Jerusalem Moves West: Undoing the Hebrew Bible in Blake’s Milton and Jerusalem

Abstract

ABSTRACTWilliam Blake’s evocative figuration of England as Jerusalem is central to debates about his attitude to nationalism. Nonetheless, Jerusalem in his poems is often read as not actually referring to the city in Palestine. In this article, I argue that while Blake’s refraction of Enlightenment standards of time and space has produced depoliticized readings of his Jerusalem, his attempt to restore spirituality to Britain was nonetheless cast in political and in geographical terms. Blake reacted against an Arian theology that relegated spirituality to a distant time and space. In his prophetic poems, he undoes the temporal and spatial organization of the Hebrew Bible, a possibility first explored in Milton and then fully achieved in Jerusalem, where Blake deconstructs the ancient biblical world to rebuild it in modern Britain. To rescue Britain from spiritual crisis, Blake rewrites Newtonian physics and theology, the Miltonian epic, antiquarian histories about the eastern Levant, and the Hebrew Bible. Common to these diverse engagements is Blake’s effacement of the East as the cradle of spirituality, and his recasting of sacred geography in immediate local terms, moving it away from the geography of Palestine. Notes1 Eitan Bar-Yosef argues that Blake’s Jerusalem “is primarily a spiritual concept signifying a return to the blissful existence in the Garden of God, a perfect social order” (59). For a similar argument, see Saree Makdisi (Romantic Imperialism 171). In contrast, Talissa J. Ford argues that Blake “deterritorialise[s] his own geographic spaces” to question “the space of London, of Jerusalem, and of the globe” (92).2 See also David V. Erdman’s earlier reading of The Four Zoas as celebrating the British defeat of Napoleon at Acre (294).3 See Susan Matthews (94).4 Newton traces blasphemy not to the Jews, but to the Romans who practiced Christianity in a manner “more suitable to the old principles of placing religion in outward forms and ceremonies, holy-days, and doctrines of Ghosts, than the religion of the sincere Christians” (Observations 202). He suggests that the Catholic worship of sepulchers and the bones of saints developed from the Roman legacy of heresy and subsequently shaped modern expressions of idolatry (208–09).5 On the Royal Exchange, see Paul Miner (279–80).6 Blake echoes King David’s lament for Jonathan, slain by the Amelakites: “Ye mountains of Gilbo’a, let there be no dew, neither let there be rain, upon you, nor fields of offerings” (2 Sam. 1.21).7 On the analogy of Jerusalem’s Temple to Saint Paul’s Cathedral in Blake’s work, see Morton D. Paley (197).8 Beulah is a transliteration of “married woman” probably familiar to Blake from Pilgrim’s Progress, representing God’s forgiveness of the Israelites following their idolatry: “the Lord hath called thee a woman forsaken” (Bar-Yosef 20; Isa. 54.6).9 See also J. F. C. Harrison, who contrasts Richard Brothers’s notion of Jerusalem as an “actual city” with Blake’s “symbol, an imaginative statement about the conditions of human liberty” (85).10 Blake’s sources—according to Otto—were Napoleon’s campaign in the East and kabbalistic influences on evangelical Christianity in London (407–08).11 Jon Mee (92–93) and Jason Whittaker (49) both consider Blake as hostile to antiquarianism because of its purported nationalism. In contrast, Julia M. Wright argues that Blake initially saw antiquarianism as an alternative to imperialism in its mixing of Gothic, Celtic, and Hebrew cultures (31). She suggests that by the time he wrote Milton and Jerusalem, Blake had turned to biblical nationalism, subordinating Jews, Deists, and Christians to British imperial designs and purging the Christian Bible of its Hebraic roots to create a homogenous nation (166, 171).12 See Peter N. Miller on the neglect of the eastern Levant in the scholarship on antiquarianism, itself an overlooked field according to Rosemarie Sweet (464). Thora Brylowe relies on an essay by Marilyn Butler, who separates “popular” British antiquarianism from discourses about the classical and oriental worlds (328). In their introduction to a Romantic Circles issue on antiquarianism, Noah Heringman and Chrystal B. Lake employ Butler’s distinction (para. 5). In the same issue, Jonathan Sachs presents the alternative view that the orient was inseparable from “popular” British antiquarianism in eighteenth-century culture (para. 4).13 See Rosemarie Sweet for a critique of the anachronistic view of antiquarianism as eccentric, which she traces to Walter Scott’s 1816 The Antiquary (349–50).14 Basire’s studio did not illustrate Pownall’s article in volume two of Archaeologia, but created images for a sequel by Pownall in volume three.15 William Stukeley, an Arian and secretary of the Society of Antiquaries, as well as Newton’s biographer, asserts that “Abraham was literally speaking Christian. For he had a firm faith in Christ” and taught the patriarchal faith to Phoenicians in Egypt, who brought it to the Druids in Britain (2: 108).16 Blake engraved the second and third issues of the journal, which was published every two to three years. Basire’s studio engraved many but not all of the illustrations, and Blake was one of two apprentices working on these assignments (Ackroyd 44).17 Matthews identifies Blake’s allusion to the biblical antiquarians in Jerusalem through Blake’s citation of Jacob Bryant’s work in A New System, Or, An Analysis of Ancient Mythology (1775–76) (93).18 In his “Descriptive Catalogue of Paintings” (1809), Blake revises Bryant’s argument in A New System that ancient Greece has eclipsed the Hebrew Bible: “The Grecians were so possessed with a notion of their own excellence and antiquity, that they supposed every ancient tradition to have proceeded from themselves” (Bryant 1: 130). Yet whereas Bryant posits the narrative of the Hebrew Bible as the dominant European genealogy, Blake asserts that “[T]he antiquities of every Nation under Heaven, is no less sacred than that of the Jews. They are the same thing as Jacob Bryant, and all antiquaries have proved. How other antiquities came to be neglected and disbelieved, while those of the Jews are collected and arranged, is an enquiry, worthy of both the Antiquarian and the Divine” (“Catalogue” 543).19 For a similar argument that Blake regarded Islam as an alternative to Deism, see Humberto Garcia, who argues that Blake, like other republicans, saw Mohammad as a revolutionary role model (21). Angus Whitehead takes issue with Edward Larrissy, who notes the underlying orientalism of Blake’s view of the East as depraved (11).Additional informationFundingThis research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation [grant number 624/21].