AS THE HISTORIAN Sacvan Bercovitch famously argued, the Puritans spun the fantasy of chosenness they drew from their fascination with the ancient Jews into the “exceptionalism” that would come to occupy the center of American ideology. “As Israel redivivus,” Bercovitch writes in his 1978 study The American Jeremiad, New Englanders “could claim all the ancient prerogatives” of the biblical Jews, including a divinely authorized state. For these settlers, Bercovitch explained, the wilds of New England took on “the double significance of secular and sacred place.” In other words, the forests of Massachusetts had as central a role to play in God’s unfolding plan as the deserts of Sinai.
Among the 17th-century North American Puritans, only the renegade minister Roger Williams rejected this Judaizing vision. He believed that the divinely authorized state of the ancient Jews had become, after Christ, an illegitimate aspiration—a conviction that made him one of the earliest theorists of the separation of church and state. For Williams, the wilderness through which Moses led the Jews was, for Christians, a kind of supercharged holy metaphor for the path toward grace. No real forest or desert was required. Williams was also a skeptic of what Bercovitch called the “genetics of salvation,” the notion that God’s favor could be inherited. After all, the New Englanders could trace their descent to many peoples: “the Britons, Picts, Romans, Saxons, Danes, and Normans,” as he wrote in one of his polemical tracts. In other words, if they were chosen, their chosenness could not be, as it was for the ancient Jews, a question of bloodline. Williams, as Bercovitch’s predecessor Perry Miller put it, “would be a Christian, but not a Christianized Jew.” He was accordingly exiled to Rhode Island.
Freud was preoccupied with the Puritans—not least because he saw something of his own intense ambivalence toward Jewishness in theirs. He admired Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan Lord Protector of England, so much that he named one of his sons after him. “The affinity for militant puritanism, not uncommon among secular Jewish intellectuals, indicates a certain preferred character type, starched with independence and cerebral rectitude rather than with a particular belief or doctrine,” writes Philip Rieff (or is it Susan Sontag?) of Freud’s feeling for Cromwell. In Rieff’s view, Puritanism and Jewish intellectualism converge on the grounds of iconoclasm, the hard-minded rejection of all false images of truth and authority.