How Moses Crossed the Atlantic: John Weemes and Philo-Semitism in Colonial New England

Katherine Hermes

The writings of the seventeenth-century Scottish philo-Semitic theologian John Weemes present an ideological basis for the incorporation of Mosaic law into seventeenth-century Puritan colonial legal codes that has never been recognized. There is a direct link between Weemes's insistence on the applicability of Mosaic moral and judicial (but not ceremonial) law in a Christian Commonwealth and the legal proposals and theories of Reverend John Cotton. New Haven's reliance on Cotton's work embedded the theories of Weemes into the colonial reality of civil government for a short time in the seventeenth century. The now obscure philo-Semitic writer's "tolerationist" views of the "Other" affected the colonial Puritans' views of themselves as rulers and subjects of a nascent religious polity. The Puritan law codes did not last, but Weemes's philo-Semitism may have had a lasting, negative impact in their wake when his views of the "Other" remained without the millenarian context for which they were designed.

[WP # 00004]