Speaker

David Dalin, historian and rabbi, is a senior research fellow at Brandeis University. He is the author or co-author of twelve books, including “Jewish Justices of the Supreme Court,” which was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, “Jews and American Public Life: Essays on American Jewish History and Politics,” and “Religion and State in the American Jewish Experience” (co-authored with Jonathan D. Sarna). He was a research fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. 

Topic

The founding fathers — such as John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington — knew their Hebrew bible backward and forward. Several were familiar with it in the original Hebrew. For many years, biblical Hebrew was a required course at both Harvard and Princeton Universities. They spoke and wrote of the ancient Israelites in the most glowing terms. They very much saw the American revolutionary effort as paralleling that of the liberation from bondage of the original Children of Israel and believed that King George III was akin to Pharaoh. They modeled the symbolism and the laws of the new nation on what they found in the Hebrew bible. Originally, the seal of the new country was to be a depiction of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea, led by Moses. James Madison gave the valedictory address at Princeton University the year of his graduation in Hebrew. In at least two cases, this high regard for the ancient Israelites stretched toward the Jews of their own day. David Dalin will build upon these ideas in his lecture. 

This lecture is part of the Herbert W. Vaughan Lecture Series on America’s Founding Principles.