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Halakha, Transgression, and the Protestant Interest: The Case of Haijm Isaac Karigal

Mon, December 17, 3:00 to 4:30pm, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Waterfront 2 Ballroom

Abstract

On Shavuot 5533 (May 28, 1773), Rabbi Haijm Isaac Karigal of Hebron preached a sermon in Newport entitled “The Salvation of Israel.” This was the first rabbinic oration published in North America, and suitable to the holiday of Shavuot, it related heavily to halakha and to national redemption. Within it, Karigal stated that “if any person should be seized with evil thoughts or temptations, it would be their wisdom to apply directly to the meditation of the law, which has the power of separating from him all those malignities” (16). He went on to state: “Let us have a firm belief in the innumerable prophecies that predict our restoration” (17). For Karigal, halakhic transgression, which was troublesome to normative Judaism, was fundamentally tied to exile, while adherence to the law was tied to both personal and national deliverance. This is no light matter coming from an emissary from the Holy Land who, as I will show in my paper, was already setting up a divide between restoration in the Land of Israel and Judaic transgression in the exilic New World.

Laura Leibman has convincingly argued that Karigal’s sermon was responding to the Catholicism known to the converso families that in large part formed the Jewish community of Newport, and to the Maskilim who were beginning to shape Jewish modernity (Leibman, “Sephardic Itinerant Preaching,” 87). My paper will argue that added to this mix should be what Thomas S. Kidd has called “The Protestant Interest,” which was the immediate descendent of Puritanism and which saw its goal as the spread of Protestantism to the world. This was indeed the dominant religious culture in which Newport Jewry found itself, and it was the culture of the Newport Congregationalist minister Ezra Stiles, who was Karigal’s main interlocutor and whose personal papers contain the only known manuscript copy of Karigal’s sermon. I will argue that Karigal’s exhortation to Jewish law as related to national redemption is partly a response to the Protestant interest, its promotion of Jewish conversion, and its recasting of redemption history as leading through the new Promised Land of America.

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