The first few decades of the eighteenth century witnessed an important moment in Jewish-Christian relations, as influential Christian scholars increasingly looked to Jewish texts to reveal the truths of their own faith. To what extent could postbiblical writings help them better understand the New Testament? And who would best be able to explicate these connections? Connecting the Covenants focuses on two separate but entwined stories, the first centering around the colorful character of Moses Marcus. The English-born son of wealthy parents and the grandson of the famous autobiographical author Glikl of Hameln, Marcus was a prominent Jew educated in the Ashkenazic yeshivah at Hamburg. On New Year's Day, 1723, Marcus was baptized as a Christian, later publishing a justification of his conversion and a vindication of his newly discovered faith in a small book in London. A trophy convert, he was promoted by figures at the highest levels of the Anglican Church as a cultural mediator between Judaism and Christianity. His modest successes in the world of the elite clerical establishment were followed, however, by conspicuous failures, both intellectual and material. The second story that David Ruderman tells emerges against the background of Marcus's professional decline. In the end, the prize convert proved to be a theologian of limited ability, far outstripped in sophistication and openness to rabbinic learning by a circle of Enlightenment Protestant scholars. It was not the Jew who had abjured Judaism who was willing or able to apply the Mishnah and Talmud to Christian exegesis, but figures such as William Whiston, Anthony Collins, William Wotton, and the Dutch scholar William Surenhusius who seized upon the ways to connect the covenants. " Connecting the Covenants uses previously untapped archival sources and little-studied printed books to explore an important episode in the early eighteenth century 'battle of the books.' It sheds light on the famous debate between Ancients and Moderns as well as the status of the Bible in early Enlightenment thought. At the same time, Ruderman uncovers a fascinating episode in the history of European Jewry and Jewish-Christian intellectual relations. Connecting the Covenants is compelling as both narrative and history." ― Matt Goldish, The Ohio State University David B. Ruderman is Joseph Meyerhoff Professor of Modern Jewish History and Ella Darivoff Director of the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of many books including Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe and Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key: Anglo-Jewry's Construction of Modern Jewish Thought, winner of the Koret Jewish Book Award in History. Introduction: The subject of this book lies at the interstices of Jewish and Christian history during the first decades of the eighteenth century. I attempt to reconstruct a fascinating moment in the reevaluation of postbiblical Judaism among a circle of Christian writers, many of them clerics, primarily living in England. Historians of Christianity have treated this subject only tangentially and cursorily while it has generally been ignored or passed over in silence by those who study Jewish history. As an historian whose primary interest is Jewish culture, I hope to recover its significance for Jewish as well as for Christian history. The history of Jewish civilization in this era has been told and retold around certain prominent themes, often as discrete trajectories disconnected from each other. Recent scholarship has underscored the prolonged sense of crisis within the Jewish community precipitated by the messianic movement of Shabbetai Zevi in the late seventeenth century and the heresies that emerged in its path throughout the eighteenth century, on the one hand, as well as the shock waves generated by Benedict Spinoza's assault on Judaism and Christianity within the community of former conversos in Amsterdam and beyond, on the other hand. Some have pointed to a perceived diminution of interest in Jewish culture and literature among Christian scholars by the beginning of the eighteenth century, that was replaced by a more critical and hostile posture towards Judaism. Still others have focused on the concentration of large numbers of Jews living in Poland-Lithuania and in the Ottoman Empire and their relative isolation from cultural developments within Western European civilization as a whole. Most recently, several Jewish historians have underscored the importance of the cultural aspirations of a small group of Jewish intellectuals primarily living in central Europe at the beginning of the eighteenth century, even labeling them as early maskilim . In using this term to distinguish them from advocates of the later political and pedagogic movement known as the Haskalah appearing at the end of the century, they hope to locate the actual origins of the Jewish enlightenment in West