3. 2 Kings 17. Except where otherwise indicated, biblical quotations are from the Jewish Publication Society translation, Tanakh: A New Translation of the Holy Scriptures According to the Traditional Hebrew Text (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985); John Bright, A History of Israel, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1981), 269–76; Hayim Tadmor, “The Period of the First Temple, the Babylonian Exile and the Restoration,” in A History of the Jewish People, ed. H. H. Ben-Sasson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), 133–38; William W. Hallo and William Kelly Simpson, The Ancient Near East: A History (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 131–38. The prophet Hosea’s rendering of God’s castigation of Israel’s sins and threats of terrible punishment became a central homiletic theme in Jacobean England and a main source of the so-called puritan Jeremiad. Michael McGiffert, “God’s Controversy with Jacobean England,” American Historical Review 88 (December 1983): 1151–74.
4. Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 36–37, 73.
5. Numbers 16:12–13.
6. Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 189–90.
7. George B. Cheever, The Guilt of Slavery and the Crime of Slaveholding, Demonstrated from the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1860), 191–95.
8. Exodus 14:12.
9. Daniel Coker, Journal of Daniel Coker (Baltimore: Edward J. Coale, 1820), 15–17, 27, 31; Tom W. Shick, Behold the Promised Land: A History of Afro-American Settler Society in Nineteenth-Century Liberia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 22; Robert A. Hill, ed., The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, vol. 5 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 291. John B. Russwurm, the Bowdoin College graduate who edited Freedom’s Journal and then emigrated to Liberia in 1829, also compared himself to Moses and referred to the Americo-Liberians as Israelites. Penelope Campbell, Maryland in Africa: The Maryland State Colonization Society, 1831–1857 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 172. Although Garvey denied that he had ever called himself a Moses, he referred continually to the biblical Exodus and to Jewish history in general, including the rise of Zionism. When quoting letters of Coker and other historical figures, I have retained the spelling and punctuation of the specified text, without inserting sic.
10. McGiffert, “God’s Controversy with Jacobean England,” 1153, 1157. McGiffert, who sees John Downame’s Lectures upon the Four First Chapters of the Prophecy of Hosea (1608) as a crucial preparatory step toward the revolution of the saints, disputes the distinctions that Sacvan Bercovitch (see note 11, infra) and others have made between the themes of American and European Jeremiads.
11. Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978); Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985); Edwin S. Redkey, Black Exodus: Black Nationalist and Back-to-Africa Movements, 1890–1910 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1969); Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977); Edmund David Cronon, Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969); Hollis R. Lynch, Edward Wilmot Blyden: Pan-Negro Patriot, 1832–1913 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 117, 121. In his two-volume history of religious refugees from antiquity to the 1960s, Frederick A. Norwood pictures Exodus as the paradigmatic event. Strangers and Exiles: A History of Religious Refugees, 2 vols. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1969). But for Christians, the Mosaic Exodus could also prefigure or “typify” a decisive change in an individual’s life; for example, this is the way John Bunyan interpreted the publication of his own Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. Linda H. Peterson, Victorian Autobiography: The Tradition of Self-Interpretation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986), 103.
12. Walzer, Exodus and Revolution, 16–17, 120, 134; Revelation 21:1; 2 Peter 3:13.
13. Walzer, Exodus and Revolution, 77–80, 115, 120–22; Jeremiah 42–44. Egypt fought together with Judah against the Babylonian invasion and even tried to break the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem.
14. Jeremiah 31:31–34; Walzer, Exodus and Revolution, 115–20; Bright, History of Israel, 269–76, 350; Peter R. Ackroyd, Exile and Restoration: A Study of Hebrew Thought of the Sixth Century B.C. (London,: S.C.M. Press, 1968), 17–24.
15. Walzer, Exodus and Revolution, pp. 119–20. It should be stressed that Western perfectionism and utopianism also drew on Classical and Eastern sources.
16. Ibid., 122–25.
17. Abraham Lincoln was a notable exception. In a speech eulogizing Henry Clay and praising the goals of the American Colonization Society, Lincoln warned, “Pharaoh’s country was cursed with plagues, and his hosts were drowned in the Red Sea for striving to retain a captive people who had already served them more than four hundred years. May like disasters never befall us! If as the friends of colonization hope, the present and coming generations of our countrymen shall by any means, succeed in freeing our land from the dangerous presence of slavery; and, at the same time, in restoring a captive people to their long-lost father-land, with bright prospects for the future; and this too, so gradually, that neither races nor individuals shall have suffered by the change, it will indeed be a glorious consummation.” “Eulogy on Henry Clay,” July 6, 1852, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953), pp. 2, 132.
18. Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography, in The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Adrienne Koch and William Peden (New York: Modern Library, 1944), 51; [Jesse Burton Harrison], Review of the Slave Question, Extracted from the “American Quarterly Review,” Dec. 1832; Based on the Speech of Th. Marshall, of Fauquier: Showing that Slavery is the Essential Hindrance to the Prosperity of the Slave-Holding States… (Richmond: T. W. White, 1833), 25. On September 10, 1786, Thomas Barclay had written to Jefferson and John Adams from Tangier, attributing the origin of Moroccan piracy to “the expulsion of the Moors from Spain in the reign of Phillip the 3d. when 700,000 were banish’d from that Country.” Julian P. Boyd, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 10 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), 346–47. J. H. Elliott estimates that after the edict of 1609, approximately 275,000 Moriscos left Spain (out of a Morisco population of some 300,000). Between 120,000 and 150,000 Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492. J. H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469–1716 (London: E. Arnold, 1963), 95–98, 301; Léon Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism, vol. 2, From Mohammed to the Marranos, trans. Natalie Gerardi (New York: Vanguard Press, 1973), 199. About 160,000 Huguenots fled from France between 1680 and 1690. Jon Butler, The Huguenots in America: A Refugee People in New World Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 3. In 1824 Jefferson was privately proposing the deportation of 60,000 blacks a year, “the whole annual increase,” for a period of twenty to twenty-five years. Jefferson to Jared Sparks, Feb. 4, 1824, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul Leicester Ford, 10 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1892–1899), 10: 289–93.
19. Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews in England (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1941), 68–90; Robert C. Stacey, “Royal Taxation and the Social Structure of Medieval Anglo-Jewry: The Tallages of 1239–1242,” Hebrew Union College Annual 56 (1985): 201, 205; Elliott, Imperial Spain, 98, 299–303; Henry Charles Lea, The Moriscos of Spain: Their Conversion and Expulsion (Philadelphia: Lea Bros., 1901), 292–343. Many of the Jewish physicians who did leave Spain acquired great prestige and influence in Turkey. Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, vol. 4 (New York: G. Dobsevage, 1927), 401. From the time of Constantine, Christian efforts to expel Jews or force them to convert were partly mitigated by a recognition of their mercantile, financial, and scientific services.
20. Thomas Jefferson to Jean Nico
las Démeunier, June 26, 1786, in Boyd, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 10, 63.
21. John Boswell, The Royal Treasure: Muslim Communities under the Crown of Aragon in the Fourteenth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977), 293–307; Robert Ignatius Burns, Islam under the Crusaders: Colonial Survival in the Thirteenth-Century Kingdom of Valencia (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), 16, 334, and passim.
22. Lea, Moriscos of Spain, 292–365; Elliott, Imperial Spain, 227–34, 299–303.
23. Graetz, History of the Jews, vol. 4, 334–422; Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, “The Middle Ages,” in History of the Jewish People, 568–71, 583–90, 620–21; Poliakov, History of Anti-Semitism, 2:147–233; E. H. Lindo, The History of the Jews of Spain and Portugal (1848; repr., New York: B. Franklin, 1970, 325–26. During the fourteenth and fifteenth century, Jews were also expelled from France and parts of Germany. In 1496, after Portugal had received a massive influx of Jewish refugees from Spain, King Emanuel I ordered them to leave the country but then enabled most of them to stay by forcing their conversion to Christianity.
24. Poliakov, History of Anti-Semitism, 2:198–99; Norwood, Strangers and Exiles, 2:30–54; Charles M. Weiss, History of the French Protestant Refugees, trans. Henry William Herbert (New York, 1854), vol. 1, passim; Bona Arsenault, History of the Acadians (Québec: Le Conseil de la vie française en Amérique, 1966), 105–242; Lawrence Henry Gipson, The Great War for the Empire: The Years of Defeat, 1754–1757 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960), 243–57; Mary Beth Norton, The British-Americans: The Loyalist Exiles in England, 1774–1789 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), 8–41, 244–47; Ellen Gibson Wilson, The Loyal Blacks (New York: Capricorn Books, 1976).
25. Jane Kamensky, “Limits of Resistance: The Uncertain Legacy of Ernst von Weizäcker and the Final Solution” (unpublished senior history essay, Yale University, 1985); Eugene Havesi, “Hitler’s Plan for Madagascar,” Contemporary Jewish Record 4 (August 1941): 381–94; Karl A. Schlevnes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy toward German Jews, 1933–1939 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970), 184–85; Celia Heller, On the Edge of Destruction: Jews of Poland Between the Two World Wars (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 136–37; Harry M. Rabinowicz, The Legacy of Polish Jewry: A History of Polish Jews in the Inter-War Years, 1919–1939 (New York: Y. Yoseloff, 1965), 191–92; Howard Morley Sachar, The Course of Modern Jewish History (New York: Dell, 1977), 267–79, 355–61, 510–11; Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939–1945, 2d ed. (London: Valentine Mitchell, 1968), 79–82; Gordon A. Craig, “Schreibt un Farschreibt!” New York Review of Books, April 10, 1986; David Vital, Zionism: The Crucial Phase (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1987), 173–74. There had been a long history of Jewish colonization projects. In the mid-nineteenth century, a number of Jewish writers began envisaging a return to the ancestral homeland in Palestine; in the 1890s, as conditions worsened in the Russian Pale of Settlement and as increasing numbers of Eastern European Jews found a refuge in the United States, Baron Maurice de Hirsch’s Jewish Colonization Association advocated a mass migration to Argentina; even Theodor Herzl, the organizer of the First Zionist Congress, accepted as an “emergency measure” Britain’s proposal in 1903 for a Jewish settlement in Uganda, a concession that brought a bitter though temporary division in the Zionist movement. David Vital, The Origins of Zionism (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1975); Vital, Zionism: The Formative Years (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1982).
26. For the deportation of the French Acadians, see John Mack Faragher, A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from Their American Homeland (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005).
27. Lindo, Jews of Spain and Portugal, 248–351; Graetz, History of the Jews, 4:387–88; Lea, Moriscos of Spain, 343–65; Butler, Huguenots in America, passim; Gipson, Great War for the Empire, 289–96.
28. Lea, Moriscos of Spain, 328–31.
29. Poliakov, History of Anti-Semitism 2: 199; Graetz, History of the Jews, 4: 387, 400.
30. Pierre Jurieu, The Last Efforts of Afflicted Innocence (London, 1682), 62–71, 136; Isaac Minet, epigraph to Part I of Butler, Huguenots in America; Jurieu, Lettres pastorales (Rotterdam: Abraham Acher, 1688), 89–91, 120; Jurieu, Monsieur Jurieu’s pastoral letters, Directed to the Protestants in France…(London: Jo. Hindmarsh, 1688), 15 and passim; Jurieu,The Reflections of the Reverend and Learned M. Jurieu upon the Strange and Miraculous Extasies of Isabel Vincent (London: Richard Baldwin, 1689), 38–39; Jurieu, Lettres pastorales, 89–91, 120.
31. American Colonization Society [hereafter ACS], Second Annual Report of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Davis and Force, 1819), 193; P. J. Staudenraus, The African Colonization Movement, 1816–1865 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 17; Shick, Behold the Promised Land, 8–9; Deuteronomy 1:19–45.
32. Deuteronomy 7:1–2, 22–24; 20:16–18; Joshua 6:21. At Sinai, God had already promised to annihilate the Amorites, Hittites, Perizzites, Canaanites, Hivites, and Jebusites (Exodus 23:23–31).
33. William W. Hallo, “Deuteronomy and Ancient Near Eastern Literature,” in The Torah: A Modern Commentary, ed. W. Gunther Plaut (New York: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1981), 1381; Walzer, Exodus and Revolution, 143–44.
34. Historians long assumed that the early “Calvinistic” Afrikaners invoked the Israelite model of a chosen people to legitimate their divine commission, based on Deuteronomy, to “smite” and enslave the black heathen, to flee “Egypt” in the Great Trek, and to establish a Promised Land of white supremacy. André du Toit has carefully traced the origins of this historical interpretation, which appears to be a myth largely created by the missionary David Livingstone but which was then appropriated, in the early twentieth century, by the Afrikaners themselves. André du Toit, “No Chosen People: The Myth of the Calvinistic Origins of Afrikaner Nationalism and Racial Ideology,” American Historical Review 88 (October 1983): 920–52.
35. For some of the historical distinctions drawn between blacks and Indians, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966), 4–5, 10, 167–75, 177–81, 192–94; Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 21–11, 89–91, 162–63, 239–40.
36. I am aware that the eastern Indians who were removed west of the Mississippi were also placed in the role of “colonists” living in regions already inhabited. But even the Cherokees were not expected to civilize and regenerate the entire West. Apart from criticism from opponents of removal that civilized tribes would be surrounded by violent “savages,” little thought seems to have been given to the specific cultural implications of westward removal.
37. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree, vol. 4 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1961), 227–34. Franklin’s prejudiced remarks about German immigrants, blacks, and people of “a swarthy Complexion” were omitted from reprinted editions of the essay in the 1760s but were publicized by his political enemies.
38. There were precedents for such colonization in the European plantations in Palestine, Cyprus, Crete, Sicily, and especially in the Canary Islands, the Cape Verde, Madeira, and São Tomé. See David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 53–63. But Irish and New World colonization was on a larger scale and involved the new objective of obtaining land for sizable European settlements.
39. T. W. Moody, F. X. Martin, and F. J. Byrne, eds., A New History of Ireland, vol. 3, Early Modern Ireland, 1534–1691 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1976), 69–141, 187–232; Karl S. Bottingheimer, Ireland and the Irish: A Short History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 73–140.
40. Thomas More, Utopia, ed. Edward Surtz (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1964), 76, as quoted in Edmund S. Morgan, American
Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975), 23.
41. James Monroe, “First Annual Message, December 2, 1817,” in A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, ed. James D. Richardson, vol. 2 (New York: Bureau of National Literature, ca.1917), 585–86.
42. Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (1939; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954), 475, 477; Alan Heimert, “Puritanism, the Wilderness, and the Frontier,” New England Quarterly 26 (Sept. 1953): 361–69, 376–77, 382; David D. Hall, The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 86–89; Andrew Delbanco, “The Puritan Errand Re-Viewed,” Journal of American Studies 88 (December 1984): 343–60; John Cotton, God’s Promise to His Plantations (London, 1630), reprinted in Old South Leaflets 3, no. 53 (Boston, n.d.): 4–16; 2 Samuel 7:10 (King James Version). English claims to land in North America were not based on biblical precedents but on royal grants and charters. Wilcomb E. Washburn, “The Moral and Legal Justifications for Dispossessing the Indians,” in Seventeenth-Century America: Essays in Colonial History, ed. James Morton Smith (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 16–18. It should be stressed that the parallels drawn between New England and ancient Israel generated increasing anxiety as clerical leaders contemplated the corruptions and punishments of ancient Israel. Robert Middlekauff, The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596–1728 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 22–23, 105–12.
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