| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Shalom Goldman. God's Sacred Tongue: Hebrew and the American Imagination. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2004. Pp. xiv, 349. $34.95.

In this book Shalom Goldman offers a biographically driven intellectual history of American Hebraism. Starting in the seventeenth century and moving backward in time, seeking both European antecedents and differences between the "old world" and the "new," Goldman explores the ways in which the Hebrew language served the needs of Americans and American culture. Clearly no study of Hebrew as a language and its various meaning for different constituencies can be disentangled from the Bible. As Americans, described in this book over the entire course of their history, engaged with Hebrew as language, they also engaged with the sacred scripture. Goldman's foray here includes intellectual, religious, linguistic, and ethnological, encounters. He looks at theologians, missionaries, and Jewish converts to Christianity as well as scholars, literary critics, creators of new religions, producers of literature, and mystics. The players in this book primarily come from the ranks of America's Protestants, particularly those of Puritan origins, but Mormons also figure into Goldman's narratives, as do Native Americans. Jews, too, play a role, and one theme that runs through the book involves the ways in which the presence of Jews and the existence of functioning Jewish communities in America shaped the Christian Hebraists' imagination and behavior. Ultimately all of these encounters, and all of these Hebraists, functioned in the political realm, broadly defined, and Goldman places them in that context as well.

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