Renaissance England and the Jews
Chapter 1 discusses historical evidence regarding how Jews or ‘Hebrews’ and were imagined, represented, and encountered by Englishmen in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This chapter considers English attitudes towards Jews as well as Hebrew, the language most closely associated with the Jewish people; and argues that these encounters reflected complex, morally ambivalent responses that are not easily dismissible as flatly anti-Semitic, as some influential recent scholarship has insisted. Among the evidence this chapter discusses is Henry VIII’s solicitation of rabbinical opinion on the Great Matter of his divorce, the Classicist Robert Wakefield’s text Oratio de utilitate trium linguarum, English writers’ prefaces to their translations of Classical texts, and the inventor Simon Sturtevant’s instructional text Dibre Adam, or Adams Hebrew Dictionarie.