The recovery of religious knowledge could be pursued from a college as well as from a reforming congregation. Ezra Stiles (1727–1795), who became president of Yale, read widely in Hebrew and Jewish traditions. His friendship with the rabbi Haim Isaac Carigal (1733–1777) gave part of that learning a personal setting. A tradition encountered in books could also be approached through a scholar who knew it as his own.
Stiles’s interests included the Zohar, a major work of Jewish mysticism, alongside a broad collection of religious and historical writing. He sought connections across the ancient world and followed reports that enlarged European knowledge of Asia. The purpose was more than the accumulation of unfamiliar information. He hoped that learning could recover relationships among peoples and clarify the history of religious truth.
Those interests entered his expectations for America. In his election sermon of 1783, the new republic became a setting for the future growth of religion and knowledge. The distant past and the national future could be considered together because he believed education had a part in the enlargement of human understanding. His public position gave such hopes an audience beyond the readers of his private notes.
Stiles’s career prevents this story from becoming an account only of marginal seekers and unusual revelations. The same interest in remote antiquity belonged within an established college and the public speech of a respected minister. His conversations and reading also remind us that the traditions he studied were represented by living people. The rabbi who helped him learn was more than a witness to a past that a Christian scholar wanted to reconstruct.