Jerusalem and Albion

In his 1964 book, Jerusalem and Albion: The Hebraic Factor in Seventeenth-Century Literature , Harold Fisch argues that Blake provides a more insightful and broader account of the seventeenth century’s “dissociation of sensibility” than Eliot, who coined the phrase. For Blake, the great crisis of England was the dissociation of Albion from Jerusalem, the latter being the “city of peace” that “came to mean the undivided unity of flesh and spirit, reason and imagination, fact and symbol, corresponding to an outer realm from which the glory of God (and the terrors of God) have not been banished.”

When Jerusalem is restored, Albion will be renewed. And Blake found intimations of this restoration in the prose writers of the seventeenth century - Robert Fludd, Thomas Vaughan, Traherne, Milton. For Blake, and even more for Fisch, one of the key factors in this achievement was their common share in “a vital store of Hebraic intuitions and images, and a certain resistance to the frigidities and intellectual abstractions of Greek culture.”

Fisch suggests that Blake was aiming for redemption through myth, but that the Hebraic culture of seventeenth-century England was interested instead in a redemption in history: “If it is true that Jerusalem and Albion were joined in marriage (of however brief duration) in the seventeenth century, then the union was consummated not only in poetry and philosophical prose, but also in the world of politics, of practical science, and practical divinity. This is the difference between the Hebraism of Blake, and that of his forbears in the seventeenth century.”

In a lengthy footnote, Fisch complains that “Hebrew learning in the seventeenth century is a subject that deserves more attention than it has received so far,” and points out that this century “was after all the great age of oriental scholarship in England,” listing Pococke, Lightfoot, and John Selden as examples.

The dissociation of sensibility, he argues, was the collapse of this biblical, Hebraic rhetoric, the departure of Jerusalem from Albion.