Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders

by Denise A. Spellberg

  103. Harold Lawton Bruce, “Voltaire on the English Stage,” University of California Publications in Modern Philology 8 (1918): 57.

  104. Quoted in Arthur H. Scouten, ed., The London Stage, 1600–1800: A Calendar of Plays, Part 3: 1729–1747 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1961), 1104.

  105. Quoted in Allison, Crescent Obscured, 234 n. 14.

  106. Quoted in Ronald Hamowy, introduction to Trenchard and Gordon, Cato’s Letters, 1:xxiv; Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 37; Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1972), 27, 30.

  107. Hamowy, introduction to Trenchard and Gordon, Cato’s Letters, 1:xxiv; Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment, 56.

  108. John Hoadly, prologue to James Miller, Mahomet the Impostor (London, 1744), Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

  109. James Miller, Mahomet the Impostor, in Bell’s British Theatre (London, 1776); James Miller, Mahomet the Impostor (London, 1777), Houghton Library, Harvard University. A very similar “portrait” exists on a fresco in the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. The image, designed in the 1930s, became the object of American Muslim protest in 1997, when sixteen Islamic organizations requested that the Supreme Court remove it because Sunni Islamic tradition rejects any visual rendering of the Prophet, but also because the message sent to viewers was that Muhammad spread his faith by violence. Chief Justice William Rehnquist refused to remove the image of the Prophet, adding that to have the image was a sign of honor and the sword “a general symbol of justice”; see Marr, Cultural Roots, 1–2.

  110. Bruce, “Voltaire on the English Stage,” 147–48. The play was reprinted in 1776, 1777, 1782, 1786, 1795, and 1796.

  111. Allison, Crescent Obscured, 45.

  112. Rivington’s Royal Gazette, New York City, November 11, 1780.

  113. Ibid.

  114. Without reference to the prologue, the soldiers “may have felt under siege by passionate zealots who were rousing the innocent colonists to kill their symbolic father, George III,” and they doubtless did see in the play “a vindication of their role as protectors of the established order,” from those rebels who might destroy “empire.” For these observations, see Allison, Crescent Obscured, 45.

  115. The play was performed in the United States later in 1795 and 1796 as a critical response to the violence of the French Revolution; see Allison, Crescent Obscured, 45.

  116. Quoted in J. Thomas Scharf, The Chronicles of Baltimore (Baltimore: Turnbull Brothers, 1874), 203–5. My thanks to Marilyn Baseler for this reference. See also Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser, September 3, 1782, which states that “about 500 French troops remain in and near the town under the command of General La Valette.”

  117. Theatrical Playbill Collection, MS 2415, Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore; Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser, June 28, 1782.

  118. “At the Theatre in Baltimore on Tuesday Evening the 1st of October, 1782, will be presented the Tragedy of Mahomet, the Impostor,” Broadside, New-York Historical Society, #Y1782. The broadside for October 15, 1782, is also at the New-York Historical Society.

  119. Allison, Crescent Obscured, 45.

  120. Battistini, “Glimpses of the Other,” 447. There were 130 American captives by 1793; see Richard B. Parker, Uncle Sam in Barbary: A Diplomatic History (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), 208.

  121. Bubonic and pneumonic plague outbreaks were common in eighteenth-century North Africa; see H. G. Barnby, The Prisoners of Algiers: An Account of the Forgotten American-Algerian War, 1785–1787 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 86.

  122. G. Thomas Tanselle, Royall Tyler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 141.

  123. Hunter Miller, ed., Treaties and Other International Acts of the United States of America, 8 vols. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1931), 2:185–227, 275–317, 329–425.

  124. Tanselle, Royall Tyler, 10–12.

  125. Tyler, Algerine Captive, 1:166. The novel has been carefully read as a reflection of American ideals regarding slavery by Allison, Crescent Obscured, 94–95, and as depiction of a despotic Islam and a liberty-loving United States by Marr, Cultural Roots, 55–58. Race is more emphasized by Johar Schueller, U.S. Orientalisms, 50–58; see also Reynolds, Faith in Fiction, 15–20.

  126. Tyler, Algerine Captive, 1:184, 186 (quote).

  127. Ibid., 1:187.

  128. Ibid., 1:185; Marr, Cultural Roots, 55.

  129. Tyler, Algerine Captive, 2:27.

  130. Ibid., 2:6; Johar Schueller, U.S. Orientalisms, 56; Marr, Cultural Roots, 56.

  131. Tanselle, Royall, 168–69.

  132. Tyler, Algerine Captive, 2:19, 20–21 (quote).

  133. Ibid., 2:24–27, 28–30.

  134. Ray W. Irwin, The Diplomatic Relations of the United States with the Barbary Powers, 1776–1816 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1931), 204.

  135. Tyler, Algerine Captive, 2:33.

  136. Ibid., 2:38–39.

  137. Ibid., 2:42; Allison, Crescent Obscured, 94; Jill Lepore, “Prior Convictions: Did the Founders Want Us to Be Faithful to Their Faith?” New Yorker, April 14, 2008, 71. Thanks to Neil Kamil for this reference.

  138. Tyler, Algerine Captive, 2:42–43.

  139. Ibid., 2:43. The assertion about the Bible as other than divine in origin seems to reflect a Deist position.

  140. Ibid., 2:44.

  141. Ibid., 2:46.

  142. Ibid., 2:46–49.

  143. Ibid., 1:8.

  144. Ibid., 2:50; Allison, Crescent Obscured, 50.

  145. Tyler, Algerine Captive, 2:50.

  146. Ibid., 2:52.

  147. Ibid., 2:143.

  148. Ibid., 2:53.

  149. Ibid.

  150. Ibid., 2:56.

  151. Tanselle, Royall, 6.

  152. Tyler, Algerine Captive, 2:70, 72.

  153. Ibid., 2:132–33; Tanselle, Royall, 172–73.

  154. Tyler, Algerine Captive, 2:167.

  155. Ibid., 2:168.

  156. Ibid., 2:177–88.

  157. Ibid., 2:187, 216–21.

  158. Ibid., 2:221–23.

  159. Ibid., 2:120–30.

  160. Ibid., 2:129.

  161. Tanselle, Royall, 172; Allison, Crescent Obscured, 94; Marr, Cultural Roots, 58; Reynolds, Faith in Fiction, 16; Lepore, “Prior Convictions,” 74.

  162. Quoted in Tanselle, Royall, 268 n. 29.

  163. “Infidel,” Oxford English Dictionary, 5:260.

  164. Reynolds, Faith in Fiction, 17.

  165. Quoted ibid.

  166. Ibid., 17–18; Allison, Crescent Obscured, 94–96.

  167. Tyler, Algerine Captive, 2:145.

  2. POSITIVE EUROPEAN PRECEDENTS FOR THE TOLERATION OF MUSLIMS, AND THEIR PRESENCE IN COLONIAL AMERICA, 1554–1706

  1. Quoted in Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 9–10.

  2. Ginzburg first observed this religious equality; see ibid., 92.

  3. Quoted ibid., 92–93. For a study of Spain, Portugal, and their transatlantic empires as sites for the Inquisition’s charge of the heresy of Origen, as inspired by Carlo Ginzburg, see Stuart B. Schwartz, All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 1–13. Origen believed “that the Jews were a wicked nation of deicides who deserved to suffer”; see Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer, eds., Antisemitic Myths: A Historical and Contemporary Anthology (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2008), quote on 5.

  4. Ginzburg, Cheese, 92–95.

  5. Many general histories of European religious toleration include sporadic references to Muslims (or Turks), but no single history of these ideas exists. This chapter is an initial but not a fully inclusive attempt to survey the varied roots of these ideas. See, for disparate examples: Henry Kamen, The Rise of Toleration (London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967), 65, 74, 78, 100, 116, 126–27, 133, 178, 201; Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 2, 7–8, 265, 279, 287; and the classic Joseph Lecler, Toleration and the Reformation, trans. T. L. Westow, 2 vols. (New York: Association Press, 1960) 1:74–78, 87, 107–8, 111, 137, 161, 175, 220, 239, 420; 2:38–39, 53, 72–76, 104, 109, 182, 198, 369, 401, 458, 463. I do not treat, for example, John Goodwin (1594–1665), an Englishman who supported “full liberty of conscience to all sects, even Turks, Jews, Papists,” in 1644, the same year as Roger Williams; see Kamen, Toleration, 178; Lecler, Toleration, 2:458. John Marshall devotes two chapters to the importance of toleration discourse about Muslims and Jews; see John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture: Religious Intolerance and Arguments for Religious Toleration in Early Modern and “Early Enlightenment” Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 371–95, 593–617. For a study of “sympathetic” views of early Islamic history as a discourse in support of religious toleration for Christian dissenters and in opposition to the English government that he terms “Islamic Republicanism,” see Humberto Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment, 1670–1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), xi–59. However, much support for the toleration of Muslims does not conform at all to the pattern of “Islamic Republicanism.” Many who embraced Deism and Unitarianism, such as John Locke and Joseph Priestley, would be castigated as Muslims. John Locke’s borrowing of a key precedent for the toleration of Muslims from Edward Bagshaw may be found in Nabil Matar, “John Locke and the ‘Turbanned Nations,’ ” Journal of Islamic Studies 2, no. 1 (1991): 68, 71.

  6. Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966), 18–192; Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 36–37.

  7. Quoted in Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2007), 296, 294–330; Susan R. Boettcher, “Insiders and Outsiders,” in Reformation Christianity, ed. Peter Matheson (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 242.

  8. Kaplan, Divided by Faith, 296. For a discussion of the term “infidel” for Muslims, see “Infidel,” Oxford English Dictionary, 13 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 5:260; Zagorin, Toleration, 5–6.

  9. David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 14–15, 200–49; Perry and Schweitzer, Antisemitic Myths, 2–3.

  10. Quoted in Kaplan, Divided by Faith, 296.

  11. One of the first to combine tolerationist views toward Muslims and Jews in his work is Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture; see chapters 12 and 19.

  12. I would like to thank my colleague Neil Kamil for his initial suggestion that I read Ginzburg’s history of Domenico Scandella in conjunction with his own important observations about this text; see Neil Kamil, Fortress of the Soul: Violence, Metaphysics, and Material Life in the Huguenots’ New World, 1517–1751 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 192–202, 219, 889–92; Ginzburg, Cheese, 51, 152; Stuart Schwartz, All Can Be Saved, 1, 8.

  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.
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  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.”