Milton and the Rabbis: Hebraism, Hellenism, and Christianity. (Reviews).

Jeffrey S. Shoulson, Milton and the Rabbis: Hebraism, Hellenism, and Christianity

New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. xii + 340 pp. $22.50. ISBN: 0-231-12329-9.

It is tempting, though not quite accurate, to say that Milton and the Rabbis is Jeffrey Shoulson's experiment in writing midrash on Milton. It is inaccurate because, to the extent midrash is concerned not just with finding the right meaning of a text but also with action in the world, Shoulson's interpretive approach to Milton is too historical and not sufficiently ethical to qualify as midrash in itself. But Shoulson's rhetorical style evinces the same balancing of microscopic close-reading of texts with interpretive free-play that informs the work of ancient rabbinic writing.

In terms of content and methodology, Shoulson's study explores the general idea that, because Milton and the ancient rabbis write from related perspectives, a modern reader can learn something about both by putting their work in dialogue. And the perspective Shoulson is talking about is a shared experience of loss, an experience with both political and spiritual dimensions. Thus, to take an example from his final chapter, in his discussion of Miltonic and rabbinic attempts to articulate the possibility of continued political agency under the shadow of defeat, he argues that "both midrash and Paradise Lost serve as consolations, responses to tragic circumstances, mirrored textually in moments that defy direct signification" (236). This paralleling of situation informs each chapter, and the study as a whole reads as a series of meditations not on how Milton read the rabbis but on how a modern reader might construct a conversation between them.

By any standard, Shoulson's work is impressively learned, rich in implication, and attentive to the subtleties of what we might call the poetics of theological speculation, a poetics that, in the context of either post-Temple Judaism or post-Civil War England, has a decidedly political edge as well. For the rabbis, the problem is with how not only to simultaneously accommodate and resist Greco-Roman domination but also to cope with the ascendancy of Judaism's own offspring, Christianity. In discussing Genesis Rabbah in chapter one, for example, Shoulson shows how the text is situated "at a crucial moment of transition, from a Judaism accustomed to dealing with a radically other pagan Rome to a Judaism having to face an increasingly and disturbingly familiar Christian Rome. The redactors inherited a tradition that had taken to acknowledging Others and Difference in ways no longer fully adequate to the complex sameness and difference" of the new Christian Empire (17). At their very best -- and the study is, in many ways, better on the rabbis than on Milton -- Shoulson's readings document the complex rhetorical strategies necessary to negotiate such strained circumstances.

Shoulson's discussions about Milton are perhaps less convincing because he is constrained by his own argument. While he is interested in exploring what it means "to characterize ... Milton as a Hebraic poet" (4-5), he is not arguing that Milton himself is directly responding to the rabbis' own theological-poetic vision. There seems to be a certain embarrassment in the study over this latter issue: even as Shoulson notes at one stage (and this problem shows up time and again) that it is "impossible to determine" whether a particular idea formulated by Milton "comes directly or [even] indirectly from the rabbis" (162), he is constantly hedging this lack of connection by arguing by analogy; thus, he remarks variously that he wants to "prob[e] the limits of the relationship between Milton and his Jewish antecedents" (5), that he wants to read "rabbinic statements[s] ... in tandem" (162) with ones by Milton, or that the fact that we might get "parallel" accounts in Miltonic and rabbinic texts is itself "noteworthy " (176). It is not unreasonable to argue that Milton is himself writing midrash -- that he is, paradoxically, a Christian rabbi -- and it might have eased some of the strain in the presentation had Shoulson simply acknowledged that. What Shoulson offers by way of compensation, though, are frequent glimpses at Milton's own ambivalence concerning Jewish priority in religious-historical matters (or maybe the phrase Christian belatedness would be more appropriate). And, in fact, part of what is so fascinating about Shoulson's work is that he shows Milton trying to negotiate at once the experience of political defeat, the still unsettled terrain of post-Reformation Christianity, and the non-Christian origins of Christianity. Although at times the argument of Milton and the Rabbis gets needlessly complicated, overall we should applaud Shoulson for taking on such an ambitious and certainly worthwhile project.