Rooted in a philosophy that assumes that humans are the ultimate measure of everything, the arbiters of both the visible and invisible, and that human reason is the pinnacle of evolution, The White Man's Burden asserts that through self-enlightenment and the acquisition of knowledge, humans can shape their own destiny through the unfolding of history. There is a theological evil that surpasses mere considerations of political violence. It is a deeper violence inflicted upon the human soul itself, which is at the very core of our divine image.
The New England Puritans’ fascination with the legacy of the Jewish religion has been well documented, but their interactions with actual Jews have escaped sustained historical attention. New Israel/New England tells the story of the Sephardic merchants who traded and sojourned in Boston and Newport between the mid-seventeenth century and the era of the American Revolution. It also explores the complex and often contradictory meanings that the Puritans attached to Judaism and the fraught attitudes that they bore toward the Jews as a people.
More often than not, Michael Hoberman shows, Puritans thought and wrote about Jews in order to resolve their own theological and cultural dilemmas. A number of prominent New Englanders, including Roger Williams, Increase Mather, Samuel Sewall, Benjamin Colman, Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and Ezra Stiles, wrote extensively about post-biblical Jews, in some cases drawing on their own personal acquaintance with Jewish contemporaries.