Setting Boundaries: Early Medieval Reflections on Religious Toleration and Their Jewish Roots

By Glenn W. Olsen

Hebraic Political Studies, Vol.2:2 (2007)

Abstract: The history of toleration has no beginning. Tolerance and intolerance, the instincts to welcome and to exclude, have been practiced by each individual and every people. From its beginnings, Judaism regarded itself as the religion of a chosen people that drew lines of separation between itself and others (especially in the matter of purity) while also welcoming the stranger. Christianity and Islam acted similarly. This paper explores particular ways in which Judaism’s approach to the problem of tolerating those with whom it could not comfortably live a shared life influenced its daughter faiths, especially Christianity.

In the early Middle Ages, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all affirmed some form of the proposition that there is no compulsion in religion and that people have a right both to the public practice of their religion and to the formation of a shared community that embodies it. Indeed, many religious thinkers and legists would have agreed with Augustine’s reformulation of Cicero in the City of God (XIX, 24), where he defined a people as “a multitude of reasonable beings bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love.” In other words, religion was to be viewed not simply as a matter of private practice, but rather as something that should create a shared, public life. Few societies, however, were so homogenous that “common agreement as to the objects of their love” could be assumed. Thus, the question of the relationship between the axiom that religious faith cannot be coerced and the axiom that religion, by its very nature, tends to form a shared community was inevitably centered on the place of the (religious) stranger within society.


In early medieval Europe, the imperative of religious fidelity played out both culturally and politically, against other considerations, which were generally of a prudential nature. This essay seeks to relate seriously to Jews, Christians, or Muslims who wished to affirm the exclusive nature of their faiths (as expressed, inter alia, through endogamous marriage, or through eating only with coreligionists). It considers the common belief that religion cannot be compelled and the resulting conundrum of how the life of the individual related to the values of each society. However, as we are most concerned here with the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, a definition of terms, and a prior word of caution, is in order.

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