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Protestant Unity and Anti-Catholicism: The Irenicism and Philo-Semitism of John Dury in Context

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 March 2017

Jeremy Fradkin
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Abstract

This article examines the religious and political worldview of the Scottish minister John Dury during the English Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century. It argues that Dury's activities as an irenicist and philo-semite must be understood as interrelated aspects of an expansionist Protestant cause that included Britain, Ireland, continental Europe, and the Atlantic world. Dury sought to imitate and counter what he perceived to be the principal strengths of early modern Catholicism: confessional unity, imperial expansion, and the coordination of global missionary efforts. The 1640s and 1650s saw the scope of Dury's long-standing vision grow to encompass colonial expansion in Ireland and America, where English and continental Protestants might work together to fortify their position against Spain and its growing Catholic empire. Both Portuguese Jews and American Indians appear in this vision as victims of Spanish Catholicism in desperate need of Protestant help. This article thus offers new perspectives on several aspects of Dury's career, including his relationship with displaced Anglo-Irish Protestants in London, his proposal to establish a college for the study of Jewish learning and “Oriental” languages, his speculation regarding the Lost Tribes of Israel in America, and his cautious advocacy for the toleration of Jews in England.

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Articles
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 56 , Issue 2 , April 2017 , pp. 273 - 294
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Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies 2017 

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References

1 The documents relating to this proposed colony are in the Hartlib Papers (hereafter HP), bundle 12. Transcriptions are digitally available through the University of Sheffield's Hartlib Papers project at http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/hartlib/. The quotations are taken from 12/9B, 12/66A and 25/7/1B–2A HP. See also Leng, Thomas, “‘A Potent Plantation well armed and Policeed’: Huguenots, the Hartlib Circle, and British Colonization in the 1640s,” William and Mary Quarterly 66, no. 1 (January 2009): 173–94Google Scholar, at 180–83.

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10 Two letters from Dury to Roe, reproduced in full in Westin, Negotiations about Church Unity, 216–21.

11 These letters are preserved in Roe's state papers and printed in full in Westin, Negotiations about Church Unity.

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32 Barnard, “The Protestant Interest,” 282–84; Patricia Coughlan, “Natural History and Historical Nature: The Project for a Natural History of Ireland,” in Greengrass, Leslie, and Raylor, eds., Samuel Hartlib, 298–317, at 299–300; Turnbull, Hartlib, Dury and Comenius, 219; Hunter, Letters of Dorothy Moore, xix; Webster, Great Instauration, 65–67.

33 For an exploration of the more typical English Protestant colonial discourse concerning Ireland throughout the early modern period, and its reflection in maps and surveys, see Smyth, William J., Map-Making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland, c. 1530–1750 (Cork, 2006)Google Scholar. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this reference.

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38 McKenny, Kevin, “The Restoration Land Settlement in Ireland: A Statistical Interpretation,” in Restoration Ireland: Always Settling and Never Settled, ed. Dennehy, Coleman (Aldershot, 2008), 35–52 Google Scholar. The quotation is taken from Canny, Making Ireland British, 558; for a detailed geographic study of this transformation, see generally Smyth, Map-Making.

39 Pestana, Carla Gardina, The English Atlantic in the Age of Revolution, 1640–1661 (Cambridge, MA, 2004)Google Scholar, chap. 6; Games, Alison, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (Oxford, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 8; Donoghue, John, Fire under the Ashes: An Atlantic History of the English Revolution (Chicago, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 6.

40 Batten, John Dury, 125, 143. On Dury's support for the Engagement, see Skinner, Quentin, Visions of Politics (Cambridge, 2002)Google Scholar, 3:189–99; Zagorin, Perez, A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution (London, 1954), 62–77 Google Scholar.

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43 For a good summary of the existing research into the philo-semitism of Dury and Hartlib, see Kaplan, Yosef, “Jews and Judaism in the Hartlib Circle,” Studia Rosenthalia 38/39 (2005): 186–215 Google Scholar. The quotation is from Richard H. Popkin, “Hartlib, Dury and the Jews,” in Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation, ed. Greengrass, Leslie, and Raylor, 118–36. See also Popkin, Richard H., “The First College for Jewish Studies,” Revue des Études Juives 143, no. 3 (June 1984): 351–64Google Scholar; idem, “The End of the Career of a Great 17th Century Millenarian: John Dury,” Pietismus und Neuzeit 14 (1988): 203–20Google Scholar. For Dury's place in the wider context of English Judaizing and philo-semitism in this period, and for the circumstances of Jewish readmission, see the classic study by Katz, David S., Philo-semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England, 1603–1655 (Oxford, 1982)Google Scholar.

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48 See generally Popkin, “Hartlib, Dury and the Jews.”

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56 Dury, Case of Conscience, 3; Klooster, Wim, “Networks of Colonial Entrepreneurs: The Founders of the Jewish Settlements in Dutch America, 1650s and 1660s,” in Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800, ed. Kagan, Richard L. and Morgan, Philip D. (Baltimore, 2009), 33–49 Google Scholar, at 35–37.

57 Dury, “Epistolicall Discourse,” sig. e3–e4.

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74 Turnbull, Hartlib, Dury and Comenius, 272.