England’s Protestant Talmudist

The 17th Century Rabbinic Life of John Selden

John Selden, a lawyer, politician and scholar was said to be the most learned person in 17th century England. A Christian, he was the country’s outstanding Hebrew scholar, the author of several books of rabbinic scholarship. Selden was one of a small group of Christian Hebraists, largely forgotten today, who became experts in the study of ancient and medieval Jewish texts.

In his mid-thirties Selden caused a rumpus in the English church by proving that priests did not have a divine right to receive tithes from their parishioners. It had been a burning political issue for some years. Using rabbinic commentaries, Selden showed that there was no connection between the Torah’s requirement that Israelites had to give tithes to their priests and the voluntary system of tithing which existed in the church. His argument threatened to deprive the clergy of a considerable proportion of their income and he was summoned to appear before King James I to explain himself. He managed to deflect the king’s wrath by engaging him in scholarly talk but James eventually ordered him to appear before the Privy Council to apologise for the book.

In 1617 John Selden published De Diis Syris, a study of Canaanite gods and idols, based on ancient and medieval rabbinic commentaries. The book played a part in a controversy then raging over male actors who dressed as women to perform female roles. Preachers raged against the actors from the pulpit accusing them of spurning the biblical prohibition against cross dressing, protests took place in the streets, anti-theatrical polemics were published. The outcry became so great that in 1642 Parliament closed the theatres.

During the controversy Selden’s friend, the actor Ben Johnson, wrote to him asking for his scholarly opinion on the issue. Selden replied by quoting Maimonides who had argued that the Hebrew word that the church translated as clothes can also mean weapons and that the original biblical prohibition was against women putting on armour and going to war. Drawing on his study of Canaanite gods Selden explained that the purpose of the commandment was to prevent the ancient idolatrous rites in which men worshipped Venus by dressing in women’s clothes and men worshipped Mars by donning weapons. Cross-dressing in the theatre, he maintained, was therefore permitted because the biblical prohibition only applied to idolatry, not to art or daily life.

Selden also used his rabbinic scholarship to take up a position on Henry VIII’s divorce of Catherine of Aragon. Henry was long dead by this time, but the debate was still current because it touched on the question of whether or not divorce should be permitted in the Protestant English church.

Selden’s formed his view on the controversy as a result of his correspondence with the Venetian rabbi Leon Modena. Modena had told him that it was not unheard of for Jews in Europe to take a second wife if the first was unable to have children. Since Catherine had not given Henry a male heir, if he had been Jewish he would have been entitled, said Modena, to a simultaneous second marriage with Anne Boleyn.

Selden didn’t like this answer. It wasn’t robust enough for him. So he turned to the medieval Jewish commentaries on the book of Job, to show that the practice of taking a second wife was frowned upon and that divorce was a more acceptable and preferable option.  Had Selden been born when Henry was trying to divorce Catherine of Aragon, he would have come down firmly on the King’s side.

John Selden’s attitude to Jewish law was very different from other Christian Hebrew scholars of his age. Many Christian Hebraists were hostile to the Jews; they studied Judaism to condemn it, pointing out what they believed were its errors.  They blamed the rabbis and the Talmud for distorting the meaning of the Hebrew Bible with the severity of their laws. Selden did not agree. He appreciated the binding force of Talmudic law, understanding that part of its role was to introduce restrictions to minimise zealotry and fundamentalism. He took the Bible penalty of capital punishment as an example. Talmudic law, he said, was a safeguard against tyrannical abuse because the perpetrator could not be executed if he had not been warned of the consequences of his action beforehand. Nor could he be executed if there were not at least two witnesses to the crime or if the matter had not been tried by a competent court. Like the ancient rabbis Selden recognised that biblical law by itself was only a  statement of principles that needed to be refined before being put into practice.

One of the great issues in the 17th century was that of religious toleration. We take our multicultural societies for granted but in those days the question of how societies should respond to dissent or to minority religions was a hot topic. Selden used the rabbinic concept of the Noachide laws- the seven basic laws of humanity that were given to Noah- to argue for a ‘natural’ religion in which it was up to the individual to decide what they believed. He regarded the Sanhedrin, the ancient Jewish court in Temple times, as the divinely ordained model of how a judicial system should operate: the Sanhedrin had authority over social and ethical behaviour but had they had no right to rule on matters of personal belief. Living, as he did, in a period of extreme religious intolerance with the Puritans under Cromwell about to take over the country, Selden’s advocacy of the Sanhedrin model, of freedom of belief, was a dangerous and controversial move.

Selden was elected to Parliament in 1624, during the period leading up to the Civil War between the Parliamentarians and the Royalists. He allied himself with the Parliamentarians and in 1629 found himself hauled before the Privy Council and thrown into the Tower of London.

Incarcerated in the Tower, Selden wrote a letter to his friend, the antiquarian scholar Sir Robert Cotton. The letter would change the course of his life and further deepen his scholarship. Selden, whose enforced idleness left him, in his words, with ‘much time here before me’, asked Robert Cotton to borrow the copy of the Talmud that was in the Westminster Abbey Library and send it to him. The Westminster Abbey Library Talmud was one of only three copies in England; it may have been the one which Henry VIII had brought over from Venice when he was trying to find a rationale for his divorce.

Over the next five years Selden was released and imprisoned several times. Among the many things he did with his imposed leisure was to study the Talmud. Unlike the Christian Hebraists on the Continent he almost certainly had no tutor, there were no learned Jews in England that he could consult, there were hardly any Jews in England at all. But his depth of learning was such that for the rest of his life he studied the edition of the Talmud that Cotton had obtained from Westminster Abbey. And he didn’t just study it. He wrote six works of profound Talmudic scholarship, covering topics as diverse as natural law, divorce, inheritance, the calendar, the Karaites and as his final work, a two-thousand-page study of Jewish jurisprudence.

Selden’s Talmudic writings influenced a generation of British political thinkers. Jason Rosenblatt, in his masterly study, Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi, demonstrated how Selden’s works inspired Isaac Newton, John Milton, Ben Jonson and Hobbes among others. His books, all of which draw liberally on Talmudic and rabbinic sources include The History of Tithes; Jewish Marriage Law, Jewish Laws of Inheritance, the Jewish Calendar, the Noachide Laws and three volumes on the Sanhedrin. The German Hebraist Johann Stephanus Rittangel, knowing full well that Selden was not a Jew, nevertheless addressed his letters to Rabbi Selden of London.

Rosenblatt laments the obscurity into which Selden’s Talmudic works subsequently fell. Jews have had many great and distinguished scholars during their long history. But we’ve never come across anyone quite like John Selden. He deserves to be better known.