SOURCE: Shoulson, Jeffrey S. “‘Proprietie in this Hebrew poesy’: George Wither, Judaism, and the Formation of English National identity.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 98, no. 3 (July 1999): 353-72.

[In the following essay, Shoulson examines Wither's writings on the Hebrew Psalms as part of the seventeenth-century discourse on the opposition between Hellenism and Hebraism.]

Spenser introduces his enigmatic and polyvalent representation of Arthur in The Faerie Queene with a detailed description of the legendary king's attire. In his depiction of the crest of Arthur's helm, Spenser writes that a bunch of colored hairs seemed to dance “Like to an Almond tree ymounted hey / On top of greene Selinis all alone.”¹ Spenser's contemporary readers would have recognized the image of the almond tree from Numbers 17, which describes Aaron's rod blossoming and bearing ripe almonds as a sign that he had been chosen by God: “And the Lord said unto Moses, Bring Aaron's rod again before the testimony, to be kept for a token [Heb. ‘oth] against the rebels …” (verse 10). Sitting atop the figure of England incarnate, the Biblical image adorns Spenser's romance hero, signifying a similar form of election. Indeed, this scriptural accessorising has been further conflated with the classical tradition to which it is compared, for it occurs within a simile that places the almond tree on top of Vergil's Selinus, town of the victor's palm in Book III of the Aeneid. Typically eclectic and wide-ranging, Spenser elides the historical, cultural, and religious gaps that separate classical and Biblical narratives. Within the expansive (and expanding) boundaries of Spenser's national epic, stories of the Bible combine with the stories of classical epic to form one vast treasure house of exempla from antiquity—a treasure house that allows for the comparison we are given here, which may even be said to derogate Biblical tradition in favor of the classical. For this poet of the late sixteenth century, ancient Hebrew and Latin literatures complement and supplement each other to produce the flourishing of Elizabethan culture embodied in the Arthurian folk legends.

Eighty years after the publication of The Faerie Queene, when John Milton brings together these same elements in his Paradise Lost, a far more troubled combination of Hebraic, classical, and romance elements results. The poem, it is true, takes its form from the classical epic; it represents crucial episodes of its Biblical narrative via classical paradigms. But the antagonism between Hellenism and Hebraism is inescapable. Milton always concludes his own versions of Vergil's or Ovid's tales with his famous Biblical correctives—“thus they relate / Erring,” he informs his epic audience at the conclusion of the mistaken classical pedigree of Mulciber.² Early on in the planning of his great English epic, Milton considered an Arthurian theme. In 1641/42 he described his goal for this projected national poem in the following terms: “That what the greatest and choycest wits of Athens, Rome, or modern Italy, and those Hebrews of old did for their country, I in my proportion with this over and above being a Christian, might doe for mine.”³ The classical and Biblical traditions occupy virtually equivalent positions in the first half of this statement; Milton looked to the precedents set not only by the pagan cultures of Greece and Rome, but also by the divine society depicted in the Hebrew Bible. With the additional modification, “I in my proportion with this ever and above being a Christian,” however, Milton already adumbrated an important shift that becomes much more explicit by the time he comes round to completing and revising the abortive attempt at an Arthurian romance. The epic poet changes his plans drastically, constructing instead a re-creation of the Biblical narrative of Genesis that goes out of its way to disparage the classical tradition.⁴ Arthurian romance appears in Paradise Lost, but only to be denigrated as part of a description of Satan watching the ingathering of his fallen compatriots:

                                                                      For never since created man,
Met such imbodied force, as nam'd with these
Could merit more than that small infantry
Warr'd on by Cranes: though all the Giant brood
Of Phlegra with th' Heroic Race were join'd
That fought at Thebes and Ilium, on each side
Mixt with auxiliar Gods; and what resounds
In Fable or Romance of Uther's Son
Begirt with British and Armoric Knights;
… Thus far these beyond
Compare of mortal prowess, yet observ'd
Thir dread commander …

(I. 573-81, 587-89)

Milton's augmented Biblical narrative fully supplants the famous stories of classical Greece and Rome, which have themselves been lumped together with the world of Arthurian romance: “Thus far these beyond / Compare of mortal prowess.” Though Hebraism and Hellenism continue to coexist in the works of Milton, the former has gained the upper hand in its struggle with the latter.

During the first half of the seventeenth century, Biblical paradigms increasingly overwhelmed classical and folk models. England's turning away from classical precedents may be understandable in light of its increasingly explicit attempts to distinguish itself from the Continent, especially any lingering Papal ties. But what of the denigration of native folklore? Arthur's legends would have offered writers of the mid-seventeenth century impressive material for the celebration of a developing sense of Englishness. Arthur was not completely absent from English literature during the seventeenth century—by the end of the century Sir Richard Blackmore had written two largely unreadable Arthurian epics, Prince Arthur (1695) and King Arthur (1700).⁵ Yet, with few exceptions, the Arthurian legends did not permeate the literature of the century in ways that they had in the previous century. The growing success of low church Protestantism—with its attendant anti-Royalist sentiments—played a major role in this literary sea-change; but Protestantism itself was greatly influenced by an evolving extra-Biblical Hebraism, one that extended beyond an interest in the Hebrew of the Bible to include the writings of Jewish scholars of the ancient and medieval past.

The eighty-year period that separates The Faerie Queene from Paradise Lost directly coincides with a dramatic rise in debates concerning Hebrew, Judaism, and Jews, culminating in the Whitehall Conference of 1655-56 and the deliberation over the readmission of the Jews to England.⁶ Recently, the issue of “readmission” has been called into question.⁷ Whether there were Jews living in England prior to 1656 is of little consequence to the argument that follows. The Jewish Question was raised more vocally in England during the first half of the seventeenth century than at any prior time. These debates had as much to do with definitions of Englishness as with the value of Hebraic scholarship.⁸ George Wither's writings on the Hebrew Psalms provide an opportunity to examine the changing character of Hebraic influence in seventeenth-century England. His life conveniently spans the eighty-year period under investigation between these two literary milestones: born in 1588, two years before the publication of the first three books of The Faerie Queene, he died in 1667, the same year that the ten-book version of Paradise Lost first appeared. Though Wither's earliest poetic achievements in pastoral eclogues have occasioned literary historians to place him in the company of the so-called Spenserians, by the time he died following the Restoration he had made the transition to a decidedly prophetic and didactic strain of poetry—Miltonic in ambition, if not in success—informed largely by his reading of the Hebrew Psalms and his understanding of the nature of English Christianity's relation to its Jewish antecedents. Reading Wither's writings on the Hebrew Psalms we can begin to understand the transition from the earlier forms of Christian Hebraica, which worked toward dismantling entrenched forms of political, religious, and cultural domination, to its later incarnation, which wielded remarkable power in installing new forms of prejudice. The textual formulations of English national identity—as embodied in Wither's writings on the literary qualities of the Hebrew Psalms—inevitably depend upon an incipient religio-ethnic discourse that posits the Jew as a liminal figure on the English landscape.

I

What factors participated in the changing influence of Hebraica on English cultural production? Christian Hebraica was certainly not an innovation of seventeenth-century England. As Beryl Smalley established nearly five decades ago, medieval Christian scholars were not at all unfamiliar with, or reticent about citing, Jewish authorities on particular interpretive matters.⁹ By the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, however, the increasingly refined tools of historical philology and textual criticism became essential aspects of the study of the Bible.¹⁰ The earliest Protestant efforts to make the Bible available to a wider reading and listening public coincided with a further growth in and dissemination of Hebrew scholarship. The Rabbis were consulted not only on points of grammar, but also for more comprehensive definitions of faith and the meaning of the New Testament. Paul Fagius, the first Regius Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge, argued that the only way to appreciate Christ and his mission fully was through a study of the historical and cultural milieu out of which he rose, that is, the Jewish Pharisaic period of the first century C.E.

Hebrew scholarship in England found its first gifted and articulate advocate in Robert Wakefield. His work during the first half of the sixteenth century was more profound in its treatment of various aspects of Hebrew than even that of the great Continental Hebraist, Johann Reuchlin.¹¹ He consulted Hebrew sources that were outside the latter's scope. Wakefield's contemporary, Bible translator William Tyndale, is also thought to have had some command of Hebrew, although there remains some dispute over how well acquainted with the language he actually was. E. I. J. Rosenthal has written that Luther, who is commonly held to have had the greatest influence on Tyndale's translation, could not have been the source for any English rendering that draws on the important medieval Jewish commentator, Rashi. Since Tyndale spent many years on the continent, chiefly in Worms and Antwerp, Rosenthal has suggested that it would have been natural that Jews introduced the English Protestant to their own interpretations of more difficult Biblical passages. Abraham Schper has countered that although Tyndale probably used the Hebrew text, rather than the Vulgate, as a basis for his English translation, and although in specific cases he utilized Rabbinic commentaries that he culled independently or through Nicholas of Lyra, his limitations as an Hebraist are most apparent in his numerous “errors.”¹² Regardless of Tyndale's skills in the Hebrew language, we do have written evidence of his estimation of the language, which probably had significant impact on the English Reformers of the next century. He writes, “the properties of the Hebrew tongue agreeth a thousand times more with the English than with the Latin. The manner of speaking is both one; so that in a thousand places thou needest not but to translate it into the English, word for word; when thou must seek a compass in the Latin, and yet shall have much work to translate it well-favouredly, so that it have the same grace and sweetness, sense and pure understanding with it in the Latin and as it hath in the Hebrew. A thousand parts better may it be translated into the English, than into the Latin.”¹³ Tyndale's claim for the profound linguistic equivalence between Hebrew and English was often cited by Protestant Bible translators, including Archbishop Matthew Parker, whose Whole Psalter (1567) exercised enormous influence on subsequent generations of readers and translators.¹⁴ Parker became very active in promoting Hebrew studies in England, inviting foreign Hebraists to her shores, and endeavoring to procure teaching appointments for them.

Lloyd Jones has shown that the prevailing concern of early sixteenth-century English reformers and supporters of Hebrew study was not with the revival of learning per se, but with the reform of the Church, which they tried to bring about by raising the educational standards of the clergy. Education was considered to be the panacea for every ecclesiastical malady, so that the reform of the university had to precede the reform of the Church.¹⁵ In the mid-sixteenth century an influx of continental scholars (including Paul Fagius and Martin Bucer) inspired the fellows and chancellors of Cambridge and Oxford with a new interest in Hebrew. Only then was Hebrew instituted as an important aspect of scholarly pursuit and teaching in those two universities. Hebrew education in the schools moved more slowly. While Hebrew did not lack its supporters among churchmen, educators, and benefactors, it made little progress as a school subject before the early decades of the seventeenth century. Gradually, over the course of the mid-sixteenth century, grammar schools around England began to make Hebrew an important part of the curriculum. Schoolboys generally began the study of that language at the age of thirteen or fourteen, after they had already had substantial exposure to Latin and Greek. By the end of Elizabeth's reign, education in Hebrew had taken root in some of the leading schools and had even become part of the educational program of a few Tudor households. Indeed, several scholars were given their first taste of Hebrew at home by private tutors. Either a relative or hired mentor would instruct these young pupils in the elementary aspects of Hebrew, hoping that they would ultimately pursue the language to a more sophisticated extent.¹⁶ It took a longer time still for English printers to learn the skills necessary for handling Hebrew texts, and until 1637, books printed in England containing any Hebrew text were done with wood blocks rather than loose type. The first book published in England containing any Hebrew characters was Robert Wakefield's Oration de laudibus et utilitate trium linguarum Arabice Chaldaicae et Hebraice in 1524. The first entirely Hebrew book was not printed in England until 1705, although from 1637 real Hebrew printing had become well-established in Oxford, Cambridge, and London.¹⁷

The most conspicuous evidence for the growing success of Hebrew education in the schools and universities is the production of the Authorized or “King James” version of the Bible. Whatever its short-comings, the Authorized Version clearly shows a debt to improved Hebraic scholarship.¹⁸ Of the fifty-four scholars enlisted by the King for this project, we have the names of only forty-seven, but those names include a number of men who had documented abilities in Hebrew: Edward Lively, Lancelot Andrewes, Richard Thomson, John Richardson, Laurence Chaderton, Thomas Harrison, Robert Spalding, John Reynolds, Richard Kilbye, and Miles Smith. In addition to these scholars of English origin, James recruited several figures from the continent, including Franciscus Gomarus (b. 1563), a Hebraist of wide renown, who spent time at both Oxford and Cambridge.

During the earliest period of Christian Hebrew scholarship its practitioners knew few national boundaries; they studied at home in gymnasia and larger schools; they traveled across borders to distant universities; they moved from position to position, as they were invited to join faculties of one newly founded institution after another. Religious values, rather than national identities, united students of Hebrew. Debora Shuger offers a suggestive account of the permeable national and religious boundaries that characterized Biblical scholarship in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, concluding that “the respublica litterarum sacrarum possessed a social existence; it is not an a posteriori label imposed on diverse materials but a close-knit textual community whose axis ran from Geneva, Sweden, and the Palatinate in central Europe through France and the Low Countries to England and the west.”¹⁹ The universal character of the study of Hebrew within this Republic of Sacred Letters was potentially and often actually subversive. It displayed an openness that allowed for new ideas to penetrate, to overthrow ancient forms of prejudice. The leveling potential offered by this new area of study attracted many younger scholars and writers like Wither, who rose up from the ranks of the lower middle class and looked to Hebrew studies as a source of political, as well as religious, redemption and deliverance.

II

Wither's earliest writings were satires that enjoyed extensive popularity among the professional classes of London. His most successful early composition, Abuses Stript and Whipt, published in 1613, landed Wither in prison because it was suspected of serious political transgressions against the Lord Chancellor. Wither managed to obtain his release in 1615 by currying favor with the King through the publication of A Satyre, “dedicated to His Most Excellent Majestie.” Upon his release from prison Wither began a reexamination of his chosen poetic profession, looking to more divine matters for guidance. In 1619 he published A Preparation to the Psalter. The years that followed, the period of Wither's composition of the Psalm paraphrases (1621-25), were years in which Wither was in constant favor with much of the reading public. Indeed, when we compare Wither's popularity amongst his contemporaries to that of the two dominating figures of English literary history with whom I began this essay, we may be surprised to discover that Wither enjoyed a reputation that matched, and on occasion surpassed, that of Spenser and Milton. Wither's subsequent marginalization within literary study owes at least as much to his politics—in its various manifestations—as it does to any measure of aesthetic merit.²⁰

Despite his contemporary popularity, Wither was still clashing with figures in authority. As compensation for his imprisonment, the King granted Wither a highly unusual Royal patent stipulating that every version of the Prayer Book published by licensed English publishers was required to contain his Hymnes and Songs of the Church (1623). This infringement on the autonomy of the Stationers Company greatly upset that group of businessmen, who claimed absolute ownership of the publication rights on “Prymers Psalters and Psalmes in meter or prose with musycall notes or withoute notes both in greate volumes and small in the Englishe tongue.”²¹ Indeed, the Records of the Court of the Stationers Company reports that on 17 June 1615, in the course of granting an exception to their royal patent on the Psalms, the company referred to this book of the Bible as “the psalmes which belong to the Company.”²² While from a technical, legal standpoint this claim of ownership may have been accurate, it further indicates a rather astonishing notion of intellectual property as it pertains to a portion of the Scriptures, in particular, a book that served such an essential role in all varieties of English religious expression. This proprietary claim on the Psalms parallels the claims of Tyndale—and later Wither—for the English language's unique suitability to the translation of the Hebrew Bible. That is, just as the Stationers Company held special title to the Psalms, so too the English people could claim to possess a distinctive relation to the ancient legacy embodied in Scriptures. I shall have more to say regarding this “propriety” below.

In response to his infringement on their control of the Psalms, the stationers refused to publish anything composed by Wither. Not to be outdone, Wither wrote (and personally published) a scathing attack on the company, The Schollers Purgatory, which not only reproached the stationers for their monopoly of the publishing business, but also set forth many arguments for a free press that were later expressed more famously in Milton's Areopagitica. Wither, like anyone who challenged this powerful group, was fighting a losing battle; when it came time to print his Psalm translations, he found no English publisher. As a last resort, he was forced to have his translation published by a Puritan printing house in Holland. This strained relationship to the English literary community produced in Wither a corresponding ambivalence toward his own English identity and its role in a Christian life.

Wither's interest in the book of Psalms was not especially unusual. No book of the Hebrew Bible was—or is, for that matter—better known to Christians than Psalms. It figured prominently in the liturgy of all Christian denominations, and comprised a major portion of the daily spiritual diet of the godly. The adoption of the Book of Psalms by the Church began with the New Testament itself, where it is more frequently quoted than any other book, often in the mouth of Christ. The Psalms were regarded as divinely inspired poetry, combining essential doctrine with necessary comfort for the Christian reader. In 1562 Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins published their Whole Book of Psalms, which quickly became the authoritative metrical psalter, as well as the most familiar collection of English verse during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, appearing in more than 500 editions.

The Psalms certainly owed some of their increased popularity to the Renaissance flourishing of lyric poetry. But they owed at least as much to a new emphasis on the literal, historical interpretation of the Psalter made available by improved Hebraic and Judaic scholarship. This early modern historicism, which became better known and understood by Christian scholars in the latter part of the sixteenth century, was enlisted in two well-established humanist reading strategies, themselves sometimes complimentary but often contradictory. As Anthony Grafton has shown, one branch of humanism sought to make the world of the ancients (whether classical or Biblical) relevant to a modern readership through a process of analogy and allegory, while the other branch sought to historicize and particularize ancient texts by historical philology and other innovative interpretive methods.²³ By the seventeenth century, these potentially conflicting trends were not so clearly distinguishable among Christian Hebraists. Historical philology of the Hebrew Bible could—and did—lend itself to Christian typology, the fulfillment of which was to be found in Christ and the true Church. A good Christian could read the Psalms and, with the aid of Jewish scholars, better understand the historical milieu in which they were composed, and toward which they pointed, the period of Christ's life.²⁴ The reader could then pursue an interpretation that illuminated his contemporary situation and gave anagogic insight into the coming end of days. Debora Shuger describes a similar approach to the reading of the Gospel accounts of Christ's life. Yet if, as she argues, “After the mid-sixteenth-century the Church Fathers … were gradually replaced by Hebraic texts as sources for the philological and cultural interpretation of the New Testament,”²⁵ these same texts played an essential role in the reading of Christianity's Jewish background, specifically as it was embodied in the books of the Hebrew Bible. In so doing, they reasserted typology and allegory as essential interpretive models, since even these new textual critics acknowledged the large historical gap separating King David—the author of the Psalms—and Christ. As Wither writes in his Preparation, “there is both a Literall and a Spirituall sense to be there considered [in the Psalms].”²⁶ He has in mind the Christian four-fold method of interpreting Scripture, captured in the Latin couplet, “Litera, Gesta docet; quod credas Allegoria; / Moralis quod agas; quo tendas Anagogia,” which Wither translated, “The Letter setteth downe the storie: / Our faith is in the Allegory: / The Morall shewes our duties all: / Our Hope, the Anagogicall.” Wither, following a tradition established by the fourth-century Church Fathers Athanasius and Basil, both of whom he cites as authorities in his Preparation, viewed the Psalms as a digest or compendium of the entire Bible.²⁷ Since the Psalms offered such rich opportunities for reading and instruction, they served not only as historical documents or spiritual handbooks, but also as literary sources. Indeed, no poet could versify the Psalms without showing his or her view of the means and ends of poetry more broadly construed.²⁸

The reading (and versifying) of the Psalms not only encouraged reflection on the work of poetry. The Psalms, as part of the Hebrew Bible (before it is typologically transformed into the Old Testament), also posed a paradox that necessarily brought together the discursive fields of theology and national politics: on the one hand, the Biblical deity was the single God of all the earth; on the other hand, God had nevertheless chosen as the paradigmatic relation with humanity the particularism of a compact with one people. This paradox had special relevance to Protestants of early seventeenth-century England who saw themselves as the rightful heirs to the first “People of the book.” Calvinism's retreat from universalism via the doctrine of election grew out of Judaism's founding principle, a covenant that restricted the availability of salvation to a single nation, Israel. Judaism and Calvinism do not share the same notion of election or salvation; and certainly strict Calvinism mutated into a number of different forms, like Arminianism, largely because of disputes regarding the dynamics of election. The connection I have drawn between Judaism and the Reformers serves rather to stress the structural parallel that allowed Calvinism to theorize its notion of election as the typological fulfillment of Judaism's covenant theology. This changing emphasis stimulated unrelenting warfare (both ideological and military) between the elect and those doomed to damnation, and exaggerated the inclination toward opposites that came to dominate seventeenth-century England.²⁹

Wither is less willing than some to argue explicitly for the election of England as opposed to, say, the Dutch Protestants, when he writes, “But if you search out the significations of all those Names by which the people of God are named, or of the places where they are said to inhabite, you shall see that every one of them doth more properly set forth the condition of Christ his spirituall kingdome and people, then it doth either the estate of the Iewes, or the Countrey of Palestine” (p. 115). Yet if the theory of the elect resisted direct geopolitical application in favor of a spiritually understood New Israel, it nevertheless always wielded the potential to reinscribe a more nationalist or ethnic chauvinism. Wither's ambivalence regarding English ascendancy can be felt in passages like this one, and result from the endurance of Calvinism's political leveling, coupled with Wither's own doubts about English election prior to—and even during—the Interregnum. The Jews were once the Chosen People, but now that title had fallen to Christendom. As the seventeenth century wore on, the spirit of eclecticism that characterized Hebrew scholarship in the previous century was increasingly replaced by an intellectual and religious orthodoxy that was used alternately to confirm and to downplay burgeoning English nationalism. Analogous to the paradox inherent in reading the Psalms as addressed to a universal God who had established a unique relationship with a single people, Wither's writings mark a kind of transition by appealing at times to an extranational religious sensibility and at other times to an English pride in national election. As Norbrook has shown, Wither's seemingly contradictory political views—he began his literary career as an advocate of the monarchy only later to support the execution of Charles I and to serve as an officer in the New Model Army—must be seen in the context of a complex evolution of thought that allowed Wither to justify his shifting allegiances on religious and literary terms.³⁰ Indeed, that Wither only begrudgingly accepted the regicide while at the same time serving as an explicit inspiration for far more radical thinkers, such as John Lilburne, who cites Wither in his Leveller manifesto, England's Birth-Right Justified (October 1645), dramatizes the protean nature of Wither's writings. It also provides an important analog to the ideological shifts and changes I am seeking to describe regarding the study of Hebraica and the construction of the Jew in seventeenth-century England.

III

Although Wither was by no means the first to translate the Psalms metrically—more than seventy versions of the Psalms were printed in English between 1530 and 1600 and probably many more circulated in manuscript—he was the first writer of the seventeenth century to cause any stir with his translation and prose writings on the Psalms, which directly challenged the Sternhold and Hopkins version.³¹ Many of the arguments put forth by Wither in A Preparation to the Psalter do not originate with him. Some can be traced to more learned Christian Hebraists, to Luther and Calvin, and beyond them to the early Church Fathers. At the beginning of the Preparation Wither writes, “Becavse I will not presvme to deliuer anything vnto you, meerely vpon my owne credit; Beside my priuate reasons for that which I haue done, it is also confirmed by testimonies of good Authoritie.” He then provides a “Catalogue of such Writers, as I made vse of in this Preparation,” citing sixty-eight different names. In all likelihood, Wither personally read only a fraction of these writers, who in turn would have cited others. My focus on Wither is based less on his originality than on his historical, religious, and political location at a transitional moment in the development of English national identity. It is the combination of Wither's discussion of Hebrew prosody with his ambivalent sense of Englishness that makes him especially worthy of investigation. A Preparation addresses the Psalms from both an aesthetic and a religious viewpoint. Wither tries to formulate a coherent approach to the Biblical poems, taking into account aesthetic, political, and religious questions. Although he devotes a great deal of his energy to developing a theological perspective on the Psalms, Wither also provides an expansive analysis of the literary qualities of the Biblical text. At times he sounds more like Sidney in his Defense of Poesy than like Calvin in his Commentary on the Psalms. “Obserue here, how maruellously he hath set forth the Maiestie, the Wisedome, the Power, the Prouidence, and the terrible wrath of God. Note also how many lofty words, and what store of elegant and significant Metaphors there bee in these few lines … Our diuine Poet is not so sterile as to weare threadbare his descriptions; but very often and exceeding properly varieth his expressions, when he hath occasion to speake more then once of one thing” (p. 73). In her discussion of Sidney's ambivalent categorization of David as a divine poet and not as a “right poet,” Anne Lake Prescott suggests that these two kinds of poet were distinguished for religious and subversive, poetically ambitious reasons.³² By the time we come to Wither, however, the category of “right poet” becomes largely subsumed within the notion of divine poet, whose “Science is the absolut'st and the best” (Wither, “Of Weakness”). He expands Athanasius's view of the Psalms as a universal scriptural compendium to include all knowledge. Wither's combination of aesthetic and religious considerations comes out of what he understands to be the precedent of the Hebrew Bible and Hebrew prosody generally: “I have not followed the aduice of my owne braines in what I haue done: for if those that were learned in the Hebrew have not been deceiued, there is a variety of Numbers also in the Originall. … And they who thinke out of a reuerende respect of the Hebrew, to preserue alwaies in their Versions, her owne naturall speech, in steede of the right which they imagine to giue that sacred tongue, doe much iniure it: because the same phrases which haue an extraordinary Emphasis in their owne language, being Verbatim reduced into another, are many times of no force” (p. 17). In the same breath Wither invokes the Hebrew as precedent for his own variety of verses and argues for greater freedom in translation. Rather than playing down this apparent contradiction between remaining true to the Hebrew original (the letter) and adapting to the English of the translation (the spirit), Wither allows this tension to become part of his argument, suggesting an essential problematic at the core of Wither's use of Hebraic and Judaic materials: he reaches for a Hebrew precedent so as to close the gap between the Judaic past and the English present and to preserve forever the difference between the two.

In order to distinguish his English Psalms both from secular poetry and from the classical tradition—and here we may recall Milton's similar gestures in the example of Satan's pre-Arthurian cohorts—Wither echoes an observation that was already accepted by a large portion of the English community of Hebrew scholars. As we have already seen, in the previous century William Tyndale wrote as preface to his English translation of the Bible that “the Hebrew tongue agreeth a thousand times more with the English than with the Latin.” The English claim to linguistic privilege suggests political and religious analogies between the Jews and the English, as the chosen, or elect of God, which serve as counterpoint to Wither's uneasiness about English privilege. He writes: “that which the Iewes yet vse, & what we are taught in our Hebrew Grammars, hath far neater affinitie with our Verses, then with those which the Latines teach; whereas the language of the Hebrew and the phrases thereof are so different from the two learned Tongues of Europe, Greeke and Latine, that in my opinion there should not be any likeliness in the Scansion or manner of their Verse” (p. 61). The congruence between English and Hebrew extends well beyond the linguistic level. The English people share a common bond with the ancient Jews, fortuitously manifested in a similarity of verse, among other things. But Wither cannot let this elevation of English go unqualified. He continues: “Yea, I am assured (and vpon good reason) that there is proprietie in this Hebrew poesy, which cannot be truely searcht into, by those Rules which the same Art hath in other Languages” (p. 63). Some of the mystical and transcendent qualities of the Adamic, prelapsarian language are indeed untranslatable; Hebrew serves as a kind of figure for the religious transcendence that the Psalms are meant to help English readers achieve. Nevertheless, Hebrew's “proprietie” also argues for a peculiar affinity between Hebrew and English. If Hebrew verse, although partly opaque, still lends itself to English translations more readily than to Latin or Greek, then English must also offer its readers a version of Hebrew's “proprietie” that confirms a privileged status for the language of the translation. The contrast between English and the languages of classical antiquity indicates that the adaptation of Hebraic qualities to English culture, religion, and politics aims at supplementing, or even usurping, the stronghold of the classical humanist tradition on English scholarship. Wither charges his readers to value the Psalms more dearly than “Alexander the Great prized Homer's Iliads” (p. 128). The example of an empire-builder's esteem for the classical epic is not accidental, and offers a glimpse at precisely what kind of role Wither sees the metrical Psalms playing in English culture.

Part of Wither's spirited defense of the Psalms as Divine Poetry depends on his insistence that, first, King David was the author of all 150 Psalms, and second, David was prophetically inspired by the Holy Spirit, who enabled him to project his poetic occasions typologically into the future Incarnation, Suffering, and Triumph of Christ: “[David] was by inspiration of the holy Spirit, raised … to an admirable fore-sight of the Mysteries of Christ and his Church: and so knowing perfectly the spirituall sense of that which was done in the olde Testament, he made Psalmes that were literally to be vnderstood of Christ, and such things as concerned his Kingdome” (p. 31). The word “literally,” as we have already seen, has a technical meaning in scriptural interpretation. Wither de-historicizes David's intentions in the composition of the Psalms. Yet, this is not an allegorical reading of the Psalms foreshadowing the coming of Christ; it is explicitly a literal one for Wither. David is central to Wither, not only as an inspired precedent for his own self-appointed profession of poet, but also as a figure who stands in special contrast to the other pastoral leader of the Jewish people, Moses.

The similarities between David and Moses are worth recalling briefly. Both figures were shepherds before they arose from relative obscurity to become leaders of Israel. Both enjoyed close relationships to God, yet they committed transgressions egregious enough to give God cause to deny them the fulfillment of their respective goals: entry into the land of Canaan, in Moses' case, and the construction of the Temple, in David's. Wither ponders these similarities in his brief discussion of the 90th Psalm, which in the Bible is explicitly attributed to Moses. Unlike many of Wither's predecessors and contemporaries, who may have simply ignored these Biblical attributions when they did not suit their purposes, Wither argues explicitly against the words that open the Psalm, “A Prayer of Moses man of God,” that this is in fact a misattribution. He writes at length about David's process of composition, which he imagines to have begun with the divine poet's contemplation of “some passages … in the Books of Moses” (p. 31). This meditation induced a prophetic state during which David was inspired to write his own Psalms. But in this very act of inspired composition, according to Wither, David was able to put himself in the place of Moses, and thus usurp the earlier leader's historical position, “For as it seemeth, Dauid doth there petition for all those things which Moses had asked [in Exodus 33]” (p. 31). Wither suggests a poetic impersonation or prosopopoeia to replace the figure of Moses, the Jewish leader par excellence, the law-giver and conduit for God's jealous wrath; Moses has been sublated into David, the progenitor of the Messiah, the prophet of Christ's earthly and heavenly kingdoms. The leader of the Jews is swallowed up and assimilated by the most Christian of pre-Christians.

We can locate in Wither's fascinating transformation of Moses into David the tension of sameness and difference that characterizes so much of his writings about the Hebraic tradition. Christ's mission to seventeenth-century England can have little or no meaning without reference to the history of pre-Christian Jews. Yet, each invocation of a Jewish precedent produces an equal and opposite reaction against the Jews. Even as the Whitehall Conference of 1655 debated the pros and cons of readmitting Jews into England, the accusation of “judaizing” was a devastating condemnation. The Jews, of course, were eventually to be admitted, at least partly so that they could be persuaded by the English preachers to mend their ways and convert to Christianity. Hebrew had played a great part in the Reforming movement, as one of many ways to break with the Roman church; yet the fear of Jews and things Jewish grew stronger in the context of this separation from Catholicism. In making such a claim for historical change I know that I must bracket the pathological anti-semitism of the very first reformer, Martin Luther. Obviously, the study of Hebraica by Christian scholars—both Catholic and Protestant—inevitably led to the testy recognition of Christianity's debt to and distance from its precursor religion. I am seeking to describe a shift in emphasis rather than an absolute break. Whereas in the famous Reuchlin controversy of the early sixteenth century the division was between advocates of Christian Hebraica who also tended to be more sympathetic to the Jews themselves and those who opposed Hebraica and Jews alike, as the seventeenth century wore on the advocacy of Hebrew learning led to a simultaneous denigration of its source.

Wither, in this treatise composed in 1619, more than thirty-five years before the Jews were invited back to the shores of England, dwells on the misguided and perverse nature of the Jews even though he and his English audience probably encountered very few, if any, actual Jews. Shapiro's useful recent corrective to the assumption that no Jews lived in England from the time of their expulsion to “readmission” notwithstanding, it is still the case that most Englishmen had little contact with Jews and may not have even known it when they did. Nevertheless, Wither complains that the growing presence of schismatics in England is a result of “An infection of Judaisme crept in among our Sectaries; or some Jewish arguments spread abroad, by which the beliefe of Vnlearned men may be abused” (p. 35). Perhaps the most dramatic example to be adduced from the Preparation is Wither's fantastical “reconstruction” of the invention of the Talmud. It bears quoting at length:

[W]hen the Doctors of the Iewes, after the Conuersion of Constantine, saw that the Gentiles began to be generally couerted to the faith of Christ: seeing also, that a great part of the Iewes, beleeued with them, acknowledging that he, whom they had despightfully crucified and refused, was the Messias promised, figured, and prophecied in the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalmes: yea, perceiuing that the Psalmes of David had more particularly, and more plaineley then all the rest, foretold the calling of the Gentiles, and that the Christians did from thence bring many Arguments, which they were not able to deny; They began to feare, their malice would be generally discouered; and saw, that vnlesse they could find some way to discredit this Prophet, and take a new order with some others, the commodities of the Rabbins would grow mean, by the lessening of their Congregations. The maisters of the Hebrewes therefore assembled together, at a Cittie in Egypt, now called Cayro, and there made that counterfeit Scripture, which they call the Thalmuth, that they might keepe the simple and common sort of their Nation in blindnesse, vnder their obedience. They made also a false Glosse vpon the holy Scriptures of the olde Testament … and so this froward and wicked generation haue giuen themselues the lie.

(pp. 40-41)

Besides being a complete fantasy, this passage demonstrates just how much Wither depends on the Jews and Jewish learning for a sense of his own political and religious identity. It is unlikely that Wither invented this story on his own, but I have been unable to trace its provenance. It resembles many of the stories told by opponents of Christian Hebraica during the Reuchlin controversy, which makes it especially noteworthy here, since it appears within a treatise that argues for the value of Hebrew scholarship, rather than against it.³³ Wither's use of rabbinic authorities specifically to exaggerate the distance between English Christianity and contemporary or ancient Judaism is identical to the rhetorical gesture entailed in calling the Hebrew Bible the Old Testament, for they both simultaneously bestow truth-value upon the earlier text and its tradition, and, by positing Christ as their fulfillment, displace that truth-value onto the New Testament and the Christian tradition. An example contemporary to our own times of this same act of usurpation can be found in the term “Judeo-Christian.” On the one hand, this hybridized label suggests an uncontested continuity between Judaism and Christianity. On the other hand, truncating “Judaic” and completing it with “Christian” implies that Judaism has been fulfilled and therefore replaced by Christianity.³⁴ Actually, Wither expresses this ambivalence better than I could ever hope to: “the Law which was before Christ, and that which is since, is both the same, and not the same” (p. 95).

By way of conclusion let me return to my primary question: why did the study of Hebrew shift from a politically, religiously, and intellectually liberating practice, part of the international and cross-denominational respublica litterarum sacrarum, to a means by which to justify and install new forms of prejudice and repression, either as the chauvinism of a burgeoning national identity or the anti-semitism of a fraught religious one? The answer lies in the overdetermined figure of the Jew in seventeenth-century England. In light of Reformation study of Biblical and Rabbinic texts the Jew appeared uncannily close to evolving Protestant English self-perceptions, while at the same time resisting full assimilation to that identity as something ultimately different and incomprehensible. English Christian Hebraica, which gave access to the early history of Christianity and opened doors to new ideas, also cleared the path for a powerful and threatening return of the repressed. The anti-semitism that became increasingly pronounced as the Reformation progressed repeated in many respects the earliest Christian origins of anti-semitism. English Reformers were becoming uncomfortably aware of the conflict between their vast debt to and great distance from the Jewish culture that gave birth to Christianity. The study of Hebraica by Christian scholars, though it first may have offered new intellectual and religious opportunities, and the means of political and cultural liberation, forced English reformers to confront profound questions of difference. Writing about Christianity's Jewish precedence gave English writers like George Wither the occasion to develop a sense of nationalism that was less available to them in the folklore surrounding Arthur and Camelot. Religious sensibilities and political discourse coincided powerfully in Christian Hebraica. The Hebrew Psalms suggest two conflicting ways to interpret them, analogous to the contradictions that were so difficult for Christian Hebrew scholars like Wither to ignore. Reformation readers of the Psalms polemically understood them to be the product of a particular historical and cultural milieu, that of pre-Christian Judaism. To this extent they represented the unseverable connection between Christian and Hebrew religious traditions.³⁵ But the Psalms also lent themselves to personalized and particularized readings: the sixteenth-century lyric versions of Wyatt, Surrey, and Sidney are one form of this approach. The Christian emphasis on references to the coming of Christ, his passion, and resurrection is another. It was thus essential that a considerable distance be maintained between Protestant Christianity and its Hebrew origins.³⁶ Wither is remarkably self-conscious about this tension in the Psalms, and writes about the necessity of giving both readings their due in the context of a discussion of the preter, or past tense of the Psalms: “Dauid foresaw in spirit, that after the Messias was come, we of the latter Ages should … sing these Psalme and holy Mysteries in the Christian Church; rather Historically then Prophetically, & so he put them in that Tense which would best fit both” (p. 106).

For Wither, as for many of his contemporaries, history and prophecy, moral instruction and predictions of the future, the form of poetry and its message stand always in uneasy tension with one another. The very words of the Psalms possess a central relevance to all that they proclaim. This is an Hebraic relevance, one that draws on the importance of the word in the Judaic tradition. But it is also distinctly and necessarily Christian, since these words are made available to the English public through translations which seek to highlight the distance Christianity has come from Judaism, even as they claim to discover that distance in the Hebrew words themselves.

Notes

1. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (Essex: Longman, 1977), I.vii.32.

2. John Milton, Paradise Lost I.746-47, in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merrit Y. Hughes (New York: Macmillan, 1957); hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by book and line. Anne Lake Prescott has reminded me that within this Biblical corrective is embedded a further ironic inversion, since its rhetorical pattern, including the caesura, echoes the classical writings of Lucretius: “quod si forte aliquis, cum corpora dissiluere, / tum putat id fieri quia se condenseat aer, / errat” (I.391-93). See De rerum natura, ed. and trans. Cyril Bailey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947). Yet even this reappearance of a pre-Christian Latin model occurs in a different register, since Lucretius's poem addresses the natural world—in this passage he is describing how fish swim through the water—rather than erroneous mythological paradigms.

3. John Milton, The Reason of Church-Government, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, Vol. 1, ed. Don M. Wolfe (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1953), p. 812.

4. Milton was not the only seventeenth-century poet to propose an Arthurian poem, only to renege on the promise; both Ben Jonson, before Milton, and John Dryden, after, made similarly abortive plans.

5. A useful study of Arthur during the period is to be found in Roberta Florence Brinkley, Arthurian Legend in the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1932).

6. See David Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Re-admission of the Jews to England, 1603-1655 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), for an extended account of this debate. See Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and “the Jews,” trans. Andreas Michel and Mark S. Roberts (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1990) for further meditations on the Jew as Other or Outsider.

7. Most notably in James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 55-76.

8. Shapiro argues that in addition to the mass conversion and economic exploitation, a third account of the readmission debate should be added: a redefinition “of what it meant to be English during a period marked by social, religious, and political instability” (p. 57).

9. Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 2d ed. (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1964).

10. For detailed discussions of the growth of humanistic Biblical scholarship during the Renaissance see Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450-1800 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991), and Debora Kuller Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1994).

11. For an illuminating discussion of Reuchlin and the controversies his writings sparked, see Gareth Lloyd Jones, The Discovery of Hebrew in Tudor England: A Third Language (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), pp. 20-40.

12. E. I. J. Rosenthal, “Rashi and the English Bible,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 24 (1940), 140, and Abraham Schper, “Christian Hebraists in Sixteenth-Century England” (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1944), p. 80.

13. William Tyndale, “Obedience of a Christian Man,” in Doctrinal Treatises and Introductions to Different Portions of the Holy Scripture, ed. Henry Walter, Parker Society, Vol. 42 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1848), pp. 148-49.

14. For a discussion of the influence of Parker's metrical psalter, especially on Sir Philip Sidney, see Anne Lake Prescott, “King David as a ‘Right Poet’: Sidney and the Psalmist,” English Literary Renaissance, 19 (1989), 131-51.

15. Lloyd Jones, pp. 109-10. For an excellent account of the movement to educate the clergy, see Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559-1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), Chap. 3.

16. Lloyd Jones, pp. 226-44.

17. See Aron Freiman, A Gazetteer of Hebrew Printing (New York: New York Public Library, 1946), and A Catalogue of an Exhibition of Anglo-Jewish Art and History held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, 6 January to 29 February, 1956.

18. The classic—and essential—study of Hebraic influence on the Authorized Version is David Daiches, The King James Version of the English Bible: An account of the development and sources of the English Bible of 1611 with special reference to the Hebrew Tradition (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1941).

19. Shuger, pp. 13-16.

20. David Norbrook begins his useful study of Wither's middle period with a convincing debunking of John Aubrey's infamous account of Wither being saved from execution by the Royalist Sir John Denham so that he (Wither) could continue to serve in his capacity as England's worst living poet. See David Norbrook, “Levelling Poetry: George Wither and the English Revolution, 1642-1649,” English Literary Renaissance, 21 (1991), 217-18.

21. Quoted in Records of the Court of the Stationers Company, 1602-40, ed. William A. Jackson (London: Bibliographical Society, 1957), p. viii. The Stationers had purchased this patent on 29 October 1603, for the rather large sum of nine thousand pounds; they renewed the patent in 1616 and then again in 1634.

22. Jackson, p. 456. For a useful discussion of Wither's disputes with the Stationers Company, see James Doelman, “George Wither, the Stationers Company and the English Psalter,” Studies in Philology, 90 (1993), 74-82.

23. Grafton, pp. 26-27. The Rabbinic authorities to whom these Christian scholars turned were not by any means univocal in either their approaches or their readings. Indeed, trends in Jewish Biblical exegesis followed many of the patterns described by historians of the Renaissance such as Grafton, though not at the same times. Commentators like Abraham Ibn Ezra (1089-1164) and Radak (Rabbi David Kimchi, 1160?-1235?) emphasized philology and stylistics (the Peshat), while the enormously influential Rashi (Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac, 1040-1105) frequently imported the more allegorical, moral, and theological interpretations he found in classical Midrash.

24. Grafton refers to this conflation of methods as “interpretive schizophrenia” (p. 37).

25. Shuger, p. 33.

26. George Wither, A Preparation to the Psalter (London, 1619), p. 97. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. The Spenser Society has reissued facsimiles of many of Wither's writings, including A Preparation.

27. Prescott discusses this tradition in her “King David as a ‘Right Poet.’”

28. For studies of the English metrical Psalm tradition see Rivkah Zim, English Metrical Psalms: Poetry as Praise and Prayer, 1535-1601 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), and Philip von Rohr-Sauer, English Metrical Psalms from 1600 to 1660 (Freiburg: Universitäts-druckerei Poppen & Ortmann, 1938). On the influence of the Psalms on the lyric poetry of the period see the differing views expressed in Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1954), and Barbara K. Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979).

29. See Patrick Collinson's important discussions of these shifts in his Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London: The Hambledon Press, 1983) and in The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Macmillan, 1988).

30. Norbrook, pp. 244-45.

31. The first complete metrical translation of the Book of Psalms into English was produced by Robert Crowley in 1549. The most important Middle English translation of the Psalter was by the Yorkshire hermit Richard Rolle (d. 1349).

32. Prescott, p. 146.

33. I am indebted to Anne Lake Prescott for this observation.

34. This phenomenon of completion takes its most vivid and extreme form in the context of conversion. When Jessica converts to Christianity in The Merchant of Venice, for example, she fulfills the Old Covenant that had been bowdlerized in Shylock's quest for the pound of flesh by accepting the New Covenant of Christian love in her marriage to Lorenzo. For a probing analysis of the legacy of conversion narratives in English literature, see Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” & English National Identity (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1995). On the term “Judeo-Christian,” see Marshall Grossman, “The Violence of the Hyphen in Judeo-Christian,” Social Text, 22 (1989), 115-22.

35. For two considerations of the modern legacy left by this early modern tension between philo- and anti-semitism, see Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of “The Jew” in English Literature and Society: Racial Representation, 1875-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), and Frank Felsenstein, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture, 1660-1830 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1995).

36. Timothy Hampton addresses a dynamic of analogously anxious contours in his analysis of the use of classical examples in early modern texts; see Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990).