Brian Ogren's Kabbalah and the Founding of America is an unexpected and fascinating book about five learned early American figures who pursued deep engagements with the Jewish mystical tradition—George Keith, the Quaker intellectual and, later, dissident; Harvard's first Hebrew teacher and Jewish convert to Christianity, Judah Monis; and three well-known Puritans, Increase and Cotton Mather and Ezra Stiles. Its mix of a Quaker, a converted Jew, and three Puritans makes it unusual. Stressing their engagement with esoteric Jewish traditions makes it exceptional.

Ogren begins with Keith. His fascination with Kabalistical mysticism, which developed in intense meetings with the English philosopher Anne Conway in 1675, has long been well studied, including recent work by Madeleine Ward and Michael Birkel. But for the first time, Ogren extends Keith's interests to America. He persuasively identifies Keith as the author of a long, unsigned, and Kabalistically soaked manuscript letter at the American Antiquarian Society, most likely sent in 1688 to the quirky New Jersey almanac maker, Daniel Leeds. Leeds had just digested the writings of the German mystic, Jacob Boehme, in a book published in Philadelphia the same year, The Temple of Wisdom for the Little World, and Keith critiqued Boehme's “imperfect notions” of the Jewish “Cabbala or mystick Theology” (209). But Keith moved well past his criticisms of Boehme to give Leeds a seminar in writing on Kabbalah across twenty-five full pages, demonstrating how thoroughly Keith had sustained his command of the subject after arriving in America in 1685. The discovery is entirely new to what we have known about Keith after 1680, and Ogren runs with its consequences. He argues that Kabalistical sophistication informed Keith's criticism of preaching by prominent Delaware Valley “Public Friends” that resulted in the Keith-led schism among Pennsylvania Quakers of 1691–1692 and at least obliquely underwrote the theology of Keith's short-lived separatist “Christian Quaker” movement, producing his disownment by the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1692 and the London Yearly Meeting in 1695.

If Ogren's discussions of the Mathers, Monis, and Stiles lack manuscript discoveries, they pay new attention to often bypassed Puritan pursuits of Jewish mysticism. For Increase Mather, the conversion of the Jews would be a central event of the end of times, and Ogren argues that Mather's 1669 and 1709 publications on the subject reflect an awareness of the millennialism that swept through Europe's Jewish communities in the mid-seventeenth century, which were ignited by the mystic and messiah, Shabbetai Tzevi, although Mather never named Tzevi specifically. In contrast, Cotton Mather employed the 1708 English-language edition of Jacques Basnage's History of the Jews to make specific mention of Tzevi's Kabalistically informed messianism, which he then incorporated into a distinctly Christian understanding of history's unfolding. Mather also plumbed Christian Hebraic works to cite material from the Kabalistic tradition, a practice that “works for Mather,” Ogren argues, “precisely because it is removed from its [Jewish] context” (69).

The conversion of the Harvard Hebrew tutor, Judah Monis, in 1722 brought the Mathers’ Christian appropriation of the Kabalistic tradition full circle. Almost everything about Monis's background is mysterious, from his birth (probably Italy) and education (probably Amsterdam) to his arrival in America. That said, his Harvard teaching appointment and Christian baptism, joyfully overseen by the 83-year-old Increase Mather and Boston's Puritan elite, led to a three-part “Discourse” from Monis published as The Truth, The Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth (1722), the third of which Ogren describes as “the first kabbalistic text published in the American colonies” (119). But Monis, like the Mathers, placed the “Authority of the Cabalistical Rabbies” (120) plus his own knowledge of the Kabalistic tradition in the service of Christianity, reassuring his sponsors that his conversion was genuine.

Ezra Stiles, minister at Newport for twenty years before he became president of Yale in 1778, likely initiated his interest in Kabbalah in the 1760s. He met Monis, read Monis's Nothing but the Truth, and observed in a 1781 essay on Hebrew literature that the Kabbalah was, “next to the Scriptures, the most antient learning” (150). Stiles was the most scholarly of the Kabbalah's colonial interlocutors. He read and wrote Hebrew fluently. By 1776 he had acquired the 800-page 1684 Nuremberg edition of the Zohar, the most ancient of Khabbalist texts, possibly through Benjamin Franklin in London. He read it for years, noting how it described “mystic secret spiritual Traditions concerning God” (159). With Newport's hazzans or cantors, he sharpened his Hebrew and discussed Judaism regularly. But his most profitable discussions took place with two visiting rabbis, Moses bar David and Hijim Isaac Karigal, because they “focused on kabbalistic hermeneutics, messianism, and eschatology” (184), as Ogren assesses them. But again, his aim paralleled that of Keith, Monis, and the Mathers, in Stiles's words, “the restitution of all things, the millennium and the world to come” (184), in Christian terms, of course.

Ogren explores the mysteries and character of the Kabalistical tradition with clarity and patience. He includes a Kabbalistic glossary, a transcription of the important Keith document, and a Hebrew transcription and English translation of Stiles's 1781 oration on Hebrew literature that Stiles wrote in Hebrew. He stresses how all five figures used Kabbalah to achieve distinctly non-Jewish ends and could ridicule Jews and the Jewish understanding of the Kabbalah even as they praised Jewish learning and insight.

Occasionally, issues emerge. The back and forth with the Mathers is not always easy to follow, and better copyediting could have eliminated repeated references to “this book” and to awkward notices of previous quotations and discussions—“mentioned above,” “the above quote,” “the above passage,” among others (2, 57, 70). Still, The Kabbalah and the Founding of America reads compellingly. No matter that it is not really about America's founding or Jewish influence across Britain's mainland colonies, as its title suggests. It is an intriguing, learned book about the theological interests of five remarkable colonial figures who tenaciously pursued obscure Jewish traditions that had originated centuries earlier and, now, an ocean away. Anyone interested in the breadth of intellectual possibilities available to New World learners will find it curiously absorbing.