Religious Diaspora in Early Modern Europe: Strategies of Exile ed. by Timothy G. Fehler et al. (review)

The four co-editors of this collection of papers from a 2012 conference at Toronto do not include its “guiding spirit” (ix), Nicholas Terpstra, whose absence may help to explain why its conceptual cohesion seems slack. Kroeker’s introduction celebrates the diversity of religious beliefs represented, notes the different sizes and vast range of destinations of early modern refugee communities, and concludes that “early modern exiles exhibited remarkable creativity and obdurateness in their strategies for survival in new contexts” (2). The contents represent a commendable range of disciplines beyond history—English literature, art history, anthropology, and religious studies. However, a smorgasbord of disciplines usually offers little more than reciprocal isolation; apart from the interplay of vernacular languages and theology in Jonathan Ray’s overview of the formation of the Sephardic diaspora (Chapter 11, 153–166), the volume betrays little evidence of any unusual interdisciplinary combinations.

A glance at the table of contents reveals that the two usual suspects—the religious diaspora communities with the largest academic constituencies—dominate this volume. Most of the chapters deal with either Sephardic Jews or Reformed Protestants. Anabaptists—whose choices were generally exile, Nicodemism, or annihilation—receive one entry. Spanish Muslims, who underwent a numerically far larger diaspora than any other religious community during the early modrn centuries, remain unrepresented, “out of the loop” despite the vital importance of Muslim integration to contemporary Western states. The book offers a brief glimpse of “churches of the Mohammedan law” in the freewheeling climate of Livorno—a “majority-minority” community—but their members were prisoners.

Moreover, early modern chronology does not fit all of the diaspora communities equally well, particularly the “academic big two.” Although the Sephardic diaspora studies in this collection sprawl from 1492 into the later eighteenth century, its Protestant experts cluster between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries.

Notwithstanding these complaints, the volume is due something more than faint praise; some of the contributions stand out from the rest. Maria Tausiet’s exploration of the surprisingly close and important relationship between Michael Servetus, Spain’s best-known exile of the Reformation era, and the shadowy alumbrado movement is a case in point (Chapter 8, 107–120). Tausiet manages to shed considerable new light on both man and movement through an emphasis on Servetus’ “theology of light,” which remains “still largely unknown today” (110). David Parry’s slightly forced comparison between a famous real exile (John Amos Comenius) and an even more famous “internal exile” (John Milton) is notable for its sheer elegance, strewing such phrases as the “fittingly multilingual secondary literature on Comenius” (198, n. 2), or the “embarrassment of his twentieth-century biographer” in reference to Comenius’ publication of prophecies foretelling the restoration of Bohemia’s “Winter King” (56).

Several other chapters provide useful overviews. Some of them also offer novel syntheses in English—for example, Charles Parker’s survey of Dutch Reformed clergymen “exiled” in Asia (Chapter 5, 61–74), or Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby’s unlikely story of an enormous panorama of Istanbul made during the war for Crete by an embittered exiled Venetian monk that somehow found its way to Tel Aviv (207, n. 3).