The Truth About Pilgrims and Maccabees

By Deanna Mirsky

Did the Pilgrims celebrate Hanukkah? No. Did they know about it, and the Maccabees? Certainly.

THEY STUDIED ALL THE TIME

This gathering of families later called Pilgrims studied, sang psalms, celebrated thanksgivings and endured fasts. The community answered only to its “gathered” members (and reluctantly to its funders).

Plymouth’s literacy was phenomenal: estate inventories from the period before 1660 show that 60-80 percent of households left books. So many books that we don’t begin to have a complete list, because they were often counted as “other small books.”

The Pilgrims were tremendous Bible readers. Their usual text was the Geneva Bible, produced by English Protestant exiles. King James knew that Geneva’s marginal notes and translation choices were full of references to wicked kings and tyrants. Most of the King James translation matches Geneva, but carefully toned down.

The Hanukkah texts aren’t biblical, but Maccabees and Judith were often printed between the “Old” and “New” Testaments, and at least one Geneva Bible at Plymouth included them. Josephus and its fabulous 10th-century derivative, Josippon, were full of heroic material about Judas Maccabeus, available in English and Latin, and were wildly popular among Christians and Jews. Because psalms replaced fixed prayers at Plymouth, our colonists would have known the Hallel psalms sung at Hanukkah well.

THEY LOVED HEBREW

Amazingly, at least two colonists knew Hebrew: Governor William Bradford and Plymouth elder (and teacher) William Brewster, who had run a printing press that published Puritan books and tracts for reshipment to England.

The separatists were in Holland between 1608 and 1620; a year in Amsterdam, then in Leiden, at just the time a Jewish community was forming in Holland. (It is tempting to imagine contacts and to think that Bradford and Brewster learned at the feet of Jews.)

Bradford may have studied Hebrew at Cambridge, and Brewster certainly did. Bradford resumed his study of Hebrew in Plymouth, and his Hebrew exercises and dictionary are bound together with the Of Plimouth Plantation manuscript. More Hebrew is found in the manuscript of another work, his Third Dialogue.

There were many accomplished Christian Hebraists by the 16th century. Printing had enabled cheap production of Bibles and religious works, and made Hebrew texts increasingly available. Hebrew was sacred for Protestants, who saw themselves as the “new Israel.” Followers of John Calvin made ceaseless efforts to create faithful translations and to understand and recreate early Jewish life. Hebrew was a required subject for ministers in (officially) Jew-free England.

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