NEW YORK (NEXTBOOK) — Natan Sharansky, who spent nine years in Soviet prisons before moving to Israel and embarking on a career in politics, turned to me in the front lobby of the building that housed the offices of
the New York Sun. I had walked him down the stairs after an editorial board meeting in which I gently teased him about his latest book, Defending Identity, and his previous book, The Case for Democracy.
“It’s all so abstract and general,” I said. “Identity, democracy… when are you going to write a book about the Jews?”
He looked skeptical. Before we parted, I mentioned that I, too, had a book coming out soon.
“Oh? What about?” Sharansky asked.
“It’s a biography of Samuel Adams,” I replied.
He raised his eyebrows. “Ah, so you, too, are not writing just about the Jews.”
Not quite.
Let’s get this out of the way: Samuel Adams — an organizer of the Boston Tea Party, a member of the Continental Congress, a signer of the Declaration of Independence — was not Jewish. But he illustrates one of the fascinating features of the Jewish Exodus story — the way it has inspired even non-Jews to fight for their freedom.
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The Congregationalist Protestant Christianity Samuel Adams practiced was less distant in its trappings from Judaism than are many forms of modern-day Christianity. One of the places Adams worshiped, Old South Church in Boston, still stands today. A visitor there can’t help but be struck by the absence of Christian imagery. There are no crosses, no crucifixes, no Madonnas. The Massachusetts Congregationalists shared with the Jews an aversion to graven images. And that was not all they shared. Samuel Adams, one of the most significant moving spirits behind the American Revolution, was related to and influenced by Cotton Mather, a Puritan minister in Boston and one-time head of Harvard College.
Mather, in his 1726 book Faithful Account of the Discipline Professed and Practiced in the Churches of New England, cited Jewish practice as a guide, though not law, on everything from how many congregants were required for a new church (“The Jews of old held, that less than Ten Men of Leisure, could not make a Congregation”), to the reading of scripture aloud on the Lord’s day (“The Pentateuch was divided into fifty four Parashoth, or Sections, which they read over in the Synagogue every year”).
Part of the required curriculum for Harvard students from 1735 to 1755, which includes the time Samuel Adams was there, was the study of Hebrew grammar from a textbook written by Judah Monis, who had converted to Christianity from Judaism one month before joining the Harvard faculty. One of Adams’s nicknames, “the psalm-singer,” refers to the joy he took in singing texts that are part of the Jewish Bible. Even the names Samuel Adams gave to his children — Hannah and Samuel — could have easily belonged to Jews.
But the link between Samuel Adams, the strand of New England Congregationalism he personified, and Judaism goes well beyond the formal or stylistic, extending into the ideology and rhetoric that motivated Adams and his fellow New Englanders against the British. Again and again, both subtly and directly, Adams placed the American colonists in the role of the Israelites fleeing slavery in Egypt and likened the British to the oppressive Egyptians.
Writing in the Boston Gazette on August 8, 1768, Adams referred to the British as “taskmasters,” a term the Bible uses to describe the Egyptians. Earlier, he had referred to the Stamp Act as “a very grievous & we apprehend unconstitutional tax,” echoing the language Exodus uses to describe the “very grievous” hail, cattle disease, and locust plagues.
From Philadelphia, Adams wrote home to Massachusetts that the heart of the British King, George III, “is more obdurate, and his Disposition towards the People of America is more unrelenting and malignant than was that of Pharaoh towards the Israelites in Egypt.” In a speech to his fellow members of the Continental Congress, Adams is said to have credited God with providing the Americans a “cloud by day and pillar of fire by night,” which had, according to the Bible, also guided the Israelites in the wilderness after Egypt.
In a private letter on December 26, 1775, Adams wrote of the people of Massachusetts, “Certainly the People do not already hanker after the Onions & the Garlick!” It was a reference to Numbers 11:5, which recounts the restless Israelites in the desert, complaining to Moses about the manna, and recalling wistfully the food back in Egypt: Fish, cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions, and garlic.
When, after the Revolution, Adams became governor of Massachusetts, one of the annual election day sermons went so far as to compare Adams to Moses.
“Moses affords such an example to human governors. He was wont to apply to God for direction, in guiding his refractory people,” Samuel Deane preached to Adams, one of the more religious of a set of founders that included some famous skeptics.
Adams was not alone in linking the Israelites to the Americans. One fellow revolutionary, Reverend Samuel Cooper of the Brattle Street Church in Boston, referred to Massachusetts in a sermon as “This British Israel.” Another, John Hancock, gave an oration in 1774 referring to Boston as “our Jerusalem.” Yet another, Samuel Langdon, referred to “the Jewish government” as “a perfect Republic.” In the influential pamphlet Common Sense, Thomas Paine likened George III to “the hardened, sullen-tempered Pharaoh” who kept the children of Israel in bondage in Egypt.
Adams referenced the Exodus story more relentlessly than anyone among the first rank of founding fathers. The Bible was a commonly understood frame of reference in revolutionary times, and people on both sides of the conflict used its stories similarly to the way contemporary Americans invoke television or movie plots. It is remarkable that of all the stories in both the Jewish Bible and the Christian one, Exodus was the one invoked so frequently by the Americans to frame the Revolution.
And just as the Jewish love of freedom had a way of being contagious during the days of the American revolution, it has ricocheted again — back to this day. Sharansky noted in his book on identity, “The Puritans strongly identified with the Hebrew scripture of the Old Testament. They saw their journey to the New World as going to a new promised land.” The same book briefly makes the case that the American Revolution “was born out of American religious tradition and identity no less than out of political traditions of democracy and Enlightenment.”
So there you have it — a Soviet-born Israeli Jew noting the way American revolutionaries were inspired by the Jewish story, and calling for Israeli policies to spread freedom along those lines. I wouldn’t put it past Samuel Adams to find a way, through history, to remind even more of the Jews of their own ideals. He would be repaying a favor they once did for him.
Ira Stoll is the author of Samuel Adams: A Life, out now from Free Press. Reprinted from Nextbook.org, a new read on Jewish culture.