The image of early modern Europe as plagued by religious persecution and confessional violence is familiar. In recent years, however, historians have begun to paint a more complex picture in which people of different faiths found ways to live together. In Divided by Faith, Benjamin J. Kaplan draws on their work to provide an overview and an important new analysis of how Europeans constructed religious pluralism. The book makes use of examples ranging from Ireland to Lithuania to show how Europeans practiced what Kaplan calls “toleration.” Since not all the means Europeans of different faiths found to live together would strike us as very tolerant, some historians might prefer a more neutral noun like “coexistence.” But it is central to Kaplan's argument that we cannot think of toleration only in Enlightenment terms, as a willingness to accept individual freedom of conscience and the right to worship as one sees fit. Toleration came in many forms, and Europeans found a variety of ways to practice it. Their understanding of toleration was pragmatic, based on the need to contain religious conflict.
The division of Christianity in Europe into competing churches sparked horrible violence, and Kaplan devotes the first part of his book to explaining the reasons behind it. But for some, strife was worse than disunity. Kaplan's most important contribution is his discussion of how toleration could be constructed in the midst of confessional conflict. An irenic strain in religious thought suggested ways to seek compromises by stressing what the faiths had in common and by downplaying differences as adiaphora, indifferent matters. Some churches, for example the Church of England, simply allowed a good deal of latitude in their members' beliefs.
Elsewhere differences in belief remained sharp, but rival faiths found themselves forced into accepting each other's legal existence. In Transylvania, from 1568, Reformed, Catholic, Lutheran, and Unitarian Churches received official status. Under the Warsaw Confederation (1573) the noble-dominated Catholic, Reformed, and Socinian churches of Poland agreed to respect one another's rights. The majority Catholic Church of France had to suffer the existence of the Reformed Church after the promulgation of the Edict of Nantes (1598). In the Peace of Augsburg (1555) and the Peace of Westphalia (1648), Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed rulers of the Empire determined the faith of their territories while respecting that of their neighbors, the principle known as cuius regio, eius religio. Thus while some political authorities pursued confessional uniformity through intolerance, others sought peace by protecting pluralism among their subjects.
Those subjects often found their own means of toleration. In some places the integration of confessional groups, noticeable, for example, in frequent mixed marriages, promoted a tolerant atmosphere. But toleration often depended less on integration than on segregation. Citizens of different faiths agreed, either tacitly or in formal contracts, to separate their religious practices. One way to do so was through the practice of Auslauf, in which a religious minority agreed to establish its church outside a city. Viennese Protestants from the 1570s to the 1620s—sometimes as many as ten thousand on a Sunday—marched to an estate at Hernals to worship. The Austrian state prohibited Auslauf, but Viennese of both faiths accepted it. Auslauf constructed a visible separation between the observances of rival groups. It invented a fiction of religious uniformity within city walls and thereby set up a way for a religious majority to accept the existence of a minority in its midst.
The same result could be achieved inside cities through other practices, such as the establishment of supposedly clandestine churches. Catholics used them in the Dutch Republic, where they were known as schuilkerken. They were not really secret, but they allowed confessional majorities and minorities to engage in a pretense: minorities agreed to confine their observances to buildings that looked like houses, not churches, and majorities agreed not to bother them. Of course, clandestineness did not always work; in England, secret Catholic worship did not escape official persecution.
Elsewhere, toleration did not depend on pretense and fictions, but rather on public arrangements. Such was the case with Simultankirchen, churches Catholics and Protestants shared, which were numerous along the Rhine. This required each group to accept religious observances deemed heretical in its sacred space. Sharing churches led to numerous petty quarrels. But the disputes were what Kaplan calls “a form of essentially peaceful engagement,” a “relatively harmless outlet for antagonisms” (216–217).
In the most thorough form of separation, rival groups regulated not only their religious practices but other aspects of their civic lives as well—schools, hospitals, roles in city governance, and judicial affairs. Carefully demarcated confessional communities developed, and parity arrangements or quota systems that fixed each confession's seats on city councils protected group interests. The Edict of Nantes dictated such settlements in biconfessional French towns, but the arrangements in the Empire were more long-lasting. The classic case was Augsburg, where the laws on separation promoted among Catholics and Lutherans a “mania for differentiating themselves” (217) but also stability and peace in the city.
Toleration through segregation could serve the interests of minorities. Such was the case in the most notorious cases of segregation, the Jewish ghettos of Italian cities, established first in Venice in 1516. Venice's response to Christian anxieties about Jews was to segregate them behind ghetto walls at night. The ghetto has become a symbol of religious persecution but, as Kaplan shows, it offered Christians a means by which to accept the presence of Jews in their community by reducing the occasions for tension over nighttime activities, for example, sexual relations between Jews and Christians. It also protected Jews from attack and may have led to the development of a distinctive Jewish culture.
Segregation, accommodation, agreements, pretense: these were the tools of practical toleration in biconfessional communities. They did not depend on the Enlightenment idea that European society had “matured” beyond religious violence. Indeed, as Kaplan reminds us, religious conflicts hardly ended by the eighteenth century. Instead, they depended on a pragmatic realization of the need to contain conflict through coexistence. Kaplan's masterful account demonstrates that even during a time when religious antagonism remained fierce, people could and did find ways to live together peacefully.
