrew to a wider audience. Protestant Hebrew demonstrates how the constraints of Anglo-Protestant culture could materialize through the very mechanisms of colonial publishing.
The author would like to thank the editors, anonymous reviewers, and colleagues at Princeton’s Religion in the Americas workshop and the Danforth Center in Religion and Politics seminar for all of their invaluable feedback on this article.
1 Judah Monis to the administrators of Harvard College, June 29, 1720, https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:46833481$160i.
2 Judah Monis to the administrators of Harvard College, May 22, 1722, https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:46833481$224i.
3 Cotton Mather, Diary 1709–1724, ed. Clifford Shipton et al., Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Seventh Series (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1892), 741.
4 Monis, Judah, “Preface,” in Dickdook Leshon Gnebreet: A Grammar of the Hebrew Tongue: Being an Essay to Bring the Hebrew Grammar into English (Boston: Printed by Jonas Green, and are to be sold by the author at his house in Cambridge, 1735)Google Scholar.
5 Boyarin, Jonathan, The Unconverted Self: Jews, Indians, and the Identity of Christian Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 610.7208/chicago/9780226069142.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the early constructions of race, see Heng, Geraldine, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018)10.1017/9781108381710CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Goldman, Shalom, God’s Sacred Tongue: Hebrew and the American Imagination, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 2Google Scholar.
7 Kabakoff, Jacob, “The Use of Hebrew by American Jews during the Colonial Period,” in Hebrew and the Bible in America: The First Two Centuries, ed. Goldman, Shalom (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England), 196 Google Scholar.
8 On Christian Hebraism, see Sutcliffe, Adam, “Hebrew Texts and Protestant Readers: Christian Hebraism and Denominational Self-Definition,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 7, no. 4 (2000): 317–37Google Scholar. Sutcliffe posits that one important defining feature of Christian Hebraism is the tension between Protestant idealized notions of Hebrew and the Rabbinic Hebrew more readily studied among Jewish scholars. Despite this distinction, it still views the Hebrew language from the vantage point of Protestant nuance. More recent scholarship has stressed the contribution of itinerant or newly settled Jews on New England Puritan thought, gesturing towards the possibility that Hebrew invited interreligious dialogue, albeit in highly constrained ways. See Hoberman, Michael, New Israel/New England: Jews and Puritans in Early America, (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011)Google Scholar. This article concerns itself with the ways in which those constraints persisted and perhaps the mechanisms by which they were able to last as long as they did, despite the growing number of Jewish presences in British colonial America.
9 In addition to Protestant Hebrew, I have considered a variety of other terms that captures different sides of the argument. “Homiletical Hebrew” was a strong contender since it more directly named the context and function for most Protestant performances of Hebrew. While it avoids the trappings of “Protestant” by narrowing this phenomenon as a distinctly Protestant phenomenon, “Homiletical” does miss the other genres (such as almanacs) whereby the logics of orientalism were similarly deployed. I also considered retaining “Christian Hebraism” but it would be difficult to disassociate it from the longer histories that have shaped its study. Furthermore, “Christian” papers over the way in which the history of Protestant Hebrew was tethered to anti-Catholicism throughout circulating and public discourses using Hebrew in the broader Americas.
10 There seems to be a general consensus on figures. Since all students were required to take Hebrew, the number of students trained in the language should equate to the number of graduating students. Robert Geiger estimated that under the first two presidents, Henry Dunster and Charles Chauncy (1640–72), there were about 200 graduates (of an initial 300 attendees), and there were about 360 students enrolled for the next few presidencies, with no concrete figure for how many of them graduated. If we were to extrapolate a similar graduation rate from the first set of presidencies into the second one, then we can come to about 240 students who graduated in the second set, leading to about 440 students who graduated at the turn of the century. See Robert Geiger, The History of American Higher Education: Learning and Culture from the Founding to World War II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 6. A more recent article published in the Harvard Gazette cites the number 439, based on diplomas and commencement documents. See Corydon Ireland, “History by Degrees,” Harvard Gazette, May 2024, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/05/history-by-degrees/.
11 For a short list of figures that show the breadth of offices occupied by students trained in Hebrew, as well as the textbooks and theses that facilitated Hebrew instruction, see Pfeiffer, Robert H., “The Teaching of Hebrew in Colonial America,” Jewish Quarterly Review, 45, no. 4 (April 1944: 365–66Google Scholar. Pfeiffer names famed ministers like Richard and Cotton Mather, the Harvard presidents Henry Dunster and Charles Chauncy, the Plymouth governor William Bradford, the missionary to the Wampanoag John Eliot, and even the founder of the city of Providence, Roger Williams.
12 Fessenden, Tracy, Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006)Google Scholar, 221n21. Also see Ross, Andrew, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989), 55–56 Google Scholar.
13 Records of the Colony of New Plymouth, in New England: Acts of the Commissioners of the United Colonies of New England, 1643–1679 (Boston: Press of W. White, 1859), 278.
14 On the theory, details of this particular publication, and inspirations for Thorowgood, see Cogley, Richard, “The Ancestry of the American Indians: Thomas Thorowgood’s Jewes in America (1650) and Jews in America (1660),” English Literary Renaissance 35, no. 2 (2005): 304–3010.1111/j.1475-6757.2005.00061.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar. For its legacy in American thought, see Elizabeth Fenton, Old Canaan in a New World: Native Americans and the Lost Tribes of Israel (New York: New York University Press, 2020).
15 Williams, Roger, A Key into the Language of America (London: Printed by Gregory Dexter, 1643)Google Scholar.
16 See Boyarin, The Unconverted Self.
17 For more on the seventeenth-century history of print in colonial British America, see Whiteman, Maxwell, “The Introduction and Spread of Hebrew Type in the United States,” Printing History 12–14 (1990–2): 41–58 Google Scholar; Eames, Wilberforce, “On the Use of Hebrew Types in English America Before 1735,” in Studies in Jewish Bibliography and Related Subjects in Memory of Adolph Solomon Freidus (1867–1923) (New York: The Alexander Kohut Memorial Foundation, 1929), 481–502 Google Scholar; and Mikliszanski, , “Firsts of Hebrew Printing in America,” Hebrew Studies 17 (1976): 101 Google Scholar.
18 Preface, Bay Psalm Book (Cambridge, MA: Stephen Daye, 1640).
19 The appearance of these marks has also been referred to as the difference between pointed and unpointed Hebrew. Those intimately familiar with how Hebrew appears on the page might be able to infer proper recitation based on consonants alone, though such expertise among the Protestant laity was unlikely. Few Protestants ever conversed strictly in Hebrew, and Stiles’s unique correspondences and conversation with Carigal in Hebrew (after the rabbi had trained the Protestant minister) suggest that it was not part of Protestant training to be conversant in Hebrew. For an example of early American printed Hebrew, see Inscription of Mahzor Sefaradim le-Yamim Nora’im (Amsterdam, 1689), Michael Gratz collection.
20 For more on the years-long controversy involving George Keith, William Bradford, and the Philadelphian Quakers, see Green, Jim, “The Middle Colonies, 1680–1720,” in A History of the Book in America: The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, ed. Amory, Hugh and Hall, David D. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 199–223 Google Scholar. In general, Keith advocated for Quakers to rely more heavily on scripture and a historical Jesus, challenging Quaker doctrinal emphasis on the self-evident revelation of God. Critics accused Bradford of playing both sides of the controversy by printing for both supporters and opponents of Keith. It also did not help that, just a year prior, the Philadelphia Quakers had contracted Bradford in order to keep him from returning to London and depriving Philadelphia of a printer. The Philadelphia Quakers eventually released Bradford from his contract in April 1692, accusing him of driving and favoring the schism among the Friends, rather than printing works that bridged the factionalism: “The Printer hath not yet refused to print anything for either party; and . . . he is willing and ready to print anything for the future that G.K.’s Opposers shall bring to him.”
21 George Keith, “Preface,” in The New England’s Spirit of Persecution Transmitted to Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: William Bradford, 1693).
22 See Jacob Rader Marcus, “Light on Early Connecticut Jewry,” American Jewish Archives (June 1950): 5; McManus, Edgar, Law and Liberty in Early New England: Criminal Justice and Due Process, 1620–1692 (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 21 Google Scholar.
23 Cotton Mather, Diary of Cotton Mather, 1681–1724, ed. Worthington Chauncey Ford (New York: Ungar, 1957), 137.
24 While it is important to note that, as merchants from Barbados, they did need to be conversant with those in the colony who did speak English, their status as Sephardic Jews, coupled with Rabbi Haim Carigal’s visit to them in the eighteenth century, suggests that they may have spoken mostly Ladino. For more on this community, see Goodwin, George M. and Smith, Ellen, The Jews of Rhode Island (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press)Google Scholar.
25 On Crypto-Jews in the early modern period, see Gitlitz, David M., Secrecy and Deceit: The Religion of the Crypto-Jews (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1996)Google Scholar. Gitlitz surveys some of the genres of texts that ensured the survival of Jewish textuality into sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain through their creative uses of books that the Church itself would sanction as permissible for Catholics. Specifically, see Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit, 425–41.
26 It is worth noting that there were no rabbis who presided over American synagogues until the arrival of Abraham Joseph Reiss in the 1840s. Prior to Reiss, there were itinerant rabbis like Carigal, who will be discussed later in the section.
27 For more on the Jewish communities throughout the Americas, see Wiznitzer, Arnold, Jews in Colonial Brazil (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960)Google Scholar; Jacobs, Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1492–1776, 3 vols. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970)Google Scholar.
28 For an account of Roza Judia, an elite Jewish woman in Suriname, shown to have owned various Hebrew books, a prayer book in Spanish, a Hanukah candelabrum, and a sabbath lamp, see Aviva Ben-Ur, “The Cultural Heritage of Eurafrican Sephardi Jews in Suriname,” in The Jews in the Caribbean, ed. Jane S. Gerber (Portland: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2014), 190. Similarly, a copy of the kabbalistic text Sefer Shefa Tal (Hanau, 12) was owned by Jacob Franco Lugarto, a rabbi of a congregation in Tamarica, Brazil. The text is likely dated to either 1643 or 1648. A photocopy of the manuscript and notation appears in Goldman, Yosef, Hebrew Printing in America 1735–1926: A History and Annotated Bibliography, ed. Kinsberg, Ari, 2 vols. (Brooklyn, NY: YG Books, 2006), 1160 Google Scholar.
29 See Kayserling, Meyer, “Isaac Aboab: The First Jewish Author in America,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 5 (1897): 125–36Google Scholar. Also see Leibman, Laura, “Aboab da Fonseca and the Dutch Rescue of Recife (Brazil, 1656),” in Jews Across the Americas: A Sourcebook, 1492–Present, ed. Leibman, Laura Arnold and Brodsky, Adriana M. (New York: New York University Press, 2023), 45–48 10.18574/nyu/9781479819331.003.0014CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
30 See Kohut, George Alexander and Parry, John, “Early Jewish Literature in America,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, no. 3 (1895): 103–47Google Scholar. On the specific documents and other examples of texts circulating at the same time as the commemorative publication, see 127–28.
31 For a broad coverage of the languages and their politics of use for wills and gravestones across the Americas, see Ben-Ur, “The Cultural Heritage of Eurafrican Sephardi Jews in Suriname.”
32 The will is reprinted in Hershkowitz, Leo, “Wills of Early New York Jews (1704–1740),” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 55, no. 3 (March 1966): 324–25Google Scholar.
33 See Ben-Ur, Aviva and Frankel, Rachel, Remnant Stones: The Jewish Cemeteries of Suriname: Epitaphs (Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 2009)Google Scholar. For the epitaph of Sarah de Miranda (OS61, d. 1817), see p. 299; for Sarah de Miranda (OS52, d. 1803), see p. 295.
34 An image of this appears in Goldman, Hebrew Printing in America, 1735–1926, 252–59.
35 For more examples of material objects, rituals, and cultures that circulated and sustained identity across the Americas for Jews in diaspora, see Leibman, Laura Arnold, Messianism, Secrecy, and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2013)Google Scholar.
36 It is worth noting that her children were also learning Hebrew and Spanish together.
37 Abigail Franks to Naphtali Franks, October 30, 1748. Translation pulled from Letters of Abigail Levy Franks, ed. Edith B. Gelles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 154n2.
38 Abigail Franks to Naphtali Franks, July 9, 1733, from Gelles, Letters of Abigail Levy Franks, 7.
39 Abigail Franks to Naphtali Franks, October 17, 1739, from Gelles, Letters of Abigail Levy Franks, 68.
40 Jacobs, Colonial American Jew, 2:968.
41 Sewall, Samuel, Phaenomena quaedam apocalyptica ad aspectum novio rbis configurata (Boston: Printed by Bartholomew Green and John Allen, And are to be sold by Richard Wilkins, 1697)Google Scholar. On the Spanish Bible, see Gruesz, Kirsten Silva, Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons: A Story of Language, Race, and Belonging in the Early Americas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022), 72 Google Scholar. Gruesz argues that “Sewall is disingenuous about the Spanish Bible,” which can only have been a copy of the Biblia en Lengua Espanola Traducida Palabra por Palabra en Verdad Hebrayca (Bible in the Spanish Language Translated Word for Word from the True Hebrew).” I think the link is strong and it would make sense that Hebrew translations of the Tanach would continue to circulate among Sephardic Jews across the Atlantic. Comparing European productions to British colonial print culture establishes the latter’s distinctly Protestant identity, which was slow to accommodate non-Protestant textual productions.
42 Mather, Diary, 1709–1724, ed. Shipton et al., 298–300.
43 Mather, Cotton, The Faith of the Fathers. Or, The Articles of the True Religion, All of Them Exhibited in the Express Words of the Old Testament (Boston: Printed by B. Green and J. Allen, 1669), 4 Google Scholar.
44 Mather, Faith of the Fathers, 5, 23.
45 Jacob Marcus reads the texts’ primary audience as being other New England ministers: see Jacobs, Colonial American Jew, 3:1140. Hoberman contends that the text also functioned as a jeremiad for the laity of the Congregationalist Church, as a means of galvanizing them toward adopting Mather’s own views about the conversion of the Jews: see Hoberman, New Israel/New England, 73–85. Hoberman’s reading is helpful in situating Mather’s writings within broader ministerial anxieties in the wake of the Glorious Revolution and New England’s shifting goals in relation to Great Britain. Gruesz convincingly argues that Mather may have had a more geographically inflected ambition to have his text reach Mexico City: see Gruesz, Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons, 39. Nevertheless, the immediate audience for such a performance and the manner by which it was printed domestically, rather than produced via European printers, gestures towards the idea that Mather may have targeted his fellow ministers and Congregationalists, not diasporic Jews themselves.
46 Sewall, Phaenomena quaedam apocalyptica ad aspectum novio rbis configurata, 80.
47 See references from note 17.
48 On the cost of Hebrew alongside Caslon types, I primarily used the printer Isaiah Thomas’s ledgers in the American Antiquarian Society. See Isaiah Thomas Papers, 1748–1874, box 8, vol. 1, and box 15, folder 1. The English types that he had procured appeared in much larger quantities and, on average, cost about half the amount of a non-English type per set ordered. For example, in Thomas’s ledger, each set of English pica font (12-point font) costs about 1 shilling (15 pounds and 17 shillings for 317 sets), compared to the cost of a set of Hebrew pica type, which cost about 2 shillings (3 pounds and 6 shillings for 33 sets). The same ratio appears for long primers (10-point font), where thirty sets cost 3 pounds, which comes out to about 1 shilling per set.
49 William Caslon I, “A Specimen,” Broadside (Letter-Founder, in Chiswell-Street, London, 1734). The languages he included in the broadside included Syriac, Arabic, Armenian, Coptic, Hebrew (both pointed and unpointed), and Greek.
50 A brief list of Jewish conversion texts published in London appears in Jacobs, Joseph and Wolf, Lucien, Bibliotheca Anglo-Judaica: A Bibliographical Guide to Anglo-Jewish History (London: Office of the Jewish Chronicle, 1888)Google Scholar. Some notable texts that appeared at the same time as Truth Springeth from the Earth were Isaac Israel’s Christ Jesus, the True Messiah, Deleineated in Three Oeconomics Agreed on All Sides (London, 1682); Daniel Ben Alexander, A Declaration of the Christian Faith, with a Letter to Those of His Own Nation from the Syriac (London, 1688); and John Alexander, God’s Covenant Displayed by John Alexander, a Converted Jew (London, 1689).
51 Records of the Governor and the Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England (Boston: W. White, 1853–4).
52 On the connection between the merchant Franco who arrived in Boston and the later Franco who authored Truth Springeth, I rely on Jacobs, Colonial American Jew, 1:300–1. Here, he charts Franco’s movements when Franco returned to Holland in 1649. Three years afterward, Franco appeared in London teaching Hebrew.
53 Franco, Solomon, Truth Springeth out of the Earth: That Is, The Truth of Christ Proved out of the Earthly Promises of the Law (London: Printed by J. Flesher for the Author, 1668),Google Scholar Epistle to the Reader.
54 On printing in Jamaica, see Cave, Roderick, “Early Printing and the Book Trade in the West Indies,” Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy 48, no. 2 (1978): 163–9210.1086/630053CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
55 Goldman, God’s Sacred Tongue, 2.
56 New England Courant, March 1722.
57 New England Courant, March 1722. See also Goldman, God’s Sacred Tongue, 34n6.
58 Silver, Rollo, Publishing in Boston, 1726–1757: The Accounts of Daniel Henchman, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 66 (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1956), 20 Google Scholar. As Silver also points out, “sermons in earthquakes and on execution of criminals, particularly female, sold quite readily and in greater quantity” (20). It is likely that the baptism of a Jew, especially with ministers and local newspapers outlining the event itself, would have fascinated potential buyers.
59 Henchman worked with the London agent John Rowe on a reprinting job on February 1750. It is not too far a stretch to say that he was familiar with the book trade in London as well. See Silver, Publishing in Boston, 1726–1757, 27. On the connection between Kneeland and D. Henchman, see Isaiah Thomas, The History of Printing in America, vol. 1 (Worcester, MA: from the Press of Isaiah Thomas, 1810), 304–7. Thomas observed that “Kneeland and Green printed, principally for Daniel Henchman, an edition of the Bible in small quarto” (305). Kneeland proceeding with the project “privately” suggests a certain level of trust between the bookseller and the printer, particularly as the publication of the “first Bible printed, in America, in the English language” would have warranted “prosecution from those in England and Scotland, who published the Bible by a patent from the crown.” England was wary about allowing the colonies to print Bibles. As to whether there was an actual full English Bible printed by Kneeland and Green and Henchman remains unanswered. It was common for colonial printers to circumvent licensing and copyright issues as they related to printing English Bibles by including other texts, so that they were never read as the authoritative Bible or were merely seen and read in the “family” of Bible genres. See Seth Perry, Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 19–39. Nevertheless, Thomas’s note about the relationship between the printers and the rumors that spread around it is still noteworthy.
60 Benjamin Colman, A Discourse Had in the College-Hall at Cambridge, March 27, 1722. Before the Baptism of R. Judah Monis (Boston: Printed [by Samuel Kneeland] for Danuel Henchman, 1722). For the Judah Monis portions, see Judah Monis, “The Truth,” iv, 13; Judah Monis, “The Whole Truth,” 2; Judah Monis “Nothing but the Truth,” 3. On this trope within Protestant transatlantic literary spheres, see Kidd, Thomas S., The Protestant Interest: New England after Puritanism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004)10.12987/yale/9780300104219.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
61 Scholars have long debated the sincerity of Monis’s conversion. Some, like G. A. Kohut, pointed to the survival of Jewish customs such as Monis’s observance of Saturday, instead of Sunday, as the sabbath as evidence that Monis “remained loyal to Israel at heart, while apparently devoted to Christianity. . . . He changed his faith in name only, in order to reach the object of his ambitions. It is evident that Monis, though converted, was a Jew at heart, and a Christian in public life” ( Kohut, George Alexander, “Judah Monis, M.A.: The First Instructor in Hebrew at Harvard University [1683–1764],” American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures 14, no. 4 [1898]: 218–1910.1086/369287CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Others, like Arthur Hertzberg, have argued that Monis’s conversion was “genuine,” tied to an actual appreciation for New England Puritanism’s tenets and practices, especially over and against Catholicism (Arthur Hertzberg, The Jews in America: Four Centuries of an Uneasy Encounter [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006], 43). Some have even gone as far as to doubt Monis’s authorship of the work (Jacobs, Colonial American Jew, 1099). Most scholars have, however, remained ambivalent. Shalom Goldman argued that the retention of Jewish practices does not necessarily signal Jewish identity formation (Goldman, God’s Sacred Tongue, 41). Some have opted to historicize the anxieties around the conversion itself by Monis’s own contemporaries (e.g., Hoberman, New Israel/New England, 47–48). Hoberman’s broader point gestures towards what I believe are the stakes for the conversion, not necessarily the driving motivation: “Monis’s arrival was timely insofar as it coincided with a broadly based appeal in the part of the Harvard authorities to revive the spirit of the fathers by reasserting the power of individual conversion experience as a communal spectacle” (89). The spectacle flags what I believe has been missed in these approaches. The question of sincerity and proper conversion are difficult to answer within the various networks of relationship that determined the form and meaning of the printed text. This was especially true for Monis’s conversion, which relied on Benjamin Colman’s and Increase Mather’s prefaces, the bookseller Daniel Henchman, the printers that Henchman entrusted with his project and who ran newspaper ads for the project, and Harvard College, which ensured some kind of return for the cost and risk of selling the text. Whether or not we can ascertain whether Monis converted, it is clear from what was printed that those involved were very much invested in it being so.
62 Pfeiffer, “The Teaching of Hebrew in Colonial America.”
63 Clifford Shipton, Harvard College Records, Part II: Corporation Records, 1636–1750, Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 16 (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1925), 506. Note that this process of copying, a form of scribal publication, was a common practice among students. For more on scribal publication, see Hall, David H., “Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century New England: An Introduction and a Checklist,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 115 (2006): 29–80 Google Scholar.
64 Letter from Thomas Hollis to Edward Wigglesworth, February 10, 1725; also see Thomas Hollis to Benjamin Colman, February 10, 1725, both in Shipton, Harvard College Records.
65 Judah Monis, “Preface,” in Dickdook Leshon Gnebreet.
66 Shipton, Harvard College Records, 564.
67 Monis provided the college with a tally of how many of each Hebrew character he would need to be ordered. See Judah Monis Collection, “Mr. Monis’s daggishes,” [ca. 1728], HUG 1580.5, box 1, folder 4, Harvard University Archives.
68 Shipton, Harvard College Records, 562: “The Corporation desired Mr. Monis to correct his Hebrew Grammar fit for ye Press, & bring it to Mr. President & Mr. Flynt to peruse; and also yt a sheet half in he Paradigms be printed, whereby there may be an Estimate made of ye charge in printing ye whole Grammar, in case the Corporation should think proper to Incourage ye Printing of it. And yt this be done so as to be laid before ye Corporation at their meeting in September next.” It is important to note the shifting tone after two years: that, even with Hebrew text types and with Monis making the proper provisions, the board was revisiting the question of whether it was “proper to Incourage ye Printing” of the text itself.
69 Shipton, Harvard College Records, 625.
70 See the page after the cover page in extant copies of Monis, Dickdook Leshon Gnebreet. One extant copy, owned by the minister Samson Occom, is in the Dartmouth College Collections and was digitized through the Occom Circle project, https://www.library.dartmouth.edu/digital/digital-collections/occom-circle. Another digitized copy appears in Evans Early American Imprints, with a similar correction, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/evans/.
71 Monis, Dickdook Leshon Gnebreet.
72 Cited from Whamsey, Rachel, “‘A Pure Language (or Lip)’: Representing Hebrew in Colonial New England,” Studies in Jewish American Literature 37, no. 2 (2018): 122 Google Scholar, citing Friedman, Lee M., “Stephen Sewall to Richard Gray September 7, 1764,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 38, no. 2 (1948): 146–51Google Scholar.
73 Monis, “Preface,” in Dickdook Leshon Gnebreet.
74 Prior to this point, most students begrudged studying Hebrew but, because it was a requirement, they had no option, and the board continually thought of ways to make learning the language more tolerable for them. For more on Hebrew at Harvard, see Pfeiffer, “The Teaching of Hebrew in Colonial America,” and Meyer, Isidore S., “Hebrew at Harvard (1636-1760): A Résumé of the Information in Recent Publications,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, no. 35 (1939): 145–70Google Scholar.
75 Joseph Yeshurun Pinto, The Form of Prayer Which Was Performed at the Jews Synagogue in the City of New-York on Thursday October 23, 1760 (New York: Printed and Sold by W. Weyman, 1760), 7.
76 See Goldman, Hebrew Printing in America, 1735–1926, 160. It is possible that the types may have survived because the Hebrew types were with the printers while the Drapers produced Sewall’s text. The absence of extant domestic Hebrew productions in the British colonies between the fire and Thomas’s importing Hebrew text-types in 1785 suggests that they may have been lost.
77 See Hugh Amory, “The New England Book Trade,” in Amory and Hall, History of the Book in America, 332–33.
78 Chauncy’s Mystery Hid from Ages and Generations (1783) and Five Dissertations (1784) likely needed to be printed in London with printer Charles Dilly in part because there were no Hebrew or Greek text types in New England. In contrast, his text Benevolence of the Deity (1784) was printed in Boston because it was entirely in English. Chauncy’s biographers have made a similar observation. See Edward Griffin, Old Brick: Charles Chauncy of Boston, 1705–1787 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980). For more on the history of publishing Chauncy’s manuscript, see Baysa, Michael, “Printing, Publics, and Pudding: Charles Chauncy’s Universal Salvation and the Material Transformation of New England Orthodoxy,” Church History 92, no. 2 (June 2023): 291–311 10.1017/S0009640723001403CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
79 John Eliot to Jeremy Belknap, 26 August 1784, in The Belknap Papers, Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society Sixth Series 4 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1840), 275–76.
80 William Hazlitt to Richard Price, 19 October 1784, in “The Price Papers,” Electronic Enlightenment, Oxford University Press, online collection, http://www.e-enlightenment.com.
81 See Thomas, Isaiah, A Specimen of Isaiah Thomas’s Printing Types. Being as Large and Complete an Assortment as Is to Be Met with any One Printing-Office in America. Chiefly Manufactured by That Great Artist, William Caslon, Esq. of London (Worcester, MA: Printed by Isaiah Thomas, 1785)Google Scholar. For the Greek and unpointed Hebrew types, see p. 29.
82 It is also worth noting that the Vermont printer David Carlisle was apprenticed by Thomas and was part of his broader network of printers/booksellers across the Atlantic coast of the United States. See Emblidge, David, “Isaiah Thomas Invents the Bookstore Chain,” Publishing Research Quarterly, 28 (2012): 53–64 10.1007/s12109-012-9254-7CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It was likely this connection that gave him access to the types.
83 In particular, John Baine of Boston and Philadelphia operated a foundry, and Adam Gerard Mappa was credited with being the first typefounder in New York City. For a brief overview, see Annenberg, Maurice, Type Foundries of America and Their Catalogs (Baltimore and Washington, DC: Maran Printing Services, 1975), 34–36 Google Scholar.
84 For more, see Grafton, Anthony, Inky Fingers: The Making of Books in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021)Google Scholar. It is worth noting, however, that the Spanish Inquisition would eventually constrain print in certain Catholic-dominated countries. Nevertheless, there is something to be said about the persistent Anglo-Protestant control over the press in the colonies that, in some ways, mirrors the effects of the Inquisition on European presses.
85 See Hacker, Joseph and Shear, Adam, eds., The Hebrew Book in Early Modern Italy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 111–1210.9783/9780812205091CrossRefGoogle Scholar, citing a translation by Finkelstein, L., Jewish Self Government in the Middle Ages (New York: Philipp Feldheim, 1964), 304 Google Scholar.
86 For a sampling of the range of ordinances restricting Hebrew printing across Europe, see Joseph Hacker, “Sixteenth-Century Jewish Internal Censorship of Hebrew Books,” in Hacker and Shear, eds., The Hebrew Book in Early Modern Italy, 109–20.
87 It is unclear which of the following was more operative. Jacobs argues that, in 1663, the influential Bevis Marks congregation “had declared, under threat of excommunication, that no religious book was to be published by a Jew without the approval of the synagogal board” (Jacobs, Colonial American Jew, 968). However, there does not seem to be a strong argument or footnote in support of this claim, leaving scholars like Shalom Goldman to merely cite it as a claim by Jacobs. This is an interesting argument since it places the onus on Jews themselves self-censoring for cultural and religious reasons. Another reason that seems just as plausible was that one of the conditions for Jewish resettlement in London was set by John Thurloe, the Secretary to the Council of the State, who specified in one of the 1656 minutes that Jews were “not to be allowed to print anything, which in the least oppose the Christian Religion, in our language” (quoted from Samuel Edgar, At The End of the Earth: Essays on the History of the Jews in England and Portugal [London: Jewish Historical Society of England, 2004], 188). While this freed Jews to publish in Hebrew and Spanish, it did place an important restriction on the ways in which they could self-represent in the Anglophone world. It is hard to say how this affected the British colonies, but the combination of this constraint on Jews publishing dissent in English and the absence of Hebrew text types may have further hindered any attempts to work with British American colonial printers.
88 Quoted from Jacob R. Marcus, Early American Jewry, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1953), 497. Also see Rosenthal, Judah M., “Two Early Jewish Polemicists on American Soil,” Hebrew Union College Annual 34 (1963): 229–50Google Scholar.
89 See Kerner, Alexander, “1733–1781: Censorship at Its Peak – Moseh Nieto’s Prayer Book,” in Lost in Translation, Found in Translation: Books, Censorship, and the Evolution of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews’ Congregation of London as a Linguistic Community, 1663–1810 (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 202–2710.1163/9789004367050_015CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
90 Pinto, Isaac, “Preface,” in Prayers for Shabbath, Rosh-Hashanah, and Kippur, or the Sabbath, the Beginning of the Year, and the Day of Atonements (New York: Printed by John Holt, 1766)Google Scholar.
91 While I use the adjective “Spanish” here, some scholars have preferred the term “Ladino” as the language of Iberian Jews. I find that, by the eighteenth century, both Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews described their primary language as Spanish rather than Ladino, which is why I have opted for it in this article. However, I acknowledge the important regional distinctions that might trouble the simplicity of naming it as the primary spoken language, i.e., changes in Spanish dialects over time and proximities to adjacent languages like Portuguese.
92 Stiles, Ezra, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, DD., LL.D., vol. 1, ed. Dexter, Franklin Bowditch (Charles Scribner’s Sons: New York, 1901), 376 Google Scholar.
93 Stiles, Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, 377.
94 It is important to note that there were not many rabbis in the British colonies. Rabbinical authority was not established among Jewish communities until closer to the post-Civil War period. For one example of lay authority in relation to rabbis, see Zev Eleff, “Society of Reformed Israelites,” in Leibman and Brodsky, Jews Across the Americas, 171–73.
95 Stiles, Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, 377, mentions that “The Jews intend to print it.” On the commemorative function of printed sermons compared to the oral performance, see Michael Warner, “The Evangelical Public Sphere,” A. S. W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography, Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania, March 23,–26, 2009, recording available at https://repository.upenn.edu/entities/publication/840f5aba-36f2-4184-b083-f87820419808.
96 Stiles, Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, 378.
97 Stiles, Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, 378.
98 Leibman, Laura, “From Holy Land to New England Canaan: Rabbi Haim Carigal and Sephardic Itinerant Preaching in the Eighteenth Century,” Early American Literature 44, no. 1 (2009): 71–93 10.1353/eal.0.0044CrossRefGoogle Scholar.