The contribution of Jewish Literature to 'Sacred History' in Late 17th-century Cambridge

This project thus engages with the burgeoning scholarship on the subject of early modern 'Christian Hebraism', which has been given new impetus by Kenneth Austin's The Jews and the Reformation. Austin argues that the proper relationship between Jews and Christians is fundamental to the ruptures of the Reformation-era. I would like to write the next chapter of this story, with a particular focus on the ways in which late seventeenth-century English scholars were guided by Jewish scholarship in their quest to understand 'paganism'. This appears a fertile and yet, under-explored area of Hebraic scholarship, which is widely understood to have gone into terminal decline in this period, as is evidenced by the work of Jacob Abolafia, Eric Nelson, Anthony Grafton and Timothy Twinning as well as that of Sutcliffe. Whilst these scholars are correct to point out the marginalisation of specifically Jewish scholarship in this period, I would posit that such scholarship does not die out, but rather becomes part of a broader, polyglottal conversation encompassing more languages and cultures, as these become part of biblical chronology and philology. In doing so, I will be following in the footsteps of Zur Shalev and Jonathan Sheehan, as well as Levitin, who have posited that a distinct 'history of idolatry' emerges in this period, which goes on to form the basis of Enlightenment 'histories of religion'.

I wish to situate the work of Castell within a broader orientalist context, which saw his chair in Arabic endowed over one-hundred years after the appointment of the first Regius Professor of Hebrew. It is my contention that the findings of early modern Hebraism necessitated the broader study of ancient Near-Eastern languages, which forms the basis of 'sacred history'. Scholars have tended to assume that 'Christian Hebraism' was instrumentalised by advocates of Catholicism, Lutheranism and Calvinism in their debates with one another. Whilst this was the case for many Hebraists, it is not the end of the story. Through polyglottal scholarship, inter-denominational debates about the Hebrew Bible, its' status and the historicity of its' vowel points, are complicated and expanded. The study of the Bible in multiple languages entails a recognition of its' multiple meanings. These might be uncovered as part of a quest to recover the 'original' text or to endorse a particular theological position. Whilst there is a rich scholarly literature on the usages of Jewish texts to buttress Christian confessional claims, recognition of the ways in which Jewish scholarship informed the beliefs of Christians, and in some cases, took those to the bounds of 'orthodoxy' and into the 'history of religion', is more recent. The need to read multiple versions of the Bible side-by-side is based on an important assumption, which gets to the heart of the insights derived from Hebraic scholarship as to the historical specificity of the Old Testament. A multi-lingual approach to the Scriptures assumes a diverse historical context, a multi-cultural chronology, which cannot be made sense of through a single 'holy book'. This recognition does not entail turning the Bible into mere fragment of ancient history but rather using historical-philological methodology to uncover its' meanings. It is this quest which formed the basis of 'sacred history', which evolved into the 'history of religion'. This Enlightenment-era discipline, does not, as previously argued, represent a break with Reformation-era biblical scholarship, but is rather a development of it.