Notes on the Judeo-Christian Tradition in America

IN 1952 MODERN LIBRARY BROUGHT OUT AN EDITION OF WHAT MAKES Sammy Run?, Budd Schulberg's 1941 bestseller about an unsavory Jewish immigrant son named Sammy Glick, who claws his way in record time from the Lower East Side to the top of the movie industry. a freshly written introduction, Schulberg solved the novel's riddle for the reader. What made Sammy run? In throwing over the ways of his father without learning any sense of obligation to the Judeo-Christian-democratic pattern, he had nothing except naked self-interest to guide himself.' The same year, a few days before Christmas, President-elect Eisenhower gave a speech before the Freedoms Foundation in New York in which he called attention to the foundations of democracy. Our form of government, he explained, has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don't care what it is. With us of course it is the concept but it must be a religion that all men are created equal.: 2 As of 1952 good Americans were supposed to be, in some sense, committed Judeo-Christians. It was a recent addition to the national creed. the beginning, Judeo-Christian had served only to designate connections between Judaism and Christianity in antiquity. Its first appearance, according to the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, occurred in the Literary Guide in 1899: a Judaeo-Christian 'continuity' theory postulated the development of Church ritual out of the practices of the Second Temple. Not until some decades later did the term begin to be used to refer to values or beliefs shared by Jews and Christians, to a common western