A Tree with Two Different Fruits:
The Jewish Encounter with German Pietists
in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World

Holly Snyder

ON May 7, 1759, the Salzburg Lutheran minister Johann Martin Boltzius made note in his diary of a discussion he had had with a Jew in Savannah, Georgia, just a few days earlier. As he was passing by the Jew's house, going about his business in town, the Jew pulled him aside with a friendly but urgent application. He "handed me an English language-periodical printed in Pennsylvania called the American Magazine," Boltzius wrote, "with the request that I read the sermon which a distinguished rabbi had preached. . . . He made so much of this sermon, as if nothing like it had ever appeared before, although I found nothing special in it." 1	1
Boltzius did not name his Jewish contact in Savannah, nor did he provide any specifics of the article he had read or give any indication of what prior contacts he had had with the anonymous Jew in question, although the man was clearly someone who knew him well. Examination of the many published volumes of the diary, printed in Germany by Samuel Urlsperger as part of his Ausführliche Nachricht von den Salzburgischen Emigranten (Detailed Reports on the Salzburger Emigrants) and Americanische Ackerwerk Gottes (American Godly Fieldwork), does not definitively reveal the identity of the Jew involved in the incident or provide much insight into the character of the relationship that existed between the two men. Nor are there any extant personal papers of Savannah Jews from the eighteenth century that permit the unqualified analysis of this anecdote from the Jewish side.	2
These circumstances help to explain why there has been so little historical attention focused on Christian-Jewish relations in the early modern Atlantic world. The extant documentary record is almost wholly Christian in origin; the Jewish perspective on such encounters is nearly absent. Jews thus appear largely as stick figures, embedded in a Christian narrative that either advocates the millenarian cause through wholesale conversion or excoriates the Jewish condition as a curse inflicted because the Jewish people have failed to acknowledge the saving power of Christ. Nevertheless, it is possible, using a wide array of surviving source materials--and, in particular, the record of this particular conversation between a Jew and a Lutheran pastor in Georgia in May 1759--to reconstruct a broader picture of the encounters between German pietists and Jews in British America. To do so, we will need to start with the question of the text that was shown to Boltzius and the identity of the Jew who presented it for his perusal. We will need to understand something about the political backdrop of the publication in which it appeared during the Seven Years' War. We also need to place this curious encounter in the general context of Jewish-Christian relations on both sides of the Atlantic during the eighteenth century. And, finally, we need to attempt an understanding of the specific motivations behind the encounter in question, which is to ask: why was this particular Jew so keen to show the Reverend Boltzius, a devout Lutheran, a sermon preached by a rabbi? Through the close interrogation of this singular encounter in the middle of the eighteenth century, the Jewish perspective obscured in Boltzius's extant account may be uncovered, and we may then begin to delineate a framework for understanding the larger context of Jewish interactions with pietists and, more particularly, with German-speaking pietists, in the complex social milieu that formed the British Atlantic world.	. . .