Protestant Hebrew
Performing Religious Authority through Eighteenth-Century Language Production
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4517467 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Michael Baysa (0009-0006-6308-2519, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Pages | 1-39 |
| Publication date | 2025-07-17 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Religion and American Culture A Journal of Interpretation (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1052-1151 • E-ISSN: 1533-8568 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/rac.2025.10054 |
| OpenAlex | W4413084795 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 16 |
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
Art · Colonialism · Hebrew · Judaism · Literature · Political science · Protestantism · Scholarship · Sociology · Classics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical and Linguistic Studies · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Religious Studies
| Highly cited | No |
|---|