By Douglas A. Brooks
The difficulty of the Jews deeply engaged Milton all through his occupation, and never unavoidably in ways in which make for cozy or reassuring analyzing at the present time. whereas Shakespeare and Marlowe, for instance, critiqued instead of recommended racial and non secular prejudice of their writings approximately Jews, a similar can't be acknowledged for Milton. the students during this assortment confront a author who participated within the unhappy historical past of anti-Semitism, whilst he appropriated Jewish versions all through his writings. good grounded in good historic and theological learn, the essays either jointly and separately supply an enormous contribution to the talk on Milton and Judaism, and should encourage new instructions in Milton experiences. This publication could be of curiosity not just to students of Milton and of seventeenth-century literature, but additionally to historians of the faith and tradition of the interval.
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Like many revolutionaries, Milton appropriated Exodus, the founding narrative of the Jews, as the founding narrative of the English Israel. In Eikonoklastes, his first commissioned piece for the new commonwealth, Milton reminds the English how God delivered them from bondage under Charles by a “strong and miraculous hand” (CPW, III, p. 580; cf. Exod. 15:6–7; Ezek. 20:33–36). Appropriating the chosenness of the Israelites for the English, who, as the Christian Israel, are presumed to outdo the ancient Jews, Milton proclaims that the “incomparable deliverance” of England was greater than that of Israel (CPW, III, p.
He contrasts the “perfection of the Gospell” with the “Ephod, and Teraphim of Antiquity” (Of Prelatical Episcopacy, CPW, I, pp. 652) – linking the breastplate (Ephod) of the Jewish high priest with the idols (Teraphim) that belonged to Rachel’s father (Gen. 31:19). An Apology against . . a Modest Confutation (1642) appropriates Isaiah’s description of the corrupt priests in the Temple as “dumbe and greedy dogs” to attack the English prelates, but turns the Hebrew prophet to anti-Jewish as well as antiLaudian ends as Milton insists the prelates with their “sorcerous doctrine of formalities” have “transforme[d]” “Christian men into Judaizing beasts” (CPW, I, p.
7 Milton’s antiprelatical pamphlets are strongly anti-Judaic. He vilifies the Mosaic Law along with episcopacy and the ceremonial worship of the English church, which seemed to Milton “anti-Christian” as they were based on Jewish laws abrogated by Christ. Believing that the English church under the prelates had been contaminated by “popery,” which itself was, from his reformed perspective, an amalgam of Jewish and pagan traditions, Milton declares in Of Reformation that England has “backslid” into the “Jewish beggery, of old cast rudiments” (CPW, I, p.