Jews and Muslims in Seventeenth-Century Discourse: From Religious Enemies to Allies and Friends by Gary K. Waite (review)

In this ambitiously-titled work, Gary Waite sets out to understand how Jews and Muslims were perceived in the early modern Dutch Republic. His goal, as outlined in the preface, is to understand and combat modern anti-Semitism and Islamophobia by examining a state that rapidly shifted from religious repression to active tolerance and diversity, providing a test case for how old prejudices can be rethought (pp. xi–xii). Drawing on approximately 120 printed publications, including pamphlets, chronicles, and news-sheets, as well as manuscript materials, Waite persuasively argues that unusual religious diversity and tolerance in the Dutch Republic, and external pressures from the Spanish Habsburgs, led Dutch writers, particularly nonconformists and spiritualists, to advocate for and pursue productive relationships and alliances with Jews and Muslims. Waite's work focuses heavily on Dutch sources that have remained unexamined in English scholarship, as well as comparisons with better-known English-language sources, and his coverage is much more comprehensive for the period 1568–1648, when the Dutch religious and political environment changed most significantly, and the Habsburg threat most encouraged seeking allies outside Christendom.

Waite's first two chapters juxtapose 'mainstream' Dutch Reformed writings about the Jews in this period, charting a move away from medieval stereotypes to active engagement on an evangelistic and political level, with nonconformist and spiritualist writings, which emphasize piety, love, and forbearance over doctrinal conformity, and begin to imagine new religious identities that might include both Christians and Jews. In the following three chapters, Waite surveys Dutch and English accounts of Muhammad, the Moors and Moriscos of the western Mediterranean, and the Ottoman Turks. Beginning with highly negative and polemical accounts aimed at discrediting Islam and justifying Christianity by denigrating the Prophet, Waite traces a divergence in Dutch and English attitudes as the Dutch increasingly engaged in positive diplomatic and cultural relations with Morocco and then the Ottoman Empire. According to Waite, the year 1648 was a watershed, which reduced both the Spanish and Ottoman threat in Dutch popular discourse. The following period up to 1700 saw 'many more works published about the Turks […] too many to fairly deal with them all' (p. 165), so Waite instead focuses his final two chapters specifically on millenarianism and messianism. He identifies a pervasive nonconformist movement across both nations that expected imminent conversion of the Jews to Christianity, the second coming and the establishment of Christ's rule on earth. Distinctively, however, he centres his assessment on two Jewish figures, whose supporters and detractors spanned Europe. Waite concludes with three vignettes from 1716, 1653, and 1675, which each illustrate the complicated and fluid attitudes that Dutch and English writers held towards Jews and Muslims.

Waite's most distinctive contribution in this work lies in his presentation, description, and contextual framing of a significant number of Dutch works that have remained unexamined in English historiography, which will prove a boon to future scholars of Judaism and Islam in Europe who are not fluent in early modern Dutch. Scholars wishing to rely on his broader arguments, however, should be aware of Waite's potentially problematic slant against state-sponsored religion and doctrinal precision. Having been through 'a religious phase' as a young man, Waite's struggle 'to break free of that restrictive mindset' (p. xi) has evidently informed his understanding of Dutch religious toleration, which in his assessment significantly came from spiritualist visions of 'unity and harmony which disregarded theological precision' (p. 71) and their willingness to 'reconsider their perception of [religious minorities] as they reshaped their own faith, reducing the emphasis […] on the divinity of Christ' (p. 101) or the Trinity (p. 174). Waite's list of 'attitudinal factors' (p. 25) affecting inclination towards toleration assumes relativism as the norm, requiring active prejudice or superstition to oppose it and freedom from restrictive doctrine to support it. Dutch conformists...