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THE THREE JEWISH CHILDREN AT BERLIN: COTTON MATHER'S OBSESSION

BY

LINDA MUNK Toronto

Yea, who knowes what Use the Lord may make of such an Essay? Cotton Mather, The Faith of the Fathers

In February 1704, , minister of the Second Church of and an avid eschato10gist, recorded in his diary Cotton Mather's "unsuccessful attempt to convert to Christianity a Boston Jewish merchant, one of the Frazon brothers - evidently by some jugglery with holy texts." According to Sewall: '''The forgery was so plainly detected that Mr. C.M. confest it, after which Mr. Frasier [Frazon] would never be persuaded to hear any more of Xianity."'l The historian Lee M. Friedman remarks: "The ambition to be the means of converting a Jew to Christianity was so near an obsession on the part of Cotton Mather that it is easily possible to understand how he overstepped the bounds of propriety when one realizes his Puritan viewpoint." From Mather's millennial point of view, "to be the means of converting a Jew was not merely a matter of personal glory, but another step accelerating the establishment on earth of the Kingdom of God."2 Born on February 12, 1663, Cotton Mather was the first of nine children of and Maria, daughter of the great . It seems that "young Cotton had begun to pray as soon as he could speak. His father began to suspect that this gifted child was one of the happy few (a tiny fraction of the elected saints) who are

I L. Huhner, "The Jews of New (Other than Rhode Island) Prior to 1800," Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society II (1903), p. 79, n. 3. 2 L.M. Friedman, "Cotton Mather's Ambition," in Jewish Pioneers and Patriots (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1942), p. 98. This chapter of Friedman's monograph is a revision of an essay that appeared in 1918: "Cotton Mather and the Jews," Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 26 (1918), pp. 201-211. Huhner (1903), p. 79 n. 272 MUNK given a saving faith and a virtuous character in their very infancy."3 By the time Cotton was twelve, "his proficiency in Latin was so good that while listening to the Sabbath sermon, which was delivered in English, he could take notes on it in Latin." He also "read Greek capa­ bly." By the age of fourteen, he could write in Hebrew. At fifteen the prodigy and visible saint graduated from , "hav­ ing consumed enormous numbers of books in most of the arts and sciences known to seventeenth-century scholars."4 Some of those books were out of date; his Harvard thesis of 1678 pleads a lost cause: "An Puncta Hebraica sunt Originis Divinae. Affirmat Respondens Cot­ tonus Matherus."5 At eighteen he "preached so effectively in Grandfather Cotton's that some auditors declared them­ selves hardly able to forbear crying out aloud during the sermon."6 He died on February 13, 1728, a day after his sixty-fifth birthday. "In every church [we read in Perry Miller's The Mind] there were discourses on Cotton Mather, three of which were printed." Benjamin Colman described him as '''the first Minister in the Town, the first in Age, Gifts and in Grace.' From the beginning of the coun­ try to this very day, no leader of these churches amassed so great a trea­ sure of learning 'and made so much use of it, to a variety of pious Intentions, as this our Rev. Brother and Father, Dr. Cotton Mather."'7 The focus of this essay is Mather's conversionism - his pious intention, or obsession, to convert Jews. Christ's return to earth was imminent, Mather believed; the true Church, true Israel, must prepare itself for the bridegroom, the thief who comes in the night, and Mather intended to expedite his com­ ing. Unregenerate children among the Puritan elect must be saved; otherwise, like Papists, Turks, and other heretics, they would perish in the "tremendous Conflagration, which is to precede the New Heavens and the New Earth."s As for the "infidel" Jews, at Christ's

3 D. Levin, Cotton Mather: TIe Young Life if the Lord's Remembrancer, 1663-1703 (Cambridge Mass., 1978), p. 10. 4 R. Middlekauff, TIe Jl,fathers: TIree Generations if Puritan Intellectuals, 1596--1728 (New York, 1971), pp. 194-95. , D. de Sola Pool, "Hebrew Learning among the of New England Prior to 1700," Publications if the American Jewish Historical Society XX (1911), pp. 66, 80. 6 Levin, (1978), p. 62. 7 P. Miller, TIe New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge Mass., 1954), p. 482. 8 Cotton Mather, letter to Gordon Saltonstall, August 3, 1724, Diary, II, p. 804. First published in 1911-1912 in 2 Volumes by the Massachusetts Historical Society,