FACULTY NEWS & NOTES Scholarship in Progress: Rachel Trocchio Redefining the Parameters of her Field Imagine yourself at a banquet, and at each banquet table there is an ongoing conversation about some aspect of the human experience—history, culture, politics, religion, art, music, and more. And imagine an endlessly fascinating figure at this banquet, one who could join the conversation at the vast majority of tables and have something relevant and endlessly fascinating to contribute. That banquet is the world of scholarship, and the endlessly fascinating figure represents Jewish studies, a field that spans almost 4,000 years of human experience and within that period touches most parts of the globe. And yet, the connections between Jewish studies and other fields can still surprise. Take, for example, New England Puritanism. The Puritans’ fascination with Judaism is well known, but who would think to connect them to Jewish communities in Lithuania? And Rachel Trocchio yet Rachel Trocchio (Assistant Professor, English), one of the most recent scholars to join the faculty in the Center for Jewish Studies, has done exactly that in her forthcoming article on the Puritans and Karaites, “Lost Tribes East and West,” appearing in New England Quarterly 93, no.3 (Sep 2020). With regard to what she characterizes as the Puritans’ “obsession” with the Israelites, Trocchio explains: Believing they had assumed the Jews’ place as God’s chosen people, the Puritans who traveled to the New World made meticulous study both of Jewish history and the Hebrew language. From Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where a majority of first-generation theologians were trained, to their private studies in New England (and their new college, Harvard), early American divines traced the correlations between Puritan and Jewish experience that would promise them singular access to God’s grace. This much has been well documented. But Trocchio has established an explicit connection not just with the broad Jewish narrative, but with the specifically Karaite narrative, and thus with Jewish communities and thinkers not mythic but real, and far from the North Atlantic and New England environs usually associated with Puritan thought. As an important branch of Judaism, Karaism developed in the Muslim world in the ninth and tenth centuries. Karaite practice is characterized by its rejection of the authority of the Oral Law—and hence of the authority of the rabbis—insisting instead on the necessity of direct, critical study of the biblical text. Protestant scholars in the seventeenth century saw affinities between the Karaite rejection of rabbinic institutions and the concomitant emphasis on individual reading of the Bible and their own rejection of the Catholic Church and their subscription to the primacy of the Word. Based on an account of a Lithuanian Karaite community published in Thomas Thorowgood’s Jewes in America (1650), however, Trocchio has established a Puritan claim of affiliation with Karaites that goes well beyond mere affinity. According to Trocchio, Thorowgood’s tome, which otherwise attempts to demonstrate that Massachusett natives were one of the ten lost tribes, includes a letter by Scottish Calvinist John Dury concerning the Lithuanian Karaite community with whom, Dury believes, the Puritans will march as an army in anticipation of the Second Coming of Christ. “By virtue of the distinctly theological registers that structure his imagining of that community,” Trocchio argues, “Dury effectively calls the Karaites Puritans.” In her essay, Trocchio proposes not only that Dury thus draws an affiliation between Puritans and Karaites that several bodies of scholarship have not given its proper due, but that “as an idea and in the context of the print and manuscript networks that gave rise to it, that affiliation rearranges the parameters of a resolutely Atlanticist Puritan studies that has fixated on New England.” Trocchio’s essay lays the groundwork for a much larger project in which she plans to explore the questions to which a Puritan-Karaite association gives rise: “How is exile experienced in colonial America, before demarcations of state and the rise of the ‘new republic,’ and how does one religious community’s imagination of exile—its own and another’s—serve to cohere its doctrinal commitments and its social bonds?” Trocchio reports that she is excited to see her essay in print, just as we are excited to see the future contributions of her scholarship.
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