Religious Toleration: Jews and Jewish Precedents in the Christian Church and State

Abstract

If factionalism and controversy dominated the religious landscape of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the mid-seventeenth century is thought to have seen the emergence of a desire to encourage religious freedom; an attempt, on the part of many English Christians, to transform denominational intolerance into religious toleration. The birth of the tolerationist movement in the 1640s has been well documented, beginning with the development of the patriotic idea, in the Victorian era, that tolerance was a uniquely English virtue, and the resulting efforts to trace its genealogy.¹ Later on, as fascism swept across Europe, the recovery of a tolerant past became an even more pressing task: W.K. Jordan’s The Development of Religious Toleration in England was published between 1932 and 1940, at the same time as the American historian William Haller’s Tracts on Liberty, a collection of seventeenth-century texts on toleration, and A.S.P. Woodhouse’s collection, Puritanism and Liberty.²