Refugee Politics in Early Modern Europe (Bloomsbury, 2024) (2025)

Proofs Connecting Worlds and People

Connecting Worlds and People. Early modern Diasporas, 2017

In recent decades historians have emphasized just how dynamic and varied early modern Europe was. Previously held notions of monolithic and static societies have now been replaced with a model in which new ideas, different cultures and communities jostle for attention and influence. Building upon the concept of interaction, the essays in this volume develop and explore the idea with specific reference to the ways in which diasporas could act as translocal societies, connecting worlds and peoples that may not otherwise have been linked. The volume looks at the ways in which diasporas or diasporic groups, such as the Herrnhuters, the Huguenots, the Quakers, Jews, the Mennonites, the Moriscos and others, could function as intermediaries to connect otherwise separated communities and societies. All contributors analyse the respective groups' internal and external networks, social relations and the settings of social interactions, looking at the entangled networks of diaspora communities and their effects upon the societies and regions they linked through those networks. The collection takes a fresh look at early modern diasporas, combining religious, cultural, social and economic history to better understand how early modern communication patterns and markets evolved, how consumption patterns changed and what this meant for social, economic and cultural change, how this impacted on what we understand as early developments towards globalization, and how early developments towards globalization, in turn, were constitutive of these.

Distributing Aid to Believers in Need: The Religious Foundations of Transatlantic Migration

Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, 1997

Radical Tolerance in Early Enlightenment Europe

History of European Ideas, 2017

Freedom of religion generally resonates in the collective mind as a prized legacy of the European Enlightenment alongside most individual liberties and modern values. This assumption, however, is flawed as it tends to downplay centuries of religious pluralism and cohabitation. Tolerance, in other words, was a practice long before it became a theory. This article considers tolerance not as an idea, but as a religious belief and a practice in the early Enlightenment. Drawing from rare manuscript sources scattered over several countries, it argues that tolerance was a grassroots Christian belief primarily promoted by those who needed it the most: persecuted radical dissenters. It shows how the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 sparked a tolerationist spur in Protestant countries, ‘refuges’ that often offered only a limited level of freedom. By contrast, more radical forms of tolerance existed among underground millenarians and ecumenical societies of this period. These refuges and milieus made a significant contribution to the Enlightenment debate on tolerance and deserve to be acknowledged for it.

Reimagining Religious Identity: The Moor in Dutch and English Pamphlets, 1550–1620*

Renaissance Quarterly, 2013

This essay examines how Dutch and English vernacular writers portrayed the Moor in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when their respective governments were engaged in diplomatic and trade discussions with Morocco. It aims for a better understanding of the difference in religious attitudes and cultures between these two Protestant realms by arguing that their respective approaches to internal religious toleration significantly influenced how their residents viewed Muslims. Dutch writers adopted a less hostile tone toward the Moor than English writers due to the republic’s principled defense of freedom of conscience, its informal system of religious toleration in the private sector, and its merchantRealpolitik. Unlike in England, Dutch conversos were allowed to be Jews. A number of Moroccan Muslims also resided in Holland, lobbying on behalf of the Muslim King of Morocco. The Moroccan Jewish Pallache family played prominent roles with the government and in two of the...

Female Religious Orders

Wiley Online Library

« Charité et communauté diasporique dans l’Europe des XVIe-XVIIIe siècles », Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 61 (2014), p. 7-27

“Charity and Diasporic Community in Early Modern Europe”. This paper focuses on the socially performative dimension of charity in diasporic context. Beyond their differences of religion, the studied populations share a common exil for “matters of religion” between the 16th and the 18th centuries: Huguenots fled France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), New Christians of Jewish descent left the Iberian Peninsula from the Sixteenth Century, Moriscos expelled from Spain in 1609-1614, Catholic fled England after the establishment of Anglicanism (c. 1560-1570), and the Jacobites left Britain after the Glorious Revolution (1688). Practices of charity bring together highly mobile and heterogeneous populations in terms of political preferences, social status and even religion. Charity seeks to ensure the cohesion of the group by its margins, despite the discontinuities associated with the diversity of social contexts and the forms of secrecy they impose. It structures the groupe by converting it into a social body and a moral community that includes the living and the dead, while “producing locality” and creating its own territory at different scales. When repression decreases, charity provides the basis for the institutionalization of local communities, legitimates them in the eyes of the diaspora, and strengthens the links between communities. Finally, it takes part in the Messianic Destiny of the communities of believers these diasporas claim to be.

Competing Visions of the Mennonite _Gemeinde_: Examples from Early Modern Krefeld in Their Dutch Context (2008)

Defining Community in Early Modern Europe, edited by Michael J. Halvorson and Karen E. Spierling, 2008

ABSTRACT: Early modern Mennonites and Doopsgezinden could choose from elements of at least two competing visions of an ideal Mennonite _Gemeinde_ (congregation or community). In one vision, the _Gemeinde_ was conceived of as the visible, pure and disciplined community of true believers modeled on the example of the early Christians, while in the other it was conceived of as an invisible church of all individual believers who considered the love of one’s neighbor as the highest command. While it is useful heuristically to make a clear distinction between these two visions, in practice each Mennonite congregation usually found its own unique mix of the biblicist and communitarian tendencies of the first vision on the one hand and the spiritualist and individualist tendencies of the second vision on the other. To illustrate the distinctions and how they played out in lived circumstances, the essay critically reviews examples and interpretations from Peter Kriedte's important but problematic 2007 book _Taufgesinnte und großes Kapital_ (about Mennonite culture and proto-capitalism in the early modern Rhineland). Kriedte's book is problematic because it relies upon a religiously conservative portrayal of Mennonite life and ideals. The essay discusses sociological models by Tönnies, Weber, and Simmel.

" On the Road to Religious Freedom": a Study of the Nazarene Emigration from Southeastern Europe to the United States

Journal for Ethnography and Folklore , 2017

Different historical and socio-political circumstances often were the cause of migration, especially in the countries of Southeastern Europe. Migration was also triggered by religious persecution of particular religious minorities by different political systems, one of them being the Nazarenes. The Nazarenes were founded by a former Reformed minister Samuel Fröhlich around 1830 in Switzerland, but they soon expanded to Central and Eastern Europe. Because of their pacifist beliefs and refusal to swear and to take an oath a large number of the Nazarenes were condemned to severe prison sentences. Defending their religious identity and escaping religious persecution, thousands of Nazarenes started to emigrate especially during the First World War and in the interwar period to North America. In North America they joined the Apostolic Christian Church (Nazarene), which was the official name of the Nazarene community in the United States and Canada. The material presented in this paper results from empirical research, conducted in Serbia and the United States, on the history of the Nazarene emigration to North America. The aim of this paper is twofold: to analyze how early migration is remembered by the Nazarenes today and how the Nazarenes, as a religious minority from Southeastern Europe, became a transnational religious community that developed in several branches. The paper shows how religion could be a 'channel for migration' and how immigrants used religion in processes of migration.

SWISS CRYPTO JEWS

Hidden Jewish Ancestry , 2022

Many of the Swiss immigrants to America, 1720-1780, appear to have been Crypto-Jews. Modern ancestry DNA indicates these immigrants had Jewish origins. Many were anabaptists and in America became old order Mennonites, Amish, and Brethren. The Jewish origins of these immigrants is examined in detail.