In this, the latest intervention in the strikingly persistent question of John Milton's indebtedness to rabbinic literature, Frank Mattern has clearly learned valuable lessons from his predecessors, irrefutably showing the missteps of previous work by scholars. Mattern's book serves as a helpful reminder of the hazards of source studies, especially in the case of a writer like Milton, whose eclectic reading habits and encyclopedic poetic efforts have invited wide-ranging speculations about where some of his most compelling and idiosyncratic ideas might have originated.
The book is divided into two parts, “Preliminary Questions” and “Resolutions of Scriptural Problems in Paradise Lost and the Rabbis,” each, in turn, comprised of three chapters. Part 1 constitutes the real strength of Mattern's work. Drawing on much of the most recent scholarship on early modern Christian Hebraism, Mattern grounds his inquiry in the intellectual and religious contexts of Milton's time. He first reviews the most influential trends in Christian readings of rabbinic literature, correctly distinguishing among the different strands of rabbinic writings and how these differences would have been read by early modern Christian Hebraists. Mattern then addresses the question of Milton's access to these Christian readings from a practical, but more importantly from an ideological, perspective. Rather than relying on speculation, coincidence, or circumstantial possibilities, Mattern rightly insists that we consider the motivations someone of Milton's intellectual and religious sensibilities might have had for turning to Jewish learning. It is not sufficient simply to observe that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed a considerable rise in the interest in Jewish traditions; one must also investigate the degree to which this increased interest also meant acceptance and absorption of those traditions.
In light of these caveats, Mattern organizes the second half of his study around three distinct (and incrementally less likely) aspects of potential rabbinic influence on Paradise Lost, philology, theology, and imagination. His guiding assumption is that both Milton and rabbinic readers would have been motivated to make sense of the same interpretive cruxes in the Bible and so he looks to those difficulties — anomalies in diction, grammar, or narrative detail, for example — for signs that Milton might have resolved them by turning to rabbinic materials.
As reasonable as this approach seems to be, the second half of Mattern's book is something of a letdown. His systematic approach of looking at difficulties in Genesis 1–9 and then examining rabbinic responses in comparison to Milton's responses to those same cruxes has some merit, except that Mattern does not offer much beyond the same circumstantial evidence of which he was so correctly critical in his account of previous scholarship. What's more, the choice of Genesis 1–9 seems rather arbitrary. It is true that Paradise Lost primarily retells the narrative contained within the earliest chapters of Genesis, but Milton's use of biblical materials — and the difficulties they pose — is far more extensive; there is no particular reason to think his potential use of rabbinic materials would not have included writings about Exodus, Isaiah, Psalms, or any other portion of the Hebrew Bible.
In his discussion of theology, Mattern makes a strong case for preserving a healthy suspicion of claims for Milton's indebtedness to Jewish materials: “Jewish and Christian readings of numerous apparently unsuspicious narrative details are interfused with such profound divergences of belief . . . that the rabbinic elaborations could in such cases hardly have served as the merely ornamental embellishments which have tended to be seen as in previous source studies” (131). Fair enough. But such an argument fails to address the most convincing discussion of Milton's Hebraic innovations in theological matters, put forward by Jason Rosenblatt who has drawn crucial connections between Milton's monism and Jewish writings, primarily by way of the English Hebraist, John Selden. In Rosenblatt's expert analysis, Milton's Hebraic monism is not an accidental, ornamental, or inconsistent element of his larger philosophical system, but rather at the very heart of his conceptualizations of material existence, sexuality, marriage, and divorce.
For all the intriguing matters of intellectual and cultural archeology that this book addresses, the payoff of this kind of study ought to be, at least in part, new insights into Milton's poetry. Yet Mattern makes few advances in interpretive analysis or deepening contextualization. The juxtapositions of passages from Paradise Lost with quotations from early modern Christian Hebraists are not accompanied by especially helpful explication, even when the potential is there (and acknowledged). For example, Mattern offers the beginnings of an interesting reading of rabbinic responses to the plural forms used with respect to God in Genesis — “Let us make man in our image — relating them to Milton's representation of the Godhead in Paradise Lost and his apparent espousal of Arianist views concerning the Son's relation to the Father. The connection is a suggestive one, but Mattern does little with it, only making a plea for further investigation.
So the question of Milton's indebtedness to Jewish learning is likely to be asked again. Future scholars will benefit from Mattern's work, but he has not put the matter to rest.
