Jenna Weissman Joselit, who teaches at George Washington University, is well known for her work on the material culture of the American-Jewish community. She offers in this brief, perceptive, and highly readable study of a series of sketches illuminating how the Ten Commandments in their material form have periodically emerged in American culture as icons of national identity as well as complex expressions of American Jewish self-understanding.
Joselit begins with a brief and somewhat wry account of the discovery of allegedly ancient plates by one David Wyrick, a gentleman of somewhat unstable temperament who had been excavating some Indian mounds in Newark, Ohio, in 1860. This eccentric endeavor briefly created a national sensation before becoming eclipsed by rather more ominous events. Although ultimately a trivial occurrence, Wyrick's fifteen minutes of fame does provide an amusing introduction to a more durable American fascination with what has frequently been claimed as a foundational document not only for Israel of old but also the new American nation (God's New Israel).
Two more dramatic and enduring visual and material representations of the two tablets were the work of the same hand, namely, the movie director Cecil B. DeMille in 1923 and then again in 1956, each time to enormous popular acclaim and considerable critical irritation. The first version was produced on a vast scale in the sand dunes of California, employing considerable numbers of recent Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe as extras on the theory that Jews of DeMille's day must not have changed very much from their very remote ancestors. The 1956 remake, by the same director, now carried an implicit Cold War message of equality and deliverance. Despite the myriad of problems with DeMille's epic renderings of the Exodus story, American Jews in particular were enthusiastic fans, welcoming their depiction as foundational actors in the American story. Although film critics now largely regard DeMille's work as kitsch, the second version of The Ten Commandments continues to be televised every spring during the season of Easter and Passover.
While DeMille's films were experienced by American audiences—Jewish, Christian, African American—as unifying, positive phenomena, the rage to erect public stone representations of the tablets led by the Fraternal Order of Eagles in the 1950s was considerably more controversial, culminating in a series of court cases brought by the ACLU and others with mixed results. The Eagles’ campaign soon sputtered out as such monuments were widely neglected and ignored, only to be taken up again later by the infamous Alabama jurist Roy Moore, who was twice deposed from his post as state Supreme Court justice for defying U.S. Supreme Court orders to remove the giant version of the tablets he had had erected at the Alabama court headquarters. Moore's stunts did, however, prove extremely popular among the religious right, though not enough to ensure his election as US Senator in 2017.
Joselit also devotes considerable attention to two Jewish houses of worship for which the material representation of the tablets became significant. In the 1850s, the New York congregation Anshi Chesed installed a round stained-glass window with the Commandments painted upon them. A prolonged dispute among the congregants resulted in a compromise, with the newfangled circular decalogue in glass remaining while augmented by a more traditionally linear marble version.
Another innovation in representing the Commandments was acted out at Congregation Shearith Israel in San Francisco in 1905. Not controversy but acclaim greeted its new window, which depicted, in effect, Moses's bringing of the Commandments to California. El Capitan, however, rather than Mount Sinai, loomed in the background, and the vegetation that surrounded the Israelites was considerably more reminiscent of Pacific rather than Mediterranean shores. The banners of the twelve tribes were red, white, and blue in color. The United States was the new Promised Land, and the Jewish people of San Francisco were very much at ease in their new Zion.
Joselit keeps her essays focused on particular topics and avoids getting into much explicit dialogue with the vast literature on the Bible in American culture, church and state law, New World revelation, material culture, and a myriad of other topics on which her discourse impinges. The endnotes are confined almost entirely to her copious and far-ranging primary sources. If only obliquely, though, this work stands in the tradition of the Miller-Heimert-Berkovitch lineage of attempts to place the development of American society within the context of the Puritan endeavor to create new biblical commonwealths informed not only by Decalogue-based law but understood as a latter-day recapitulation of Israel of old. “If you are wondering what became of the Ten Commandments . . .” Joselit concludes in her introduction, “They landed in America.” (8)
