Insane on the Subject of Judaism

Pursuing the Ghost of Warder Cresson

Bibliographic Data

ID5348640
AuthorsStuart Schoffman (corresponding author)
Year2004
Volume94
Issue2
Pages318-360
Publication date2004-03-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Jewish Quarterly Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-6682 • E-ISSN: 1553-0604
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/jqr.2004.0052
OpenAlexW2047304749
LanguageEN
References cited10

T H E J E W I S H QUA R T E R LY RE V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 2 (Spring 2004) 318–360 ‘‘Insane on the Subject of Judaism’’: Pursuing the Ghost of Warder Cresson STUART SCHOFFMAN IN AN ARTICLE ENTITLED ‘‘Proselytes of Righteousness,’’ first published in the B’nai B’rith Magazine in 1935, Cecil Roth began his brisk historical survey of conversion to Judaism with an apposite passage from Maimonides: A man who left father and mother, forsook his birth-place, his country and its power, and attracted himself to this holy, despised, and enslaved race; who recognized the truth and righteousness of this people ’s Law, and cast the things of this world from his heart—shall such a one be called fool? God forbid! Not witless but wise has God called thy name, thou disciple of Abraham our father, who also left his father and his kindred and inclined Godwards.1 Given the grim destiny of various proselytes in centuries past—Roth’s roster included Alexander Voznitzin, the retired Russian naval captain who was publicly burned in St. Petersburg in 1738, and Valentine Potocki , the Polish count who met the same fate in Vilna, in 1749— Maimonides’ encouraging words have often, as a practical matter, rung I wish to acknowledge the late Professor Moshe Davis of the Hebrew University and Professor Jonathan Sarna of Brandeis University for their encouragement and assistance. 1. Cecil Roth, ‘‘Proselytes of Righteousness,’’ Personalities and Events in Jewish History (Philadelphia, 1953), 143–44. Roth’s elegant translation is a condensation of the final paragraph of Maimonides’ ‘‘Letter to Obadiah the Proselyte.’’ Diplomatically omitted, for example, is Maimonides’ statement that other religions are ‘‘stolen’’ from Judaism and distortions of it. See Yitzhak Shilat, ed., Igrot haRambam [Epistles of Maimonides] (Hebrew; Jerusalem, 1987), 240–41. See also Isadore Twersky, A Maimonides Reader (New York, 1972), 474–76. Twersky’s excerpt does not include the passage quoted by Roth but stresses the halakhic focus of Maimonides’ letter. The Jewish Quarterly Review (Spring 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. “INSANE ON THE SUBJECT OF JUDAISM”—SCHOFFMAN 319 sadly ironic. They assume a rare piquancy, however, when one considers the strange and widely forgotten career of Warder Cresson (1798–1860), the prosperous Pennsylvania farmer and religious enthusiast who left his family in 1844, briefly served as the first American consul in Jerusalem, was circumcised there on March 28, 1848, and took the name Michael Boaz Israel. After returning to Philadelphia later that year, hoping to persuade his loved ones to become Jews too and return to Jerusalem with him, he was, at the behest of his wife and son, adjudged legally insane by a six-man sheriff’s jury.2 It was in 1990, in Jerusalem’s City of the Dead, the Israeli author Meron Benvenisti’s engaging tour of the capital’s cemeteries and sundry characters interred therein, that I first encountered Warder Cresson.3 At once I sensed in the eccentric lover of Zion a kindred spirit, worthy of further investigation. Two years earlier, in the thick of the first Palestinian intifada , I had moved to Jerusalem from Los Angeles, where I’d spent ten years as a Hollywood screenwriter. The Israeli consulate had stamped my American passport to indicate that I was a new immigrant. ‘‘‘Oleh h .adash?’’ exclaimed the El Al security guard, as he examined the document —‘‘Shiga‘on!’’ This last word can be translated idiomatically as ‘‘far out,’’ but it derives, of course, from the same root as meshugga‘, a connotation that was clearly implicit in—or that I projected into—the guard’s choice of words. Was Cresson meshugga‘? A century and a half later, it’s hard to say. He appealed the 1848 decision, and the case went to court in May 1851. His attorney, General Horatio Hubbell, was a distinguished veteran of the Pennsylvania Volunteers, a poet and lyricist, and coauthor of a proposal, submitted to an unreceptive Congress in January 1849, to lay a transatlantic telegraph cable connecting America and Europe.4 The thrust of 2. See Roth, Personalities and Events, 166, for a brief treatment of

Hebrew · Judaism · Power (physics) · Righteousness · Subject (documents) · Theology · American Jewish Fiction Analysis · Classics · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Jewish Identity and Society · Philosophy · Religious studies

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