scholarly journals Creating Confusion in the Colonies: Jews, Citizenship, and the Dutch and British Atlantics

Itinerario ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 55-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Roitman

Jews in most of early modern Europe struggled to assert their rights within legal frameworks that presumed them to be intrinsically different—aliens—from the (Christian) population around them no matter where they had been born, how they dressed and behaved, or what language they spoke. This struggle played itself out on various fronts, not the least of which was in the Jewish assertion of the right to become more than aliens—to become citizens or subjects—of the territories in which they lived. Citizenship, in its various forms, was a structural representation of belonging. Moreover, citizenship conferred tangible rights. As such, being a recognised citizen (or subject) had not only great symbolic, but also great economic, importance.

2002 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 341-361 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin J. Kaplan

AbstractIn the wake of Europe's religious wars, it became accepted that embassies could include chapels where forms of Christianity illegal in the host country could be practiced. In theory, only ambassadors and their entourage had the right to worship in such chapels, but in practice the latter became bases for full-fledged congregations of native religious dissenters. Constructed out of residential space, the chapels belonged to a broader category of edifice, the "clandestine church." They helped give birth to the modern doctrine of "extraterritoriality."


1994 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Werner L. Gundersheimer

Persons of authority in early modern Europe—whether parents, preachers or princes—knew well that among the resources available to them for controlling behavior and maintaining hierarchies, there was always shame. Humankind, to its woe, had experienced shame in the Garden of Eden. Noah had been shamed by his nakedness, Sarah by her barrenness, Jacob by his effeminate body, Potiphar's wife through her brazen advances. Hesiod had introduced two sorts of shame: the right kind, derived from modesty; and the wrong kind, produced by poverty. These instances, and many others from ancient and medieval sources, lay at hand for easy use by Renaissance moralists, and who is not a moralist? Applying their own imaginative skills to techniques and rituals of humiliation, medieval and early modern people devised such innovations as thepitture infamanti, the dunce cap, the stocks, the charivari, the yellow badge.


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