Although Jews sometimes attempt to impose constraints on those with whom they disagree on religious matters, or relate to them as if they were not Jews at all, at other times they have recognized differences of practice and belief and developed ways of handling them. The evidence presented in this book of such toleration over the centuries has important implications for writing both the history of Judaism and the history of religions more generally.
The essays in this book consider issues of tolerance and intolerance faced by Jews and Christians between approximately 200 BCE and 200 CE. Several chapters are concerned with many different aspects of early Jewish-Christian relationships. Five scholars, however, take a difference tack and discuss how Jews and Christians defined themselves against the pagan world. As minority groups, both Jews and Christians had to work out ways of co-existing with their Graeco-Roman neighbours. Relationships with those neighbours were often strained, but even within both Jewish and Christian circles, issues of tolerance and intolerance surfaced regularly. So it is appropriate that some other contributors should consider 'inner-Jewish' relationships, and that some should be concerned with Christian sects.
In the last twenty-five years, the effort to understand the ways of others has reinvigorated religious discussion on many levels. We have entered what has been described as the "Age of Dialogue." But what should be the nature of such dialogue? And what should be its goal? What exactly is the proper relationship between different communities of faith? In this book, Sandra B. Lubarsky offers some new answers to these timely questions. She begins with an affirmation of "veridical pluralism," the position that more than one tradition "speaks truth" - a "blessed fact" that enables us to enlarge our vision of truth through openness to the perceptions of others. Using the concept of "transformative dialogue" (a term borrowed from the theologian John B. Cobb, Jr.), she presents a method for the encounter of traditions in an age of religious pluralism - one which entails neither a loss of particularity nor a descent into relativism. In a Jewish contexts, Lubarsky argues that the Noachide Covenant, the premodern Jewish approach to non-Jews, is an inadequate framework for today's dialogue since it accords no independent value to any non-Jewish tradition. She then gives serious attention to the interreligious views of four seminal modern Jewish thinkers: Leo Baeck, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Mordecai Kaplan. Acknowledging our tremendous intellectual debt to them, she nevertheless calls for a move beyond tolerance and beyond mutual appreciation toward dialogue that may be transformative of our own traditions.
This collection of essays investigates signs of toleration, recognition, respect and other positive forms of interaction between and within religious groups of late antiquity. At the same time, it acknowledges that examples of tolerance are significantly fewer in ancient sources than examples of intolerance and are often limited to insiders, while outsiders often met with contempt, or even outright violence. The essays take both perspectives seriously by analysing the complexity pertaining to these encounters. Religious concerns, ethnicity, gender and other social factors central to identity formation were often intertwined and they yielded different ways of drawing the limits of tolerance and intolerance. This book enhances our understanding of the formative centuries of Jewish and Christian religious traditions. It also brings the results of historical inquiry into dialogue with present-day questions of religious tolerance.
There is a myth—easily shattered—that Western societies since the Enlightenment have been dedicated to the ideal of protecting the differences between individuals and groups, and another—too readily accepted—that before the rise of secularism in the modern period, intolerance and persecution held sway throughout Europe. In Beyond the Persecuting Society John Christian Laursen, Cary J. Nederman, and nine other scholars dismantle this second generalization. If intolerance and religious persecution have been at the root of some of the greatest suffering in human history, it is nevertheless the case that toleration was practiced and theorized in medieval and early modern Europe on a scale few have realized: Christians and Jews, the English, French, Germans, Dutch, Swiss, Italians, and Spanish had their proponents of and experiments with tolerance well before John Locke penned his famous Letter Concerning Toleration. Moving from Abelard to Aphra Behn, from the apology for the gentiles of the fourteenth-century Talmudic scholar, Menahem ben Solomon Ha-MeIiri, to the rejection of intolerance in the "New Israel" of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Beyond the Persecuting Society offers a detailed and decisive correction to a vision of the past as any less complex in its embrace and abhorrence of diversity than the present.
Today, and historically, religions often seem to be intolerant, narrow-minded, and zealous. But the record is not so one-sided. In Religious Tolerance in World Religions, numerous scholars offer perspectives on the "what" and "why" traditions of tolerance in world religions, beginning with the pre-Christian West, Greco-Roman paganism, and ancient Israelite Monotheism and moving into modern religions such as Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. By tolerance the authors mean "the capacity to live with religious difference, and by toleration, the theory that permits a majority religion to accommodate the presence of a minority religion." The volume is introduced with a summary of a recent survey that sought to identify the capacity of religions to tolerate one another in theory and in practice. Eleven religious communities in seven nations were polled on questions that ranged from equality of religious practitioners to consequences of disobedience. The essays frame the provocative analysis of how a religious system in its political statement produces categories of tolerance that can be explained in that system’s logical context. Past and present beliefs, practices, and definitions of social order are examined in terms of how they support tolerance for other religious groups as a matter of public policy. Religious Tolerance in World Religions focuses attention on the attitude "that the ’infidel’ or non-believer may be accorded an honorable position within the social order defined by Islam or Christianity or Judaism or Buddhism or Hinduism, and so on." It is a timely reference for colleges and universities and for makers of public policy.
