On Fri, 11 Mar 2005, Max B. Sawicky wrote:
> There is no such thing as Judeo-Christian ideology. That would be like
> Cat-Mouse Ideology.
and John Lacny added:
> It's definitely a category of recent vintage.
Sorry guys, but this is definatively not true. There is a judeo-Christian ideology -- it's called the Reformation. And it was especially pronounced in Puritanism, where being able to read Hebrew was considered more important than being able to read Greek. Do you know there were several serious proposals to make Hebrew the official language of America (because English is a pagan tongue)? And the kind of millenarianism that unites fundamentalists with right wing Jews today is nothing compared to what you found in the mid-17th century, which was one of America's formative moments. Sabbatai Sevi was covered as news for the entire year of 1665 by Northern European papers and Increase Mather, among others, was positive he was the messiah.
If you'd like to read more about the deep connections between Protestanism and Judaism, there was an absolutely brilliant exhibition mounted at the New York Public Library in the Fall of 2004 called "Jewes in America." It was a display of rare documents going back to Columbus's first voyage that in themselves were a complete bore. (The writing was dull even when they were in a language you could read, and the room had to be kept so dark you could hardly read them.) But the accompanying notes that explained them were dazzling. They distilled all the latest edge scholarship little two paragraph narratives, all of them cross referential, and detailing astonishing bits of lost history. It's like reading a cross between _Pale Fire_ and the Thurn and Taxis sections of _The Crying of Lot 49_. Except that it's all true.
Anyway, I scanned it into a 4MB Adobe file for a friend and would be glad to send it to anyone who's interested. Because it's broken up into 98 short numbered bits, it makes great subway and bathroom reading. It's truly deep and weird.
Michael