Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (60 page)

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Authors: Denise A. Spellberg

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BOOK: Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders
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13.
Ginzburg,
Cheese
, 112–13, quote on 113.

14.
Caroline Finkel,
Osman’s Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire, 1300–1923
(New York: Basic Books, 2005), 127–28.

15.
Menocchio admitted that he had read the tale in the
Decameron
(“Cento novella”) by Giovanni Boccaccio. It appears there as the third story of the first day, which was “prohibited” by the church by the miller’s time, but had circulated in a “a late thirteenth-century collection of short stories”; see Ginzburg,
Cheese
, 49–50; Schwartz,
All Can Be Saved
, 41.

16.
Quoted in Ginzburg,
Cheese
, 49.

17.
Ibid.

18.
Quoted ibid., 49–50.

19.
Ibid., 51.

20.
The reference is to the miller nicknamed
Pighino
, or “the Fat”; see ibid., 124–25.

21.
Samuel P. Scott, trans., “
Siete Partidas
,” in
Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources
, ed. Olivia Remie Constable (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977), 271–73.

22.
Quoted in Schwartz,
All Can Be Saved
, 53.

23.
Ibid., 43–118.

24.
Quoted ibid., 66.

25.
Ibid., 2, 138.

26.
Ginzburg,
Cheese
, 28–30, 41–51.

27.
Ibid., 43.

28.
Quoted ibid., 43, 101.

29.
Quoted ibid., 102.

30.
Ibid., 30.

31.
Quoted ibid., 101.

32.
Kaplan,
Divided by Faith
, 304–5. By 1621, two decades after Menocchio’s death, the Venetians built the Fondaco dei Turchi on the banks of the Grand Canal as their official residence. The ornate building contained the capacity for the storage of goods and Islamic worship, based on the plan of an Islamic
funduq
, or merchant hostel, a structure common throughout the Middle East.

33.
Ginzburg,
Cheese
, 110–12.

34.
Ibid., 111. The Italian term for the torture device is
strappado.

35.
Ibid., 128.

36.
Ibid., 18–19. Earl Morse Wilbur,
A History of Unitarianism: Socinianism and Its Antecedents
, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1945–52), 1:76–96.

37.
Quoted in Adam S. Francisco,
Martin Luther and Islam: A Study in Sixteenth-Century Polemics and Apologetics
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2007), 46–47; Robert H. Schwoebel, “Coexistence, Conversion, and the Crusade against the Turks,”
Studies in the Renaissance
12 (1965): 175. Earlier instances of religious universalism that included Islam may be found in Robert H. Schwoebel,
The Shadow of the Crescent: The Renaissance Image of the Turks, 1453–1577
(Nieukoop: B. Degraaf, 1967), 219–20.

38.
Wilbur,
History of Unitarianism
, 1:84–85.

39.
Zagorin
, Toleration
, 97; Sebastian Castellio,
Concerning Heretics: Whether They Are to Be Persecuted and How They Are to Be Treated: A Collection of the Opinions of Learned Men Both Ancient and Modern
, trans. Roland H. Bainton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935), 3, 217; Ginzburg,
Cheese
, 122.

40.
Quoted in Daniel,
Islam and the West
, 187; John Tolan,
Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 135–69.
Important research on real Muslims in France and England during the premodern period continues, see Bernard Vincent and Jocelyne Dakhlia, eds.,
Les Musulmans dans l’Histoire de l’Europe
(Paris: Albin Michel, 2011).

41.
The date of Servetus’s death is provided as October 27 in Zagorin,
Toleration
, 93. In contrast, the event occurred on October 23 according to Roland Bainton in Castellio,
Concerning Heretics
, 3. See also Roland Bainton,
Hunted Heretic: The Life and Death of
Michael Servetus
(Boston: Beacon, 1960), 219.

42.
Bainton,
Hunted Heretic
, 67; Zagorin,
Toleration
, 93–94.

43.
Bainton
, Hunted Heretic
, 207.

44.
Castellio,
Concerning Heretics
, 3.

45.
Wilbur,
History of Unitarianism
, 1:62–63.

46.
The number of Jews expelled is estimated between 150,000 and 400,000 by Henry Kamen, “The Mediterranean and the Expulsion of Spanish Jews in 1492,”
Past and Present
119 (May 1988): 30.

47.
Bainton,
Hunted Heretic
, 5–16.

48.
Ibid., 16; Wilbur,
History of Unitarianism
, 1:61.

49.
Wilbur,
History of Unitarianism
, 1:52; Garcia,
Islam and the English Enlightenment
, 161, 278 n. 9.

50.
Wilbur,
History of Unitarianism
, 1:71; Garcia,
Islam and the English Enlightenment
, 161.

51.
Zagorin,
Toleration
, 99; Castellio,
Concerning Heretics
, 9–10.

52.
Quoted in Roland Bainton,
The Travail of Religious Liberty
(New York: Harper, 1958), 120.

53.
Castellio,
Concerning Heretics
, 126.

54.
Ibid., 123.

55.
Ibid., 132.

56.
Ibid.

57.
Ibid., 132–34.

58.
Ibid., 133.

59.
Tolan,
Saracens
, 214–74. Peter the Venerable had advocated this position since the twelfth century; see Schwoebel, “Coexistence,” 174.

60.
Castellio,
Concerning Heretics
, 150–51.

61.
Lecler,
Toleration
, 1:161.

62.
Perry and Schweitzer,
Antisemitic Myths
, 43, 47.

63.
Castellio,
Concerning Heretics
, 71; Jan Slomp, “Calvin and the Turks,” in
Christian-Muslim Encounters
, ed. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Wadi Zaidan Haddad (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995), 131.

64.
Castellio,
Concerning Heretics
, 203.

65.
Ibid. For discussions of “Saracen,” see Daniel,
Islam and the West
, 14, 79; Tolan,
Saracens
, 105–34. The term existed as early as the ninth century in Middle English to mean nomadic Arab peoples. For the best discussions of the “obscure” etymology, see Katharine Scarfe Beckett,
Anglo-Saxon Perceptions of the Islamic World
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 93–104. See also the multiple pre-sixteenth-century English usages of “Saracen,”
Oxford English Dictionary
, 9:106.

66.
Robert White, “Castellio against Calvin: The Turk in the Toleration Controversy of the Sixteenth Century,”
Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance
46 (1984): 573–74.

67.
Ibid., 573–86.

68.
Ibid., 575.

69.
Castellio,
Concerning Heretics
, 101.

70.
Wilbur,
History of Unitarianism
, 1:37.

71.
Ibid.; Castellio,
Concerning Heretics
, 93–94.

72.
Castellio,
Concerning Heretics
, 94.

73.
Zagorin,
Toleration
, 86.

74.
Castellio,
Concerning Heretics
, 95.

75.
Ibid., 97–98.

76.
Schwoebel, “Coexistence,” 180; Castellio,
Concerning Heretics
, 96; Franco Cardini,
Europe and Islam
, trans. Caroline Beamish (London: Blackwell, 1999), 147–49.

77.
Steven Ozment,
Mysticism and Dissent: Religious Ideology and Social Protest in the Sixteenth Century
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 141.

78.
Franck quoted in Castellio,
Concerning Heretics
, 96; in the Qur’an, see 2:256. Franck also observed, “At Constantinople there are Turks, there are Christians, and there are also Jews, three peoples widely differing from one another in religion. Nevertheless they live together in peace, which certainly they could not do if there were persecution.”

79.
The French scholar Jean Bodin (d. 1596) saw the burning of Servetus in Geneva; see Clarence Dana Rouillard,
The Turk in French History, Thought, and Literature (1520–1660)
(Paris: Boivin, 1941), 390–91; Marshall,
John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture
, 593.

80.
This tendency among Protestants would continue into the seventeenth century; see Ahmad Gunny, “Protestant Reactions to Islam in Late Seventeenth-Century French Thought,”
French Studies
40 (April 1986): 131–34. Not only radical English Protestants in the seventeenth century embraced the Ottoman example of religious toleration. Catholics and Protestants applied this comparative tactic, beginning in the sixteenth century. For the English precedent, see Garcia,
Islam and the English Enlightenment
, 1–59.

81.
Castellio,
Concerning Heretics
, 97.

82.
Franck quoted ibid., 101–2.

83.
Ibid., 97; Nabil Matar,
Islam in Britain, 1558–1685
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 137.

84.
Castellio,
Concerning Heretics
, 3–4, 107–11.

85.
Ginzburg,
Cheese
, 51, suggests this.

86.
Castellio,
Concerning Heretics
, 113–17.

87.
H. Wheeler Robinson, introduction to Thomas Helwys,
The Mistery of Iniquity
(London: Kingsgate Press, 1935), viii.

88.
Ibid., viii–x.

89.
Ibid., 69. As the “first in England to demand universal liberty,” see Robinson’s introduction, xiii; Marshall,
John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture
, 150.

90.
Robinson, introduction to Helwys,
Mistery
, vii–viii, x.

91.
Ibid., xiv.

92.
Helwys,
Mistery
, 69.

93.
Nabil Matar,
Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), ix–42.

94.
Cecil Roth, “England,” in
Encyclopaedia Judaica
, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, 16 vols. (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007), 6:412–13.

95.
Robinson, introduction to Helwys,
Mistery
, xiv.

96.
Ibid., ix.

97.
Helwys,
Mistery
, 212.

98.
Robinson, introduction to Helwys,
Mistery
, x.

99.
Helwys,
Mistery
, 42.

100.
Robinson, introduction to Helwys,
Mistery
, xiii; William R. Estep,
Revolution within the Revolution: The First Amendment in Historical Context, 1612–1789
(Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1990), 50–58.

101.
L. H. Butterfield, “Elder John Leland, Jeffersonian Itinerant,”
Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society
62 (October 1952): 164.

102.
Smyth quoted ibid.

103.
Helwys,
Mistery
, 69.

104.
I take this definition from David Hackett Fischer,
Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 293.

105.
Edwin S. Gaustad,
Roger Williams
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 96.

106.
Zagorin,
Toleration
, 198–99.

107.
Gaustad,
Roger Williams
, 19–20.

108.
Zagorin,
Toleration
, 198.

109.
Gaustad,
Roger Williams
, 22.

110.
Zagorin,
Toleration
, 199.

111.
Roger Williams,
The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution
, ed. Samuel L. Caldwell, vol. 3 of
The Complete Writings of Roger Williams
(New York: Russell and Russell, 1963), 3:52; Zagorin,
Toleration
, 200. My thanks to Holly Snyder for first suggesting I investigate Roger Williams. For a thoughtful discussion of Williams’s impact on liberty of conscience that includes his references to Muslims, see Martha Nussbaum,
Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality
(New York: Basic Books, 2010), 34, 37, 50, 66. The idea that Williams included Islam as a potential American religion is mentioned by Akbar Ahmed,
Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam
(Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2010), 46–50.

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