Professor George Bush, Early American Hebraist
President George Bush is making his first trip to Israel as president and his first ever to Palestinian-controlled land as he attempts to effect change in the Arab-Israeli conflict. He has vowed to work hard as peacemaker, promising additional trips to the area in an all out effort to conclude an accord between the two sides before his second term as president ends. Although declaring publicly that the Palestinians are entitled to a state of their own, critics suggest that his policies skew too much toward Israel. Most Israelis trust him as a caring friend. Some say that his Mideast efforts have come too late and it is an attempt to effect a more favorable legacy as he leaves the presidency. Can his late charge actually play any role toward this legacy or, has his legacy caught up with him?
Webster’s Dictionary defines legacy thusly: “Something transmitted by or received from an ancestor or predecessor or from the past”. Let’s explore.
The son of an old colonial family, George Bush was born in Norwich, Vermont, in 1796. At age eighteen he enroled in nearby Dartmouth College. He had gained, in his high school years, considerable proficiency in Greek and Latin, and having then read widely in the classics. At Dartmouth, Bush found in the study of religion a focus for his intellectual energies. Upon graduation he entered the Princeton Theological Seminary, where he was ordained to the Presbyterian ministry and later became a tutor. He had received a thorough grounding in the study of the Bible in it’s original languages and early translations. In addition to Hebrew, he mastered Aramaic and Syriac. He would later use his knowledge of these languages to produce a multivolume Notes on the Old Testament, published in the 1840s.
In 1824 Bush was ordained and installed as pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis, Indiana. In his new post his independent and inquiring spirit asserted itself. He was soon making statements from the pulpit to the effect that there was no scriptural authority for the Presbyterian form of church government. The ensuing controversy led to Bush’s removal from the pulpit. This was not the only time he would become embroiled in religious and academic controversy.
For some time Bush had been interested in Islam, a subject then little known in the United States. In 1830 he published The Life of Mohammed, which was issued in the popular Harper Family Library series. It was the first American book about Islam. Islam was presented as an “invention” by a former merchant “constitutionally addicted to religious contemplation.” Bush offered various explanations for Mohammed’s motives in “palming a new religion upon the world.” All in all, The Life of Mohammed was an anti-Islamic polemic typical of its time.
In 1831 the board of New York University invited George Bush to become its professor of Hebrew and oriental literature. NYU was a secular institution with no denominational ties. Bush accepted the position and remained at NYU for fourteen years (1832-46).
In 1833 Bush wrote A Treatise on the Millennium, in which he questioned the notion, then popular in some Protestant circles, that the second coming was imminent. This would later place Bush in direct opposition to William Miller, leader of the Aventists. As Bush saw it, there was no scriptural basis for Adventist belief. It was in his opinion, “one of the most baseless of all the extravaganzas of prophetic hallucination.”
The year 1835 saw the publication of Bush’s A Grammar of the Hebrew Language. More than a century before, Judah Monis, a Jew of Marrano extraction, whose story I covered in a lecture entitled “Our Hebrew American Heritage”, had chosen to convert to Christianity in order to receive an appointment as instructor of Hebrew at Harvard College.
In 1844 George Bush was at it again. He produced Valley of Vision; or,The Dry Bones of Israel Revived: An Attempted Proof of the Restoration and Conversion of the Jews. He argued against a spiritual interpretation of the prophecies concerning “the end of days” and advocated instead “the literal return of the Jews to the land of their fathers.” In the tradition of the European humanist scholars however, Bush did not have much regard for the Jews as a people. He believed that they would be restored to life and land and would accept Christianity in the end.
The realism of Bush’s call for the return of the Jews was underscored by the inclusion in the book of a map of Palestine with areas marked for the settlement of the returning tribes. This geographic realism exemplifies a shift from the Puritan concept of American Zion to an advocacy of American support for the renewal of the Biblical Zion. The advocacy is scripturally based, but not apocalyptic in nature. The Adventist/Millerite claims are rebutted, but the support for a renewed Zion remains.
While formulating his view of the coming redemption and of the place of the Jews in it, Bush was deeply influenced by the Swedish scientist and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), a man whose all-encompassing mystical system exerted enormous influence in European esoteric circles. By the mid-1840s Bush had become a full-fledged Swedenborgian, a convert to the Church of the New Jerusalem. Because of his increased involvement with the Swedenborgian church, Bush abandoned his university post and stopped writing and publishing scholarly works.
George Bush (1796-1859), though now well-nigh forgotten, was once considered one of the most profound and ingenious scholars of the mid-nineteenth century, and his more than thirty volumes of polemic, biblical commentary, and interpretive history of religion enjoyed great popularity. His views on the Hebrew language, the Jews, and his statements about the possibility of a restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land is noteworthy. His life and work have to be taken into account in any evaluation of the early study of Hebrew and Judaism in America.
One wonders today whether Bush would have been surprised by the realization of the dream of the Return to Zion, then advocated only by a small group of “Christian Zionists”? Could he have imagined that two of his relatives would someday become presidents of the United States?
Nineteenth-century scholar George Bush saw history through a biblical lens. Today, as the younger President Bush formulates his own Middle East policies and contemplates his own place in history, the writings of his ancestor may hold renewed relevance and an answer to a legacy.
Ralph Buntyn