SEARCHING for the soul of CHRISTIANITY
In 1608, a group of young activists left northern England for Amsterdam. They were part of what had become an underground Christian movement. The group initially sought to bring the Church of England back to its roots, but the church refused. The group was being watched; some were arrested. Others continued to meet in secret.
William Bradford, who would later become the governor of Plymouth Colony, was eighteen when he landed in Amsterdam. By the age of seven, he had lost both of his parents. When William was twelve years old, he secretly went with a friend to listen to a radical preacher sporting a long white beard. The man insisted that moves taken by the Church of England to distance itself from the Catholic Church had not been enough. It was obvious that followers of Messiah should not be bowing down to statues and kissing the rings of clergymen, but this man insisted that Christ had asked for more. The grassroots movement he attached himself to looked to the Old Testament for inspiration.
Hebrew notes of William Bradford (Second Governor of Plymouth Colony)
It was in Amsterdam that William and the rest of his friends came into contact with faithful Jews for the first time. The Jewish people had already been expelled from England for 300 years by the time separatists began to leave the country. In the Netherlands, religious freedom was a possibility for those wanting to separate from the church and for Sephardic Jews as well. This included conversos who had been baptized into the church but refused to give up Jewish tradition and continued to practice Jewish law after adopting Christian faith. While this was punishable by death within the Catholic Church, our Pilgrim Fathers were intrigued. The group moved to an urban center called Leiden. Jews William’s age were learning at the university in Leiden at that time and the school was home to one of the world’s oldest Hebrew printing presses. William was still a teenager when he began working as a producer of fabric and was certainly in contact with Sephardic Jewish merchants who came in and out of Leiden’s large ship canals.
By the time William Bradford was thirty years old, he had become a leader in this new community, which made plans to relocate to the New World. They dreamed of a world where they could follow Christ as his original disciple had. When the group landed in what we now call New England, they had already been living in the Netherlands for almost fifteen years. They came dressed in the clothing of Western European merchants. Our collective imagination of what the people we call “pilgrims” looked like is cartoonish and inaccurate. William Bradford and his community were indistinguishable in dress from the Sephardic merchants to whom they sold goods, which often included a black skullcap. This classically Jewish accessory became a recognized symbol of Pilgrim piety
In New England the end of the workweek was not called Sunday but Sabbath as a matter of religious fidelity. After 3 pm the previous day, no work was to be done. On Sabbath, activities such as cooking, carrying a burden, haircuts, and travel were not only forbidden but illegal. Old World Christians joked that the Creator’s request for one day a week wasn’t good enough for the separatists; they demanded a day and a half!
In reality those who had separated from the church looked to Hebrew practice as a model for Sabbath observance. The prohibitions they observed, which began in the afternoon before the Sabbath, sound eerily similar to the opening passages of the Jewish Mishnah in tractate Shabbat. New England separatists did not attend “church,” but rather went to the “meeting-house,” which is simply an English translation of “synagogue.” Here they sat on benches to sing hymns, most of which had been penned by King David.
At the age of sixty, William Bradford composed a book of Hebrew vocabulary and phrases. He imagined a time when Hebrew would become the language of the New World. Today American Christians are returning to the example set for us by our Pilgrim fathers and mothers; Christians are learning scripture from both the original Hebrew text and context.