In 1862, a Presbyterian missionary, the Reverend Golak Nath, stationed in India, wrote the following lines based on his personal and professional experience: “The social position of a missionary, his intellectual and spiritual attainments, his highly civilized ideas, and his cultivated, refined feelings, must place him so far above his converts, generally, that there can scarcely be any fellow-feeling between them. A missionary would hardly find any loveliness in the character of his converts, to excite much kind feeling towards them. They are necessarily objects of his compassion and pity, but hardly worthy of his friendship, or capable of communion with him, except on religious subjects.”1
Nath’s remarks appear to be not only a declaration of cultural superiority or cultural imperialism but also an honest admission of the limits of the missionary’s personal relationship with his subjects, his cultural alienation from them, and his inability to build fully a satisfying human relationship with them. No doubt Nath openly expressed his sense of privilege in being a European with intellectual and spiritual attainments and possessing “his highly civilized ideas” in contradistinction to the inferior and primitive ones of his converts. But perhaps he was signaling more his own disadvantage, his own limitation, in not connecting with them as a Christian should. Seeing them as “objects of his compassion and pity” was hardly the same as being their friend, expressing true Christian love and affection for them, and communing with them beyond his professional duties of focusing “on religious subjects.”
How might Nath’s perceptions of his relationship with the converts and the potential converts under his charge apply to McCaul’s relationship with his Jewish subjects? What actually did McCaul feel toward the Jews he encountered both in Warsaw and London and toward the small number of converts he successfully led to the baptismal font? Was it an authentic expression of true Christian love or merely a posture dictated primarily by a sense of professional duty? And what about the sentiments of his Christian critics Oxlee and Tonna, who seemingly professed an appreciation of Jews and Judaism even beyond that of McCaul in not insisting that Jews abandon their ancestral norms and rituals? The same question might be posed about the converts themselves. Did they perceive their conversion as a new opportunity to embrace their fellow Christians with an intimacy previously denied them in their former Jewish state of “unbelief”? Could they, at the same time, sustain close relationships with relatives and friends they had left behind and who had been a significant part of their earlier Jewish lives? Could a Christian Jew still find common ground with his former coreligionists, somehow separating his newly found faith from his ethnic and cultural bonds with them? Finally, could Jews in virtual combat with their Christian adversary be positively transformed or at least minimally affected by their intense encounter with him and his ideas? Could they come away from this confrontation with some appreciation of his position, his honest expressions of approval for them, and even some admission that at least some of his criticisms were not totally off the mark? Jews could not be expected to warmly embrace their fierce Christian critic, but could they at least respect his position, his extraordinary effort to master their languages and literature, and to defend them during the infamous blood libel of 1840? In familiarizing themselves with the diversity of Christian approaches to Judaism and Jews, could they learn to recognize that some Christians were more worthy of their respect than others, and that it was even possible to build meaningful friendships with those few who genuinely cared for their welfare?
Based on the evidence presented in this book, it might be possible to offer some tentative answers to such questions regarding the quality of the relationships forged by the principals of this encounter among themselves and toward other Jews, Christians, and converts. Whether McCaul truly loved the Jews with whom he interacted is difficult to say, even if he and his daughter Elizabeth Finn explicitly declared this love. But what is clear is the special relationship he developed with them in comparison with that acknowledged by Nath regarding his Indian constituency. The Jews McCaul met engaged the missionary from a position of greater security and pride in the literary traditions in which they had been educated. They even displayed a clear sense of ethical, religious, and cultural superiority when confronting McCaul and his message. Their dialogue with him was hardly novel in their eyes but had been shaped by hundreds of years of previous Jewish-Christian debates and a complex relationship of subjugation and discrimination that long preceded this present contact situation with the London Society and its distinguished representative. At the very least, McCaul immediately perceived their formidable strengths and had to fortify himself with serious Jewish learning in order to enter into a dialogue with them. His book was impressive from the perspective of the history of Christian Hebraism but hardly passed muster with vaunted Jewish intellectuals such as Levinsohn and Fuenn who found his knowledge of rabbinics and history wanting. Such a challenge may not have elicited a deep love for his subjects, although it may have engendered a sincere respect and admiration for their high level of literacy and their intellectual accomplishments.
Margoliouth had the advantage over McCaul of familiarity and intimacy with the Jewish tradition when approaching his former coreligionists. But it is difficult to say how far this could take him when Jews discovered he was in fact an Anglican cleric. Were his fantasies of a kind of Jewish-Christian rapprochement shared by any of the Jews who encountered him during his journeys in the Middle East? He had gained entrance into synagogues and Jewish homes, if his own testimony is to be believed, but did he actually convert anyone with his intellectual arguments and did they sincerely feel a kinship to him as a former Jew who spoke their language? Margoliouth appears to have been a curiosity to his beholders and a person they should fear or suspect more than respect or admire. We might recall the fact that the famous rabbi Ḥayyim Palachi had apparently welcomed Margoliouth to his home, but this in no way altered his firm and outspoken resistance to Christian missionaries throughout his lifetime. The convert also appeared to be more fascinated with his Jewish hosts than they with him despite his efforts to present himself as their distinguished guest. Like McCaul, he made few inroads in forging warm relations with Jews, as we have seen.
Such severe limitations hampering actual intimate social bonds between missionaries, converts, and Jews, should not obscure altogether the occasional good rapport that could transpire among them. While it is hard to imagine McCaul’s deep friendship with individual Jews, he no doubt admired Jewish culture and literacy; he understood and appreciated Jewish spirituality and religiosity, and he valued “authentic” Jews who did not water down their cultural values as he claimed the German Reform Jews had done. This was also the case with respect to John Oxlee and Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, each knowledgeable of Judaism to varying degrees and each committed to allowing Jews to be Jews, to practice their traditions, and to be welcomed in all their particularity into the Christian fold. Jews doing their “Jewish thing” was an essential part of their imagined scenario of Jesus’s second coming. Christians, they claimed, were dependent on Jews living out their full Jewish lives not simply by converting but by embracing Jewish rituals and laws while identifying with the faith of Christ.
Stanislaus Hoga and Moses Margoliouth could never expunge their Jewish accents and habits, their love of Jewish learning, their commitment to Jewish values, ritual, music, and collective memory; they seemed very much suspended between their Christian faiths and their Jewish selves. They were truly hyphenated figures living between the two faith communities, identifying with both but often feeling socially distant and isolated from their former and present coreligionists.
Isaac Baer Levinsohn and Samuel Joseph Fuenn were deeply committed to reform and modernization and critical of the traditionalist communities from which they came but, nevertheless, remained unwilling to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Despite their open dissent from the tradition, they still loved rabbis and rabbinic texts and they took pride in recounting the history of Jewish accomplishments and ethical behavior. They felt an intimacy with a tradition that still commanded their attention and drew them in. They also knew Christianity, its sacred texts, its complex history and its unflattering record of Jewish persecution and discrimination. At the same time, they were infatuated with German and European culture and literature and identified with the cultural elites of the Christian world. Levinsohn even acknowledged that Jews still had much to learn from educated Christians. They believed that the unsavory parts of Christianity emanated from the Catholics, not necessarily the Protestants, and from the poor and uncivilized, not the rich and educated. The persecution of the Jews was very much a matter of low class and lack of education.
The two maskilim were also suspended between a radical version of Haskalah and cultural reform and traditional Judaism. Their encounter with McCaul obliged them to embrace their tradition, but they did so by reformulating it within a European discourse, overcoming rabbinic alienation by translating it into a Christian frame of reference. Judaism in their eyes was more clearly defined, appreciated, and elevated when distinguishing its cultural formation from that of Christianity and its checkered history. Raphael Kassin too was very much a fish out of water: a Sephardic Jew enamored of European ways and the allure of Western civilization; fascinated by other religions, especially Christianity; and determined to define Judaism against the Christian and the Muslim other. In the end, he also articulated a Jewish faith shaped by his exposure to reform and maskilic values emanating from European culture, but seemingly less familiar to a Jewish congregation rooted in Muslim and Ottoman culture. In the final analysis, the story of McCaul and each of his seven associates and their intense encounter with the other was less about mutual affection and admiration and more about the acquisition of self-knowledge through contrast and contestation, through an intense exposure to the other, leading ultimately to the construction of religious and cultural identities sometimes internally inconsistent and even conflicted.
The narrative presented in this book about an interfaith conversation of the nineteenth century is not meant to displace or diminish the importance of other well-known narratives about Jews living in Europe and the Middle East during the same era: the history of political emancipation and its challenges; the decline of Jewish communal authority; the integration and assimilation of individual Jews especially in the West; the secularization of certain segments of European Jewry; the ideological struggles between reformers and traditionalists; and the radical social, political, and economic upheavals experienced by Jews and Christians alike. My modest goal has merely been to investigate another relatively understudied dimension of Jewish-Christian relations in this era among individuals who genuinely wrestled with the meaning of their religious identity and the ways both religions affected their personal faiths and lives. Their particular Jewish-Christian debate and dialogue represented a genuine reengagement with the past and its long history of mutual recriminations, but also a novel iteration of these same old narratives and arguments in new guises and contexts. These included the presence of a new and powerful missionary organization and its bold offensive against rabbinic Judaism; a new Christian assertion of cultural superiority and aggressiveness toward the non-Christian world aligned with the expansion of European empires across the world; the emergence of a small but conspicuous community of Jewish converts to Christianity; new modes of communication through the circulation of newspapers, periodicals, and pamphlets disseminated widely across cultures and in multiple translations; as well as a creative and defiant response on the part of certain Jews confident in the value of their own culture and capable of articulating their message more clearly and more effectively through their own public forums and publications. This conversation also emerged, as we have seen, against the background of new scholarly approaches, new intellectual tools of philology, history, and social criticism, new thinking about the past, about gender relations, and about the ethical responsibility of religious traditions to the other.
Is there a legacy or afterlife of this conversation for our age, with its own concerns and challenges? Any quick Google search will reveal that Alexander McCaul’s books, especially The Old Paths, are still being published in new editions and are still being utilized for missionary work. Missionaries continue to challenge the organized Jewish community as well as nonaffiliated Jews with their own contemporary versions of Jewish or Hebrew Christianity, missionary Judaism, and Jews for Jesus, no doubt the direct heirs of such hybrid versions of Judaism and Christianity as those articulated in the nineteenth century by Hoga, Oxlee, Tonna, and others. Modern Jewish thinkers, well into the twentieth century, as we have mentioned, strongly polemicized with Christianity in defining their own place in Western civilization, taking up the kinds of arguments articulated by Levinsohn, Fuenn, and Kassin.
What has changed is the widespread ignorance of rabbinic texts, the decline of rabbinic authority, and the irrelevance of observance and ritual for the majority of Jews. McCaul’s argument rested on the assumption that the rabbis were still a force to contend with and that most Jews still valued the Talmud as the basic foundation of their Jewish identity. How effective could McCaul’s critical tome be to Jewish readers with little awareness of their own sacred texts and no allegiance to their normative prescriptions? Recall again the prescient observation of R. S. Spiegel, a missionary of the London Society writing in 1892:
Most of our tracts have been written for Jews of one mind and religious thought, losing sight of the manifold and various characters (and education) of the Jews we have to deal with. To have to reckon with the orthodox Talmudicals, The Reformed or rather De-formed, the educated, the illiterate, the Chasidic-superstitious, the Socialistic, the Atheistic, the Infidel, the merely National Jew; we have to provide missionary literature for Jews who think that Judaism is more a misfortune than a religion. We have not to forget Jews who with incision think that the different religions are the same wine in glasses, differently coloured; we have to remember Jews who use certain phrases and ceremonies in an emotional way without any sanctifying influence on their lives.2
Over a century later, the Talmud and its authority have even less cogency for the overwhelming majority of Jews.
McCaul further assumed that evangelical Christianity, as he understood it with its basic fundamentalist assumptions, would still be viable by the second half of the nineteenth century and beyond. His desperate attempts to combat the biblical critics clearly underscored the diminution of his Christian brand. Despite his panic over the slippage of biblical literalism during the last years of his lifetime, he could have hardly anticipated the decline of Christianity in Europe and the unsustainability of a mission to European Jews based on the assumptions that informed his critique.
In the aftermath of the Holocaust and with the emergence of a Jewish state and a powerful Jewish community in North America, a heated controversy over a missionary assault on the Talmud of the mid-nineteenth century might seem increasingly remote and irrelevant to contemporary concerns. Yet, on the other hand, evangelical Christianity still flourishes in the Americas, in Africa, and in Asia; the present Israeli government garners strong political and financial support from evangelicals who fervently defend the present right-wing coalition; and increasing numbers of intermarried unions of Christians and Jews cope with the challenge of forging hybrid, nonconfessional beliefs and practices for themselves and their children. Perhaps the story of McCaul and his associates—Christians, Jews, and those in between—is not as irrelevant to our own age as it might first appear.