Rebecca Hyneman: Crossing Holy Lands

Rebekah Hyneman (1816–1875) was born to a Jewish father, later converting to Judaism through Isaac Leeser, in whose journal The Occident she also often published. What little has been written about Hyneman places her largely through the paradigm of nineteenth-century “separate spheres” which divided genders into a male public “world” as against a private “women’s sphere”. However, neither her private life, nor domesticity, nor gender itself, is Hyneman’s main focus, although gender certainly situates and frames her writing and self-representation. What emerges instead as central to imagery, setting, and scene of Hyneman’s writing is a topic of fundamental importance to both Jewish and American discourses of her period: the Holy Land. The Holy Land exploded in the nineteenth century as a looming obsession. It fit centrally into the missionary, millennialist project of America’s Second Great Awakening, extended eastward to Ottoman Palestine newly accessible through the revolutions in transportation of steamship and railroad; as well as westward in the Manifest Destiny of America as itself Holy Land, inherited through Puritan claims of themselves as the Israelites of the Old Testament. A Christian Zionism emerged, imagining the restoration of the Jews to Palestine as itself a millennialist sign. These American projects frame an emerging Jewish proto-Zionism focused on the Holy Land. Leeser himself exhibited a strong restorationist commitment. A new Jewish focus on the Holy Land as concrete geographical site and project thus takes shape in concert and contest with Christian eschatologies of Jewish ingathering. Rebeka Hyneman’s work stands within but also against the American vision of Holy Land. The Holy Land she presents proposes both common features and countering ones to those around her. Her verse participates in the disputes regarding mission, millennialism, restoration, and republicanism vividly circulating in Leeser’s Philadelphia. Through poem after poem, the Holy Land emerges as central site and scene of Hyneman's poetry, which is an archive of Holy Land topoi. Reflecting new approaches to the Holy Land through study of flora, fauna, geology, geography, the poems construct the land through an itinerary of place-names and images of rock, vines, olive, plain, desert, streamlets. Landscape is the central figure, but nature is never unhistorical. Rather, it is the site of a recovered Jewish history, past and more recent. Hyneman, then, presents a striking possibility of overlapping Jewish and American communities, as they influence, qualify, confirm and also conflict with each other.