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“Modern Christianity Is Ancient Judaism”: Rabbi Gustav Gottheil and the Jewish-American Religious Future, 1873–1903

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Caleb J. D. Maskell
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Abstract

Gustav Gottheil was a person of great influence in the development of American Reform Judaism, but his story has been largely forgotten. From 1873 to 1903, he was rabbi at Temple Emanu-El, the largest and wealthiest Reform Congregation on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. A prolific author and public teacher, he was “a striking and dominating figure … in American Judaism at large.” He was also controversial, criticized by some for his perceived openness to the ideals, institutions, and elites of American liberal Christianity. One editorialist wrote that he was “frequently accused of … ogling with Christianity, of servilely fawning upon it.” Another suggested that, when the history of American Reform Judaism was written, “ill-disposed critics [would] deny Gottheil his legitimate place,” judging that he was “dragging the congregation into … un-Jewish paths” based on his warm relations with urban Christian elites.

This essay is a study of the complex dynamics of Gustav Gottheil’s relationship to American Christianity. It argues that Gottheil believed America was in profound religious transition. In spite of the fact that American culture was dominated by Christian normativity, liberal Christians who were giving up their Trinitarian dogmas were actually becoming Reform Jews—“Modern Christianity,” he said in 1885, “is ancient Judaism.” This trajectory left him in no doubt that Reform Judaism was the “only possible religion of the American future.”

Throughout his ministry, Gottheil sought to advance the process of the conversion of American Christianity to Judaism. He entered into extensive dialogue and friendship with scores of liberal Christian leaders—the “ogling” and “fawning” for which he was criticized. His strategy was rarely to debate but, rather, to inhabit their vocabulary. He spoke the religious language of the normatively Christian American culture, affirming the cultural impulses of the Christian nationalist vision while creatively renarrating them on Jewish foundations.

Keywords

Gustav GottheilReform JudaismJewish-Christian relationsreligious nationalismcivil religion
Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , Summer 2013 , pp. 139 - 184
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 2013

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References

Special thanks are due to Kathryn Gin, Elesha Coffman, April Armstrong, Rachel Gross, Lauren Winner, Judith Weisenfeld, Ryan Harper, and Benjamin Tievsky for their assistance with the development of this project.

1. Obituary, American Hebrew, April 17, 1903. The editors took Gottheil to be “mark[ed] … out over and above many of his peers” in the Reform movement because of his role as an ambassador for Judaism in a normatively Christian America. Lawrence Charap's analysis of the anti- Reform sentiments of the American Hebrew makes the tone of the obituary all the more noteworthy. See Charap's unpublished dissertation, “‘Imperceptibly We Convert One Another’: Jewish-Protestant Dialogue in America, 1883–1915” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2000), 21 Google Scholar, and chap. 1, passim.

2. A hakham was a sagacious Talmudic rabbi. Kohler's word choice associates Gottheil with a noble and ancient tradition of rabbinic wisdom. Thanks are due to Benjamin Tievsky for helping me to situate this reference in Kohler's speech.

3. Kohler, Kaufman, cited in Moses, I. S., “Eulogy on Dr. Gustav Gottheil,” Central Conference of American Rabbis Yearbook, vol. 13 (1903), in Gottheil, Richard and Gottheil, Gustav, The Life of Gustav Gottheil (Williamsport, Pa.: Bayard Press, 1936), 508 [hereafter LOGG]Google Scholar. On Kohler's authorship of the Pittsburgh Platform, see Meyer, Michael, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 268 Google Scholar. The Life of Gustav Gottheil is a biography cum lightly redacted compendium of most of the primary source materials preserved in the Gustav Gottheil papers at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York City. It is, by and large, quite useful, as it preserves a great many letters and articles in a transcribed published form that is easy to access. It is also reasonably academically rigorous in its form, as it was prepared by Richard Gottheil, Gustav Gottheil's son, who was a professor of Semitics at Columbia University.

4. Voorsanger, Jacob, Obituary, in Emanu-El (April 1903), in LOGG, 276 Google Scholar.

5. Gottheil, , in Meyer, Response to Modernity, 281 Google Scholar.

6. More on the specifics of all of this below.

7. One important exception here is his turn to Zionism in 1897, which he embraced during the last five years of his life and ministry. Gottheil's emergence as one of the first Americans to hold together Reform Judaism and a robust political Zionism is important and worthy of further study but is beyond the scope of the present essay. See LOGG, 190–95, 261.

8. Cohen, Naomi Wiener, What the Rabbis Said: The Public Discourse of Nineteenth-Century American Rabbis (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 187 Google Scholar.

9. See Gustav Gottheil Papers, Box 44–1, Jewish Theological Seminary Library Archives, New York [hereafter GGP].Google Scholar Much of his correspondence is transcribed and reproduced in LOGG.

10. See, for example, LOGG, 97–114, 243–47, and 467–71.

11. Ibid., 262–63.

12. See Kraut, Benny, “The Temple Sermon,” From Reform Judaism To Ethical Culture: The Religious Evolution of Felix Adler (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

13. LOGG, 40–42.

14. Obituary, American Hebrew, in LOGG, 505. Jacob Voorsanger also uses this language of “ogling,” though he says Gottheil was accused of “ogling with Unitarianism.” This must have been a concrete accusation made in a public forum against Gottheil. The shared language can hardly be coincidental. However, I have not been able to locate the accusation, and Gottheil's personal papers make no mention of it. If I had to speculate, I suspect that it came from Isaac Mayer Wise, who often used the language of “ogling” in the American Israelite to describe what he takes to be illicit relations with Unitarians. However, the reference is not to be found in the American Israelite or in the papers of Wise or Gottheil.

15. “Editorial Notes,” Reform Advocate 12 (December 12, 1896), 259. I am indebted to Charap, “‘Imperceptibly We Convert One Another,”’ 214, for the citation.

16. Voorsanger, editorial, Emanu-El (San Francisco, 1903), in LOGG, 275–76. While I do not wish to judge contemporary historians of American Judaism as in any way ill-disposed to Gottheil's approach, it is fascinating to see the way that Voorsanger's prophecy about Gottheil’s marginalization was fulfilled, as he is barely mentioned in most standard histories. See, for example Sarna, Jonathan, American Judaism: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Michael Meyer, , Response to Modernity; and Raphael, Marc Lee, Profiles in American Judaism: The Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, and Reconstructionist Traditions in Historical Perspective (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984)Google Scholar. One wonders if this relative absence indicates something about the broader structure of how the story of Reform Judaism is usually told.

17. Emma Lazarus to Gustav Gottheil, October 3, 1882, in LOGG, 65. “Modern Christianity Is Ancient Judaism” 171

18. Gottheil, Gustav, “Benjamin, Levi, Abram,” New York Herald, November 5, 1888, 9 Google Scholar; Gottheil, Gustav, “The Mission of Israel,” New York Herald, September 12, 1875, 6 Google Scholar; Gottheil, Gustav, “The Position of the Jews in America. Second Article,” North American Review 127 (1878): 87 Google Scholar. The idea of “normative nationalist Christianity” is akin to Catherine Albanese's category of “public Protestantism” in America: Religion and Religions (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1992), 395–98. However, in the case of Gottheil, Albanese's category is not sufficient for a couple of reasons. First and most simply, Gottheil explicitly included Catholicism in his characterization of a normative nationalist Christianity in the midst of which Jews had to locate themselves. To him, there was a cultural unity established by shared Christian faith—in spite of well-documented Protestant/Catholic tension—that formed a locus of Jewish exclusion in American national identity. This was an intellectual as much as cultural problem; Gottheil understood normative nationalist Christianity to draw strength from a fundamental theological unity. Much rested in Gottheil’s mind on the extent to which Christians of all sorts understood Jesus Christ to be the unique savior of the world. As we shall see below, this belief threw American Christian discourse into a particular relation to time and progress with regard to the second coming of the Messiah. In spite of intra-Christian difference, he believed that this Christian discourse all but wrote nonconverting, practicing Jews out of the conversation. As Gottheil tracked the transformation of normative nationalist Christianity, he paid close attention to the way that doctrines of the uniqueness of Christ began to give way to lower-boundary beliefs in Christ's exemplary human life and Christ as a signpost to the ways of God. He saw this transition to what some scholars have called “liberalism” happening among Catholics and Protestants alike. To be sure, as shall be made clear below, Gottheil's chief interlocutors were Unitarians, some of whom were self-consciously on their way out of the liberal Protestant community. This does not change the fact, however, that Gottheil was concerned with what he took to be “Christianity” in relation to “Judaism” and not a “Protestant establishment” in relation to those on its margins.

19. The structures and iterations of normative nationalist Christianity in the nineteenth century have been the focus of much recent scholarly attention. The most provocative, generative works include David Sehat, The Myth Of American Religious Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Tracy Fessenden, Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007); and John Lardas Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). In what follows, I will note significant intersections with each of these works. Surprisingly, though, there is little in these accounts that deals with American Judaism, though venturing into that arena would bolster the arguments of each, showing the ways in which the presence of Jews in America was working to complicate and indeed weaken the hegemony of normative nationalist Christianity over the construction of “Americanness” from the mid-nineteenth century onward. An excellent work that attends to this phenomenon is Lila Corwin Berman's Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), but her argument is rendered almost exclusively in the context of twentieth-century history. Another important study that maps the reshaping and pluralization of the normative nationalist Christianity that Gottheil worked to renarrate is Kevin Schultz's Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). However, Schultz's book is also a twentieth-century story. Eran Shalev's American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013) is an excellent intervention into nineteenth-century American intellectual history, though it is mostly a story of the appropriation of Old Testament themes by the Protestant majority who then wove them into Christian American self-consciousness. The present essay attempts to occupy space between these discourses, situating Gottheil as a nineteenth- century American Jewish religious figure thoroughly concerned both with the problem of normative nationalist Christianity and with the construction of a Jewish religious response that could entirely reorient American religious culture toward not just the Old Testament but a national Judaism.

20. Moses, , “Eulogy,” 508 Google Scholar.

21. See Mace, Emily, “Cosmopolitan Communions: Practices of Religious Liberalism in America, 1875–1930” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2010), 27, chap. 1, passim Google Scholar. Many of his friends were preoccupied with this search, but Gottheil fundamentally disagreed with their aims. See, for example, Gottheil's 1894 speech in honor of Harlem Unitarian minister the Reverend Merle St. Wright, Croix, “The Broader Brotherhood,” in LOGG, 240–42Google Scholar.

22. Gottheil, , “The Broader Brotherhood,” 240 Google Scholar; Gottheil, Gustav, “The Drift of Modern Christian Thought,” Conference Papers, Essays and Addresses Delivered at the First Conference of the Jewish Ministers’ Association Held in New York, Jan. 19–20, 1885 (New York: American Hebrew, 1885), 107 Google Scholar. Isaac Mayer Wise said similar things about the future of Reform Judaism but for different reasons. See Kraut, Benny, “Judaism Triumphant: Isaac Mayer Wise on Unitarianism and Liberal Christianity,” American Jewish Studies Review 7 (1982): 179–230 Google Scholar.

23. There is a vast array of scholarship that touches on the nature of “modernity” in this period. However, the most salient to what Gottheil meant by “modernity” is Meyer, Response to Modernity. Some key themes he highlights include a positive outlook toward science, biblical criticism, technical innovation, liturgical innovation, and the progress of Western— especially American—civilization, as well as a pronounced ambivalence toward the authority of tradition.

24. Gottheil, , “The Drift of Modern Christian Thought,” 107 Google Scholar.

25. Ibid., 109–110.

26. “Countersupersessionism” is the theological opponent of “supersessionism,” the Christian theological idea that, after the Christ event, the special status once given by God to Israel and Judaism through the Mosaic covenant is instead given to the church and Christianity through Christ. As this essay shows, Gottheil consistently argued against this logic, proposing that it was not Judaism but orthodox Christianity that would be left behind as the sun rose upon the American future. A concise account of the theological stakes of supersessionism in contemporary Jewish-Christian relations can be found in David Novak's 2005 article, “The Covenant in Rabbinic Thought,” in Two Faiths, One Covenant? Jewish and Christian Identity in the Presence of the Other, ed. Korn, Eugene B. and Pawlikowski, John (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005)Google Scholar.

27. For details on Gottheil's early life, education, and ministry in Berlin and Manchester, see LOGG, 1–32.

28. Gottheil, , “Benjamin, Levi, Abram,” 9 Google Scholar.

29. See Gottheil, Gustav, “Syllabus of a Treatise on the Development of Religious Ideas in Judaism since Moses Mendelsohn,” in Judaism at the World's Parliament of Religions Comprising Papers on Judaism Read at the Parliament, at the Jewish Denominational Congress, and at the Jewish Presentation (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke and Co., 1894), 26–34 Google Scholar.

30. “The Mission of Israel,”New York Herald, September 12, 1875, 6.

31. Ibid. This is an example of Gottheil's elision of the priorities of a modern democratic ideal with the priorities of the biblical prophets.

32. Gottheil, , “The Position of the Jews in America. Second Article,” 87 Google Scholar.

33. Ibid., 86–88.

34. Gottheil, Gustav, “The Position of the Jews in America. First Article,” North American Review 126 (1878): 302, 300–308Google Scholar.

35. This use of social-scientific statistical analysis can be viewed as a prefiguration of what Lila Corwin Berman describes as “the Social- Scientific turn” in Jewish self-narration. This approach rose to prominence in the 1920s and 1930s with such books as The Ghetto by Louis Wirth, a protégé of Robert Park at the University of Chicago. Wirth, she argues, was “preaching from the altar of sociology” when he posited his thesis that American Jews in a free society would, by virtue of their cultural intelligence, seek out the isolation of a ghetto to occupy in order to preserve their cultural intelligence and self-awareness. This ghettoization enabled them to look upon their world, in Robert Park's words, as “marginal man … with the detachment of a stranger.” Wirth and Park's sociological analysis argued for a strong correlation between cultural difference and a certain kind of cultural superiority. While Gottheil would have taken issue with the language of ghettoization, as well as the incipient universal pluralism (or, at least, scholarly agnosticism) of their argument, the larger point is quite similar. See Berman, , Speaking of Jews, 39 Google Scholar.

36. Gottheil, , “The Position of the Jews in America. Second Article,” 88 Google Scholar. Emphasis in the original.

37. The relationship between Isaac Leeser and Isaac Mayer Wise was contentious, even, at times, antagonistic. They differed strongly on matters of theology and the proper formulation of Jewish religious identity in the American context. See Sarna, , American Judaism, 103–10Google Scholar, for an overview of the tensions between them. However, in their approach to the political issues raised by normative nationalist Christianity, they were allies. See Sussman, Lance, Isaac Leeser and the Making of American Judaism (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 243–44Google Scholar, for an exposition of Wise's admiration of Leeser's political tenacity.

38. Sussman, , Isaac Leeser, 147 Google Scholar.

39. Ibid.; Noll, Mark, “The Bible, Minority Faiths, and the Protestant Mainstream,” in Minority Faiths and the American Protestant Mainstream, ed. Sarna, Jonathan (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1998), 199 Google Scholar. David Sehat's The Myth of American Religious Freedom marshals a great deal of evidence to show the ways in which an explicit Protestant normativity conditioned virtually every area of American public life, especially legal and political, from the colonial era well into the twentieth century. While Sehat's book is mostly an account of outrageous violations of the religious freedom taken today to be guaranteed by the First Amendment, it is also a chronicle of resistance to this hegemonic Protestantism by those who took it to be their ideological enemy (see 203–40, passim). Sehat’s story follows David Hollinger in the assessment that the chief non- Jewish allies of American Jews in their struggle for public religious freedom and nondiscrimination were twentieth-century “post- Christian” intellectuals. See Hollinger, , “Jewish Intellectuals and the De-Christianization of American Public Culture in the Twentieth Century,” in New Directions in American Religious History, ed. Stout, Harry S. and Hart, D. G. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar. Surprisingly, Sehat has little to say about Jewish attention to these issues in the post-bellum nineteenth century; he makes no mention of such figures as Isaac Mayer Wise, Isaac Leeser, and Kaufman Kohler, all of whom seminally addressed the central concern of his book in precisely themanner that he frames it—as resistance to and reinterpretation of the Christian-inflected moral norms that the Protestant majority took to be commonsensical, self-evident, and necessary for the construction of a Republican government. Sehat tells most of the Jewish part of this story in the twentieth century in interactions with “post-Christians” who took the intellectual inheritance of their forbears but abandoned their faith. Attention to the figures treated in this essay would show that very similar conversations were happening in the last three decades of the nineteenth century between Reform Jews and liberal Protestants, many of whom were intent on retaining precisely the faith that “post- Christians” gave up. Gottheil affirms the countersupersessionist aims of Leeser, Wise, et al. but rejects their rhetorical approach.

40. Sussman, , Isaac Leeser, 148 Google Scholar.

41. Ibid.

42. Ibid., 149; Noll, , “The Bible, Minority Faiths, and the Protestant Mainstream,” 199 Google Scholar.

43. Sussman, , Isaac Leeser, 87 Google Scholar. This episode would seem to give further credence to John Lardas Modern's argument about the distribution of evangelical literature and its effect on the sense of the normative secular in the antebellum era.

44. Sussman, , Leeser, Isaac, 134 Google Scholar.

45. Ibid., 148–49.

46. Ibid., Leeser, 243–44.

47. Kraut, , “Judaism Triumphant,” 183.Google Scholar

48. Ibid., 184–85.

49. For more crystalline examples of Isaac Mayer Wise's triumphalism, see ibid., passim.

50. See Eisen, Arnold, The Chosen People in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 20–22, 53–56Google Scholar.

51. For a fine account of this, see Berman, , Speaking of Jews, 11, chap. 1 Google Scholar, passim.

52. Kraut, , “Judaism Triumphant,” 183 Google Scholar.

53. See, for example, Gottheil's, second speech at the World’s Parliament of Religions, “The Greatness and Influence of Moses,” in Judaism at the World's Parliament of Religions, 159–63Google Scholar.

54. This proposal interacts in two fascinating ways with Tracy Fessenden's subtle and brilliant Culture and Redemption. First, it adds a dimension to her emphasis on the complex and problematic racialized elements of American religious self-narration. Where Fessenden (8–9) rightly locates Jews on the margins of the American secular proposed by the likes of Stowe, Whitman, and Emerson, Gottheil is proposing an alternative Jewish center for the construction. His proposal is both racialized and universalized, in the manner of Fessenden's Protestants, with a key difference—he is not proposing the establishment of a “new race” but, rather, the incorporation of all Americans into the ideology of an ancient one, whose particularized, distinctive “foundation truths” he finds to “contain the elements of all religions” ( Gottheil, , “The Drift of Modern Christian Thought,” 109 Google Scholar). It may be that Fessenden (191) would mark Gottheil's move as yet another reiteration of the ideology of the Protestant secular in a Jewish mode. This would be a very interesting reading, but it would raise more questions than it answered, particularly vis-à-vis the influence of Germanic and Romantic thought on American Protestant notions of the secular. Gottheil's Judaic vision of America is not, at base, one of pluralistic tolerance but, rather, of Jewish triumphalism, gently delivered. Fessenden asks all sorts of suggestive questions that gesture toward this complexity issue in her chapter on Mark Twain’s discomfort with American Christian/secular self-narration (142–43), but she does not much pursue them through the lens of Judaism. Such a study would be most productive.

55. Abbott, Lyman, “The Meaning of It All,” The Christian Union, October 22, 1892, 721 Google Scholar. For recent historical work on this theme, see Nelson, Eric, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), and Shalev, American ZionCrossRefGoogle Scholar. Eric Nelson's forthcoming book, The Royalist Revolution, will be especially relevant, as it will consider Hebraic ideas of political authority in the context of the American founding.

56. Gottheil, , “Benjamin, Levi, Abram,” 9 Google Scholar.

57. Ibid.

58. Ibid.

59. Gottheil, , “The Greatness and Influence of Moses,” 159 Google Scholar.

60. Ibid., 159–61.

61. Jonathan D., Sarna, “The Cult of Synthesis in American Jewish Culture,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, and Society 5, nos. 1–2 (1998): 52–79 Google Scholar.

62. Meyer, , Response to Modernity, 227 Google Scholar.

63. Gottheil, Gustav, “Jews in the Philippines,” New York Herald, December 5, 1898, 9 Google Scholar.

64. See Abrams, Jeanne, “Remembering the Maine: The Jewish Attitude Toward the Spanish-American War as Reflected in The American Israelite,” American Jewish History 76, no. 4 (June 1987): 439–55Google Scholar. Significantly, there was some intramural debate over the question of support for the war among the members of the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR). Gottheil's position of unequivocating support was, by far, the majority opinion, though there was some dissent, notably from Jacob Voorsanger and Emil Hirsch. According to historian David Strassler, the Spanish-American war was a high-water mark for fervent patriotism among Reform leaders. Rabbi Henry Berkowitz of Philadelphia argued that the war was enabling American Jewish soldiers to fight back against the Catholic Spanish who had so persecuted them in the late Middle Ages: “Never did Israel prevail against Spain, save now.” In the years after the war, this posture was taken to have been a bit shortsighted; the CCAR affiliated itself with the National PeaceMovement in “atonement” for its patriotic bellicosity during thewar. For all of this and more, see Strassler, David, “The Changing Definitions of the ‘Jewish People’ Concept in American Judaism” (Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University, 1980), 53–58 Google Scholar.

65. Lears, T. J. Jackson, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 207 Google Scholar.

66. Stephenson, Anders, Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 77 Google Scholar; the “priceless principles” quote is from President William McKinley, cited in Lears, Rebirth, 210.

67. On the idea of character in this period, see Fox, Richard Wightman, “The Culture of Liberal Protestant Progressivism, 1875–1925,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23, no. 3 (1993): 639–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68. Lears, , Rebirth, 207–21Google Scholar.

69. Gottheil, , “Jews in the Philippines,” 9 Google Scholar.

70. Ibid.

71. Historian Daniel Rodgers suggests that the motif of millennialism was perhaps the crucial ideological engine driving the national Protestant mythology of America as God's chosen nation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. See Rodgers, Daniel, “Exceptionalism,” in Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, ed. Molho, Anthony and Wood, Gordon S. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 23–24 Google Scholar.

72. Ibid., 23. See also May, Henry, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), parts III and IV, esp. 153–96 and 307–37Google Scholar.

73. Gottheil, Gustav, “Rabbi Gottheil Discusses Jewish Faith in the Millennium,” Sunday World, pamphlet in GGP. The piece is reprinted almost exactly in LOGG, 382–87Google Scholar. Frustratingly, I cannot trace a date for the article in the Sunday World—because I could not find any publication information about the Sunday World. The Sunday World may well have been a Christian publication. I do not know if Gottheil wrote the article in response to his piece on Father Doherty, but there is no reason to assume that he did. However, it seems likely that the article was written after 1890 for two reasons. First, it discusses an endemic rise in national antisemitism, and, second, Zionism is latent in the text, which was not a priority for Gottheil until after 1897 (see LOGG, 190– 95). In any case, the question of the precise date of the essay is immaterial to the larger point about Gottheil's approach to normative Christian nationalism.

74. Gottheil, , “Jewish Faith in the Millennium,” in LOGG, 383 Google Scholar.

75. Ibid., 384.

76. Ibid., 383–84. Emphasis mine.

77. This point was a theme to which Gottheil returned regularly. See his sermon preached just a few months after the sermon on the Spanish-American War and the coming of the millennium, “Christ and His Religion,” New York Times, February 20, 1899.

78. Gottheil was certainly not alone in trying to articulate a Reform Jewish vision of the “messianic age” in this era. Since the articulation of the anti-Zionist Pittsburgh Platform in 1885, this had become a standard trope of Reform eschatology, though precisely how the messianic age should be understood remained a contested point. One interesting comparison piece, appearing shortly after Gottheil's essay was written, is Harris Weinstock's “Is the Messiah Yet To Come?” in his popular book of essays, Jesus the Jew and Other Addresses (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1902), 77–91. In the main, it makes similar arguments with which Gottheil would have likely had no quarrel. However, in contrast to Gottheil, Weinstock's essay on messianism does not mention Jesus or the millennium, in spite of the fact that, as George Berlin has shown, Weinstock—and many other American Reform leaders at the time—was very interested in amplifying the Jewishness of Jesus. Rather, Weinstock’s essay rejects traditional historical messianism, denying wholesale the concept of disruptive divine intervention into history and arguing that all modern people should become “personal messiahs” to “hasten the day of universal peace and good fellowship” (90). His articulation was typical of the Reform position in that era—progressive, ethical, anti-Zionist, and dismissive of supernatural divine interventionism on behalf of a chosen people. Gottheil's extensive rhetorical engagement with more historical, supernaturalist messianism stands in sharp contrast. To Gottheil, the superior rhetorical strategy was to find common American religious ground with such discourse (if only to outnarrate it), rather than simply to reject it as outmoded and antimodern.

79. Gottheil, , “Jewish Faith in the Millennium,” in LOGG, 384 Google Scholar.

80. Ibid., 385.

81. Ibid.

82. Gottheil, , “Jews in the Philippines,” 9 Google Scholar.

83. Gottheil, , “The Drift of Modern Christian Thought,” 104 Google Scholar.

84. Ibid., 105. Gottheil's characterization of “Christianity” should make it very clear to the historian that he was speaking about liberal Christians in New York City, not American Christianity as a whole. His is clearly not a synoptic view of American Christian doctrine in 1885. It was immaterial to his argument that he was not describing American Christianity as a whole. It is significant to note, however, that this is the view of Christianity that Gottheil took from his reading of the Herald and his relationships with a wide variety of New York's liberal Christian elite. Most important, this was the view that undergirded his public interventions into the rhetoric of normative nationalist Christianity, of which he took these ministers to be representatives.

85. Ibid., 106.

86. Ibid., 107. Gottheil's invocation of “ancient Judaism” has interesting resonances with the deployment of Christian primitivism that Matthew Bowman identifies in the Protestant Social Gospel movement. See Bowman, Matthew, “Sin, Spirituality, and Primitivism: The Theologies of the American Social Gospel, 1885–1917,” Religion and American Culture 17, no. 1 (Winter 2007): esp. 113–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

87. Gottheil, , “The Drift of Modern Christian Thought,” 108 Google Scholar.

88. Ibid., 109–10.

89. LOGG, 119–22.

90. “Letter to the Editor,” New York Times, April 30, 1899.

91. Newton, R. Heber, Gottheil, Gustav, and Slicer, Thomas R., eds., A Book of Common Worship (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1900)Google Scholar. It was intended to be “an object-lesson in the Possibilities of Common Worship,” opening with a long quote from St. Thomas More's Utopia on the divine origin of all religion and using the famous Latin of St. Ambrose as its epigraph, “Vox Quidem Dissona, Sed Una Religio” (“Certainly voices dissent, but there is one religion”).

92. This picture of Gottheil's correspondence is drawn chiefly from extant letters in the GGP as well as his biography and reports on his life in contemporary newspapers. In studying Gottheil's relationships to Christian ministers, the historian is faced with a familiar problem of epistolary technology, namely, that the letters in Gottheil's archive are the ones that were sent to him. None of the letters that he sent to his Christian correspondents are preserved. Inference must therefore be made, conservatively but surefootedly, about the quality of the relationships that these one-sided communications represent.

93. Henry Whitney Bellows to Gustav Gottheil, November 14, 1876, GGP.

94. Berlin, George L., Defending the Faith: Nineteenth-Century American Jewish Writings on Christianity and Jesus (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 45–78 Google Scholar.

95. Ibid., 61–62. “Modern Christianity Is Ancient Judaism” 181

96. Ibid., 61.

97. Ibid., 62–63.

98. See, for example, LOGG, 234.

99. Berlin, , Defending the Faith, 172 Google Scholar. Gottheil's definitive statement on the relationship of first-century Jews to the teaching of Jesus is found in “The Great Refusal,” Unitarian Review 27, no. 1 (January 1887): 1–12. It was a rebuttal to Unitarian minister S. R. Calthrop's article, “Israel's Last Word,” an argument that the Jews of Jesus’ day and beyond were blameworthy for not “recogniz[ing their] grandest inspiration” in Jesus (3).

100. Berlin, , Defending the Faith, 172 Google Scholar.

101. Some of his unusually vituperative energy for this cause may have come from the fact that, when Gottheil was a young man, German missionaries converted his older brother Edward to Christianity, causing a rift between Edward Gottheil and his father that Gustav tried unsuccessfully to heal. LOGG, 4–5.

102. “Jewish Conversionists,” New York Herald, April 16, 1876, 15.

103. “Rabbi Gottheil's Protest,” New York Times, April 10, 1893.

104. Ibid.

105. Ibid. Gottheil's reference to African barbarians is very striking here, calling to mind the racial dimensions present in Fessenden's account of the secular. It seems that citizenship for Gottheil is, in some sense, a racial category, differentiating cultured/ uncultured, rich/poor, civilized/uncivilized, and, perhaps most important, Jewish-Christian/barbarian. Here is an area in which her use of race in the construction of a religious account of the nineteenth-century American secular would benefit from a broader accounting for Jewish sources.

106. Camp, Stephen H. to Gottheil, Gustav, April 18, 1893, GGPGoogle Scholar.

107. Seaver, Nathan to Gottheil, Gustav, January 24, 1887, GGPGoogle Scholar.

108. Hill, Nathan S. to Gottheil, Gustav, January 24, 1879, GGPGoogle Scholar.

109. Gottheil, , “The Broader Brotherhood,” 240 Google Scholar.

110. Berman, , Speaking of Jews, chap. 1 Google Scholar.

111. Silverman, Joseph, “A Rabbi in Israel,” 255 Google Scholar.

112. Gottheil, , “The Great Refusal,” 2 Google Scholar.

113. Gottheil, Gustav, Poetry Notebook (GGP), reproduced in LOGG, 413 Google Scholar.

114. Ibid.

115. Ibid.

116. Gottheil, Gustav, Sun and Shield: A Book of Devout Thoughts for Every-day Use (New York: Bloch Publishers, 1896), ii Google Scholar.

117. For an interesting perspective on the production of Sun and Shield and its history in the context of Jewish women's devotional literature, see Friedland, Eric L., “Meditation in Progressive Judaism,” in Platforms and Prayerbooks: Theological and Liturgical Perspectives on Reform Judaism, ed. Kaplan, Dana Evan (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 139–41Google Scholar.

118. See Toorn, Karel van der, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), chap. 2, passimGoogle Scholar.

119. Gottheil, , Sun and Shield, iv Google Scholar.

120. Ibid., i.

121. See Gottheil's, Richard wry comment about Sun and Shield not making any money because so many copies were given away. LOGG, 177 Google Scholar.

122. Chadwick, John W. to Gottheil, Gustav, November 17, 1896, GGPGoogle Scholar.

123. Mitchell, J. H. to Gottheil, Gustav, December 18, 1896, GGPGoogle Scholar.

124. MacArthur, Robert Stuart to Gottheil, Gustav, November 10, 1896, in LOGG, 174 Google Scholar. Emphasis mine.

125. Gottheil, Gustav, “The Prince of Peace,” New York Times, January 13, 1896 Google Scholar.

126. Ibid.

127. Ibid.

128. Gottheil, Gustav, “Christ and His Religion,” New York Times, February 20, 1899 Google Scholar.

129. Ibid.

130. Feldman, Egal, “The Social Gospel and the Jews,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 58, no. 3 (March 1969): 315–22Google Scholar. Feldman revisits “Modern Christianity Is Ancient Judaism” 183 this argument in his Dual Destinies (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1990).