Abstract
Nicholas Terpstra showed how the Corpus Christianum as a metaphor of purity was predominant in Christian religious and social life, to the effect of distinguishing Christianity from Judaism and Islam, both spiritually and physically. Terpstra did not specifically refer to Erasmus, yet his presentation provides the conceptual context for some of Erasmus’ expressions that identify the purified Christian state with the absence of Jews and Marranos from its territory. This desire was religious—Erasmus’ fear of Judaic influence on Christianity. Nonetheless, such expressions have racial anti-Semitic implications.
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Notes
- 1.
Terpstra, Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World, 21–22.
- 2.
See notes 18–19, Chapter 9.
- 3.
As deduced, for example, by Gavin I. Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 7: “Christian anti-Judaism thus seemed an important precondition for European anti-Semitism, a halfway station between a very common kind of ethnocentric hostility and the peculiarly irrational hostility of Hitler.” (Cited by Po-chia Hsia, “Religion and Race,” 267). The title of Langmuir’s fifth chapter (p. 57) is “Anti-Judaism as the Necessary Preparation for Antisemitism.”
- 4.
CWE 5, 347–348; Ep 798: 19–25: “Optarim te propensiorem ad Graeca quam ista Hebraica, licet ea non reprehendam. Video gentem eam frigidissimis fabulis olenam nihil fere nisi fumos quosdam obiicere; Talmud, Cabalam, Tetragrammaton, Portas Lucis, inania nomina. Scoto malim infectum Christum quam istis neniis. Italia multos habet Iudaeos, Hispania vix habet Christianos. Vereor ne hac occasione pestis iam olim oppressa caput erigat.” See Price, Johannes Reuchlin and the Campaign to Destroy Jewish Books, 179.
- 5.
Marcel Bataillon, Erasmo y España (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica USA, 2nd edition, 1966), 190–205; Carlos G. Noreña, Juan Luis Vives (The Hague: Martinus Nijhof, 1970), 141; Kevin Ingram, “The Converso Phenomenon and the Issue of Spanish Identity,” in Rozbicki and Ndege (eds.), Cross-Cultural History and the Domestication of Otherness, 34, n. 18.
- 6.
On Carranza: COE, I, 273–274; Alejandro Coroleu, “Anti-Erasmianism in Spain,” in Erika Rummel (ed.), Biblical Humanism in the Age of Erasmus (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 79–83. On Zúñiga (Jacobus Lopes Stunica): COE, II, 348–349; Coroleu, “Anti-Erasmianism in Spain,” 74–79.
- 7.
LB, IX, 424E: “Stunica et Sanctius adoriantur diversum haereticorum genus, quod jam se nimium miscuit segeti Dominicae. Magis enim ac magis invalescunt Judaei quidam, sesqui-Judaei, et semi-Judaei…” See Markish, Erasmus and the Jews, 77; Ingram, “The Converso Phenomenon and the Issue of Spanish Identity,” 34.
- 8.
Under the title: “By race Jews, by religion Christians.”
- 9.
That is, the permission given by the authorities to a religious minority to perform its rites, e.g., the certification given to Jews to live in a certain place at a certain time. See n. 5, Chapter 1.
- 10.
This work of Luther: WA (= D. Martin Luthers Werke, kritische Gesammtausgabe. Weimar, 1883–1929), 53: 417–449. See also Markish, Erasmus and the Jews, 1–2 and notes 1–2; Mark U. Edwards, Jr. Luther’s Last Battles: Politics and Polemics, 1531–46 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1983), 131; Oberman, The Roots of Anti-Semitism, 94–124; Friedman, “Jews and New Christians in Reformation Europe,” 148–157; Scott H. Hendrix, Martin Luther: Visionary Reformer (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016), 264–266, 274–276; Thomas Kaufmann, Luther’s Jews: A Journey into Anti-Semitism Lesley Sharpe and Jeremy Noakes (trans.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 8, 144–147; Thomas Kaufmann, “Luther and the Jews,” in Dean Phillip Bell and Stephen G. Burnet (eds.), Jews, Judaism and the Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 76–77, 90–92.
- 11.
Roper, Martin Luther, 378–385 (the citations are on p. 378).
- 12.
“On the Ineffable Name and the Generations of Christ” (Vom Schem Hamphoras und vom Geschlecht Christi, 1543). See Roper, Martin Luther, 382–383.
- 13.
Ibid., 378–379. Thomas Kaufmann, Luthers Juden (Ditzingen: Reclam, 2014); idem, Luther’s Jews, 40–75; idem, “Luther and the Jews,” Antisemitism Studies 3 (2019): 46–65.
- 14.
CWE, 64, 238; ASD V-3, 58: “At Christianorum vulgus perperam existimat, cuivis licere Turcam non aliter occidere quam canem rabidum, non ob aliud nisi quia Turca est. Quod si verum esset, liceret cuivis occidere Judaeum, quod tamen si audeat, non effugeret poenam legum civilium.”
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Ron, N. (2019). Purification. In: Erasmus and the “Other”. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24929-8_10
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