Most people hardly ever think about Jews. This phenomenon is even more prevalent in places where Jews are not to be found or where their presence is scarcely noticed. Jews were not permitted to live in England from 1290 to 1656 (although some came in under the guise of Spanish or Portuguese merchants), so when they appeared it was usually in written form, in works both religious and literary. Even after their informal readmission during the regime of Oliver Cromwell, Jews tried to keep a very low profile, a strategy that survived their “emancipation” in 1858 (the right to be elected to Parliament without having to swear a Christian oath). Some might argue that unobtrusiveness is still the defining quality of Anglo-Jewish life today.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the history of Anglo-Jewry has been a relative backwater in the burgeoning stream of Jewish studies. As the border between cultural history and the history of literature has been thrown open in recent years, much of the interesting work in intellectual history has come from scholars with a background in literature. Achsah Guibbory is a professor of English at Barnard, and she brings to the field refreshing insight into a well-trodden topic.

The question she seeks to answer is, “how and why did early modern English people think about themselves in relation to Jews, Judaism, and biblical Israel?” (vi). Guibbory gives her answer already in the opening sentence of the introduction: “This book is about the complexity and fluidity of Christian identity.” She continues: “English Christians understood contemporary experience and defined their religious identities in relation to biblical Israel, Jewish history, and Judaism” (1). Clearly, here she is following the red herring of her Columbia colleague in literature, James Shapiro, who unconvincingly argued in Shakespeare and the Jews (1996) that English people saw the Jews as the “Other” against which English Christian identity was defined and which threatened its stability. While Guibbory is often critical of this claim, she never frees herself completely, so that it tends to reappear in the text as a way of covering all bets.

That being said, the true strength of this book is the way Guibbory looks at the way in which Judaism, Jews, and Jewish biblical history were put to work in imagining the English nation and its institutions from the time of Queen Elizabeth to the Restoration of Charles II. The Bible was not merely a history of the Jews but a narrative of God’s work in the world, a blueprint for humankind’s proper behavior. As time went on, English people began to see themselves as the inheritors of God’s promises to the Jews and their own nation as the truly blessed and chosen Protestant update of ancient Israel. History was repeating itself in a cold climate.

Blinded as we were by historical fashions in the 1970s, historians tended to concentrate on radical religion when talking about the political uses to which the Bible was put in seventeenth-century England. Perhaps the most innovative part of this compelling book is the emphasis Guibbory places on the churchmen she calls the “Anglicans” (in her inverted commas), those who favored a single, united, national church. For them, the Church of England was the Protestant equivalent of the Temple of the Israelites and provided an imagined historical continuity in response to Roman Catholic sneers that theirs was a newfangled made-up religion. Presbyterians also wanted a visible, earthly institution and compared their work of reforming the English Church to that of the Jews in building the Second Temple.

Guibbory is very good about reminding us that although the Royalists liked a good time, they were not godless. They also adopted Israelite history as their own but emphasized the bits about defeat, exile, and ultimate restoration. Their preferred text was the Book of Psalms, which the Royalists (like the Jews) sang in a proliferation of musical versions since their “Temple” had been destroyed. For them, the Hebrew Bible and the history of the Jews helped to understand the purpose of their troubles and to find consolation in defeat.

Although much has been done in this area before, Guibbory devotes three chapters to the radical Puritans and to the question of Jewish readmission. Many of our old friends are there—John Lilburne and the Levellers, Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers, John Rogers and the Fifth Monarchists, Margaret Fell and the Quakers, Abiezer Coppe and the Ranters—a sort of Top of the Pops lineup of mid-seventeenth-century English religious radicalism. Some famous soloists appear as well: Thomas “Theaurajohn” Tany, Anna Trapnel, Mary Cary, Arise Evans, and even Sabbatai Sevi. These people were unsympathetic to the idea that Israel’s promises could be extended to a nation-state and its institutions, preferring to locate “Israel” in individuals, although they did look to the Bible for usable political models. Guibbory notes that as they narrowed the circumference of their community, these radical groups paradoxically made for an England that would include religious diversity, exactly the opposite vision of both “Anglicans” and Presbyterians.

Another valuable dimension of this book is the learned discussion of a number of literary works overlooked in histories of Anglo-Jewry, not only Milton’s writings but also others such as Herrick’s Hesperides, Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans, Bunyan’s Grace Abounding, and Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis and Absalom and Achitophel. Guibbory suggests in her introduction that her study “sheds light on interfaith relations in later history, now as well as then” (20), and she returns to this theme in the epilogue. One might be exaggerating here about the ability of literary research to change people’s lives. Many seventeenth-century English people connected biblical Jews with living Jews as much as we might see ancient Egyptians as having something to do with Cairo’s Tahrir Square. The Bible was not only a religious text but also simply a common mythology with stories and images known to everyone, detached from a specifically religious context. In any case, Achsah Guibbory has provided a forceful study that demonstrates that writing English history without the Jews deprives the subject of an important aspect that would have been instantly recognized by people who lived there then.