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Book Review
| God's Sacred Tongue: Hebrew & the American Imagination. By Shalom Goldman. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xvi, 349 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-8078-2835-1.)
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| A short review cannot do justice to the depth and erudition displayed in God's Sacred Tongue. This account of the study of Hebrew language and culture is developed in the context of European and Judaic efforts in this field that date back at least to the Renaissance and focuses on the impact of Hebraism on American Protestantism and its view of ancient Israel and contemporary Jews. Employing extraordinary scholarship, Shalom Goldman traces the trajectory of this largely unexamined subject from Puritan New England to present-day America. This exploration uncovers the academic and religious history of Christian Hebraism and its Jewish reaction mostly through examining its most famous proponents from Ezra Stiles and Jonathan Edwards to Reinhold Niebuhr and Edmund Wilson. Hebraism began as a reinforcement of Christian belief in the inerrancy of the Bible and an impetus to christianize and disdain Jews; while not completely divesting itself of these ends, it became more secular, scholarly, and ecumenical. |
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