 Good afternoon everyone, welcome, and I think we're in for a very interesting program. When the early New England Puritans chose to reject the excessive ritual and structure of the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches, they went back to the Bible for guidance and found a ready-to-hand model for governances in its depiction of the Old Testament Jews. But the colonists' relations with contemporary Jews were more problematic, as was the effort to apply biblical law to their everyday problems and the issues involved in transatlantic trade. These are the issues that our speaker, Michael Hoberman, will explore in today's history by Jews and Puritans in early America. Michael is a professor of American literature at Fitchburg State University. His areas of expertise include colonial era, the early republic and antebellum authors, and he has a particular interest in regionalism and the sense of place. He's a graduate of Reed College, received his Ph.D. from UMass Amherst, and has published several books and scholarly articles on New England history and Jewish American culture. His latest book, A Hundred Acres of America, the Geography of Jewish American Literary History, was published by Rutgers University Press last June. So, please welcome Michael. Thank you. Thanks so much. I'm going to try to take a talk that's usually a 50-minute talk and reduce it down to half an hour to see how that works out, but I always, I have the slides here to remind me that I have, you know, there's a prop that I can go to to move forward. So, I thought I would start by, first of all, I want to ask who wrote that description because that's a fantastic description. I wish, okay, thank you, George. I love that description, Matt. I wish I could have said that about my own book. So, thank you. But I thought I would say something about how I got into researching this subject in the first place. There's a little bit of a story there. When I finished at UMass a thousand years ago, the PhD that I received at UMass was in American Studies, and my dissertation was on folklore. And I actually did some oral histories and then wrote a book about oral traditions among people not far from here and levered and shootsberry and so on. And so, I had gotten a habit of doing ethnographic research. A few years went by, I started teaching full-time and I needed a new project and I thought, well, you know, nobody's really done a study of Jewish people in small towns in New England. I knew well enough that I wasn't going to find a shelf, let alone a library of books on that subject. And so, if I wanted to write about Jews in small towns in New England, the only way to do it would be to do the ethnography. So I said about doing that. This is about 2003, 2004, 2005. I said about organizing myself to conduct what ended up being roughly 60 interviews, mostly in places like May, Vermont, New Hampshire, a little bit of Western Massachusetts. And that's what got me into this project. In particular, there was a story that I heard more than once. I can't remember now if it was twice or three times, but there's always significance to that. If you're a folklorist and you hear the same story in different places, you perk up your ears. The story was as follows. So the first Jews who came really who came to places like Maine and Vermont and New Hampshire were traveling peddlers. They arrived there starting in the 1880s, 1890s, and during the period of time that large numbers of Jews were coming into, from Eastern New York, coming into places like New York and Boston, these peddlers would go out into the countryside and they would sell their wares to Yankee farmers. And so the story I heard in these two different places, I think one was in New Hampshire and one was in Western Massachusetts, a person I was interviewing who would be, let's say, the grandson or the granddaughter of one of these peddlers who showed up in this town in Maine, let's say in 1900. The grandchild tells me a story about how when my grandfather first came here, he was knocking door to door and he would be invited into the house. Of course, despite whatever prejudices Yankee farmers might have had about Jews or any other non-Yankee people around them, they certainly needed the items that these Jewish people were selling, right, because they lived too far away from the department stores. And so there would be at least that much of an impulse to welcome people into their homes. Well anyway, the grandfather is welcomed into the farmhouse and he shows off his wares. And in both cases, in both versions of the story, that when the home owners, when the homesteading family realizes that he's a Jew, they ask him to take out his prayer book and read out loud from the prayer book, read to them in Hebrew. They were fascinated. They had this fascination apparently with the language of the ancient Israelites from the standpoint of being Protestants. That was of interest to them. They felt that these Jews, however outside of the circuit of blessedness they might have been, at least these Jews, they had sort of a direct line to the ancients. And so that was the basic idea that got me going on this project here. I wanted to investigate the history of the earlier history, the colonial period, when Jewish people, particularly traders, mostly of Sephardic ancestry, started arriving not in Maine or Vermont, but in places like Newport Rhode Island and to a small extent places like Boston, Seaport cities, the degree to which they were engaged by the surrounding Protestant culture. And so that's what got me going on the project. At that time, as I conceived of it, I proposed a grant and I was fortunate to have a year-long research fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society, which is where all my pictures come from, by the way. So they gave me a year to sit in their archive and look at materials and devote time to writing a book and not teach. So that's how I got the work done. So when I started studying American literature in my early 20s or whenever that was, there was already a pattern, a motif among scholars of American literature of concentrating on the Puritan period and drawing parallels between the Puritans and the Israelites, because the Puritans themselves were in the habit of doing this. So scholars like Perry Miller, we're talking about in the 1930s and 1940s, were already investigating a sort of a fairly loose but consistent affiliation, an affinity that Puritans had for what I'll call the Jewish legacy, Jewish history, Jewish ideas. So I already knew that that was out there and those scholars had done that work quite some time ago. At the same time that that work was being done, let's say in the middle of the 20th century, Jewish American historians, a sort of a separate field, were doing their best to document every single Jew that set foot in America before the Civil War. Looking at all of the instances of Jews in the major cities and in the hinterlands and so on. So that was another body of scholarship that I was able to draw upon. What I wanted to find out, and that's why I'm so fond of George's summary of my talk, was how do you square these two things? On the one hand, how do you take this fairly abstract ideological affinity that Puritans expressed for the Jewish heritage, the Jewish worldview? How do you combine that with the arrival, the actual arrival, the presence of actual practicing Jews in the new world? What happens when you put those two things together? There were, basically when I got started on this, what I discovered was that there were two prevailing views on the subject. And I divided them up in the introduction to my book. I divided them up into the Wishful Thinking School, and we'll call it the Reality School, the Skeptical School. So the Wishful Thinking School would include somebody as noteworthy as Max Faber, the sociologist, who many, many years ago drew a connection between the Protestant work ethic and some version of a Jewish work ethic. And he wrote that there was a natural affinity between Protestants and Jews that developed, he claimed, even in North America, the colonial period, owing to the fact that both peoples had this work ethic. And so, without any documentation, he basically speculates, well, naturally the Jews, the Puritans loved the Jews, they welcomed them with open arms into America. And of course, I knew that's why I call that the Wishful Thinking School. It wasn't quite like that. More recently, there have been other people who have made a similar claim, though. There are, there's recently an anthology that came out, I'm sorry, I don't remember the title of it, published by a very significant rabbi, orthodox rabbi, with, I'll just say, neo-conservative leanings, arguing that the American heritage owes, the American historical and political heritage owes much of itself to Jewish precedent. I still call that Wishful Thinking. Now, the Skeptical School, and the Skeptical School is primarily, was primarily espoused by these people, specialists in Jewish American history, look at the stories of these Jews on the ground and say, well, actually, you know, they weren't really welcomed with open arms. For the most part, yes, there were Jewish communities in New York, there was a Jewish community, many Jewish communities in the Caribbean, Charleston, South Carolina, and so on. One thing that these people notice, Arthur Hertzberg wrote a history of the Jews in America about 1990. He points out that Jews were much, there were hardly any Jews at all in colonial America, but there were especially few in New England. And that's basically, in terms of the documentation, that is true. Nonetheless, the problem with that viewpoint, as I saw it, was that it oversimplifies Puritanism, it reduces Puritans to sort of a single entity, and it fails to take it in the fact that Puritanism was actually comprised of very diverse points of view and very often dialectically divided points of view. People who could be considered Puritans run the gamut from John Cotton to Roger Williams. Roger Williams, who was evicted by the Puritans, well, why was he evicted? He was evicted from Massachusetts because he was too much of a Puritan. He was too much of a separatist. So to reduce Puritanism to sort of a monolithic entity brings about a judgment that, well, Puritans closed their doors to everybody. My contention is that Puritans were a modern people, that their orthodoxy was very much a function of their participation in a transatlantic market economy. And to the extent that Jews were intrinsic to that transatlantic market economy, there was no way that Puritans or anybody else in the colonial American, British North America could pretend that Jews weren't there. Moreover, because Puritans were so conflicted, as I've mentioned before, there was so much conflict within Puritanism. So many, you know, as a whole succession of crises through particularly if you're looking at the second half of the 17th century just in Massachusetts Bay. Every one of those crises from the Antinomian crisis when Ann Hutchinson was put on trial to Roger Williams all the way to the sale of which trials in 1692, whenever a crisis occurred Puritans would look to historic precedent for guidance. And much of the historic precedent for them could be found in that Hebraic model. And every now and then they remembered that there were Jews physically present who actually could be consulted. Some of this goes back in fact to before the Puritans were here because in England and in the Netherlands in the first half of the 17th century there were interactions. There were large Jewish communities in Amsterdam and in London and these communities were occasionally consulted on theological matters by Protestants. A sort of fascinating case in point is there was a lot of interest on the part of English Protestants in particular in something that's been called the Jewish Indian theory. Perhaps you've heard this. Some people still are proponents of it. I think maybe Mormons are. That the Native American people are actually the lost ten tribes of Israel. This is a very intriguing idea to people in England and to some people in England in the 17th century. And in a few instances consultations were made so that an English Protestant consults a Jewish rabbi in Amsterdam. The Jewish rabbi has been in contact with Jews in Brazil who claim was made that a traveling Sephardic Jew somewhere in the Amazon encountered a group of bearded Indians who recited the Shema on the other side of the river. And so when the English theologians heard this story for them what that meant was well we're at the edge of the second coming you know the Jews are going to be converted spread around the world and so on. Who did they ask? They asked Rabbi Manasseh Ben Israel in Amsterdam. Is this true? And he said well yes I heard the same thing. So these consultations preceded any interactions in North America. I think I'm probably at the point now where I should go to my slides and I think this will help me to bring it down to some of the individual stories here. The first slide here is just some documentary evidence for us of the degree to which Puritans modeled their commonwealth literally on the Israeli commonwealth of the ancient world and what you see here is a proposed version of law for the commonwealth of Massachusetts it was proposed by John Cotton. I think this document dates to 1641 it's in the Massachusetts Historical Society and the heading up here it says chapter seven of crimes each not each but most of these crimes listed on the left hand side there's a corresponding note on the margin that directs you to a passage in Deuteronomy that stipulates a punishment for that crime including stoning for violating the Sabbath and things like that and John Cotton in fact didn't prevail in this situation they didn't adopt this exact body of laws because as I said the Puritans were a modern people nonetheless the idea was floated around. Our next figure to be thinking about is some of you probably recognize Cotton Mather. Cotton Mather I would make the claim that and certainly in 17th century New England he was the greatest scholar of Hebrew on hand there were Jews as I said there were Jews in places like New York in the 1600s he knew Hebrew better than they did right the Jews who came here were merchants for the most part they were not you know they were not rabbis or anything like that and Cotton Mather in fact wrote his master's thesis at Harvard on vowel points in Hebrew so he was he was an acknowledged scholar of the Hebrew language and where it gets interesting where you have an actual story is something that occurs involving him and this person here which is Samuel Sewell right a magistrate in the Massachusetts court who gained fame late in his career for being one of the judges in the sale of witch trials he was the only judge who apologized afterwards for the role that he played and for that reason apparently he's the only his portrait hangs it might be this very one actually a portrait of him in any case hangs in the state house commemorating his acknowledgement of the mistake that he made in that case so well in any case you have both Sewell and Mather are in Boston the period of time I'm talking about right now is the very late 1690s and in roughly 1695 two Jewish brothers arrived in the city of Boston their last name was Frazin they were Sephardim of Portuguese Spanish then Portuguese ancestry their father had sent them there they had come to Boston from Barbados the father is based in London and they're conducting as many other people are the participating in what we call the triangle trade and they're they're sent sent to Boston for roughly a period of about 10 years that's what the documents tell us so as it turns out well first I have to tell a circumcision story because this this doesn't fit my it doesn't fit my my argumentative narrative but you just have to hear this story a pirate accomplice of captain kid was brought into Boston Harbor and the authorities wanted to put him on trial they were pretty certain that it was the guy they said it was he was an accomplice of captain kid and what was known about this person who was supposed to be an accomplice of captain kid was that early in his piratical career he had been captured and forcibly circumcised by Arabs somewhere in North Africa and but nobody in Boston knew what a circumcised penis looked like except the Frazin brothers and there is if you go to the Massachusetts archives you can find David given by one of these brothers claiming well yes I examined the the subject he is in fact circumcised a pair although not according to the Jewish model I guess that he said that it was a messy circumcision but in any case so these these two brothers find their way into our archives in that form but more salient interest is what happens when Cotton Mather decides that he is going to try to convert this Frazin brothers to Christianity Cotton Mather had written quite extensively in his diaries about his desire to convert even just one Jew if he could convert one Jew to Protestantism his whole life would be worthwhile and so he contrives to do it and he hauls this guy this Frazin businessman into his study and according to Sewell he doesn't get away with it the guy doesn't buy the argument that Mather is making because what Sewell says in his diaries that Mather actually fabricated a non-existent proof test that is he invented a passage that he claimed to be in the Hebrew Bible predicting the arrival of Christ and what he didn't know was that these two Frazin brothers had gone to the Yeshiva in London and they knew the Hebrew Bible better than he thought they would know and the reason we know about it is because Sewell wrote about it Sewell wasn't a very fond fan of Cotton Mather why it's salient to the the argument that I'm making the book is that remember what I was saying before about how Puritans themselves were had had conflicting ideas about how to live a correct Christian life the problem of as Mather defined it was that there's a role that we have to we have to be activists in bringing about the changes that we want to see that will bring about the second coming of Christ and Sewell was more of a person who believed I mean as sure as fairly clear to people Puritanism is very much a defined by people's acceptance of an idea of grace and predestination and so from Sewell's point of view it's not you don't intercede in behalf of God if the Jews are going to be converted you don't have to go out there and knock on their doors and try to make them convert it's going to happen naturally through the grace of God so the disagreement between Sewell and Mather dramatizes that division to which I'm speaking in connection with Puritanism how much time do I have left here 10 minutes okay I think I can get through a couple of these things so I forgot to mention in connection with particularly with Sewell when Sewell was in his 30s or 40s he went on a brief trip to England for two years I think and when he went in England when he went to England he visited among other places he visited this place this is the Bevis March synagogue it's the oldest synagogue in England it was built in 1704 the oldest the congregation itself was founded probably about 25 30 years earlier than that and Sewell visited the synagogue he watched Shabbat service there he writes about it in his diary and he also and this is the other connected picture here he also visits the cemetery where the Jews bury their dead this is a Sephardic congregation it's still functioning if you go to London it's I recommend it is a wonderful tour there by the way that's a fox that's a fox in the cemetery he goes to the cemetery and when he's in the cemetery he meets a Jewish custodian a groundskeeper and he writes in this diary about having met this groundskeeper and had having had a wonderful conversation with the groundskeeper and when they part ways Sewell and the groundskeeper Sewell says and we wished each other we wished that we would once again see one another in heaven and that when we are in heaven together we will drink a beer he says this he has to drink a beer together we will we will have beer together something to that effect to me this is just a startling thing that Sewell's idea of heaven accommodates the presence of a practicing Jew not to mention the beer drinking as a you know as an active community together so Sewell again evinces suggests a certain certain degree of open-mindedness on the subject of Jews okay another story another phase another personality perhaps people may hear may have heard of somebody in Judah Monus Judah Monus was the first teacher I don't say professor because he never achieved that rank but he was the first teacher of Hebrew at Harvard he was born he was a Sephardic Jew born in the north of Italy and for some reason we still figured out why he moves to New York in 1716 or so is from what we can gather affiliated with the Jewish congregation in New York for a few years runs a a little hardware store in New York also sells Jewish rituals supplies to the Jewish community there but four years later he moves from New York to Cambridge Massachusetts because he had on what his real application was was that he was a scholar of Hebrew and he had written what he called the grammar of the Hebrew tongue he realized around 1720 that the Jews in New York as I mentioned before they are not very good Jews they don't really know their Judaism very well they an actual ordained rabbi by the way doesn't show up in the United States until the 1840s so there's nothing like a rabbi around there are lay leaders of the congregation nobody is going to enlist this guy as as in in that role but he figures out that at Harvard they study Hebrew remember I mentioned cotton matter and the valid points so he parlays his expertise in Hebrew to the authorities at Harvard College who include at that time cotton matters father increase matter he sends a copy of the Hebrew grammar to them he proposes that they hire him that first that they give him a master's degree that they hire him and they say okay yes we will do that now of course well everybody's favorite phrase these days is quit pro quo there is a quick pro quo here and I bet you can guess what that would be conversion so he undergoes a huge public conversion in college hall in Cambridge he prepares and publishes a tripartite pamphlet it's about 300 pages long you can read it online it's called the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth and it's this elaborate testimonial to the correctness of Christianity his you know his blood origins as a Jew and his realization that you know he was missing the right way and now he sees that Jesus in fact was prophesied in the Bible and so on he makes for it he's there's an interesting story there eventually the book is published the version I showed you up here the handwritten version there are a few of these out there including one at the mass historical society and the reason that we even have these handwritten versions is just to put an interesting light on how people studied languages in those days if you were a student in Montess's Hebrew class at Harvard the way you bought your textbook was you didn't buy your textbook you hand wrote it everybody hand wrote their own version and so that's why they're about a half a dozen of these some of them have doodles in them interesting doodles I don't remember if this one does that the published version which came out in 1735 the reason they didn't happen until 1735 was that there was no printing press with Hebrew letters until 1735 when one was sent over by ship and so that was how they were able to prepare this one Montess didn't have a very wonderful career as I said he was never appointed professor at Harvard his students apparently didn't care for him very much but it's an interesting story a lot of people have speculated over the years there were a lot of claims made that well his conversion wasn't genuine you know he didn't really mean it some people said well you know what he actually celebrated the Sabbath on Saturday but if you think about that that that isn't necessarily a very big deal because we have seventh day Adventists that have been doing that for a long long time so Christian there are other Christian people who who celebrated the Sabbath on Saturday the debate as to whether he actually meant it or not to me is sort of irrelevant and what was interesting to me in studying his story was trying to understand what role did he serve within the minds of New Englanders Christian New Englanders what purpose did he serve my sense is that the purpose he served was that they were seeing the waning of their orthodoxy this was a time when all kinds of market impulses were changing the dynamics in Massachusetts people were less tending to be less and less affiliated with their churches and so Montess was brought in I claim he was brought in to sort of revive the ancient the hebraic spirit that had militated people like John Cotton and so on in the earlier generations but there's still new things being found out about Montess there are at least I know of two people who are who are doing research on him I'll finish with this picture here and the one that follows it we fast forward now very quickly to Newport Rhode Island 1770s this is Ezra Stiles he eventually was the president of Yale during the time of the American Revolution Ezra Stiles was fascinated by Jews but he wasn't just fascinated by them in the abstract and for that matter he wasn't there's no evidence that he really sought to convert them what he liked about well whatever what caused him to be interested in them the first place was the knowledge that they had and the way and his sense that their knowledge could inform his own Protestantism when he was proud of it when he was the minister in the second congregational church in Newport because he had gone to Yale and hadn't been required to study Harvard required Hebrew but Yale didn't he decided he was going to learn Hebrew in middle age and he found a Hebrew teacher in the lay leader of the Jewish congregation in Newport Isaac Torah so he teach he learns Hebrew in in his 30s and 40s and then over the next couple decades he writes extensively in his diary about the Jews in Newport the congregation the more illustrious members of that congregation and in particular the rabbis who visited that congregation as I said they didn't have their own rabbi but they would have itinerant rabbis particularly this guy so this is a rabbi high in Carrival he spent five months in Newport I think he arrives in March 1773 and he leaves in July 1773 something like that he's one of six rabbis that Stiles writes about in his diary he serves the Jewish congregation there and Stiles I mean I'm exaggerating but it's almost like Stiles falls in love with this man he writes extensively about the interactions that he has with him he is an absolute reverence in awe of Carrival's knowledge his his theological versatility his awareness of his his linguistic abilities with Hebrew and other Middle Eastern languages Carrival was a very cosmopolitan person he was actually born in spot in Israel part of a Sephardic colony that had started there in the 17th 16th century very widely traveled speaks French Spanish English German Hebrew and so on he had Stiles in fact correspond in Hebrew which is an interesting thing when Stiles when Stiles became the president of Yale by that time Carrival had died Carrival died young he after he left Newport he goes to Barbados where he's the rabbi for the Jewish congregation in Barbados he dies of smallpox but immediately after his death Stiles goes about getting money together to commission this portrait to be painted of high in Carrival and Stiles idea is that he wants this portrait to hang in the library Yale where the Yale undergraduates can be sort of influenced by its but the beauty of this this very sophisticated candid scholar that he so admires I think I'll leave it there there are all kinds of holes in my talk here and all kinds of things I haven't gotten to but I know I must be over time and I'm hoping maybe people have questions or comments we're going over do you know who painted that uh Samuel King I painted both right I mean I forgot to say that's what I mean by holes I forgot to say the same painter made both uh he was a sort of a journeyman painter in Newport uh you paid him enough money he would make your portrait it's interesting this Stiles portrait um Stiles wrote about everything uh and among other things Stiles tells you in this diary what you can actually read the title but he explains why the books are in that order uh you know why this book is here and this book is there uh you can see this kind of strange uh thing that looks like a balloon that's a tetragrammaton in it and he calls it his personal hieroglyphic for the shirina that's that's the term that Stiles uses so Stiles was was really immersed in uh hebraic uh studies himself uh what was interesting to me about uh just contrasting the portraits was how much uh how much of an apparatus there is for Stiles right here every little thing is there for you to see and uh you know there's so much iconography in there uh and the image that he had of Carigal right because this is based on what he told the painter to do Carigal is is stark you know you just see him you see his uh outfit and uh and that's all you see yes can you say anything more about the community in Newport sure yeah so the history of that community is is kind of interesting um um claims have been made that uh the the jews first arrived in Newport 1658 i don't believe that uh the the documentation of that is so flimsy it's basically a tattered fragment of paper uh from a meeting of masons uh and that's all they have to go on but uh there was a cemetery purchase in 1677 so that's pretty solid and the evidence suggests that a small group of jews came to Newport around 1677 from Curacao in the Caribbean right most of these Sephardin were uh they were very engaged in in trade with the Caribbean and there were much the jewish communities in the Caribbean were much larger than they were on on the mainland and so uh in any case a group of jews shows up from Curacao but they sort of disappear from view pretty quickly and it really isn't until the 1650s that you see an actual community forming or at least that we find documentation for it so for instance in the aftermath that there's a cataclysmic earthquake at Lisbon and uh many of the these are conversos these are jews who are you know appearing to be catholic uh the uh the the sort of social crisis uh created by that earthquake sends a wave of them out of Portugal and so some of them show up in places like Newport uh the community really gets going then and the what we call the Turo synagogue where Stiles learned Hebrew was built in 1763 and and then the the jewish community there kind of vanished oh into the british invasion of in the revolutionary war uh the the british actually used the uh the synagogue as a hospital um so so the synagogue had has a very brief and illustrious history uh before the revolution and as soon as the revolution occurs that community is dispersed most of the jews from Newport uh some of them were Tories some were uh not Tories most of them went to back to the Caribbean or they went to New York or they went to Philadelphia Andy yeah thank you Michael I um I'm wondering if uh you well I'd like your reflection on how manifest destiny as it was expressed by the Puritans had a Hebrew origin that's I guess I have not thought about a Hebrew word so when you say manifest I mean you mean like the geographic destiny of the american republic to to uh you know be on both coasts that right uh the fact that we're occupying this land is that is evidence of god's faithfulness huh yeah I don't I don't know I mean the jewish participants in this story are pretty un they're not very ideological they're here because they're selling stuff you know uh they're here because they're participating in this transit line trade and they retain their Judaism uh the way many the way jews have done around the world for for years just because it's who they are it's they they don't want to sever their traditions but I don't see that that theology I mean maybe it plays into manifest destiny maybe to the extent that they uh collude with uh with uh Protestants they are uh you know they're complicit in it I wouldn't deny that but I'm not sure that there's anything within their theology that that translates to that sort of geographical expansion for one thing uh you know the occupation of land outside of the land of Israel is not really something that jews are are have been pursuing right I mean there's some there's some interesting a odd story that maybe people have heard which moves us a few generations up into the 1830s maybe people have heard of somebody named Amorakai Manny on Noah so this was a guy who was a uh a political figure a playwright sort of a man he was a briefly an ambassador in Tunisia he was a Sephardic and a German Jew lived in New York and in the 1830s I think 1835 he's a very strong Jacksonian Democrat which is why the manifest destiny comes to mind he got this idea that he was going to bring all the jews from around the world and settle them guess where you know Grand Island in the Niagara River like you know just between Buffalo and Niagara Falls he convinced a bunch of people to buy the island and he issued a proclamation inviting jews from all over the world to come to Grand Island and found a Jewish Republic within the United States um they laid a cornerstone they had a parade and that was the end of it was called Arab and actually recently a colleague of mine who does like she's she's interested in sort of virtual reality and all this kind of apparently there's a virtual reality version of Arab like basically a bunch of people have created you know what would it be like if the jews had actually come there and so that you bring your iPhone I guess you can walk around and see you know these uh this Jewish paradise but um that's I mean that that's a good example of what you're asking but it's the only one I know of I actually meant it in the reverse and I I'm conscious of the time that the Puritans were appropriating Hebrew ideas and texts oh I see and it became something that was actually foreign to the original idea oh I see I see right yeah yeah because as new Israelites they were going to found this oh I see where you're going sure yeah that makes sense well I'm sorry that I I miss you gotta look this guy up he's he's interesting yeah yes you mentioned the Sephardic Jews were there many Ashkenazis or any there were yeah there it's I think the the the domination the dominance of Sephardic has been exaggerated the early period until recently people were people who do Jewish American history were saying well there's the Sephardic period and then there's the German period and then there's the Eastern period period but the the so-called Sephardic period there were Ashkenazin during that period and so uh this guy more to guy Manuel Noah he promoted himself as Sephardic because there is an association that Jews made make certainly made at that time that the Sephardic were sort of a noble class it was very much that those were the associations that Jews made but in fact he was half Sephardic and half Ashkenazi and some of the more illustrious Jews in in colonial America were Ashkenazin Heim Solomon the Revolutionary War financier was Polish so there I would say at that very if you're talking about the 17th century and Jews in particular places like Brazil and the Caribbean most of them are Sephardic but the ones who show up on the mainland by the end of the 17th century and it's the first part of the 18th century increasing you know it's a mixture of both yeah so you know I'm looking at the missionaries and coming out of New England and the earliest ones leave in the 18 teens to go to as part of the second great awakening to start the millennium where they've converted the Jews right and that's the plan you go to the Holy Land you convert them and then you'll have peace for a thousand years and Pliny Fisk for instance who actually was from Shelter and Falls is an example of someone who goes over and then learns Hebrew and Arabic so that you can read the other holy texts so that he understands them better in order to convert but what I've never understood and I'm wondering if it has something to do with the interactions of the Protestants with the Jews here is that they take thousands of Bibles in English to the Holy Land and distribute them thinking that this is going to be their conversion tool and I mean I haven't done maybe enough reading on this part because I've been looking a little later in different people but what in the world would possess them? Well it's this it might be a similar mentality to uh well I have a couple things I mean none of it makes any sense one is so this idea of the Second Coming being uh you know accelerated by uh Jews being in places like the Holy Land and someone dispersed throughout the continents um so some people bought into idea that the Jews all had to go to Israel to the Holy Land before this could happen but no and people were very detailed in their attempts to bring this about nobody thought about okay what would it actually look like to put them on ships and take them across the ocean wherever they have to go so that part uh doesn't make any sense and then in terms of conversion pamphlets I actually uh if I had I had almost planned to read to you from uh Cotton Mather I mentioned he was uh keen to convert Jews he wrote I think in his career he published three conversion pamphlets and if you read even read any one of those pamphlets um the the first page of the pamphlet is so hostile towards the audience the first sentence he says you Jews know that you are wrong and he couldn't possibly have thought in the same way that these people couldn't possibly thought that the Jews in in the land of Israel were going to read English I don't think he really thought they were going to so in his case really these conversion pamphlets served a different purpose they were a means by which he spoke to other Christians and I wonder if it's the same you know let's make a bunch of bibles in English and take you you know and everybody will know that we have box loads of bibles we're bringing to Holy Land and they'll see what wonderful missionaries we are it might have been more playing to that audience that's the only thing I can the only way I can make sense of it yeah yeah I'm just wondering whether the idea that the Indian tribes were actually Jewish tribes had somehow gotten there earlier at the same time that we were busily slaughtering the ball I wonder how that do you have any sense of well okay that's a very interesting question all right so first of all the there were people um John Elliott was a person who translated the bible into the native languages I think he bought into this theory Roger Williams bought into this theory Roger Williams published a book is called a key to the I forget which language a key to the such and such language in which he finds all these Hebrew cognates and native so there were people who genuinely thought this so the slaughters and the proselytizers were different they were different people they were different people because exactly Elliott and Williams um you know we may look back on them now and think about what you know crazy you know imperialists they were but their idea was to convert native people and it also this is another aspect of it was that if people were if people in in England were in doubt as to the how much sense it made to be colonizing north america and wasting resources on colonizing north america if those people were motivated by christian interest you could convince them by saying well we are actually there not just to catch fish and cut down trees but we are going to convert Indians who happen to be Jews and that's going to make them easier to convert because they already are monotheists that was part of the language right they'll it'll be easy to teach them this stuff because they already have these concepts we'll convert them and that will also advance this idea of Jews being distributed throughout the world because if the Indians are Jews then well there's Jews in America right um and it goes as I mean you can take this as far as it's actually a current political debate right now but the masters state flag the state seal the original version of which has a native guy saying come over and help us right so that that ideology yes exactly as you said the proselytizers and the killers are not necessarily the same I mean it might be the proselytizers become the killers in 10 years but for a period of time they are separate interests I think we should call a call today but are you willing to hang around for a while I'm willing to hang around I have their books I put a couple on the table I also have my my more recent book which is of similar interest and so if anyone is interested in the book let me know and I'll yeah I'm not rushing off anywhere so I'm happy to talk more thanks so much