Title: ‘A parallel made with the Jewish Sanhedrin’: Tolerating Jews and Jewish Precedents in the Early Modern Church and State
Abstract: The birth of religious toleration in the mid seventeenth century was institutionalised as a foundational event by patriotic historians writing during the Puritan revival of the Victorian era.2 At the same time, as tens of thousands of East European Jews flooded into England, prompting a rise in anti-Semitism, Anglo-Jewish historians began to celebrate Oliver Cromwell's readmission of the Jews to England in 1656. The Jews had been expelled by Edward I in 1290, and according to the tradition of Anglo-Jewish history established in the late nineteenth century, the readmission was a watershed moment, the culmination of a growing interest in Judaism on the part of seventeenth-century Puritans; and it represented the transformation of medieval Judeophobia into Renaissance philo-semitism. Puritans focussed their attention on the Old Testament, learned Hebrew, and even began to practise Jewish customs; and they extended their belief in the principle of religious toleration, it was argued, to Jews.3 Both toleration and philo-semitism were conceptualised, therefore, as the expression of novel and benevolent ideals, and the roots of both were located in the Civil War period.4
Publication Year: 2008
Publication Date: 2008-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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