Jews and Muslims in Christian Law and History

Jews and Muslims in Christian Law and History John Tolan [This is the author’s pre-publication version of an article published in in Adam Silverstein & Guy Stroumsa, eds., The Oxford handbook of Abrahamic religions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 166-88.] How does Christianity explain the existence of the two rival Abrahamic faiths, Judaism and Islam? What place does it allow in Christian society for Jews and Muslims? The responses to these questions are many, and in this brief article it will only be possible to examine a few prominent examples. Rather than a survey of Christians’ attitudes towards Jews (or Judaism) and Muslims (or Islam), we will examine how Christian law accommodated Jews and Muslims as residents of Christian societies and at the roles that Christian thinkers assigned to Judaism and Islam in a Christian scheme of history. The emphasis will be on a few salient examples from the fourth century (when Christianity obtains social and intellectual predominance in the Roman Empire) to the nineteenth (when Christianity loses that predominance in Europe). During the life of Jesus, various apocalyptic movements within Judaism anticipated the imminent arrival of the Messiah and the instauration of the new Jewish kingdom. Jesus himself seems to have taught that the end of history was near and certainly many of his followers, in the first generations following his death, taught that the end was near (Matt. 25:31-46; Luke 24:49); the extent and nature of Jesus’ apocalypticism continues to provoke scholarly debate (Aune 2006: 7-8). The apocalyptic predictions of the prophets, in particular the book of Daniel, revisited and revised in the New Testament (above all in the book of Revelation) assured Jesus’ followers that the persecutions they were experiencing would soon come to an end, the pagan Roman empire (cast as the new Babylon) would be crushed, and a new era of justice and peace would dawn. Yet when Constantine proclaimed the edict of Milan in 313, the persecutions ceased and Rome turned from persecutor to ally of the Church. Churchmen had to rethink apocalyptic schemes of history and Christian legislators had to define through law the confines of the Church and its relationship to Roman society. 1. JEWS AND CHRISTIAN ROME A. Jews in Roman and Byzantine Law In the fourth and fifth centuries, as Christianity became the dominant religion of the Roman empire, imperial decrees outlawed pagan sacrifices and ordered the closing of pagan temples, yet at the same time 1 offered guarantees to Jews: synagogues were protected; soldiers were not be billeted in synagogues; Jews were not to be summoned to court on the Sabbath; they were protected from insult and injury on the part of Christians. Yet at the same time that these laws protected Jews, other laws restricted them, prohibiting them from serving in certain positions of authority, from proselytizing among Christians (Linder 2006; Mathisen 2013). These laws were promulgated by emperors from Constantine onwards, often reacting to specific events and to requests from the people concerned: Jews worried by Christian violence, or Christian bishops concerned about Jewish proselytism. These laws reflect individual reactions to specific situations, rather than a concerted attempt to define relations between Christians and Jews (NemoPekelman 2010). Yet when Theodosius II had many of these laws grouped together into one chapter of his Theodosian Code (438), it provided a clear place for Jews as a protected but inferior minority in a Christian Roman Empire. Judaism became a tolerated but inferior religion. Indeed, one might say simply that it became a religion (Boyarin 2004). Earlier, pagan Roman emperors had granted privileges and protections to Jews, just as they had granted similar privileges to other subjected peoples. In legal terms, Jews represented one among many subjected peoples (gentes), and were not defined in terms of religion. The rise of Christianity, a breakoff Jewish sect, to dominance in the Roman Empire changed that. In the fourth and fifth centuries, Christian churchmen and Christian emperors struggled to organize and structure the institutional church and to define the contours of orthodox belief and practice: Christianity became a religion, and as such its constituent parts (hierarchy, rites and doctrine) were set down. While the emperors who promulgated these laws at times lambasted Judaism as a “superstition”, some of the laws defined it as a “religion” and indeed institutionalized it along the lines of that of the church. A hierarchy of Jewish officials was recognized and given, quite explicitly, the same privileges as the high officials of the Christian church, creating what Amnon Linder has called a “Jewish Church” (Linder 2006: 157). Among the prerogatives of this Jewish “clerical” elite was to exercise justice in communal affairs. Several laws point to difficulties in establishing boundaries between Roman and Jewish jurisdiction: Jews were subjected to Roman laws, yet could submit their affairs to their own authorities to settle internal disputes. Several laws mention cases of Jews refusing to recognize the authority of judgments rendered by Jewish judges and appealing to Roman judges. This will remain an issue throughout the middle ages and the early modern period: Jews are recognized, and given privileges, as a community; the community regulates itself and disciplines its wayward members. Justinian ordered major new compilations of law during his reign; these texts, referred to collectively as the Corpus iuris civilis, reiterated a number of the laws from the Theodosian Code concerning Jews and included various new laws, in which one seems a similar mix of protection and restriction. Ralph Mathisen has plausibly suggested that the reiteration of a 2 number of restrictive laws (on, for example, intermarriage between Christians and Jews) suggests that these laws were frequently ignored, and that “it would appear that, after the spate of Jewish legislation in the early fifth century, Jews were largely left to themselves and the laws regulating their behavior were largely ignored” (Mathisen 2013). Justinian’s Corpus iuris civilis became the foundation text for subsequent byzantine law and had a profound influence on European law, particularly from the eleventh century. While several ninth-century emperors of Constantinople attempted to force Jews to convert, on the whole the status accorded by these laws was respected (Dagron 1993; Sharf 1995). B. Jews in the emerging Christian conception of history In the first centuries of Christianity, Christians of the Roman Empire endured sometimes intense, but in fact unequal and sporadic persecution; in the fourth century, Christianity became first an officially tolerated religion within the Empire, then a more or less official state religion during the reign of Theodosius I (379-95). Many early Christians had a profoundly apocalyptic view of history, with Rome assigned the role of the “whore of Babylon”, persecutor whose demise would bring on the end of time. This changed in the fourth century, as the empire became Christian, and Christian writers assigned a salvific role to Rome, whose dominion came to be seen as a divinely-ordained tool for the dissemination of Christianity. Subsequent Christian writers would have to explain the vicissitudes of the history of Rome and the Church in the light of God’s plan of history which began at the creation and would culminate in the Last Judgment. One important issue they had to grapple with – and the one that interests us here – is the role that non-Christians (past, present, and future) played in this divinely-authored drama that is human history. Eusebius of Caesarea is in many respects the father of Christian history. Eusebius’ Chronicle is an ambitious and unparalleled effort to write universal history fusing the mythical and historical narratives of widely varying sources from different cultures: Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Greece, etc. Renouncing any effort to blend these sources into a seamless narrative, he rather laid them out in multiple parallel columns, thus emphasizing the synchronicity of people and events in different cultures. While the organization into parallel columns confers legitimacy to all these variant historiographical traditions, a closer look shows that two of the traditions predominate: the Hebrew and the Roman. The Chronicle’s tables commence with the life of Abraham: God’s covenant with Abraham thus is the key foundational event in human history. Moreover, the multiple columns (eight at some places) of the Chronicle progressively dwindle in number, as conquest causes fusion of empires (and of their histories) (Williams & Grafton 2006: 141). Rome is represented first as one column among many, but it progressively comes to dominate the Chronicle as it conquers and absorbs nations. After Octavian’s victory over Antony at Actium, only two columns only remain: Rome and the Jews. The Jewish column abruptly closes with the sack of Jerusalem 3 by Titus and Vespasian in 70: from that point on, Eusebius’ Chronicle has one unrivalled column, that of Rome. Eusebius was a close advisor to Constantine, and this disposition of his Chronicle graphically displays the triumph of a Roman Empire chosen by God as His vehicle for the dissemination of Christianity. The Jews, through their double revolt represented by the rejection of Christ the Messiah and the revolt against Roman power, lose their place in history as they literally disappear from Eusebius’ Chronicle. Eusebius’ traditional Greek learning is subsumed into a system defined and dominated by the twin systems of Jewish and Roman history: while Hebrew tradition provides the key to structuring and understanding the past, the present and future belong to Rome. It would be hard to find a clearer image of the place assigned to Jews in the new Christian Rome; Jerome translated Eusebius’ Chronicle into Latin and it thus became the foundational work of Christian historiography in both Greek and Latin. Whereas early Christians awaited the destruction of Rome which would herald in the new millennium, for Eusebius Constantine’s conversion changed everything. In his Life of Constantine, after describing how the emperor’s had new Christian sanctuaries built in Jerusalem, he writes “this being perhaps that fresh new Jerusalem proclaimed in the prophetic oracles” (Eusebius 1999: 135-6). In other words, the celestial Jerusalem had already descended to earth, thanks to the conversion of the emperor and his transformation of the Lord’s city. The new kingdom that God’s people had fervently awaited had arrived: it was Constantine’s new Christian Empire. Augustine, in his City of God, written a century after Eusebius’ Chronicle, called into question the central role of Rome in Christian history. Writing in response to pagans who claimed that the sack of Rome by the Goths in 410 was caused by the abandonment of the gods of Rome and the adoption of Christianity, Augustine reduced Rome to one empire among many and denied it any superiority or special legitimacy. Roman power, like that of previous empires, was based on the brute force of conquest. Indeed, the peace imposed by Roman emperors was propitious to the spread of Christianity. The city of God is comprised of the elect, whose members lived as peregrini, foreigners, on this earth. Human society is a civitas permixta, a mixed community where the citizens of the earthly and worldly cities are inextricably intertwined. Over and against those who saw Rome’s current tribulations as so many signs of the approaching end, Augustine affirmed that it was impossible to know when the end would come. Those Christians who hoped for the imminent millennium were misled, for the millennium had already been realized: the promised kingdom of God was to be understood spiritually as the reign of the Church (Fredriksen 1999). In various works, Augustine addresses the role of Jews in Christian society (Signer 1999). In the City of God (18.46) he explains that the Jews who put Jesus to death and failed to believe in him were in consequence crushed by the Romans and sent into exile among the nations. Since they are found 4 everywhere, they serve as witnesses, “living letters of the law”: proof in the flesh both of the truth of the scriptures which they preserve in the original Hebrew and of the humiliation meted out by Christ to those of his people who refuse to recognize Him as their Lord. While Christian heretics (such as the Donatists) should be compelled to conform with the Catholic faith, Jews should be allowed to live in peace among Christians. They preserve in error the ancient covenant and through their error, and their subservient place in Christian society, serve as unwitting witnesses to the superior truth of Christianity (Cohen 1999). Moreover, the Jews will, of their own will, massively convert to Christianity at the end of time: this, indeed, will be one of the signs that the end is near. Christian historiography is subsequently marked by two contrasting tendencies: a Eusebian tradition sacralizing Rome (and subsequent Christian kingdoms), and an Augustinian tradition denying the sacral nature of rulership, conceding only that rule by force is a necessary evil. Many medieval authors display a mixture of Eusebian and Augustinian perspectives. Hugh of St. Victor wrote and taught in the Augustinian convent of St. Victor of Paris, one of the key seats of learning in twelfth-century Europe (Sicard 1991). In his De sacramentis, Hugh sets out his theology of history. God, architect of the world and planner of its history, communicates with us through events. “In the divine utterance,” explains Hugh, “not only words but even things have a meaning” (Hugh 1961: 121). Christian history is linear, and Hugh rejects the “errors” of the ancient philosophers who saw time as cyclical (Sicard 1991: 135). Between the two cosmic dramas of creation and apocalypse, Hugh situates two major human dramas: the fall, a unique event in which man lost his privileged place in the universe that God created, and the restoration or redemption, which is human race’s slow progress towards that perfection which it had once lost. Hugh follows the traditional division of history into six periods which had been prefigured in the six days of the creation. But he also adds another traditional division into three ages. First “before the law” (from Adam to Moses) is the age in which humanity is ruled by “natural law”, as dictated by human reason. Under natural law humanity progressed and became ready to receive God’s law through Moses, marking the beginning of the second age (from Moses to Christ), “under the law” (even though most of humanity, ignoring Mosaic Law, still followed natural law). Finally, humanity progresses to the point where it is ready to receive redemption through Christ’s incarnation, which marks the beginning of the third and final age “under grace”. In this view of history, the present and the future belong to Christianity, while non-Christians follow legitimate but superseded laws. This distinction between three laws is taken up by jurists, in particular in the twelfth-century Decretum attributed to Gratian, which is the foundation text of medieval canon law in Latin Europe. While Hugh had emphasized the chronological progression between the three laws, Gratian insists on the fundamental identity and compatibility between them. God created us with 5 reason, which enables all humans to understand the fundamental notions of justice that make up natural law: the lex gentium (law of nations), to the extent that it respects universal natural law, is thus completely compatible with Christian law which subsumes it. This is in part Gratian’s response to the renewed study of Roman law, which he in this way both legitimizes and subordinates by incorporating it into Christian law. What the Law of Moses added to natural law was mystica, strictures unable to be perceived through reason alone, such as the prohibition of pork or the injunction of circumcision. The law of Christ affirms and transforms that of Moses, for Jesus himself had affirmed “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” [Matt. 5:17]. Hence, for Gratian, when the Church replaces circumcision with baptism, this is not an abrogation of the law; it is merely the fruit of understanding the law in its new, spiritual sense, rather than in the literal, carnal sense (Chodorow 1972; Southern 1995: 264-318). The law of Moses is thus subsumed in and superseded by the law of Christ: this is a trope found in countless texts, by theologians, chroniclers and others, throughout the Middle Ages. It finds vivid expression in iconographic representations of the Synagogue and the Church. Outside the south transept portal of the cathedral of Strasbourg, for example (c. 1220), Synagogue is presented as a blindfolded young woman, her head hanging down, with a broken lance in her right hand (sign of her lost power) and the tablets of the law of Moses which seem to be slipping out of her left hand, sign that she still is clinging weakly to the old law. Over and against this figure of blindness is the Church triumphant, a proud crowned woman with a piercing gaze, holding the symbols of her covenant with Christ: the cross in her right hand and the chalice of the Eucharist in the left (Rowe 2011).This vision of Judaism bowed and subservient pervades theological and legal texts of the period (Sapir Abulafia 2011). Throughout Europe, communities of Jews lived in the cities (and in some areas in the countryside) and were often played important roles in trade and, increasingly, in finance. Various European rulers issued laws guaranteeing safety and often some degree of legal autonomy to these Jewish communities. Pope Callixtus II (1119-24) issued a bull Sicut Judaeis, which offered specific protections to Jews living within Christian society. Callixtus’ letter does not survive, nor does that of his successor Eugenius III (1145-53), but both are referred to by Pope Alexander III, who issues his own bull Sicut Judaeis sometime between 1159 and 1181, in which he prohibits Christians from forcing Jews to convert or imposing penalties on those Jews who do convert. He further bars Christians from injuring Jews or taking money from them, disrupting Jewish festivals, exacting additional services, or desecrating Jewish cemeteries to extort money.i Later popes were to reissue this bull, sometimes with minor variations. Dozens of the legal texts compile by Gratian in his Decretum provide concrete examples of the subordinate but protected role of assigned to Jews in Christian society. While the Church claimed no 6 jurisdiction over Jews, it did attempt to regulate and limit Christian interaction with Jews, prohibiting Christians from sharing meals with Jews or having sexual intercourse with them – much less marry them. Jews were not to own Christian slaves (a rule later interpreted as a ban on the employment of Christian servants); they were not to exercise authority over Christians.ii In the judicial landscape of medieval Europe, multiple systems of justice overlapped (and sometimes were in outright rivalry with each other): seigniorial courts, royal courts, municipal courts, ecclesiastical courts, and rabbinical courts (which treated disputes within the Jewish communities). In theory, Jews were prohibited from bearing witness against Christians or exercising any jurisdiction or authority over them: this principal is found in Roman law, in canon law and in many texts of civic law. Yet in fact, throughout Europe we find numerous laws that allow Jews to bear witness against Christians in disputes concerning them and that allow disputes between Jewish and Christian individuals to be judged by a mixed group of Christians and Jews. As in Rome and Byzantium, these restrictive laws are often reissued and reiterated, suggesting that they were enforced only sporadically. 2. THE MIDDLE AGES AND EARLY MODERNITY A. Irruption of the Saracens into the Christian scheme of history, 7th-13th centuries If Jews and Judaism play a large part in the Christian scheme of history, Muslims and Islam are, at least at first glance, completely absent. Indeed while Islam or the Quran was often referred to as lex sarracenorum (the law of the Saracens) or lex Mahumeti (the law of Muhammad), there was never any question that it could represent a legitimate law: there was no room for a fourth phase of history after the triumph of Christianity. While, for many canon lawyers, the rule of Muslim princes could be legitimate to the extent that they respected natural law, the lex Sarracenorum itself was at best a hodgepodge of Jewish, pagan and heretical elements mixed with Christian truths. Medieval Christian writers did not speak of “Islam” or “Muslims”, words unknown (with very few exceptions) in Western languages before the sixteenth century (Tolan 2002: xv). Instead, Christian writers refer to Muslims by using ethnic terms: Arabs, Turks, Moors, Saracens. Often they call them “Ishmaelites,” descendants of the biblical Ishmael, or Hagarenes (from Hagar, Ishmael’s mother). Ishmael, according to Genesis, was Abraham’s eldest son, born of Hagar, handmaid of his wife, Sarai (subsequently Sarah). The angel of the Lord who announced to Hagar the birth of her child tells her “he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand will be against him; and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren.” (Gen. 16:12). Sarah later bears a child, Isaac; when Isaac is weaned his parents have a feast, and Sarah sees Ishmael mocking his younger brother, she tells Abraham “Cast out this bondwoman and her son: for the son of this bondwoman shall not be heir with my 7 son” (21:10). God tells Abraham to heed his wife, consoling him by announcing that “of the son of the bondwoman will I make a nation.” This is the same message God sends to Hagar in despair in the desert. Indeed, Ishmael lived to father twelve sons, “twelve princes according to their nations” who “dwelt from Havilah unto Shur, that is before Egypt, as thou goest toward Assyria.” (Gen. 25:16-18). The scheme of twelve tribes of Ishmael is no doubt meant to correspond to the twelve tribes of Israel, and in the list of Ishmael’s sons one finds names that correspond to tribes or peoples, but also to towns. It seems that the biblical term Ishmaelite was first used to refer to small groups in the Transjordan, and later expanded to designate a wide range of nomadic peoples living south and east of Palestine (Retsö 2003: 220-29). It is a band of Ishmaelite merchants who buy Joseph in the desert from his brothers and who resell him in Egypt (Gen. 37-9). The Christian allegorical interpretation of the story of Abraham and his two sons begins in the New Testament itself, in Paul’s letter to the Galatians. The two sons signify the two covenants: the first, born of the flesh from Hagar (which Paul associates with “mount Sinai in Arabia”), is the covenant of bondage; the second, born of the spirit from Sarah, associated with Jerusalem, is the covenant of freedom (Gal. 4:22-31). While learned treatises often refer to Ishmaelites, the far commoner term in the Middle Ages was Saracen (Sarracenus in Latin, Sarrasin in Old French). The term, of obscure origin, was used by Greek and Latin writers of late antiquity to refer to Arab-speaking tribes of the Arabian Peninsula. (Tolan 2012a) Eusebius seems to be the first author to treat the terms Saracen and Ishmaelite as essentially synonymous: he mentions Σαρακηνοί in several of his works, presenting them as the descendants of Ishmael.But it is Jerome who develops a vivid and negative image of Ishmaelite/Saracen marauders. The Angel’s words to Hagar, that Ishmael would be a “wild man” that “his hand will be against every man,” are fulfilled, for Jerome, in the acts of his descendants: the Ishmaelite marauders who attack towns and monasteries. In his commentary on Ezekiel, Jerome mentions the Midianites, Ishmaelites and Hagarenes, saying that the latter “now call themselves Saracens, falsely usurping the name of Sarah, thus appearing to be born of a free lady.” The Agareni are the descendants of Hagar; they can also be called Ishmaelites, descendants of Ishmael. As for the term “Saracens”, Jerome gives it a polemical etymology: these descendants of the illegitimate child of a slave-girl want to usurp the rights of the free-born descendants of the patriarch Isaac. This etymology seems to be Jerome’s own invention; it is destined to a long posterity. Two centuries before the birth of Muhammad, Jerome proffers a polemical image of Saracens as deserts marauders, enemies of civilization and Christendom, who seek to usurp the heritage of Isaac. He has little to say about their religion: he at one point mentions that they worship Venus, yet elsewhere describes how St. Hilarion had converted some of them to Christianity (Tolan 2012a). 8 Christian chroniclers in Latin Europe, when contemplating the meteoric rise of the “Saracens” in the seventh and eighth centuries of the Christian era, turned quite naturally to the authorities they held most reliable: the bible and the writings of Church fathers such as Jerome. Bede, monk at the Northumbrian monastery of Jarrow in the early eighth century, had heard of the Saracen’s conquests in the East, their subjection of Africa, and their raids into Spain and Gaul. He turned to Genesis and to Jerome’s commentary on Genesis and concluded that “Now, [Ishmael’s] hand is against all men, and all men’s hands are against him, to such an extent that the Saracens hold the whole breadth of Africa in their sway, and they also hold the greatest part of Asia and some part of Europe, hateful and hostile to all” (Bede 2008: 278-9). For Bede, as for Jerome, the words that the angel spoke to Hagar bear important meaning not only for comprehending biblical history, but for understanding eternal truths about the descendants of Ishmael, the Saracens, whose ferocity is clearly announced by the angel: it is an immutable characteristic of a clearly-identifiable people. While for modern historians (not to mention medieval Muslim writers) the rise of Islam marks a clear break in the history of the “Saracens”, from the biblically-informed vision of Christian history, that transformation is imperceptible: Bede’s Saracens are essentially the same as Jerome’s. Hence it should come to no surprise that many European authors, knowing little or nothing about Islam, portrayed Saracens in the guise of pagan idolaters: the more colorful descriptions, in crusade chronicles and epic poems, show them worshipping a panoply of idols, chief among them “Mahumet”. The epic poems describe fierce battles between Saracens and Christians and often culminate in the destruction of the Saracen’s idols. In the Chanson de Roland, the Saracens themselves, in a fit of pique after losing to the Christian army, topple the idols of their gods; the Christian knights, as they invest the city of Saragossa, finish the job off by smashing with hammers the remaining idols they find in the “sinagoges” and “mahumeries”. This image of the pagan Saracen lives on in the Chansons de geste, liturgical drama, saints’ lives, and in various Latin chronicles, until the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries, assuring the Christian readers of the truth of their own religion (Tolan 2002: 105-34). But most authors who wrote about the “lex Sarracenorum” portrayed it as a deviant, heretical form of Christianity. We find this already in John of Damascus, an eighth-century Christian who served in the administration of the Umayyad Caliphate in Damascus and subsequently became a monk in the Palestinian monastery of Mar Saba, where he wrote an encyclopedic exposition and refutation of the 100 heresies that endangered Christendom: the 100th was the heresy “of the Ishmaelites”. The proponents of this heretical doctrine, John explains, deny the divinity of Christ and the reality of his crucifixion. They accuse Christians of idolatry when they venerate the cross, but they themselves practice idolatry when they kiss the black stone of the Kaaba (Tolan 2002: 50-59). 9 Theophanes composed his Chronigraphica in Constantinople around 815 (Tolan 2002: 64-6). Theophanes claims that the Jews had first flocked to Muhammad, thinking he was their long-awaited Messiah; when they saw him eating camel (a forbidden food), they realized their error, yet some of them stayed with him out of fear “and taught him illicit things directed against us Christians.” Theophanes describes Muhammad’s marriage to Khadīja and his travels in Palestine where he sought out the writings of Jews and Christians. Muhammad had an epileptic seizure, and at this Khadīja became distressed; he soothed her by telling her: “I keep seeing a vision of a certain angel called Gabriel, and being unable to bear his sight, I faint and fall down.” Khadīja sought the advice of “a certain monk living there, a friend of hers (who had been exiled for his depraved doctrine)”; this heretical monk seems to be based on the Christian figures Bahira and Wariqa of Muslim tradition. The monk told Khadīja that Muhammad was indeed a prophet to whom the Angel Gabriel came in visions. Theophanes recounts that Muhammad promised to all who fell fighting the enemy a paradise full of sensual delights: eating, drinking, and sex. He said “many other things full of profligacy and stupidity.” A far more learned and elaborate polemic (and one which was to have a far greater impact in Latin Europe), was the Risālat al-Kindī, written by a ninth- or tenth-century Baghdad Christian (Tartar 1985; Tolan 2002: 60-66) The Risālat al-Kindī is both polemical and apologetical: it attacks Muslim doctrine and provides a defense of key Christian doctrines that would be distasteful to Muslims. Its author defends the Trinity while affirming God’s unity; far be it from a true Christian to say that “God is the third of three.” Does not God, in the Bible, refer to himself in the plural? God has many attributes, he asserts, two of which are eternal: life and knowledge. Life corresponds to Christ the Word (λoγός, kalima), knowledge to the Holy Spirit (πvευµα, rūh); thus the Trinity can be proven from a reflection on God’s nature. The Christian author makes a concerted attack against Muhammad, in order to prove that he was no prophet. He recounts Muhammad’s biography in as acerbic and derogatory fashion as possible, showing all the while a good knowledge of the Quran and early Muslim historiography. He notes that Muhammad had first been an idolater and had enriched himself through trade and through his marriage with Khadīja. Wishing to rule over his tribe, he decided to pretend to be a prophet; his companions, gullible nomads who knew nothing of the signs of prophecy, believed him. He and his followers enriched themselves through war and pillaging. These acts, for the Christian writer, are enough to prove that Muhammad was not a prophet; the failures of some of the expeditions (especially the battle of Uhud) even more so: a true prophet would have foreseen (and avoided) defeat. This Christian monk is particularly shocked by Muhammad’s sexual life, which he attacks with gusto. Muhammad himself, he says, claimed to have the sexual powers of forty men. He presents a catalogue of Muhammad’s fifteen wives, dwelling on the scandals surrounding Zaynab and ‘Â’isha. He criticizes the practice of ablutions, Ramadan fasts, the pilgrimage rites at Mecca. This work circulated among Arabic-speaking Christians in 10 Spain. Twelfth-century Latin polemicist Petrus Alfonsi used it in his Dialogues against the Jews, which for good measure contains a chapter attacking Islam, largely derived from the Risālat al-Kindī. Peter, abbot of Cluny, commissioned a translation of the work, along with the Quran and other works, in 1142; this Latin translation accompanied the Quran translation in manuscripts and early printed editions. We find a similar portrayal of Islam as a heretical deviant of Christianity in the works of various Latin authors of the twelfth century. Anastasius the Librarian translated Theophanes Chronographica into Latin in the 870s; this translation was one of the few widely-available sources about Muhammad in Western Europe before the twelfth century: supplying information, for example, in the monastic chronicles of Sigebert de Gembloux and Hugh of Fleury (Kedar 1984: 33-5, 86-9). Several twelfth-century Latin authors created more elaborate and more colorful portraits of Muhammad as a wily pseudo-prophet, founder of a heretical sect: Adelphus, Embrico of Mainz, Gautier de Compiègne, Guibert of Nogent. (Tolan 2002, ch. 6). While the details of these polemical biographies of Muhammad differ from author to author, the portrait they sketch is essentially the same. A heretical Christian monk takes the young camel-driver Muhammad under his wing, corrupts his spirit, and plots to make him leader of the Arabs by having him pretend to be a prophet. In order to convince the people of his divine mission, Muhammad performs a number of bogus miracles: he hides pots of milk and honey in the desert, then claims that God had placed them there. He trains a dove to eat grains from his ear and affirms that it is the angel Gabriel come to speak with him. He writes a book of law which he places on the horns of a bull; when the bull erupts in the midst of the assembled people, they acclaim him as a divine messenger. The revealed law encourages its adepts to indulge in polygamy and incest: the amassed people accept these injunctions with great enthusiasm. When at last the false prophet dies, he is laid in an iron coffin, which is placed in a temple with magnets in the ceiling: the coffin floats in mid-air, which the Arabs take as a sure sign of his divine election. These authors make the prophet of Islam into a colorful trickster, who through clever ruses manages to trick a multitude into following his law. The goal is not only to denigrate Islam and its prophet, but also to explain its successes, which would be the result of its debauched morals and of the false miracles. B. Jews and Muslims in Christendom: thirteenth to fifteenth centuries In 1215, Pope Innocent III presided the fourth Lateran Council, which sought to promote an ambitious agenda of Church reform, launch a new crusade to recover Jerusalem, and affirm the spiritual and temporal authority of the pope. The council reaffirmed a number of principles meant to govern the relations between Christians and non-Christians, here specifically noting that these laws applied both to Jews and to “pagans” (i.e., Muslims) who lived in Christian territories. First, they should be able to exercise no authority over Christians. They are prohibited from publicly mocking Christians during Holy 11 Week. Those who convert to Christianity are not to be allowed to return to their original religion. One of the canons requires Jews and Saracens to wear distinctive dress, in order that they may be easily recognized so that Christians may avoid illicit sexual relations with them. While the canon does not state what their specific dress should be, three years later, King Henry III requires English Jews to wear, on their outer garments, a white badge in the shape of the tablets of the law that Moses had received on Mt. Sinai.iii Innocent III showed particular zeal in policing the boundaries between religious communities and in prohibiting what he saw as illicit relations between Christians and Jews. In a series of letters to King Philip II of France and to various French prelates, the pope complains that the King and his officials not only permit Jews to practice usury, they use coercion to help Jews collect their debts. Moreover, Jews in France employ Christian servants, including wet nurses, in their homes; Jews sell to Christians meat or wine which they do not deem fit for their own consumption. Worse, some of them openly mock Christian practice (veneration for the cross, Easter festivities) and even kill unsuspecting Christians. Innocent indeed reaffirmed the papal protection of Jewish communities when he reissued the Sicut iudeis: yet he ominously added that that protection would be offered only to those Jews “who have not presumed to plot against the Christian Faith” (Grayzel 1966: 95). Innocent’s successors continued to reissue the bull into the fifteenth century. Yet by the thirteenth century, the place of Jews was more and more endangered in many parts of Europe. It is beyond the scope of this essay to relate the increasing incidents of anti-Jewish violence beginning in the late eleventh century (when crusaders attacked Jewish communities in the Rhineland), or the accusations that Jews desecrated the host or ritually murdered Christians. These stories have been told many times, and there is considerable scholarly debate about the causes and dynamics of these developments. Suffice it to say that a combination of crusading rhetoric, deep resentment concerning Jewish moneylending, and missionary efforts of the new mendicant orders created volatile situations. One of the consequences was a string of expulsions from different European polities: Bologna in 1178, the French royal domaine in 1182, Britanny in 1240, Perugia in 1279; Gascony in 1288, Anjou in 1290, France in 1306 and again in 1394, and so on into the following centuries. There were also expulsions of Muslims from Sicily (1220) from Lucera (1300) and from various areas of Christian Spain. Some of these expulsions were only temporary, some remained limited and local. In 1492, Isabel of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon expelled the Jews from Spain; the expulsion of the Muslims was to follow several years later. Jews were subsequently expelled from Portugal, Provence, and various Italian cities. The result was a massive migration of Jews towards the Maghreb, the Ottoman Empire, the Netherlands and Central and Eastern Europe. There was no longer an Augustinian consensus that Jews should be allowed 12 to live subordinate in Christendom: Where Jewish communities exist, they do so at the prerogative, if not the whim, of Christian rulers. The debate over whether these rulers should allow Jews to reside in their realms was complicated by the eruption of the war of religions. C. Christian history as seen in the sixteenth century: Martin Luther In the writings of Martin Luther, we find both a profound continuity with medieval writings on Judaism and on Islam and a major reorientation, as Luther tries to understand them in relation both to “true” (reformed) Christianity and to the errors of the papists. Luther is one of the sixteenth-century Christian authors who thought and wrote most extensively on Judaism and Islam, and his work was of course to have a profound impact on subsequent Protestant thought and was in the twentieth century cited with approbation by Nazi ideologues (Probst 2012). While Luther wrote extensively on both rival faiths, his concerns were rarely those of a missionary attempting to convert Jews or Muslims. His sought rather to explain God’s scheme of history to his readers and to protect them from the dangers and temptations offered by the devil, in the form of Jewish, Muslim and papist doctrines and practices. While Luther’s view of the place of Jews in Christian scheme of history is in many respects the same as that established over a thousand years earlier by Church fathers from Eusebius to Augustine, it is distinguished by two essential elements: first a keen apocalyptic sense that the end of history is near, and second a conviction, in his early works, that if the Jews have yet to see the light of Christian truth, the fault lies not so much with the Jews themselves but with the papacy and clergy who have failed both to preach the Gospel to the Jews and to show through their life and works a true example of Christian piety (Kaufmann 2006). In his That Jesus Christ was born a Jew (LW 45:199-229; Daß Jesus Christus ein geborner Jude sei, WA 11, 314-36), Luther presents rather standard Christological exegetical interpretations of key Old testament passages: Isaiah 7:14 (on the Virgin birth), Gen. 49:10-12 (“The scepter shall not depart from Judah . . . until the shiloh comes”, which proves for Luther that the Shiloh, or Messiah has already come), and the seventy weeks prophesied by Daniel 9:24-27, which, according to Luther’s complex calculations, show that the Messiah was born 1500 years previously. None of these arguments are new, yet Luther thinks that good (Protestant) Christians can convince Jews where “monks and papists” have failed miserably. If Jews have not wanted to convert, it is largely because they have been so persecuted by Christians: if the Apostles had treated the Gentiles so poorly, none of them would have converted either. We treat them like dogs, refuse their commerce, force them into the base profession of usury, make absurd accusations against them. “If I had been a Jew and had seen such dolts and blockheads govern and teach the Christian faith, I would sooner have become a hog than a Christian” (p. 200). 13 Yet in later works, Luther’s attitude towards Jews hardened, perhaps because he realized that they were no likelier to be convinced by Protestant arguments than they had been by those of Catholics. He also came to see Jews as the Devil’s agents who sought to weaken the faith of Christians. Around 1538, Luther composed his Against the Sabbatarians, letter to a good friend (LW 47: p. 65-98; Wider die Sabbather an einen guten Freund, WA 50: 312-337). Who these Sabbatarians actually were, what they believed and practiced, and even whether they existed have been the objects of scholarly debate. For Luther, Jews, “making inroads ... with their venom and their doctrine” (p. 65) have induced Christians to undergo circumcision, have taught them that the Messiah has not yet appeared, and have led them to believe that the Jewish law is eternal and that it should be adopted by gentiles. Gone is the optimism he showed in That Jesus Christ was born a Jew; if even good Christians can make few inroads with the stubborn Jews, that should come as no surprise: they refused to listen to their own prophets. The chief culprits are the rabbis, who for centuries have taught erroneous and absurd interpretations of the Law of Moses, given as they are to “babbling and lying” (p. 78) such that “If I were Moses, I would give my pupils, the Jews, a good box on the ears” (p. 81-2). Luther aims to establish two key truths in this tract: that God inflicted on the Jews the current “Roman” exile, which began with the destruction of the temple in 70 AD, as punishment for horrible sins, as the rabbis themselves acknowledge: what they do not acknowledge was that this sin was the refusal to recognize Jesus Christ as their long-awaited Messiah. Luther then seeks to show that the Jews are no longer are Jews: since the destruction of the temple and the beginning of their current exile, they are no longer able to perform key stipulations of the law, involving the temple and the priesthood. Sure, they point to rules they do still follow, for example those concerning dietary restrictions. But it is as if someone whose house had burned down proffered scattered bricks and charred timbers as proof that his house was still standing. No longer optimistic that Jews can be convinced of Christian truth, Luther provided his Christian readers with proofs of their error. For Luther, Jews sought to draw Christians into their corrupt faith, either fully or partially, and in some cases succeeded: this was a clear sign that their presence in Protestant Europe, even as a numerically insignificant minority, was dangerous to the faith. Hence in his later works Luther comes to the conclusion that Jews should be expelled by Christian princes in order to protect the true Church. The tone is particularly virulent in On the Jews and their lies (LW 47-137-306 ; Von den Juden und ihren Lügen, WA 53, 417–552), a long and rambling diatribe written in response to a Jewish anti-Christian tract which Luther had read. Luther lambasts the Jews for their triple arrogance: they show undue pride in their birth, in their circumcision, and in the fact that they received the Law from God on Mount Sinai. This pride leads them to despise the Goyim, whom they believe it is legal to rob, cheat and kill. Whereas in earlier works Luther had dismissed the hostile stories of how Jews poisoned wells and killed Christian children, he now asserts that these stories and worse are 14 probably true. They curse us Christians in their synagogues every Saturday, Luther asserts, and affirm that our Lord is the son of a whore. “Learn from this, dear Christian, what you are doing if you permit the blind Jews to mislead you”, he warns his reader: “Be on your guard against the Jews” (p. 172) Beyond warning his reader, Luther has seven quite concrete proposals. “First, to set fire to their synagogues or schools” (p. 268). Second, to raze and destroy their houses. Third, to take away prayer books and Talmuds. Fourth, to forbid their rabbis to teach, under pain of death. Fifth, to abolish safe conduct: since they have no honest business to conduct, let them stay at home (Luther seems to have forgotten that their homes were to be razed). Six, prohibit usury. And seventh, “I recommend putting a flail, an ax, a hoe, a spade, a distaff, or a spindle into the hands of young, strong Jews and Jewesses and letting them earn their bread in the sweat of their brow, as was imposed on the children of Adam” (272). In an age of vehement anti-Jewish polemics, Luther’s stand out as particularly violent. Luther’s assessment of Muslims (or “the Turks”, as he invariably calls them) is in a similar way based on his apocalyptical sense of history with the pope as the principal ally of Antichrist (Francisco 2007). In 1518, in defence of his 95 theses, Luther affirmed that the Turk served as “the lash and rod of God”; those who seek to fight the Turk rather than combating their own iniquities oppose God’s will (Explanations of the Ninety-Five Theses, LW 31: p. 83-252 (citation p. 92; WA 1: 525-628). God is punishing Christians for their sins, notably those of the corrupt church: the way to stop the Turkish threat is not to muster armies, but to make penance. Luther develops this theme in greater detail in 1528, when, in the aftermath of Sulayman the Magnificent’s annexation of much of Hungary, there was a real risk of large swaths of the German lands falling under Ottoman dominion. While Luther acknowledges that the emperor has the right and duty to defend his empire against the Turk, he affirms in his On war against the Turk (1529) that the most effective means of protection remain repentance and prayer in order to “take the rod out of God’s hand” (LW 46: 161-205 (citation p. 170); Vom Kriege wider den Türcken WA 30 III: 107-48). Luther’s message is the same in his Appeal for Prayer against the Turk of 1541: “The Turk, you see, is our ‘schoolmaster.’ He has to discipline and teach us to fear God and to pray. Otherwise we will do what we have been doing – rot in sin and complacency” (LW 43: 219-41 (citation p. 224); Vermahnung zum Gebet wider den Türkcen WA 51: 585-625). Just as the Israelites refused to listen to their prophets and needed to be whipped by the king of Babylon, so do Christians need the chastisement of the Turk. Beyond assigning to the “Turk” the role of scourge or schoolmaster, Luther struggled to understand the place of Islam in God’s plan: he sought out material on the rites and beliefs of the Muslims and on their attitudes towards Christians. One of his principal sources was a veritable best-seller in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: George of Hungary’s Book on the Rites and Customs of the Turks. George had been taken captive in 1438, at the age of 16, and taken to Istanbul, from which he managed to 15 escape twenty years later. His treatise provides a vivid description of the social and religious life of the Ottoman capital. Luther himself wrote a Latin preface to the 1530 reedition of George’s treatise, in which he pays particular attention to the meticulousness with which Muslims practice their rites: The religion of the Turks or Muhammad is far more splendid in ceremonies . . . than ours, even including that of the religious or all the clerics. The modesty and simplicity of their food, clothing, dwellings, and everything else, as well as the fasts, prayers, and common gatherings of the people . . . are nowhere seen among us – or rather it is impossible for our people to be persuaded to them. Furthermore, which of our monks, be it a Carthusian . . . or a Benedictine, is not put to shame by the miraculous and wondrous abstinence and discipline among their religious? Our religious are mere shadows when compared to them, and our people clearly profane when compared to theirs. Not even true Christians, not Christ himself, not the apostles or prophets ever exhibited so great a display. This is the reason why many persons so easily depart from faith in Christ for Muhammadanism and adhere to it so tenaciously. I sincerely believe that no papist, monk, cleric, or their equal in faith would be able to remain in their faith if they should spend three days among the Turks (Henrich & Boyce 1996: 259). In other words, the Turks are better Catholics than the papists themselves: convinced that their merit is reflected in their works, they excel in charity, fasting, devotion and prayer. If one is measured by works, the Turks outshine the papists. Proof, for Luther, that Catholics are doomed, more even than the Turks, for placing their hope in ceremonies, indulgences, fasting and the like, rather than in faith. Or, as he will put it in his Appeal for Prayer against the Turks: “the Pope’s devil . . . is bigger than the Turk’s devil” (LW 43: 227). Luther uses the pious Turk to bash (literally and figuratively) the dissolute papist. Luther also sought to counter those Germans who admired Muslims for their piety and justice and who would prefer the Sultan’s dominion to the oppression at the hands of their compatriots. “Some praise the Turk’s government because he allows everyone to believe what he will so long as he [the Sultan] remains the temporal lord” (On War against the Turk, LW 43: 175). “Since now,” he writes in 1530, “we have the Turk and his religion at our very doorstep, our people must be warned lest, either moved by the splendour of the Turkish religion and the external appearance of their customs, or offended by the meagre display of our own faith or the deformity of our customs, they deny their Christ and follow Muhammad” (Henrich & Boyce 1996: 260). This fear pervades Luther’s writings on Islam: fear not merely of conquest of the German lands by the Ottoman armies, but – what was of course much worse for Luther – of the attraction that Turkish culture and Muslim religion would exercise on the Sultan’s German subjects, leading them to convert to Islam, or rather, as Luther puts it, to apostatize, to “become Turks”. 16 For these two reasons, then – as a stick to bash papists and as a means to discourage apostasy – Luther sought, starting in the 1520s, to learn more about Islam. He turned, quite naturally, to the works of medieval scholars and polemicists who had confronted Islam from the twelfth to the early fourteenth centuries. In the 1520s, he came across a Latin manuscript of the Contra legem Saracenorum an early fourteenth-century tract by fourteenth-century Dominican missionary Riccoldo da Montecroce. In 1542, the Basel city council jailed two publishers who wanted to print, in Latin, a collection of texts about Islam including Robert of Ketton’s twelfth-century Latin translation of the Quran and Riccoldo’s Contra legem. The city fathers proclaimed that it was dangerous to publish the “fables and heresies” of the Qur’ān. Luther intervened to convince the council that the Quran should be printed since there was no better way to combat the Turks than to permit everyone to see for themselves Muhammad’s “lies and fables”. The Quran was published the following year, with a preface by Luther. 1542 was also the year in which Luther published his own German translation of Riccoldo’s Contra legem Saracenorum. It is striking that when it comes to understanding the role of Islam in history, Luther and his contemporaries can do no better than to study, publish, and translate the work of Catholic medieval authors who confronted the same problems before them. 3. SECULARIZATION OF EUROPEAN SOCIETY AND CHANGING NOTIONS OF JUDAISM AND ISLAM A. Towards religious relativism? The cornerstone of the Medieval Roman Church’s vision of history was the Church’s own key role in God’s plan: only through and by the Church could humanity, collectively and individually, obtain salvation. “Extra ecclesiam nulla salus”, “there is no salvation outside the Church”, is a doctrine reiterated by a number of medieval popes, notably Innocent III in 1215 and Boniface VIII in 1302. Thirteenthcentury Parisian theologian William of Auvergne devoted a full chapter of his De fide et legibus to the refutation of the idea, which he attributes to Muhammad, that “everyone is to be saved in his faith or law or sect, as long as he believes it to be good and from God and does it to please him”. Clearly contact with Jews and Muslims created doubts among some Christians as to the universal nature of the Catholic Church, doubts which ecclesiastics sought to combat. (Tolan 2012b) In the sixteenth century, reports arrived in Europe of the peoples of the Americas and of their religious practices. Were these the lost tribes of Israel, whose primitive Judaism had degenerated? Or “pagans” untouched by biblical religion? If these people had never been evangelized, how could a just God justify extra ecclesiam nulla salus? This, combined with the wars of religion that split Europe, raised serious doubts about the universality of the Church and its mission. Inquisitorial records from Spain, from 17 Portugal, and from the two countries’ American empires record many cases of people, at all levels of wealth and education, expressing such doubts or affirming that good Muslims, Jews, Lutherans or Indians could achieve salvation (Schwartz 2008). Among European intellectuals, these issues provoked the emergence of new approaches to the study of religion (Stroumsa 2010). While the proponents of these methods were often deeply committed religious, some of them showed a keen desire to understand the rival religions per se and not simply through polemical lenses. Foremost in this effort were Jesuit missionaries such as José de Acosta, whose Historia naturál y morál de las Indias (1590) offered a rich description of religious practices of various groups of native Americans, practices which he indeed saw as snares of the devil, yet tried to understand in part by comparing them to those of ancient Israel, Christianity, and pagan Greece and Rome (Stroumsa 2010: 16-18). Or Matteo Ricci and his fellow Jesuit missionaries to China in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, who adapted to the norms of the Confucian elite in order to gain acceptance from them. These Jesuits sought, like their Dominican and Franciscan rivals, to evangelize non-Christians. Yet they sought to do so through a deep and to a large extent sympathetic understanding of the language, culture, beliefs and practices of those they sought to convert. Yet their experience posed serious questions about the very nature of religion: was there a universal “natural” religion, of which Judaism, Christianity and Islam were simply historically specific manifestations? What was the purpose of religion in a wellfunctioning society? These developments coincided with the emergence of modern philology, which scholars now turned on the Bible itself and, subsequently, on other foundational texts of the world’s principal religions. What are the consequences of this for the place of Judaism and Islam in Christian law and history? There were, of course, continuities with medieval polemical strategies, as we have seen in the case of Luther; yet there were also efforts to understand contemporary, postbiblical Judaism on its own terms, if only the better to missionize Jews. Such is the case of Protestant scholar Johannes Buxtorf, who published his Judenschul in German in 1603 and then in Latin as Synagoga judaica in 1604. Buxtorf provoked a response by Venetian Rabbi Leone da Modena, whose I riti degli Ebrei (1637) was the first presentation of Jewish practice by a Jew for a non-Jewish audience (Stroumsa 2010: 41). Judaism plays a key and ambivalent role in the emergence of European atheist and anti-religious discourse in the Enlightenment. Dutch Jews of the seventeenth century wrote polemics against Christianity; since these Jewish communities were dominated by Portuguese conversos, nominal Christians who returned to Judaism (and who were unschooled in the Talmud), their arguments focused on undermining the Christian reading of the Old Testament, in particular by pointing out that Jesus did not at all correspond to the Messiah that the Jews awaited. While these texts were written for a Jewish 18 audience, they found eager readers among disaffected Christians (Popkin 1992) . The caricature of Jesus found in the medieval Toledot Yeshu, a mocking, hostile biography of Jesus known to various enlightenment authors (including Voltaire), is similar to the disparaging image of Muhammad in Christian polemics. The anonymous author of the Traité des trois imposteurs (1719) uses these polemical legends to present religion as essentially a means for a priestly elite to deceive and control the masses (Anderson 1997; Berti, et al. 1996). But the biggest charlatans were the three great impostors Moses, Jesus and Muhammad. Moses, a magician trained in Egypt, was a despot and impostor. Jesus was no better: he managed to convince a bunch of imbeciles that his mother was a virgin and his father the Holy Spirit. Muhammad is presented as a false prophet according to the traditions of medieval Christian polemics. What is new is that the author presents Moses and Jesus as impostors alongside Muhammad. Indeed, polemical attacks on Judaism and on the Catholic Church sometimes took the form of learned treatises on comparative religion. Henry de Boulainvillier, in his Abregé de l’histoire universelle jusqu’à l’Exode, compares early Judaism to contemporary religions of Egypt and China, and concludes that the early Jews showed more superstition and ignorance (Sutcliffe 2003: 110-11). In his Life of Mohamed (1730), he presents the prophet as a divinely-inspired reformer who spread knowledge of the One God as far as the Oxus. Muhammad preserved all that was best in Christianity and abolished its vices: the cult of relics and icons, and the grasping greed and inordinate power of superstitious monks and clergy (Tolan 2010). Boulainvillier’s works were influential: among his readers were Gibbon and Voltaire. Gibbon devotes a long chapter of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to the life of the prophet and the Islamic conquests. The impostor figure, indeed, has not disappeared: Muhammad “consulted the spirit of fraud or enthusiasm, whose abode is not in the heavens, but in the mind of the prophet.” (Gibbon 1932: 80) Yet he affirms that “the creed of Mohammed is free from suspicion or ambiguity; and the Quran is a glorious testimony to the unity of God.” (Gibbon 1932: 82). He echoes Boulainvilliers (whom he cites frequently) in praising Muhammad for instituting tithes for the benefit of the poor. Even in his death, the prophet showed himself worthy of emulation, a model of humility and penance. The violence of the Quran, often the object of Christian polemicists, pales in comparison with that of the Torah. Gibbon’s portrayal of Muhammad is on the whole sympathetic, though tinged with condescension. Muhammad is a pious man and a brilliant leader, who gave his people a unity and purpose that allowed them to subject half the world to their rule. Yet his Arabs and Muhammad are proud and simple people: fierce warriors, emotional, impulsive, lustful, not prone to reflection. Gibbon explains this character as the result of the influence of climate and environment. B. The emancipation of the Jews 19 While Jewish communities continued to live, and in some cases to thrive, in Central and Eastern Europe, they did so as communities. In the multireligious, multiethnic empires of the Ottomans and Habsburgs, Jews were among the many semiautonomous communities. The same is true of France (where they are marginally present beginning in the sixteenth century) and in England (where Cromwell had permitted the admission of Jews in 1656), and elsewhere in Europe. As long as the state retained a strong identification with Christianity (Catholic or Protestant), adherents of other religions, in particular Jews, had a distinct and subservient legal status. As long as states recognized groups with specific rights and privileges, Jews were simply one group among many; but as soon as states accord equal rights to all citizens, corporate or communal identities become problematic. Increasingly, Enlightenment thinkers argued that the state should no longer be associated with one religion and that adherents of all faiths should enjoy the same legal freedoms and be subject to the same obligations. John Toland published in 1714 a pamphlet addressed to the British Parliament entitled Reasons for naturalizing the Jews in Great Britain and Ireland: on the same foot with all other nations : containing also a defence of the Jews against all vulgar prejudices in all countries. Other enlightenment thinkers similarly argued that Jews should full citizens with equal rights. Various European rulers abolished key aspects of traditional European Jewry law: in 1781, Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II abolished the Jewish badge and taxes on Jewish travelers; he subsequently abolished other regulations concerning Jews, in particular on where they could live. The American and French revolutions were to bring these ideals into practice: Jews are granted equal rights by the US constitution in 1789, and the new French republic proclaimed the emancipation of French Jews in 1791. In the parliamentary debate leading to the emancipation decree, Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre proclaimed “we must grant everything to the Jews as individuals and nothing to them as a nation” (Hermon-Belot 1999: 59). In other words, a French Jew was a Frenchman with equal rights to any other Frenchman, to whom the same laws applied; there was to be no recognition of group rights of Jews, or of the authority of rabbis in any area other than those defined as strictly religious. Napoleon’s armies brought the principles of emancipation to much of Europe. While these laws were in many cases reversed after Napoleon’s defeat, the principle of emancipation was subsequently adopted in many parts of Europe, including in the German Reich by 1871 (Birnbaum & Katznelson 1995). Yet putting these principles into practice was often another matter, as there was considerable resistance from both Jews and non-Jews. Napoleon’s solution to the problem is to create a new national Jewish representative organization, the “Grand Sanhédrin”, a new postrevolutionary version of a Jewish body of governance that had disappeared some seventeen centuries earlier (Hermon-Belot 1999: 78-81). 20 The Enlightenment and the liberal regimes of the nineteenth century brought legal emancipation to European Jewry, putting an end to discriminatory legal status and in theory making them fully equal citizens and eradicating the bases of any anti-Semitic prejudice. That this optimistic EnlightenmentLiberal ideal failed to work as its proponents hoped is of course one of the great historical tragedies of nineteenth and twentieth-century Europe, but it is well beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say that not only did old forms of religious prejudice against Jews survive, and indeed thrive, but new virulent strains of secular anti-Semitism, based on race rather than religion, came to the fore. The same can be said of attitudes towards Islam: while it now was possible, in the wake of Boulainvilliers and Gibbon, to admire Muhammad and his reforms, the figure of the prophet was in many respects secularized, presented as a great statesman and lawgiver more than as a prophet. His law was often portrayed as appropriate to a rough and uncultured desert people: climate and race now predominate as factors that justify and explain the inferiority of the Arabs, displacing (but not eradicating) religious explanations. Abbreviations used: LW: Luther’s Works (55 volumes; Philadelphia: Fortress Press 1955-1975) WA : Martin Luther, D. Martin Luther’s Werke: kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimarer Ausgabe). 121 vols; Weimar: H. Böhlaus Nachfolger 1883-2009. BIBLIOGRAPHY Anderson, A. 1997. The Treatise of the Three Imposters and the Problem of the Enlightenment. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Aune, D. 2006. Apocalypticism, Prophecy and Magic in Early Christianity. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Bede. 2008. On Genesis. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Berti, S., F. Charles-Daubert and R. Popkin, eds. 1996. ‘Heterodoxy, Spinozism, and Free Thought in Early-Eighteenth-Century Europe: Studies on the “Traité des trois imposteurs”‘. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Birnbaum and Katznelson, I. eds. 1995. Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States and Citizenship. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Boyarin, D. 2004. ‘The Christian Invention of Judaism: The Theodosian Empire and the Rabbinic Refusal of Religion’. Representations 85: 21-57. 21 Chodorow, S. 1972. Christian Political Theory and Church Politics in the Mid Twelfth Century; The Ecclesiology of Gratian’s Decretum. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cohen, J. 1999. Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dagron, G. 1993. ‘Le traité de Grégoire de Nicée sur le baptême des juifs’. Travaux et mémoires XI: 31357. Eusebius 1999. Life of Constantine. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Francisco, A. 2007. Martin Luther and Islam: A Study in Sixteenth-Century Polemics and Apologetics. Leiden: Brill. Fredriksen, __. 1999. ‘Apocalypticism’. In A. Fitzgerald, ed. Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia. Grand Rapids: William Eerdmans: 49-53. Gibbon, E. 1932. Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. New York: Modern Library. Grayzel, S. 1966. The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth century: A Study of their Relations During the Years 1198-1254, Based on the Papal Letters and the Conciliar Decrees of the Period. New York: Hermon Press. Henrich, S. & Boyce, J. 1996. ‘Martin Luther - Translations of Two Prefaces on Islam: Preface to the Libellus de ritu et moribus Turcorum (1530) and Preface to Bibliander’s Edition of the Qur’ân (1543)’. Word & World 16: 250-66. Hermon-Belot, R. 1999. L’Emancipation des juifs en France. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Hugh, o. S. V. 1961. The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor : A Medieval Guide to the Arts. New York: Columbia University Press. Kaufmann, T. 2006. ‘Luther and the Jews’. In: P. Bell & S. Burnett, eds. Jews, Judaism and the Reformation in Sixteenth-century Germany. Leiden: Brill: 69-104. Kedar, B. 1984. Crusade and Mission, European Approaches Toward the Muslims. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Linder, A. 2006. ‘The Legal Status of the Jews in the Roman Empire’. In: S. Katz, ed. The Cambridge History of Judaism. Volume IV: The Late Roman-Rabbinic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 128-173. 22 Mathisen, R. 2014. ‘The Citizenship and Legal Status of Jews in Roman Law during Late Antiquity (ca. 300-540 CE)’. In: J. Tolan, N. De Lange & L. F. Capucine Nemo-Pekelman, eds. Jews in Early Christian Law: Byzantium and the Latin West, 6th-11th c. Turnhoult: Brepols. Nemo-Pekelman, C. 2010. Les juifs et le droit à Rome (IVe-Ve siècles). Paris: Honoré Champion. Popkin, R. 1992. ‘Jewish Anti-Christian Arguments as a Source of Irreligion from the Seventeenth to the Early Nineteenth Century’. In: M. Hunter & D. Wooton, eds. Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment. Oxford: Clarendon Press: 159-81. Probst, C. 2012. Demonizing the Jews: Luther and the Protestant Church in Nazi Germany. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Retsö, J. 2003. The Arabs in Antiquity: Their History from the Assyrians to the Umayyads. London: Routeledge. Rowe, N. 2011. The Jew, the Cathedral, and the Medieval City : Synagoga and Ecclesia in the Thirteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sapir Abulafia, A. 2011. Christian-Jewish Relations 1000-1300: Jews in the Service of Medieval Christendom. London: Longman. Schwartz, S. 2008. All Can be Saved : Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic world. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sharf, A. 1995. Jews and Other Minorities in Byzantium. Jerusalem: Bar-Ilan University Press. Sicard: 1991. Hugues de Saint-Victor et son école. Turnhout: Brepols. Signer, M. 1999. ‘Jews and Judaism’. In A. Fitzgerald, ed. Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia. Grand Rapids: William Eerdmans: 470-74. Southern, R. 1995. Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe. Oxford: Blackwell. Stroumsa, G. 2010. A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sutcliffe, A. 2003. ‘Judaism in the Anti-Religious Thought of the Clandestine French Early Enlightenment’. Journal of the History of Ideas 64: 97-117. Tartar, G. 1985. Dialogue islamo-chrétien sous le Calife al-Ma’mûn (813-834): Les épîtres d’al-Hashimî et d’al-Kindî. Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Latines. 23 Tolan, J. 2002. Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination. New York: Columbia University Press. Tolan, J. 2010. ‘European Accounts of Muhammad’s Life’. In J. Brockopp, ed. Cambridge Companion to Muhammad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 226-50. Tolan, J. 2012a. ‘A Wild Man, Whose Hand will be against All: Saracens and Ishmaelites in Latin Ethnographical Traditions, from Jerome to Bede’. In W. Pohl et al., ed. Visions of Community: Ethnicity, Religion and Power in the Early Medieval West, Byzantium and the Islamic World. Farnham; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 513-30. Tolan, J. 2012b. ‘“Tra il diavolo di Rustico e il ninferno d’Alibech”: Muslims and Jews in Boccaccio’s Decameron’. In A. Eisenbeiß & L. Saurma-Jeltsch, eds. Images of Otherness in Medieval and Early Modern Times: Exclusion, Inclusion and Assimilation. Berlin and Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag: 133141. Williams, M. & Grafton, A. 2006. Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. i Notice n° 103877 , RELMIN project, «The legal status of religious minorities in the Euro-Mediterranean world (5 th -15 th centuries)» ; Telma Web edition, IRHT, Institut de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes - Orléans http://www.cn-telma.fr/relmin/extrait103877/ . ii For online editions of these texts, with commentary and translations, see Notice n° 1510 , RELMIN project, “The legal status of religious minorities in the Euro-Mediterranean world (5th-15th centuries)” Telma Web edition, IRHT, Institut de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes - Orléans http://www.cntelma.fr/relmin/auteur1510/. iii Lateran IV: Notice n° 30326 , RELMIN project, «The legal status of religious minorities in the EuroMediterranean world (5 th -15 th centuries)» ; Telma Web edition, IRHT, Institut de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes - Orléans http://www.cn-telma.fr/relmin/extrait30326/. Henry III: Notice n° 252108, RELMIN project, «The legal status of religious minorities in the Euro-Mediterranean world (5 th -15 th centuries)» Telma Web edition, IRHT, Institut de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes - Orléans http://www.cntelma.fr/relmin/extrait252108 / . 24