In the introduction to his excellent study of John Selden's role in the mediation of rabbinical thought, Jason P. Rosenblatt likens the seventeenth-century polymath to the mythic body of Osiris as John Milton conceived it in Areopagitica. For Rosenblatt, this image is useful because it underscores the piecemeal, tentative fashion in which the readers of Selden must reassemble his scholarship. Less clearly argued yet nonetheless crucial for the book is Milton's assumption that at some higher level elusive to readers in the fallen world, truth always exists as a homogeneous body, whole and entire. Over the course of the book, and despite the author's protests to the contrary, Rosenblatt makes a case for the nature of this integrity. In dealing with the pieces, his book is wholly successful; in asserting an integrated whole, it is often compelling, but not entirely convincing.

First the pieces. As Rosenblatt clarifies early on, the chief subject of his book is not so much Selden per se as his extraordinary mediation of—and cultural influence on—the reception of rabbinical wisdom in seventeenth-century England and even beyond that time and place. The processes of transmission involve some major triumphs on Selden's part with regard to religious toleration in general but also with particular concern for the recovery of rabbinical and Pharisaical legacies from their widespread and deeply entrenched vilification. But, Rosenblatt argues, cultural transmission and mediation are also fragile and complicated processes, resulting sometimes in misprision and an ironic ambiguity typical of many Christian Hebraists. In chapter 1, which moves forward from Henry VIII's appropriation of incest laws, Selden appears belatedly after an exploration of marital and gender issues as they are dramatized in Shakespeare's Hamlet and Jonson's Epicoene. Selden figures more centrally in a second chapter on gender, which focuses on his learned exchange with Ben Jonson about cross-dressing. In chapter 3, Selden's influence on Milton takes center stage and remains a key motif throughout the remainder of the book: Rosenblatt traces that uneven influence—uneven because of Milton's own vacillation between monism and Pauline dualism—through instances of angelic naming in Paradise Lost and by means of an anti-typological reading of Samson Agonistes that takes seriously that hero's fervent commitment to the Torah. Further chapters range widely through Selden's posthumous and unacknowledged role in the polemical battle between Andrew Marvell and Samuel Parker, to his major role in the recuperation of the Noachide precepts as the basis for a natural law articulated as a divine positive law of obligation for all humankind. Others explore the effects of Selden's De Jure Naturali et Gentium juxta Disciplinam Ebraeorum on the problem of religious toleration, a discussion that sheds new light on seventeenth-century intellectuals such as Nathaniel Culverwell and Henry Stubbe. Having reverted to marriage themes in a chapter on a legal decision rendered by Sir John Vaughan, the book studies the major midcentury problems of jurisdiction and excommunication as they are mediated in Selden's unfinished study of the Sanhedrin. Finally, a conclusion offers a few of the many possible examples of Selden's rabbinical influence, including Giambattista Vico, Edward Stillingfleet, Milton again, and the deist John Toland.

In every chapter, Rosenblatt combines a profound knowledge of seventeenth-century England, a critical sensitivity to poetry, drama, and prose, and extensive linguistic training as he delivers one insight after another about the transmission of rabbinical wisdom by the chief means of Selden's scholarship. Especially worthwhile are the discussions of zeal, the rabbinical mitigation of scriptural rigor, competing notions of right reason and natural law, the Pharisees, the legacy of Maimonides, the Hebraic scholarship of Selden's contemporary John Lightfoot, and the inconsistencies of Christian Hebraism. The book features far too many fertile interpretive patches (the explanation of Selden's reading of Job 31, for instance) to enumerate here.

Throughout the essays, however, Rosenblatt makes a series of cases pertinent to our understanding of the whole, integral Selden that comes across at times as unintentionally inconsistent and question-begging. One major clue to the problem is that despite the book's claim to be a study of Selden's rabbinical thought, its pervasive star is clearly the De Jure, the treatise on natural law (supporting roles are played by Selden's relatively early work on idolatry and by his treatise on marriage laws). Rosenblatt has very little to say about Selden's major scholarship on Judaic priesthood, inheritance laws, or calendrical concerns, and the chapter focusing on Selden's massive scholarship on the Sanhedrin proves among the book's most disappointing and is surprisingly truncated. The overwhelming favor paid to De Jure assists Rosenblatt in making the often-compelling case that the essence of Selden's book and that requires considerable mediation in terms of the other qualities and in terms of the often-repeated argument that the less sympathetic Christian Hebraists are characterized by some brand of irony.

But Rosenblatt's essential Selden is far less convincing on two scores, first when he claims that Selden purveys a postmodern penchant for fluidity, hybridity, and indeterminacy. I am convinced that early modern versions of such qualities are of importance to Selden—one sees similar qualities in his interest in transmigration—but their postmodernization does not help us understand them, nor does the occasional use of the epithet “liberal” (168). Second, although Rosenblatt allows that Selden is deeply committed to theistic and providential notions of natural law, civil law, and epistemology, he cannot wean himself from the old canard that Selden is essentially a secularist. This assumption can be introduced very sloppily, as it is at the outset of the disappointing chapter on the Sanhedrin, where ecclesiastical jurisdiction is neither explained with clarity nor fully distinguished from the category of the “religious.” On 244, Rosenblatt presupposes for the moment that “ecclesiastical” or “clerical” and “religious” or “sacred” are somehow coterminous, and that opposition to the former entails opposition to the latter. “Erastianism” is always a problem in this book: Selden is often, and rightly, associated with this category, but what this association means (e.g., with regard to Selden's impact on midcentury Independency, fleetingly discussed on 182) is left unexplored. Rosenblatt does better when he raises the question of jurisdiction as a major problem in Selden's work (see the eloquent passage at the bottom of 222), but he never works out the problem with the care that it deserves and his notion of Selden's sometime secular essence stands out as odd in a book that clarifies the strikingly theistic (the “overtly religious” [211]) basis of Selden's arguments for toleration and for law, whether in Noachide precepts or English common law. Despite the dynamism of the stories of transmission, the essential Selden sometimes seems awfully static, anachronistic, and vague.

Aside from these argumentative problems, there are a very few editorial mistakes: for instance, a passage on 8 is repeated verbatim on 49, and a gaffe with dating on 75 (1663 does not fall within the “thirty-five years following the publication of Paradise Lost”). At times, the essayistic character of the chapters can have a desultory feel. On the whole, however, this is one of the most significant, learned, and inventive studies of Selden ever published, written in a style that is vivid, engaging, and even moving.