Handbook of Religious Culture in Nineteenth-Century Europe 9783110606324, 3110606321

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Handbook of Religious Culture in Nineteenth-Century Europe

Handbook of Religious Culture in NineteenthCentury Europe

Edited by Anthony J. Steinhoff and Jeffrey T. Zalar

ISBN 978-3-11-057367-1 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-060905-9 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-060632-4 DOI https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110609059 Library of Congress Control Number: 2024940918 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2025 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston. Cover image: James Ensor, Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889, Belgium 1888. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com Questions about General Product Safety Regulation: [email protected]

Acknowledgements Bringing a project like the present volume to completion would have been impossible without the assistance and support of numerous individuals and institutions. It is thus with great pleasure that we recognize all those who have contributed to the success of this endeavor. In the first instance, we wish to thank all our contributing authors for their expertise and professionalism, but even more so for their fortitude and patience in the face of frustrating delays caused by the disruption of academic life during the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 – 22. Ultimately, these circumstances also forced us to recommission two essential chapters. We are thus particularly grateful to Nathalie Clayer and David Meola for their willingness to contribute to the volume on very short notice. Behind the scenes, Jay D. Feist, Linda L. Gaus, and Sue Harrison provided invaluable assistance with their initial translations of, respectively, chapters 19, 20, and 3. The manuscript also benefitted from the extensive comments and suggestions provided by the anonymous peer reviewers. A warm thanks to you all. Our appreciation likewise extends to Laura Kopp for her excellent work in copyediting the completed manuscript and to Taraneh Wilkinson for producing the volume’s fine index. In ways both large and small, our work on this project was supported by our home departments and institutions, namely, the History Departments of the University of Cincinnati and the Université du Québec à Montréal. Special thanks are also due to the University of Cincinnati History Department’s Werner E. von Rosenstiel Fund and the Taft Research Center at the University of Cincinnati for their generous financial assistance in defraying the costs of the translations, copyediting, and indexing. The idea for this volume developed in close collaboration with Elise Wintz. While she left De Gruyter before the manuscript was finished, we are indebted to her for the constant backing she gave to the project. We would also like to thank Joachim Berger, Irene Dingel, and Johannes Paulmann of the Leibniz-Institut für Europäische Geschichte in Mainz, Germany for organizing an informal workshop in December 2018 at which the plans for this volume were presented and critically discussed. This feedback enabled us to refine the volume’s proposed structure in useful ways. Finally, our hearty thanks to the people at De Gruyter, especially Benedikt Krüger and Sophie Wagenhofer, whose timely assistance and encouragement ensured that this volume finally saw the light of day.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110609059-001

Contents Illustrations IX Figures IX Tables X Contributors

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Anthony J. Steinhoff and Jeffrey T. Zalar 1 Introduction

Part I: Faith Traditions Heather Bailey 1 Eastern Orthodox Christianity Nathalie Clayer 2 Islam 35 David Meola 3 Judaism

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Patrick Cabanel 4 Protestantism

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Thomas Kselman 5 Roman Catholicism Jeffrey T. Zalar 6 Popular Religion

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Carolin Kosuch 7 Secularism and Unbelief

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Part II: Cultures of Knowledge Anthony J. Steinhoff 169 8 Education

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Mark D. Chapman 9 Theology 189 Jeffrey T. Zalar 10 Publishing and Reading

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Part III: Religion and the Arts Samuel J. Kessler and Anthony J. Steinhoff 229 11 Architecture Daniel Weidner 12 Religion and Literature Bennett Zon 13 Music

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Sarah Schaefer 14 Visual Arts

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Part IV: Religion and Civil Society Yvonne Maria Werner 341 15 Gender Norman Etherington 16 Missions and Empire Leen Van Molle 17 The Social Question Anthony J. Steinhoff 18 Voluntarism

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381

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Siegfried Weichlein 19 Religion and National Politics Werner Daum and Anthony J. Steinhoff 447 20 Church and State Index

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Illustrations Figures 4.1 7.1 7.2 7.3 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5 11.6 11.7 11.8 11.9 11.10 11.11 11.12 11.13 11.14 11.15 11.16 11.17 11.18 11.19 11.20 11.21 11.22 11.23 11.24 11.25 14.1 14.2 14.3 14.4 14.5 14.6 14.7 14.8 14.9 14.10 14.11 14.12 14.13

Georges Bretegnier, La lecture de la Bible, 1892 The future belongs to him who controls the school The Shadow in Our Schools, 1890 Between Berlin and Rome The Cologne Cathedral, engraving, 1840 The Mosque – Woking, 1889 Nya Lutherska Kyrkan och Bibliotheket (The Lutheran Church by the Library in Helsinki), 1838 The (Karlsruhe) Synagogue, c. 1810 The Votivkirche in Vienna, 1879 Street façade of Holy Trinity Church (Anglican) in South Kensington, England The All-Saints Court Church (Hofkirche) in Munich Paul Abadie’s plan for the south façade of the Basilica of Sacré-Coeur (Montmartre, Paris), c. 1876 The Consistorial Synagogue of Strasbourg, 1903 Saint Basil’s Cathedral on Moscow’s Red Square, c. 1890 – 1900 The Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, Russia, 1903 The Church of Dmitry Solunsky in Saint Petersburg, Russia, 1913 The Metropolitan Cathedral (Orthodox) of Athens, Greece The Domnița Bălașa (Orthodox) Church in Bucharest, Romania The Lüneburg Synagogue (Germany), 1895 The Dohány Street Synagogue, Budapest, Hungary, 1890 Studies of the face for the Church of the Epiphany (Lutheran) in Saltsjöbaden, Sweden, 1910 The main façade of the Great Synagogue, Plzeň/Pilsen Saint-Jean de Montmartre, Paris Otto Wagner’s (Catholic) Church for Vienna’s Steinhof District Interior of the Dresden Synagogue, c. 1898 Exterior view of the Sadâbad Mosque, Constantinople/Istanbul Interior view of the Sadâbad Mosque, Constantinople/Istanbul Front façade of Aladár Árkay’s Fasor Reformed Church, Budapest, Hungary Altar space of Aladár Árkay’s Fasor Reformed Church, Budapest, Hungary Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, 1789 Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin, The Baptism of Christ, 1858 Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea, 1808 – 10 Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Evening of the Deluge, c. 1843 Enfants, n’y touches pas! (Children, do not touch!) The Reign of God, published by Pellerin, 1838 Lantern slide of David Livingstone preaching from his wagon, c. 1900 The Mosque of Omar, or the ancient site of the Temple, 1840s Jérusalem, Birket-Hammam-Setty-Mariam, 1854 Turkish woman in city dress, produced by the Maison Bonfils, 1870s William Holman Hunt, The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple, 1860 Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, Sabbath Rest, 1866 Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, Lavater and Lessing Visit Moses Mendelssohn, 1856

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14.14 Poster advertising Gustave Doré’s illustrations to La Légende du juif errant (The Legend of the Wandering Jew), 1856 14.15 La France aux Français (France for the French) 14.16 Osman Hamdi Bey, Kur’an Tilaveti (Reciting the Quran), 1910 14.17 Jean-François Millet, The Angelus, 1857 – 59 14.18 Wilhelm Leibl, Die drei Frauen in der Kirche (Three Women in a Church), 1878 – 82 14.19 Konstantin Savitsky, Paying their Respects to the Icon, 1878 14.20 Paul Gauguin, Le Christ Jaune (The Yellow Christ), 1889 14.21 Paul Sérusier, Portrait of Paul Ranson in Nabi Costume, 1890 14.22 Gustave Moreau, The Apparition, 1876 – 77 14.23 Akseli Gallen-Kallela, By the River of Tuonela, 1903 14.24 Natalia Goncharova, Christian Host, 1914 14.25 View of “0.10 – The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting,” Petrograd, 1915 – 16 17.1 John Rogers Herbert (1810 – 90), Laborare est orare, 1862

Tables 3.1 Jewish Populations in Europe, 1800 to 1900 5.1 The Nineteenth-Century Popes and Their Encyclicals

Contributors Heather Bailey is Professor of History at the University of Illinois Springfield, where she has taught modern European and Russian history courses since 2002. Her research focuses on intellectual, cultural, and diplomatic relations between France and Russia in the nineteenth century and on western European attitudes about Russia and its predominant church. She is the author of Orthodoxy, Modernity, and Authenticity: The Reception of Ernest Renan’s “Life of Jesus” in Russia (2008) and The Public Image of Eastern Orthodoxy: France and Russia, 1848 – 1870 (2020). Patrick Cabanel is Directeur d’études (History and sociology of Protestantisms) at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris. His publications include Juifs et protestants en France: Les affinités électives XVIe–XXIe siècle (2004), Histoire des protestants en France, XVIe–XXIe siècle (2012), La Fabrique des huguenots: Une minorité entre histoire et mémoire, XVIIIe–XXIe siècle (2022), and Le droit de croire: La France et ses minorités religieuses, XVIe–XXIe siècle (2024). Mark Chapman is Vice-Principal and Academic Dean of Ripon College, Cuddesdon and Professor of the History of Modern Theology at the University of Oxford. He has written extensively on the history of theology and the churches in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nathalie Clayer is professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) and a senior research fellow at the CNRS in Paris. Her main research interests are religion, nationalism, and statebuilding processes in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman worlds. Her publications include Islam in Inter-War Europe, co-edited with Eric Germain (2008); Europe’s Balkan Muslims: A New History, with Xavier Bougarel (2017); and Kemalism: Transnational Politics in the Post Ottoman World, co-edited with Fabio Giomi and Emmanuel Szurek (2018). Werner Daum is director of the Karlsruhe Campus of the FernUniversität at Hagen and associated with the Dimitris Tsatsos Institute for European Constitutional Studies in Athens. He has published widely in the areas of modern Italian history (especially the Risorgimento), European constitutional history, and the history of the public sphere and journalism during the long nineteenth century. He is a co-editor of the four-volume series, Handbuch der europäischen Verfassungsgeschichte im 19. Jahrhundert (Dietz). Norman Etherington has published widely on the history of European imperialism, Southern Africa, and Christian missions. Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Western Australia, his books include Missions and Empire (2005), The Great Treks: The Transformation of Southern Africa, 1815 – 1854 (2001), Imperium of the Soul: The Political and Aesthetic Imagination of Edwardian Imperialists (2017), Big Game Hunter: A Life of Frederick Courteney Selous (2016), and Mapping Colonial Conquest: Southern Africa and Australia (2007). Samuel J. Kessler is Assistant Professor and Lyons Chair in Judaic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is the author of The Formation of a Modern Rabbi: The Life and Times of the Viennese Scholar and Preacher Adolf Jellinek (2022) and co-editor of Modern Jewish Theology: The First One Hundred Years, 1835 – 1935 (2023). Carolin Kosuch is a historian with research interests in secularism, Jewish history, and intellectual history. After holding positions at Leipzig’s Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture, the German Historical Institute in Rome, and the Max-Weber-Center in Erfurt, she is currently professor of nineteenthcentury history at the University of Göttingen, filling in for Rebekka Habermas. She teaches courses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century transnational political, religious, and intellectual history. Her book, Die

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Abschaffung des Todes: Säkularistische Ewigkeiten vom 18. bis ins 21. Jahrhundert, just appeared with Campus Verlag (2024). Thomas Kselman is Professor Emeritus in the History Department of the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Miracles and Prophecies in Nineteenth-Century France (1983), Death and the Afterlife in Modern France (1993), and Conscience and Conversion: Religious Liberty in Post-Revolutionary France (2018). He is the editor of Belief in History: Innovative Approaches to European and American Religion (1991) and co-editor (with Joseph Buttigieg) of European Christian Democracy: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Perspectives (2003). In 2005, he served as President of the American Catholic Historical Association. David A. Meola is the Fanny & Bert Meisler Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of South Alabama and a Fulbright Scholar. He researches Jewish agency and contributions to the pre-1848 German press, foremost in fights for emancipation and about Jewish religious reform. His current project addresses Jewish contributions to the pre-1848 German liberal movement. Author of several articles and chapters, his monograph “We Will Never Yield”: Jews, the German Press, and the Fight for Inclusion in the 1840s was published by Indiana University Press in 2023. Sarah C. Schaefer is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her first book, Gustave Doré and the Biblical Imagination, was published by Oxford University Press in 2021. Other writings on religious visual culture have appeared in Material Religion, The Bible and Critical Theory, and the Journal of Art Historiography. Anthony J. Steinhoff is Associate Professor of History at the Université du Québec à Montréal. A specialist in modern French and German history, he has written widely on religion in nineteenth-century Europe. In addition to his book, The Gods of the City: Protestantism and Religious Culture in Strasbourg, 1870 – 1914 (2008), he has written an article critiquing Olaf Blaschke’s thesis of a second confessional age (Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 2004) and, most recently, contributed a chapter on urban religion for the Cambridge History of Urban Europe (forthcoming 2025). In addition, he is currently preparing a monograph on Richard Wagner’s Parsifal and operatic culture in Central Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Leen Van Molle is Professor Emerita of Social History at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium). Her research focuses on social policy, social movements, and the construction of social identities from 1800 to the present. She has published widely on the history of the rural world, gender, charity and social reform, and the methodology of oral history. She is co-founder and former president of EURHO (European Rural History Organization) and AVG-CARHIF (Archive and Research Centre for Women’s History). Siegfried Weichlein is professor of European and Swiss contemporary history at the University of Fribourg and has often been a visiting scholar at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University. His research interests include the history of nationalism, federalism and regionalism, the history of political parties, the cultural history of the Cold War, political iconography and religion, and decolonization. Among his many publications are Nation und Region: Integrationsprozesse im Bismarckreich (2004) and, most recently, Föderalismus und Demokratie in der Bundesrepublik (2019). Daniel Weidner is Professor of Comparative Literature at Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. His scholarship focuses on the relationship of literature and religion. Recent work includes the handbook Literatur und Religion (2016) and The Father of Jewish Mysticism: The Writing of Gershom Scholem (2022). His monograph Bible and Literature around 1800: Textuality, Reading, and Philology will soon be published by

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Oxford University Press. Current projects address the cultural and literary history of the German Kulturkampf and the political theology of the Enlightenment. Yvonne Maria Werner is professor in the Department of History at the University of Lund. Her research has focused on religion, identity, and culture in the modern period. She has written several works on the history of the Catholic Church in Scandinavia, among them studies of Catholic women religious in the Nordic countries, Catholic mission and conversion in Scandinavia, and Catholic masculinity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Furthermore, she has addressed the history of anti-Catholicism and anticlericalism in Sweden and Scandinavia and Scandinavian identity discourses in Catholicism and European integration. Jeffrey T. Zalar is Associate Professor of History and the inaugural holder of the Ruth J. and Robert A. Conway Endowed Chair in Catholic Studies at the University of Cincinnati. His book, Reading and Rebellion in Catholic Germany, 1770 – 1914, published by Cambridge University Press in 2019, received the 2020 George A. and Jean S. DeLong Book History Book Prize from The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP). His current project is a study of Catholics and natural science in Germany from 1830 to 1914. Bennett Zon is Professor of Music at Durham University and founding director of its Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies. He is also founding director of both the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies International and the International Network for Music Theology, and he is the inaugural president of the International Nineteenth-Century Studies Association. His publications include The English Plainchant Revival (1999), Music and Metaphor in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2000), Representing Non-Western Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2007), and Evolution and Victorian Musical Culture (2017).

Anthony J. Steinhoff and Jeffrey T. Zalar

Introduction

At first glance, James Ensor’s immense painting, L’entrée du Christ à Bruxelles (Christ’s Entry into Brussels), completed when the Belgian artist was only twenty-nine years old, may seem an odd choice of image for the cover of a handbook on religious culture, even one set in the tumultuous context of Europe’s long nineteenth century. There is little in the work that seems religious at all, apart from the haloed figure of Christ, and his location on the canvas marks him as a rather marginal figure. On its unveiling, Ensor’s piece was also controversial. Critics lambasted the choice of subject matter as both irreverent and overly political. They were even more disparaging of the work’s aesthetic qualities: its caricatural figures, odd color palette, and seeming lack of serious technique. Yet it is precisely the unconventionality of Ensor’s chef-d’oeuvre and how it evokes several subjects that have animated recent research on religion in modern Europe that make it admirably suited to be this volume’s cover image. Take, for example, the sign appearing on the painting’s right edge that proclaims, “Long live Jesus, the King of Brussels.” It could well allude to Christianity’s social and political prominence in much of Europe. But this interpretation is at odds with contemporary accounts that tended to characterize the metropolis as “godless,” a perspective that has also informed scholarly narratives about the European city as the crucible of secular modernity. Similarly, the painting’s visual language suggests that traditional understandings of religion are being called into question, especially in the urban environment. Christ may be king, but the carnivalesque atmosphere portrayed here makes no mention of ecclesiastical institutions or any identifiable Christian religious devotion. Following recent research, we might read this ambiguity as an effort to reimagine Christianity itself as faith and social practice or, in keeping with the musings of such thinkers as the composer Richard Wagner (1815 – 83), as an attempt to discover religious “truth” through art, a truth that is not necessarily coincident with organized religion (see Hübner 1995). Indeed, since the 1980s, scholars working in multiple disciplines have contributed to a fundamental rethinking of religion as a factor in nineteenth-century European cultural, political, social, and even economic life. In large part, this new understanding is the result of increasing dissatisfaction with the master narrative of progressive and inevitable secularization, especially in its more dogmatic forms (Cox 2003). For the more that scholars have paid close attention to the historical record, the less convincing the secularization thesis has proven. Without a doubt, religion’s role in Europe changed between the outbreak of the French Revolution and the beginning of the First World War. Political revolutions and the rise of the nation-state, industrialization and the emergence of an urban laboring class, new patterns of social life and shifting relations between Europe and the rest of the world due to emigration and imperialism: all these developments prompted redefinitions of the relationship of religion to state, society, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110609059-002

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and individual. But the historical evidence, more clearly understood, argues for religion’s adaptation rather than its surrender to modern conditions. In evaluating this adaptation, the wave of revisionist scholarship did not seek simply to point out the persistence of religious influences, however much they may have appeared in new guises. Rather, the new research highlighted religious life’s dynamism and its positive contributions to the construction of European modernity. These contributions are evident across the landscape of modern experience, from the development of new types of political and social organization to the articulation of original models for philanthropic charity and the exploration of modern forms of communication. Much as Callum Brown has observed (2001), this scholarship also emphasized that while alternatives to religious belief and community gained in number and in sociolegal respectability after 1850, on the eve of the First World War membership in Europe’s traditional faith communities still vastly surpassed that of all other types of social and political organization. A key measure of this revisionist research’s collective success is that it encouraged scholars who had paid little heed to religious factors to explore the salience of religion, giving rise to what some have called a “religious turn” in European historiography (Steinhoff 2004). Labor historians, for example, started attending not only to the rise of Christian trade unionism but also to how nineteenth-century understandings of work and social organization remained rooted in religious (and specifically Christian) teachings (Geary 2001). In the realm of women’s and gender studies, studies of feminine religious sociability (e. g., Davidoff and Hall 1987) inspired closer analyses of how religion helped foster a sense of separate public (masculine) and private (feminine) spheres even as it offered women significant opportunities to subvert these categories (de Groot and Morgan 2013). In a widely debated article, the German historian Olaf Blaschke made even bolder claims for religion’s role in modern Europe, proposing that we view the entire period from 1800 to 1970 as a “second confessional age” (2000). While his contention that we can apply “confessional age,” an analytic framework deriving from studies of early modern Europe (see Puff 2018), to the modern period remains problematic, it did have the merit of encouraging scholars to be more aware of the critical ways in which religion influenced European life after 1800. One of the present volume’s goals is to evaluate the field in the wake of revisionist research that both broadly succeeded in disqualifying secularization as a viable master narrative and sparked a “religious turn” that has transformed our understanding of how religion shaped many spheres of activity, public and private, over the course of the nineteenth century. At the same time, we hope that the conceptual and framing choices made here will foster new ways of thinking about religion in nineteenthcentury Europe and encourage further research. Most importantly along these lines, the present volume brings into conversation with one another all of Europe’s major faith communities, making it the first such work dealing with the nineteenth century to do so. Not only does it present a series of chapters that explore the histories of the Continent’s major religious traditions, but each of the volume’s remaining chapters examines its specified topic from the perspective of multiple faith communities. In com-

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missioning the chapters, we urged authors to take into account—to the degree that the current state of the literature allowed—developments across the entire European continent and throughout the entire century. The contributors’ success in fulfilling this mandate has resulted in a volume that offers a picture of European religious culture that is exceptional in its breadth of coverage and its ability to foster comparative perspectives across faith traditions and geographies. Central to this volume’s conception is the idea of religious culture, which is deliberately being understood in the singular and not in the plural (cultures). Some may find this a curious decision since the diversity in Europe’s nineteenth-century religious landscape was considerable and widely acknowledged at the time. In geographic terms alone, it was already commonplace to talk about a Protestant northern Europe, a Catholic western and southern Europe, and an Orthodox eastern Europe, while also recognizing a strong presence of Islam in the southeast and Jews dispersed across the Continent. Moreover, each of these communities harbored significant variations within them that rightly merit consideration as discrete religious cultures, for instance Scottish Presbyterianism, Dutch Calvinism, and Swiss Reformed Protestantism. In sum, and as the contributions to this volume make clear, nineteenth-century Europe possessed an abundance of religious cultures. Nonetheless, switching the emphasis from religious cultures to religious culture offers certain theoretical and programmatic advantages. From the outset, it is worth stressing that we do not have in mind a Weberian, ideal-typical notion of religious culture. There is thus no presumption, neither in the volume’s conception nor in the development of the individual chapters, that there exists a single, standard definition of “religious culture,” including with respect to Europe’s several faith traditions. Rather, our take on religious culture draws from the insights of other sociologists, notably Pierre Bourdieu, and from anthropologists and religious studies’ specialists, who recommend adopting more dynamic appreciations of what “religion” is (or could be) and promote a more relational approach to thinking about religion in the nineteenth century. In particular, Bourdieu’s concept of the “religious field” (1971) compels us to acknowledge that none of the Continent’s faith traditions existed in a vacuum. Even “internal” matters of the faith community—from organizational structures to ideas on belief and practice—developed in dialogue with “external” agents, forces, and structures, whether social, political, or cultural in nature. The idea of the religious field also helps scholars discern the evolving relations among religious, political, social, and even economic systems, not with the goal of charting religion’s decline but instead to comprehend better both the nature and the consequences of changes in the field. Finally, an emphasis on religious culture, understood from the perspective of religious fields, facilitates comparisons across faith traditions. The approach does not assume that the experience of any particular faith community is paradigmatic, functioning thus as a sort of benchmark. It serves rather as a potent reminder that religious coexistence shaped the construction of these religious fields, especially during the nineteenth century.

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In addition to creating a framework that speaks more effectively to Europe’s diverse religious landscape and inspires ranging reflections on faith communities in context, the decision to stress religious culture reflects a desire to circumvent certain problems with the very notion of “religion” as research object. Two particular problems warrant mention. First, as recent scholarship has shown, a major shortcoming of older research into nineteenth-century European religious life is its tendency to emphasize official definitions of religion, that is, how religious authorities defined the beliefs, practices, and obligations for their specific communities. The difficulty here is less the attention to official standards of religious practice (for example, participating in services at certain times of the year or receiving religious rites of passage), than the fixation on these standards as the sole indications of religiosity and piety. Religious sociologists and social historians of religion then compounded the problem with quantitative studies that largely reduced religious life to measurable phenomena (see also Brown 2001), sometimes even ignoring the different values that distinct communities placed on similar practices (such as going to church on Sundays or receiving communion). For Jeffrey Cox, one way beyond the limitations of this approach was to take into account what he termed “diffusive Christianity,” a concept that could also be rendered as “diffusive religion” (1982). He argued that as the nineteenth century progressed, not only churches and chapels (and synagogues and mosques) but also schools, newspapers, and voluntary organizations functioned as key actors in and sites for the diffusion of religious knowledge in ways that may or may not have enjoyed clerical endorsement. The emergence of new forms of communication, social organization, and education, then—all aspects of “European modernity”—made possible alternative, layfocused notions of faith and religious practice that also included novel methods of imagining religious community. Although it has been applied less often to studies of nineteenth-century Europe, the notion of “lived” or “everyday” religion, as advocated by such scholars as Nancy Ammerman (2007), David Hall (1997), and Robert Orsi (1985), pushes the envelope further by suggesting that scholars need also focus on how individuals conceived of themselves as religious actors and agents, since their conceptions and practices did not always coincide with religious leaders’ expectations. The concept of everyday religion, furthermore, offers a way to think about “alternative” notions of religion, not simply what we might today label as “spirituality” but also such seemingly anti-religious beliefs and behavior as secularism, which, as Todd Weir has recently argued, often functioned as coherent religious systems (2014). These reflections on lived and everyday religion lead us to the second problem we hoped to evade by employing religious culture as this volume’s organizing idea. Namely, “religion” is a constructed concept that only inadequately captures the range of social and cultural mindsets and practices it purportedly represents (Fitzgerald 2000). As such scholars as Tomoko Masuzawa (2005) and Catherine Bell (2006) have stressed, this construct both privileged and idealized European and Christian religious cultures. Indeed, in the minds of the nineteenth-century founders of the history and comparative study of religion, and paraphrasing Protagoras, Christianity was the measure of all

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things religious, hence also the tendency (until late into the century) to reserve to Christianity the status of “universal religion.” Problematic too, as Richard King (1999), David Chidester (2014), and other scholars have demonstrated, is that after 1800 European constructions of religion drew heavily on Orientalist discourses and imperial knowledge obtained not just from colonial administrations but also from Christian missionaries. While the mere substitution of “religious culture” for “religion” cannot resolve all criticisms of the latter term, “religious culture” does edge scholars away from rigid notions of what is or is not religious and recommends they be more attentive to the multiple ways in which individuals and communities saw themselves as religious and acted upon that sentiment. It also opens up possibilities for comparisons across traditions, without viewing the perspectives or experiences of any one faith tradition as either axiomatic or emblematic. This last comment calls attention to a final point that deserves a brief mention, namely, the manner in which we have defined Europe for this volume. As readers will quickly discern, our operative definition is rather conventional. In geographic terms, Europe stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Urals and from the Arctic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea. It thus includes Iceland and the British Isles, the western regions of the Russian Empire, and the northwestern portions of the Ottoman Empire, that is the Balkans and the area around Constantinople (since 1930, Istanbul). As a rule, we requested that contributors explore fully this geography in planning and writing their chapters, even if there were also important global dimensions to their subjects. Migration and missionary engagement after 1800, for instance, made Protestantism, Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy into world religions as they had never been before. Popes based in Rome appointed priests to new parishes in the United States. Evangelical Protestants in North America but also Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa sang British hymns and founded local chapters of the YMCA and YWCA. Religious ideas buttressed nation-states and helped fuel their imperialist missions to “civilize” indigenous communities and exploit local resources. Moreover, as such historians as Jürgen Osterhammel have asserted, Europe—including its religious communities—was not left unaffected by these contacts (2010). As noted above, global and imperial connections supplied essential concepts and terms to European discourses on religion, most notably in debates concerning “universal” (Christianity, and by century’s end also Hinduism and Buddhism) and “national” (Judaism and Islam) religion. Counter-migration likewise fostered the emergence of Hindu communities in Great Britain, while North American Protestants began, after 1840, to participate in “European” associations such as the Evangelical Alliance (founded in 1846). Nonetheless, apart from Norman Etherington’s chapter on empire and mission (Chapter 16), these global and transnational perspectives do not figure centrally in any of the contributions, although several gesture in that direction. Nor do the chapters on the faith traditions examine how European states handled religious questions in their colonial possessions. Our preference for a narrower sense of Europe does not stem from any rejection of this global turn but reflects instead practical concerns. On the one hand, and in keeping with our utilization of religious culture as an organ-

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izing concept, we wished as much as possible to focus attention on developments within a common geographic space, a “permeable” Europe, if you will. On the other hand, as we began commissioning chapters and spoke with potential contributors, it quickly became apparent that it was already a tall order to realize chapters that took into account multiple faith traditions across the European landmass throughout the long nineteenth century. Moreover, for several chapters in this volume, there is no clear global “angle,” especially given the state of the current historiography. Thus, while it might be desirable to produce a global history of religious culture in the nineteenth century, this is neither the pretension nor the ambition of this Handbook. The structure adopted for this volume both reflects this theoretical program and responds to recent developments in the scientific literature. It is divided into four parts: “Faith Traditions,” “Cultures of Knowledge,” “Religion and the Arts,” and “Religion and Civil Society.” Part I, Faith Traditions, begins with foundational chapters devoted to each of Europe’s five main religious traditions: Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Protestantism, and Roman Catholicism. As noted earlier, it was especially important to us that Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Islam receive due treatment with the other traditions. This consideration flows from the very geographical definition of Europe adopted for the volume. Since the Russian Empire and southeastern Europe are part of this Europe, their principal faith traditions, Orthodox Christianity and Islam, had to be represented. But it also speaks to a concern in recent historiography on Europe’s nineteenth century to call into question the “normative” nature of western European experiences and, concomitantly, the “backwardness” of the European South and East (e. g. Berend 2013). The inclusion of these two chapters, then, along with the chapter on Judaism, both reflects historical reality and highlights the tension between this reality and the notion of a “Christian Europe” that was pervasive in the nineteenth century and is still influential, at least in certain circles, today. Dedicating a chapter to each of these religious traditions affords a richer understanding of each tradition’s specific situation and experiences over the nineteenth century, while also providing essential background for the topical studies that follow in the final three parts. In particular, these chapters permitted the authors to examine the evolving institutional, theological, and devotional terms in which the corporate identity of each respective tradition was fashioned and expressed. Asking them to approach these traditions from a wider European, and not just a regional perspective, also paid valuable dividends, especially in the chapters on Judaism, Protestantism and, to a lesser degree, Roman Catholicism. In addition to placing heretofore largely isolated historiographical traditions into better conversation with one another, these chapters have called attention to comparative and transnational dimensions of the concerned communities’ nineteenth-century pasts and highlighted helpful prospects for future research. That each chapter addresses similar themes within the same temporal period should also spur comparative reflections on these communities’ experiences as they confronted similar challenges of modernity, from the rise of the bureaucratic state and new forms of social organization to industrialization and demographic ex-

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pansion. These chapters may thus be read with profit either in isolation or as parts of a larger whole. Important as it is to focus attention on the individual faith traditions, current research trends suggested that this first part needed to conclude with two additional chapters, one on “Popular Religion,” the other on “Secularism and Unbelief.” In the first case, scholarly attention to what in the 1970s was generally termed “popular” religion (see Plongeron 1976 and Badone 1990) and today more often as “lived” or “everyday” religion has made it clear that understandings of religious belief and practice that attend only to “official” norms are at best incomplete. While mindful of the ties between official and lived religion, recent work has also indicated how popular religion often sprang from “extra-ecclesial” lay initiatives. The forms and vocabularies of these initiatives frequently drew upon local folklore that people continued to revere, even if they remained tied to formally established congregations. Accordingly, popular religious beliefs could seem like faith traditions in their own right that unfolded variously in concert with or in opposition to ecclesial communities. Thinking about lived religion in this manner also helps explain why this part closes with a chapter focusing on secularism and unbelief. Whereas older research viewed secularism and unbelief as categoric rejections of religion, newer work suggests that the situation was more complex. If people rejected institutional religion and clerical authority, especially in Europe’s cities, they often embraced “alternative spiritualities,” such as freethought, scientism, monism, or socialism. These movements offered women and men a distinct worldview that was frequently accompanied by its own set of rites and rituals, which is to say its own identity, meaning, and sense of community. And everywhere they prompted reconfigurations of the religious field, not least by blurring the boundary between sacred and secular. The remaining three parts each present a group of thematically organized chapters that bring into dialogue the experiences of multiple faith communities. Part II is organized in terms of what we have called “cultures of knowledge.” In one way or another, each of its chapters responds to Owen Chadwick’s famous assertion that the nineteenth century witnessed a “secularization of the European mind” (1975) by which religion was progressively discredited as a form of knowledge or a way of knowing. And yet, as a wave of revisionist research has demonstrated, the very liveliness of the century’s culture wars attest to religion’s persistent relevance to knowledge creation and dissemination (see Clark and Kaiser 2003), even to the concept of knowledge itself. The recent rise of the “history of knowledge” as a distinct field of inquiry has provided a further fillip to inquiries into religion as a central component of nineteenth-century cultures of knowledge. Drawing insightfully from Foucauldian theory, it sets aside questions of objective value and poses instead questions about what knowledge meant to the people who created and cherished it (Sarasin 2011). This perspective “democratizes” knowledge on a leveled analytical ground, making it possible to recognize as “knowledge workers” such previously overlooked individuals as theologians, popular catechists, and religious publishers (Lässig 2016). Consequently, religious traditions themselves appear less as bastions against learning than as learning’s wellsprings and promoters.

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In each case, the chapters in this part seek to examine changing understandings of “religious knowledge” as well as its relation to the broader contexts of learning in which religious communities were ineluctably bound up. This is especially apparent in the chapters on education and theology. In both cases, we encounter knowledge systems that had been priorities for faith communities long before 1800, not least because they made essential contributions to their day-to-day functioning and long-term viability. Seeking to ensure the proper formation of clergy, express theologies attentive to the intellectual and social trends of the times, and endow the young with a solid base of religious knowledge, religious education and theology fortified people in faith, even as they drew believers into wider publics that transformed the mental coordinates by which they made sense of their world. The part’s third chapter, on reading and publishing, shifts attention from the production of religious knowledge, especially in a more institutional sense, to its dissemination and consumption. Here too we are reminded of the multiple ways in which religious groups sought to take advantage of modernity—increased literacy, the industrial printing press, libraries, multinational publishing concerns—to spread the Word and build community. Indicative of this desire for religious knowledge at the turn of the century was the phenomenal public success of a 1900 book by a Protestant theologian at the University of Berlin, Adolf von Harnack’s Das Wesen des Christentums (What is Christianity?), which one year later was already in its fifth edition and had been translated into English. We had intended to close this part with a chapter on the major question of science’s challenges to religion as an alternative, even superior source of knowledge and truth after 1800 (Hardin et al. 2018). Unfortunately, the author who had agreed to write this key chapter finally decided not to deliver it, and the late timing of this decision made it impossible for us to find an alternate author. We deeply regret the chapter’s absence. Part III shifts attention to a second area where newer research has shown that religion’s importance as a cultural force needed to be reassessed, namely the relationship between religion and the arts. If scholars have documented a certain decline in religious art after 1800 due to the collapse of ecclesiastical and aristocratic patronage and a more philistine bourgeois artistic sensibility, contemporary scholarship establishes that religion remained central to artistic inspiration, production, and popular interest. The four chapters in this part all explore the interplay between religion and a specific type of art—architecture, literature, music, and visual arts—but in distinct ways. In the case of the chapter on architecture, the primary focus is, understandably, on buildings erected for religious purposes: churches, synagogues, and mosques (and to a lesser degree monasteries and religious “club houses”). But this emphasis perforce raises questions about the very need for such construction and its consequences for understandings of religious space, especially in the urban environment. In the chapters on literature and visual arts, the stress falls more on the different ways in which artists and authors drew inspiration from and depicted religion in their works. They created works that served to promote spirituality but that at the same time “remade” believers into ever more agreeable consumers of new ideas that were constantly fermenting in the cultural realm. The chapter on music, finally, presents a third possibility for inter-

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rogating the relationship between religion and the arts. Rather than surveying the evolution of nineteenth-century religious music, the essay investigates music’s contributions to the very shaping of nineteenth-century notions of religion and religious culture, from its promotion of religious revival and mission to the sacralization of space through sound. Part IV brings together a final set of chapters that we have grouped under the heading “Religion and Civil Society.” Building on the authority of the religious turn in scholarship and in keeping with our notion of religious culture, these chapters seek to consider religion as a factor in European social and political life between roughly 1789 and 1914. Each chapter takes up a topic that has generated a robust scientific literature over the past thirty-odd years, both generally and with respect to research on European religious history: empire and imperialism, gender, industrialization and the social question, associational life and the emergence of “civil society,” nationalism, and the relationship between church and the modern (nation‐)state. But whereas much of this research focuses on specific religious groups and regions, by adopting an interfaith and transnational perspective, the chapters in this section open up possibilities for ascertaining broader patterns in the religious and ecclesiastical responses to the various shocks and upheavals of the age. At the same time, they shed needed light on the ways in which interreligious rivalries and competitions shaped how faith communities responded to modernity’s challenges. As the reader will see, the contributors to this volume approached their respective chapters in a variety of ways. Inevitably, there is some overlap in content from one chapter to another. But given the volume’s aim to provide a guide to research on religious culture in Europe during the long nineteenth century, we thought it preferable to embrace this methodological diversity, not least because it honors the different disciplinary positions of the several contributors. As editors, we are aware that there are some topics that ideally would also have found their place in this volume, not just religion and science, but also religion and economic thought. We leave these subjects, and others, as desiderata for another publication. Finally, as noted above, while the authors strove to achieve a certain geographical and, for the chapters in Parts II, III, and IV, religious balance in covering their respective subjects, they also had to work within the constraints imposed by the current state of the relevant historiography. We propose that any apparent imbalances or oversights in coverage that resulted from these limits be viewed as incitements for future research. Indeed, an important conclusion that emerges about the sum of this volume’s parts is that religious culture, a subject that has moved from the periphery to the very heart of comprehending the modern European past, remains ripe for further inquiry.

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References and Bibliography Ammerman, Nancy T., ed. 2007. Everyday Religion: Observing Modern Religious Lives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Badone, Ellen, ed. 1990. Religious Orthodoxy & Popular Faith in European Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bell, Catherine. 2006. “Paradigms Behind (and Before) the Modern Concept of Religion.” History and Theory 45 (4): 27 – 46. Berend, Ivan. 2013. An Economic History of Nineteenth-Century Europe: Diversity and Industrialization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blaschke, Olaf. 2000. “Das 19. Jahrhundert: Ein Zweites Konfessionelles Zeitalter?” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 26: 38 – 75. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1971. “Genèse et structure du champ religieux.” Revue française de sociologie 12: 295 – 334. Brown, Callum. 2001. The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800 – 2000. London: Routledge. Chadwick, Owen. 1975. The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chidester, David. 2014. Empire of Religion: Imperialism & Comparative Religion. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Clark, Christopher, and Wolfram Kaiser, eds. 2003. Culture Wars: Secular–Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cox, Jeffrey. 1982. The English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth, 1870 – 1930. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cox, Jeffrey. 2003. “Master Narratives of Long-Term Religious Change.” In The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750 – 2000, edited by Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf, 201 – 17. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davidoff, Leonore, and Catherine Hall. 1987. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780 – 1850. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. De Groot, Johanna, and Sue Morgan. 2013. “Beyond the ‘Religious Turn’? Past, Present and Future Perspectives in Gender History.” Gender & History 25: 395 – 422. Fitzgerald, Timothy. 2000. The Ideology of Religious Studies. New York: Oxford University Press. Geary, Dick. 2001. “The Prussian Labor Movement, 1871 – 1914.” In Modern Prussian History, 1830 – 1947, edited by Philip G. Dwyer, 126 – 45. Harlow, UK: Longman. Habermas, Rebekka. 2019. Negotiating the Secular and the Religious in the German Empire: Transnational Approaches. New York: Berghahn Books. Hall, David D., ed. 1997. Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hardin, Jeff, Ronald L. Numbers, and Ronald A. Binzley. 2018. The Warfare between Science & Religion: The Idea that Wouldn’t Die. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hübner, Kurt. 1995. “Meditationen zu Richard Wagners Schrift ‘Religion und Kunst’.” In Richard Wagner— “Der Ring des Nibelungen”: Ansichten des Mythos, edited by Udo Bermach and Dieter Borchmeyer, 129 – 41. Stuttgart: Metzler. King, Richard. 1999. Orientalism and Religion: Post-Colonial Theory, India and the Mystic East. London: Routledge. Lässig, Simone. 2016. “The History of Knowledge and the Expansion of the Historical Research Agenda.” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 59: 29 – 58. Masuzawa, Tomoko. 2005. The Invention of World Religions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Orsi, Robert A. 1985. The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880 – 1950. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Osterhammel, Jürgen. 2010. Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Munich: C. H. Beck. Plongeron, Bernard, ed. 1976. La religion populaire dans l’Occident chrétien: Approches historiques. Paris: Beauchesne. Puff, Helmut. 2018. “Belief in the Reformation Era: Reflections on the State of Confessionalization.” Central European History 51: 46 – 52. Sarasin, Philipp. 2011. “Was ist Wissensgeschichte?” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 36: 159 – 72. Steinhoff, Anthony J. 2004. “Ein zweites konfessionelles Zeitalter? Nachdenken über die Religion im langen 19. Jahrhundert.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 30: 549 – 70. Weir, Todd H. 2014 Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Part I: Faith Traditions

Heather Bailey

1 Eastern Orthodox Christianity In 1054 Pope Leo IX dispatched three legates to Constantinople to resolve a dispute with the Christian patriarch of that city. Instead, the legates issued a Bull of Excommunication to Patriarch Michael Cerularius, who responded by anathematizing the legates. Thus 1054 traditionally marks the Great Schism between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, although from the Orthodox point of view only the somewhat later Crusades made the split between the Eastern and Western churches more or less definitive (Ware 1997, 58 – 59). Both churches profess to be the catholic or universal church of Christ, but they split over two main issues. One was a dispute about how much authority the pope of Rome had vis-à-vis the other bishops and vis-à-vis sacred tradition as embodied in the canons of the seven ecumenical councils held between 325 and 787 . The Eastern Orthodox tradition emphasizes that authority in the church resides with the episcopacy as a whole; it rejects the idea that any one bishop has supremacy over the others or over the entire church. The second conflict was a disagreement about the procession of the Holy Spirit amid the Trinity (the filioque controversy). In Latin, the word filioque means “and the son.” In the Latin-speaking world it gradually became commonplace, when reciting the Nicene Creed, to say that the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father and the Son” instead of the original “proceeds from the Father.” Eastern Orthodox theologians claimed that Latin Christians unilaterally changed the creed without submitting the matter for resolution at an ecumenical council. After the schism, the Eastern Orthodox bishops transferred the honorary primacy that they had formerly bestowed upon the bishop of Rome to the patriarch of Constantinople, also known as the Ecumenical Patriarch. While today Eastern Orthodoxy has a global presence, until modern times world Orthodoxy was a European, African, and Asian entity with its administrative centers in the five patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, Constantinople, and Rome (until the schism). The local Orthodox churches in Europe are called “Chalcedonian,” because they accepted some decisions of the (ecumenical) Council of Chalcedon (451) that the Orthodox churches in Armenia, Syria, Egypt, and Ethiopia did not. In nineteenth-century Europe, Orthodox Christians lived mainly within the bounds of the three multi-ethnic Ottoman, Russian, and Habsburg empires. They were concentrated in the Balkan peninsula (present-day Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, and North Macedonia) and the Russian Empire (present-day Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Finland, Estonia, Georgia, and eastern Armenia), with sizeable Orthodox minorities (especially ethnic Serbs, Romanians, and Ruthenians) living within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Russia had and still

My thanks to Stephen Batalden and Jeffrey Zalar for their helpful suggestions and corrections as this chapter was being prepared. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110609059-003

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has the largest number of Orthodox Christians. Soon after Orthodox Byzantium fell to Ottoman Muslim forces in 1453, Russia emerged as the only predominantly Orthodox state with political independence. In the nineteenth century, however, the Orthodox Christian populations of southeastern Europe fended off foreign rule and established their own nation-states with autocephalous or self-governing churches. For centuries western Europeans used the nomenclature of “Greek Church” to refer to Eastern Orthodoxy, juxtaposing the “Greeks” with the “Latins” or Roman Catholics. In the first half of the nineteenth century, it became increasingly common for westerners to refer to the “Greco-Russian” or “Russian Church.” This shift reflected Russia’s geopolitical importance and the efforts of Russian sovereigns to portray Russia as the rightful defender and protector of the Orthodox subjects of the Ottoman Empire. Because of its size and Russia’s geopolitical importance, the Russian Orthodox Church has exercised great influence on other Orthodox peoples of Europe and must figure prominently in any discussion of Eastern Orthodoxy. At the same time, it is important not to conflate the experiences of the Russian Orthodox with the experiences of all Orthodox Christians in Europe. While scholars have sometimes appealed to religious differences to explain why eastern Europe’s path to modernization has differed from the West’s, on the whole the same modernizing forces—liberalism, nationalism, processes of industrialism (including technological innovations in transportation and communication)—that shaped the development of western European states in the nineteenth century also transformed eastern Christian lands. Meanwhile, the Great Powers, especially England, Russia, Austria, and France, meddled actively in Ottoman and eastern European affairs to promote their national interests, influencing the history of these regions. When it comes to religious belief and practice, the Orthodox world resembled other parts of Europe, especially Roman Catholic regions, because despite formal theological differences between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, most notably the filioque, and despite differences in emphasis, the traditions share core beliefs and ideas about piety. The dogmas of the Incarnation and the Holy Trinity are at the heart of Christian teaching. Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions alike affirm that humanity can and should aspire to sanctification through participation in the sacramental life of the church. God became man in the person of Jesus Christ in order that human beings could clothe themselves in immortality, participate in the divine life, and commune with God. One path to holiness in both religious traditions is monasticism, but the Eastern Orthodox Church has both monastic (celibate) and married clergymen. Christians honor those who have attained holiness (saints) and revere sacred places (churches, chapels, monasteries) and holy objects (icons, relics) through which God is revealed and has extended grace—physical or spiritual healing—to humanity. One receives divine grace through sacraments and sacramentals, especially the Eucharist, but also by prayer, invocation of the saints, veneration of icons and relics, and ascetic struggle against the passions and egotism. Orthodox veneration of saints, relics, icons, and the cross has sometimes struck the non-Orthodox as a form of idolatry or as worship

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of material objects or fellow humans in place of God. However, the veneration is directed toward God and is a recognition of how the Incarnation transformed and sacralized creation, making it possible for humanity to know and love God. Sacrality can be a fluid concept. Sacred persons, places, or objects may or may not have official sanction from the ecclesial hierarchy. A pilgrimage site may be permanent or temporary. Sacred objects, such as miracle-working icons, may be moved from one location to another and can be venerated wherever they are. Grace proliferates, because when an icon becomes associated with the miraculous, the faithful believe reproductions of that icon share its miraculous capacity. The agent and source of miracles is God, who chooses to use human beings and material objects as conductors of grace. Those who study Eastern Orthodoxy must grapple with negative stereotypes that have consciously or unconsciously shaped much western, including scholarly, writing about Russia and eastern Europe since the early modern era. One stereotype of relatively recent origin is that the Orthodox world lacked the kind of ethic that is conducive to “dynamic commercial activity” (Hann and Goltz 2010, 1, 3). Two other sets of stereotypes go back much further, namely the belief that the subjugation of Orthodox churches to secular authorities (caesaropapism) was so complete that Orthodoxy was hardly a religion worthy of scholarly study, and the idea that Orthodox worship was formalistic and superficial, with little impact on the moral development of its adherents. In the Russian context, intellectuals propagated the idea of a dual faith (dvoeverie) (Rock 2007). This myth posited that Russia’s illiterate peasants were only superficially Christianized and really practiced paganism under a Christian veneer. Such stereotypes appeared in early modern writing about Russia (Herberstein, Olearius), were further promoted by Enlightenment-era writers (Tournefort, Voltaire), but received their most hyperbolic forms of expression in the era of the Romanov Emperor Nicholas I (r. 1825 – 55) due to Russia’s powerful and important role in Europe after the Napoleonic Wars. Nicholas I crushed a Polish nationalist rebellion, raising the ire of the French and British, who sympathized with the Polish cause from liberal and/or Roman Catholic points of view . Furthermore, in 1839, 1.5 million Uniate Christians in the western borderlands of the Russian Empire, who adhered to the “Greek” or Eastern rites but recognized the authority of the pope, were reincorporated into the Russian Orthodox Church by means of incentives and coercion. Many western Europeans, especially Roman Catholics, considered this reunion a form of religious persecution.

Empires, Nationalism, and Autocephaly Among Orthodox peoples in Europe, the decentralizing force of nationalism in the nineteenth century contrasted starkly with the transnational, centralizing tendencies within the Roman Catholic Church, where authority was increasingly consolidated in the papacy. Although Europe’s Orthodox Christians shared doctrinal unity, as the Ottoman Empire dissolved the Orthodox populations formed several new national churches, disrupting the Eastern Church’s hierarchical structures and administrative unity.

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Yet the nationalist ideas that fractured the administrative unity of the Orthodox churches were an import from western Enlightenment thinkers and French revolutionaries. “It often goes unnoticed by the Orthodox that the very idea of ‘nation’ is itself a Western construct of imagination that was imposed on formerly occupied Ottoman territories so as to better integrate Eastern Europe into Western Europe” (Demacopoulos and Papanikolaou 2013, 11). Within the Ottoman Empire, most Orthodox Christian subjects belonged to the Rum millet (Millet-i rum, Roman nation) under the civil and ecclesial authority of the patriarch of Constantinople, a subject of the sultan. The emergence of nation-states in eastern Europe destroyed this politically and religiously unified Orthodox commonwealth. The process of obtaining political independence from Ottoman rule was accompanied by a reordering of the outward administrative structure of Orthodox churches along national lines as several new autocephalous churches—meaning the highestranking bishop was neither appointed by nor answerable to another individual hierarch—asserted their independence from the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Each closely tied to the formation of nation-states, the new autocephalous churches were that of Greece (1833), Serbia (ecclesial autonomy 1831 and autocephaly 1879), Romania (1865), and Bulgaria (1870). In all but the case of Serbia, the autocephalous churches were established uncanonically. Historically and canonically, autocephaly gave a “group of dioceses the right to elect their own primate,” but in the nineteenth century, autocephaly became largely synonymous with national churches, and the canonical meaning was obscured (Papadakis 1988, 51). To be instituted canonically, a local church cannot declare itself autocephalous but must have the consent of its patriarch (in the case of southeastern Europe, the Ecumenical Patriarch). The idea of local churches as national churches is not necessarily uncanonical (Binns 2002, 178), but it becomes problematic from a religious point of view when national or ethnic identity takes precedence over the shared faith, a heresy known as phyletism, and especially when one ethnic community condones violence against other groups. With the creation of autocephalous churches in eastern Europe, Orthodox and ethnic identity were largely conflated in every case, with some negative or even tragic consequences for the churches and for inter-ethnic relations in the region. By fracturing the unity of eastern Europe’s Orthodox churches, the emergence of new nations with their autocephalous churches weakened the spiritual and political influence of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople. Another problem was that the civil authorities in the newly independent states pursued policies that subordinated the national churches to the state and/or used the churches as political instruments for state-building and consolidating national identity. Such processes damaged Orthodoxy’s spiritual authority and international reputation, seeming to vindicate critics who charged that Orthodox churches lacked political independence, unity, and moral authority, or were guilty of phyletism. However, in some instances, western-imposed and western-oriented political leaders in the new states sought to curb the power of the Orthodox church, partly because churchmen were more likely

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to have a Russophile orientation that clashed with their government’s political and foreign policy goals. Monasteries contributed to the formation of ethnic identity and played a key role in national independence movements and state formation. During the Ottoman centuries, Orthodox monasteries were not only places where monks sought holiness but also centers of Balkan linguistic and cultural preservation. Prior to Bulgarian independence, Bulgarian monasteries ran “cell schools” that taught the Cyrillic alphabet and maintained the Slavonic liturgy (Kalkandjieva 2014, 169). When fire destroyed the ancient Rila Monastery south of Sofia in 1833, the monastery was rebuilt between 1834 and 1862 and served as a major pillar of the Bulgarian cultural renaissance. National independence movements everywhere had broad support from clergy and monks. For example, when the War of Independence broke out in Greece in March 1821, many bishops, priests, and monks, including about half the monks on Mount Athos, one of the most important centers of Orthodox monasticism in Europe, supported it (Binns 2002, 181). After attaining political independence, Greece’s political leaders, backed by some hierarchs, insisted that the new state must have an independent or autocephalous church. Just as French revolutionaries had sought to limit foreign influence in French affairs and ensure that the primary loyalty of the French clergy would be to the state and not to a foreign authority, namely the pope, the first president of Greece, Ioannes Kapodistrias (assassinated in 1831), insisted that autocephaly was necessary because the Ecumenical Patriarch, who opposed the Greek national independence movement, remained an Ottoman subject. Greek Independence Day falls on March 25, the Feast of the Annunciation, the celebration of Archangel Gabriel’s announcement to Mary, known in Orthodox theology as the God-Bearer or All-Holy Virgin, that she was to give birth to the Messiah. The rebirth of the Greek nation thus became inextricably linked to the biblical narrative of the regeneration of humanity. Soon after the War of Independence broke out, the nun Pelagia on the island of Tinos (one of the Cycladic islands in the Aegean) had two visions of the All-Holy Virgin, who instructed Pelagia that excavations were to take place and a church was to be built in a local field. Excavation led to the discovery of the ruins of a Byzantine-era church and an icon of the Annunciation, attributed to the evangelist and apostle Saint Luke. The community built a large new church of the Annunciation to house the miraculous icon. Tinos, the Church of the Annunciation, and Pelagia’s cell (Pelagia was subsequently canonized as a saint in 1971) became and remain Orthodox pilgrimage sites. The Tinians showed strong support for the Greek War of Independence. While fighting did not take place on the island, there were up to two thousand casualties from the island in the war, and refugees flowed to the island from Chios and Psara (Dubisch 1995, 129 – 30, 278n17). When Greece obtained political independence, Tinos became part of the new state, which was much smaller than present-day Greece. As an important pilgrimage site attracting Greeks from regions not included in the new state, the island became a conduit of Greek nationalism. The new state’s secular leaders promoted the tie between Greek ethnic identity and Orthodoxy, and soon incorporated the island and the church

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into narratives about Greece’s struggle for liberation from the Ottoman Turks. King Otto, the first king of Greece, visited the Church of the Annunciation upon arriving in Greece in 1833, even though he was a Roman Catholic (Dubisch 1995, 167). Monasticism flourished on the island, especially at the monastery of Kekhrovouno, where Pelagia had lived and which alone had about a hundred nuns (on an island with less than thirty thousand inhabitants) in the late nineteenth century (Dubisch 1995, 130, 276n18). The assumed link between the rebirth of the Greek nation and the story of human redemption was also useful for explaining the Great Idea (Megali Idea), an expansionist dream that Greek civil and ecclesiastical authorities pursued “to incorporate unredeemed Greeks” as well as some Ottoman territories into the new state, even “to re-create the old Byzantine Empire” (Stavrou 1988, 190). During the Greek War of Independence, Greek crypto-Christians were among those who joined the nationalist cause. Under the Ottomans, crypto-Christians lived outwardly as Muslims but secretly received the Christian sacraments and privately observed Orthodox piety. As a result of nineteenth-century Ottoman reforms and national independence movements, crypto-Christianity in southeastern Europe mostly disappeared and these communities publicly reverted to their Christian faith (Skendi 1967, 230 – 33). In Greece, Serbia, and Romania, church independence from the Ecumenical Patriarchate followed the attainment of national independence from the Porte (the Ottoman government). By contrast, in Bulgaria, church independence preceded political autonomy and the creation of a nation-state. While the Serbs, Romanians, and Bulgarians all resented Greek domination over the Christian Rum millet, the Bulgarian movement for church independence was vehemently anti-Greek due to the predominance of Greek bishops who insisted on the use of the Greek instead of the Slavonic liturgy even in areas inhabited largely by ethnic Bulgarians (Kalkandjieva 2014, 166, 179 – 80). The Bulgarians also resented having to pay taxes to the Ecumenical Patriarchate, which used the tax money to run schools that taught Greek instead of Bulgarian. As the Bulgarians made strides toward autonomy, especially after mid-century, they began to direct the funds once earmarked for the Ecumenical Patriarchate to set up schools that taught Bulgarian (Kalkandjieva 2014, 176 – 77). Anti-Greek sentiment was so strong among the Bulgarians that Russian attempts to broker a compromise between the Bulgarians and the Ecumenical Patriarch failed. Leaders of the Bulgarian national church movement used the threat of union with Rome and close cooperation with Ottoman secular authorities to advance their cause, suggesting that loyalty to the Orthodox faith was not necessarily the top priority when it came to emancipating the Bulgarian Church from the authority of the Ecumenical Patriarch (Kalkandjieva 2014, 198). In 1870 the Ottoman Porte approved the establishment of the Bulgarian Exarchate, creating an autonomous Bulgarian national church eight years before Bulgaria received political autonomy. The other Orthodox churches objected to the Ottoman secular authority’s direct interference in ecclesial affairs, especially because the seat of the Bulgarian Exarchate was in Constantinople, the Ecumenical Patriarch’s canonical territory. The creation of the Bulgarian Exarchate led to a serious and long-lasting rupture not only between the Bulgarian Church and the Ecumenical Patriarchate, but between the Bulgarian

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and other Orthodox churches, which refused to recognize the non-canonical Bulgarian Exarchate. Like Bulgaria, Greece and Romania failed to follow a canonical process for obtaining ecclesial autocephaly, leading to ruptures in their relations with the Ecumenical Patriarchate. But within twenty years, canonical relations between the Greek and Romanian churches and the Ecumenical Patriarch were restored. While the Greek rupture lasted from 1833 to 1850 and the Romanian from 1865 to 1885, the Bulgarian rupture lasted for three-quarters of a century, from 1870 to 1945. In 1872 Ecumenical Patriarch Anthimos VI convened a council of Orthodox bishops that condemned the Bulgarian Exarchate for the heresy of “ethnophyletism.” On the one hand, the patriarch was attempting to uphold canon law ; on the other hand, the Greek hierarchs behaved like Greek nationalists in their refusal to make concessions to the Bulgarians, such as the use of the Slavonic liturgy and the willingness to confirm Bulgarian bishops. An unintended result of the schism between the Bulgarian Exarchate and the other Orthodox churches was low rates of religious practice in Bulgaria in comparison with Balkan states where autocephalous churches were recognized (Leustean 2014a, 11). The Great Powers’ interference in the Balkans contributed to ethnic and churchstate conflicts in the region. Since the late eighteenth century, Russia had asserted its role as a protector of Orthodox peoples in the Ottoman Empire. To curb Russian influence, Austria and France sought to defend Roman Catholic interests in the Near East, while Great Britain sought to undermine the influence of other powers in the Ottoman Empire, especially Russia, by urging the Porte to adopt liberal reforms. Russia’s role as patron of the Orthodox peoples was particularly salient in the case of Bulgaria. There was a natural affinity between the Bulgarian Church and Russia owing to a shared Slavic heritage and liturgical language. Most of the Bulgarian clergy had been educated in Russia, Slavonic service books were printed in Russia, and even after Bulgaria’s national liberation in 1878, the Russian imperial family was commemorated in Bulgarian services. The pro-Russian Bulgarian Exarch Iosif I (r. 1877– 1915) was not consulted when the Roman Catholic Ferdinand of Coburg-Gotha (r. 1887– 1918) became Bulgaria’s king. Ferdinand looked to the Austro-Hungarian Empire for patronage rather than to Russia, leading to a series of church-state conflicts. Initially the Bulgarian hierarchs refused to commemorate the German prince (who was chosen without Russian approval) in its litanies, and they openly challenged his legitimacy (Raikin 1988, 166 – 67). By ignoring the advice of the exarch, Bulgaria’s political leaders alienated both the Porte and Russia, who increasingly lent their support to Greeks and Serbians in Bulgaria and the contested region of Macedonia (Yasamee 2001, 203 – 17). Just as ethnic Greeks had dominated the church’s episcopacy and imposed the Greek liturgy throughout the Ottoman Rum millet, in late-imperial Russia, especially in Georgia and in the western borderlands (e. g., Finland, Ukraine, Belarus, Bessarabia), there was a tendency toward Russification: the use of Church Slavonic as the liturgical language, propagation of Russian national saints and feasts, and predominance of ethnically Russian clergy and hierarchs. While Serbs, Romanians, Bulgarians, and Albanians resisted Greek cultural domination, Orthodox ethnic minorities in the Russian Em-

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pire began promoting their own languages and national traditions, pushing back against Russian domination. Although Russian missionaries translated liturgical works into indigenous languages and encouraged the growth of a native clergy when they worked at or outside the boundaries of the empire, Russification became normative in the southern and western parts of the empire. After Georgia, which was Christianized in the fourth century and obtained autocephaly in the eleventh, was incorporated into the Russian Empire, Russian authorities abolished the Georgian patriarchate in 1811. Subsequently Russian hierarchs dominated the Georgian Church, prompting one observer to note that the Georgians largely quit going to church and withheld financial support from the Russian clergy. Georgian nobles and bishops unsuccessfully petitioned the Holy Synod for restoration of their patriarchate (Peters 1988, 287– 88). After Russia absorbed Bessarabia in 1812, the province also lost its ecclesial autonomy . Russian hierarchs administered the church and Moldovan publications, churches, and schools were suppressed (Leustean 2014c, 145 – 46). In Finland, where Lutherans were in the majority but where there were nonetheless tens of thousands of Orthodox Finns, increasing anti-Russian backlash culminated in an attempt to establish a more indigenous Orthodox church following the Russian Revolution (Metropolitan John of Helsinki 1988, 267– 72). By the late nineteenth century, Russian imperial authorities increasingly interfered in the affairs of the (non-Chalcedonian) Armenian Gregorian Church, with its patriarchate in Echmiadzin, which they believed was becoming a force for Armenian independence and a threat to the empire. After the Armenian Gregorian patriarchate became part of the Russian Empire in 1828, the government left it intact and recognized it as ecumenical, meaning its authority extended to the Armenian Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire, Persia, and India. The imperial government gave the patriarchate considerable latitude because it saw the patriarchate as a means to exert Russian influence abroad. By the 1880s, however, the authorities were reconsidering their policy towards the Armenian Church, which they increasingly associated with revolution (Werth 2014, 24 – 25, 62, 150, 159 – 62). As nationalism led to the political parcelization of the Orthodox commonwealth and fueled anti-Greek sentiment among those ethnic groups historically subjected to Greek domination, Russia tried to maintain and project to western Europeans the image of a religiously united Orthodox ecumene by attempting to mediate disputes both among the new nations and other powers and among the new national churches and the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Under the sway of religious nationalism, nineteenth-century Russian secular and religious leaders often promoted the interests of universal Orthodoxy in part because, as they saw it, the interests of the Russian Empire coincided with the interests of the universal church. Nonetheless, within the empire, non-ethnic Russians reacted against their subaltern status. Thus, by the end of the nineteenth century, throughout Orthodox Europe the concept of the local church, which traditionally was defined territorially and was inclusive of all Christians living in that territory, became increasingly synonymous with national churches (Payne 2007, 834 – 36). Although each uncanonical rupture between the new

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national churches and the Ecumenical Patriarchate was eventually resolved and canonicity restored, nationalism and potentially phyletism continued to undermine Orthodox unity and Eastern Orthodox claims to catholicity. In view of these developments, Paschalis Kitromilides argues that nationalism destroyed the Orthodox commonwealth in southeastern Europe and infiltrated, with negative consequences, the two institutions—pilgrimage and monasticism—that had historically best exemplified Orthodox internationalism or interculturalism (2019, 94 – 96). But while nationalism negatively affected Orthodox interculturalism, it did not erase that interculturalism entirely. Migration patterns, along with pilgrimage and monasticism, continued to bring Orthodox Christians of various ethnicities into contact with one another as well as into contact with members of other religious groups. At least traces of an Orthodox “religious international,” to use Kitromilides’s expression, persisted.

The Globalization of Orthodoxy: Rethinking an Orthodox “Religious International” Migration ensured the proliferation of cultural exchange among Europe’s Orthodox Christians as well as between Orthodox and “heterodox” peoples in the nineteenth century. As a result of the participation of many Albanian Orthodox Christians in the Russo-Turkish wars of the late eighteenth century, over a thousand emigrated to Russia (Ramet 1988a, 151). After 1829, aided by the Russian government, many Greeks left the south shores of the Black Sea (Ottoman territory) for the Crimea or Caucasus in the Russian Empire (Roudometof 2000, 370). There was a Bulgarian diaspora community in Odessa that played an important role in the movement for a Bulgarian national church (Kalkandjieva 2014, 173). The Serbian Church looked to Kiev for instructors to teach at the Belgrade Theological Seminary (established 1836), sent students to Kiev to study, and was led for much of the second half of the century by Serbian metropolitans who had studied there (Pavlovich 1989, 199, 206, 212). The formation of expatriate and refugee communities throughout Europe, along with the establishment of Orthodox missions, further contributed to the globalization of Orthodoxy. As a result of the Greek War of Independence, there was an influx of Greek refugees in England and France after 1821. Due to migration from eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Orthodox diaspora communities in western Europe, the Americas, and Australia grew substantially (Leustean 2014b, 204). Until the late nineteenth century, Orthodox churches in western Europe consisted mainly of Russian embassy chapels or private chapels held in home churches or leased properties. Embassy chapels often had to serve the needs of all Orthodox Christians living in major European cities. As a religious minority in predominantly “heterodox” states, Orthodox Christians of varying ethnic backgrounds likely developed a sense of a common Orthodox identity. Partly because the chapels were too small to accommodate the growing numbers of Orthodox Christians in the West, and partly to en-

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hance Russia’s international image, the Russians embarked on a church-building campaign in western Europe beginning in 1861 with the Saint Alexander Nevsky Church in Paris (Bailey 2020, 3 – 4, 185). With a sizeable number of Greek expats in England and France, the Greeks, sometimes with Russian assistance, established parishes in commercial centers like London, Manchester, Liverpool, Marseille, and Paris (Birchall 2014, 17 ; Altholz 2017, 130). Along with migration, missions contributed to the globalization of Orthodoxy. Russian missionaries spread Orthodoxy beyond the Urals in Siberia and to Japan (in 1860) and China (on a small scale). In 1794, a small group of monks undertook Russian missions to Alaska, an effort that continued throughout the nineteenth century. From the Alaskan outpost, North America became a Russian mission field with a bishop assigned to America in 1840 and a diocese established in San Francisco in 1872 after the Russian sale of Alaska to the United States (Binns 2002, 24). This single diocese eventually expanded into several, all serving different ethnic communities of immigrants to the United States. Orthodox missions clearly preceded the Orthodox Mission Society, established in Russia in 1865. As a result of permanent and temporary migration and of Russian efforts after mid-century to enhance the prestige of Orthodoxy vis-à-vis Roman Catholicism, western Europeans became more familiar with Eastern Orthodoxy and vice-versa. While contact with the religious other reinforced distinctions between “Orthodox” and “heterodox” peoples, it nonetheless increased interdenominational interaction, contributing to better mutual understanding, ecumenical dialogue, and cooperation across confessional lines. Ecumenism can refer to attempts to reunite the Christian churches or to interdenominational cooperation to promote common interests. One example of ecumenism was the work of the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS). Established in 1804, it promoted the translation and distribution of the Bible in many foreign languages, including Russian, Greek, karamanlidika (Greek written in Turkish letters), and Serbian (Clogg 2004, 234 – 50; Kuzmič 2004, 251 – 67). Although the Society’s Protestant nature provoked some opposition from Orthodox quarters, the BFBS collaborated with Eastern Christian hierarchs and scholars to realize translation projects that, in turn, contributed to the modern literary forms of Greek and Slavic languages. The BFBS established the Russian Bible Society (RBS) in 1812. Even after the RBS’s work in Russia came under suspicion for undermining Orthodoxy—authorities closed the society and banned its translation of the Bible between 1826 and 1856—the society played a major role in disseminating the Russian Holy Synod’s authorized translations of Scripture after 1865 (Batalden 2004, 169 – 82). With the cooperation of Orthodox scholars at the Kazan Theological Academy (established in 1842), the society was instrumental in translating the Orthodox liturgy into twenty-two languages used in the eastern parts of the Russian Empire (Binns 2002, 153 – 54). This cooperative effort facilitated active Orthodox missions in these regions. Especially after mid-century, ecumenical efforts were fostered in part by the recognition that all Christian confessions had a common interest in defending Christian

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teachings from ideas that potentially threatened them, such as revolutionary ideologies, evolutionary theory, positivism, philosophical materialism, and biblical criticism. Yet much interconfessional dialogue of the mid to late nineteenth century involved mainly Christians who had a shared antipathy for Roman Catholic dominance and papal pretentions: Orthodox, Anglicans, Protestants, and Old Catholics (Catholics who opposed the decisions of the Vatican Council of 1869 – 70, especially the adoption of the dogma of papal infallibility). Between the 1840s and 1870s, Russian and Greek Orthodox publicists established important theological contacts with Protestants, High Church Anglicans, and Roman Catholic dissidents in western Europe. In England, dialogues between the Russian embassy priest Evgeny Popov and High Church Anglicans were established and led to the formation of the Eastern Church Association in 1863 (Birchall 2014, 92 – 100). An important “breakthrough in Anglican-Orthodox relations” occurred in 1869 , when Alexander Lycurgus, the archbishop of the Cyclades, went to England to consecrate a church in Liverpool, met England’s most important religious and political dignitaries, addressed the Eastern Church Association and another ecumenical society, and visited the Ecumenical Patriarch on his return voyage to report about his trip (Altholz 2017, 130 – 32). In Paris, a Russian Orthodox embassy priest, a Roman Catholic dissident priest, and a Russian layman founded the periodical L’Union chrétienne (Christian Unity) in 1859 (Bailey 2020, 51 – 54). It was an ecumenical paper in the sense that its aim was to rally all “true” catholics (i. e., non-papists) together against the “false” catholicity of the Roman Catholic Church, and it was also a transnational Orthodox project whose founders were honored by the Ecumenical Patriarch. Although the interconfessional dialogues were not successful in reestablishing communion among the churches as many had hoped, they were important for promoting mutual understanding and a better grasp of Orthodoxy which, especially since the late eighteenth century, had been negatively characterized or even caricatured in western Europe (Bailey 2020, 17– 44). But attempts to attain greater unity raised anxieties about compromising on essential doctrines, so each tradition had its opponents of ecumenism.

Lived Religion in National and International Contexts Major social and political upheavals of the nineteenth century, such as the national independence movements in the Ottoman and Austrian empires, the emancipation of the serfs in Russia, and the processes of industrialization and urbanization, left their mark on Orthodox popular piety. Modernity produced new socio-political and philosophical tendencies, including the advance of liberal and socialist ideologies, that were accompanied by waves of both anticlericalism and religious revivalism. Scholars of western European religion have noted that religious revivalism in the mid-nineteenth century should not be viewed as backward-looking or anti-modern, but as another form of

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modernity (Clark 2003, 12 – 13). Christians of all denominations everywhere, in fact, embraced and appropriated aspects of modernity in the interests of their churches. For example, in western and eastern Europe alike, greater press freedom and the emergence of the mass press led to the proliferation of religious newspapers and periodicals, such as Omonoia (Concord), which the Ecumenical Patriarchate founded in 1862. Railroads and steamboat travel facilitated pilgrimages and intercultural experiences. Altogether, modern changes could help insulate the faithful from secularizing forces and ideologies. Orthodox piety often demonstrated the porous nature of national borders. In the late eighteenth century, a Ukrainian ascetic, Saint Paisy Velichkovsky (1722 – 94), along with a group of Greek monks on Mount Athos, were instrumental in laying the groundwork for the interrelated phenomena of monastic revival, patristic revival, and the proliferation of the informal but influential monastic institution of elders (startsy or gerontas). Velichkovsky corrected and translated patristic texts and founded monastic communities in Romania and on Mount Athos. When Empress Catherine II secularized Russian monasteries in 1764, some Russian monks fled to Velichkovsky’s monastery in the Romanian lands. In the early nineteenth century, disciples of Velichkovsky returned to Russia and established new monastic communities there. Meanwhile, a group of Greek monks known as the Kollyvades were driven off Mount Athos due to a conflict over practices for commemorating the dead (Binns 2002, 131). Highly educated, they spread their ideas throughout Greece, founded schools, and translated patristic texts. Two of them, Makarios of Corinth and Nikodemos the Hagiorite, compiled the Philokalia (Love of the Beautiful), a collection of patristic texts. It was published in Venice in 1792; thanks to Velichkovsky’s efforts, a Church Slavonic version appeared in 1793. Saint Theophan the Recluse’s late-century Russian translation of the Philokalia became popular, spreading patristic teaching and emphasizing the “prayer of the heart” or continual repetition of the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me” (Ware 1997, 65, 100, 117, 121). This renewed emphasis on the theology and piety of the Greek church fathers paved the way for fruitful approaches to Orthodox theology with less reliance on Roman Catholic or Protestant models (Ladouceur 2020, 36 – 42). Velichkovsky and the Kollyvades were also instrumental in the revival of the institution of elders, charismatic ascetics known for their sanctity, whom people from all levels of society during the nineteenth century sought out for spiritual guidance (Binns 2002, 130 – 33). Owing to Velichkovsky and his disciples, Russia experienced an impressive monastic revival involving both men and women. It especially thrived among the latter, with the founding of hundreds of monasteries as well as numerous unofficial religious communities between 1764 and 1917 . Besides those who joined religious communities, thousands of women lived as lay sisters, following the ascetic rigors of monastic practice without the strictures of a convent (Worobec 2016, 365 – 66). Between 1840 and 1914 the number of monastics tripled in Russia, so that there was one monastic for every 1,111 Russian Orthodox believers in 1914, as compared with one for every 2,882 believers in 1840 (Kenworthy 2010, 2 – 3). Between 1850 and 1912, the number of male reli-

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gious in Russia, including novices, more than doubled, from 9,997 to 21,201, while the number of female religious skyrocketed, from 8,533 to 70,453 (cited in Dixon 2006, 339). In eastern Europe, political conditions were less favorable for monasticism. The formation of nation-states was accompanied by statist secularizing policies, such as the seizure of monastic properties, which other European states had implemented earlier under the control of eighteenth-century monarchs (e. g., Joseph II, Catherine II) or under the influence of liberals and republicans as in France during the revolution. Beginning in 1833 in the Greek kingdom, the state dissolved about three-fourths of the monasteries and auctioned off the land (Kitromilides 2019, 35; Stamatopoulos 2014, 42). The remaining two thousand monks had to move to larger monasteries. All but two or three of Greece’s thirty convents disappeared (Stavrou 1988, 189; Binns 2002, 181). These changes signified a major reduction of sacred space in the new country, provoking opposition from Orthodox societies (Zelepos 2011, 67– 69). Similar secularizing policies were subsequently enacted by Prince Alexander Cuza in the United Romanian Principalities (Moldavia and Wallachia, the precursor of modern Romania) to shore up his political power, limit Greek influence, and promote Romanian national identity. Besides confiscating monastic property, Cuza imposed a law limiting the number of monastics, resulting in a significant decline between 1867 , when there were 8,750 monks and nuns, and 1909, when there were only 4,400 (Leustean 2014c, 117– 18; Aleksov 2014, 89). Among the Serbs in Hungary after the establishment of the Dual Monarchy (1867), monasteries were plagued by declining numbers and debt (Aleksov 2014, 72). In the new Serbian state, monasticism was in a dismal condition compared with other Orthodox lands. In 1884 and as late as 1910, there were fewer than one hundred monks inhabiting Serbia’s 53 monasteries. Although the government sought to integrate the church into the project of nation-building, in 1881 the government imposed a tax on monastic tonsure and ordination to the priesthood, contributing to the fragility of monasticism and the dire shortage of clergy available to serve a rapidly growing population (Aleksov 2014, 86 – 91). Bulgaria fared a little better, perhaps because monasticism there was instrumental in the preservation and construction of Bulgarian ethnic identity. The Bulgarian Exarchate established Orthodox institutions, including several dozen monasteries, in Macedonia as part of the effort to promote Bulgarian ethnic identity and in hopes of drawing its population into the Bulgarian nation (Kalkandjieva 2014, 196; Raikin 1988, 168). Monasticism was closely connected with other forms of Orthodox piety: pilgrimage, intercessory prayer (involving the veneration of the Mother of God, saints, and icons), and the spiritual direction of elders. Pilgrimages often involved a trip to a particular shrine, church, or monastery to pray in the presence of a miracle-working icon or holy relics, to seek the advice of an elder, or to invoke the intercession of the Mother of God or a favorite saint. Among the Russian faithful it was a common practice to erect chapels to commemorate events that were important in the life of the community or nation, to expiate the sins of the community, or to express thanksgiving in the wake of some momentous political event or natural disaster. Chapels were small, sacred spaces where people congregated for communal worship, but where typically there

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was not a priest or an altar, so that the Divine Liturgy could not be served in them. In late-imperial Russia between 1861 and 1914, the number of chapels, many requested and built by peasants, soared. What this suggests is that peasants were not isolated from the so-called “official” church but identified with a broader church community, though they perhaps identified with their immediate community more than with large parish churches. Furthermore, private worship could not substitute for communal worship in circumstances where weather, age, and long distances between parish churches made it difficult for some to attend Divine Liturgy (Shevzov 1996, 586 – 606). The network of chapels, monasteries, and other sacred spaces was closely tied to the culture of pilgrimage. The terms for pilgrims in Slavic languages referred not to travelers but to people who prayed to God, worshipped, or prostrated themselves in the presence of the Holy. Pilgrimages—local, regional, or international to Mount Athos and/or Palestine—were increasingly common among Eastern Christians in the nineteenth century. Orthodox pilgrimages could be individual or communal. Sometimes villages sponsored a pilgrim to go and add the villagers’ names to the synodika or prayer registers of important monasteries. Pilgrimages were undertaken to seek healing, give thanks for a miracle, or simply as a form of penance and self-denial, since the hardships and deprivations one could encounter could be associated with Christ’s passion (Coulter 1996, 63 – 64). The hardships that were an integral part of pilgrims’ spiritual experiences could include expenses, material deprivation, accidents, crowded conditions or lack of accommodations, inclement weather, pirates or extortion, or the accomplishment of all or part of a tedious voyage on foot, even barefoot. Pilgrims often voluntarily fasted and abstained from alcohol and tobacco. Such acts of asceticism were typically expected on organized parish pilgrimages (Greene 2012, 259). Orthodox pilgrimages were an ancient practice, but prior to the mid-nineteenth century, few believers had the means or opportunity to go on long-distance trips. Improvements in transportation, namely railroads and steamboats, and in Russia, the emancipation of the serfs in the 1860s, enhanced the feasibility and popularity of pilgrimages. By the end of the nineteenth century, millions of Russians, as individuals or in small groups, had gone on at least short pilgrimages to churches or monasteries. In Imperial Russia popular pilgrimage destinations included the shrines of saints, monastic centers like Holy Trinity-Sergius Monastery located seventy kilometers from Moscow , the island of Solovki in the far north during the few months of year when weather made the journey possible, or Kiev (Chrissidis 2012/13; Worobec 2009). If they could afford it and obtained the necessary permissions from local authorities, more ambitious pilgrims ventured outside the empire on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. On such pilgrimages, the monastic peninsula of Mount Athos, a center of Orthodox spirituality, was a potential stopover point for male pilgrims. Since women were not allowed on the Holy Mountain, they had to wait in adjoining towns or take a boat that skipped Mount Athos altogether. For Orthodox subjects of the Porte, there was a long-established tradition of pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Mirroring Muslims who completed the Hajj to Mecca, Christians who completed the pilgrimage to Jerusalem appropri-

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ated the name Hajji, a practice dating from early modern times, and attained a hereditary rise in social stature (Izmirlieva 2012/13, 137– 47). One Russian recounted in a travelogue that zeal for pilgrimage to Jerusalem was great among the Greeks and that, prior to the Greek revolt against Ottoman rule in 1821, there were as many as three thousand Orthodox pilgrims to Jerusalem per year, most of whom were Greek or Armenian. Only about two hundred of them were Russian (Prousis 2017, 1991; Coulter 1996, 69n36). After mid-century, however, Slavs, especially from the Russian Empire, surpassed Greeks and Armenians as the largest group of pilgrims to Jerusalem. A Bulgarian pilgrim described Jerusalem as “almost a Slavonic city,” because Slavic languages were heard everywhere (Coulter 1996, 69). At Easter, the most popular time to be in Jerusalem, there were reportedly thousands of Russians and hundreds of Bulgarians and other Slavs in the city. Among East Slav pilgrims to Jerusalem there were peasants of both sexes and women of all classes, though peasant women were especially well represented. By the 1850s, steam travel reduced the journey from Kiev to Jaffa from two months to two weeks, and by 1900, the trip could be completed in four days (Coulter 1996, 69 – 72). On the eve of World War I, an estimated twenty thousand Russian pilgrims traveled to Jerusalem per year (Batalden and Palma 1993, 251). While in the Holy Land, pilgrims sought a blessing at the patriarchate of Jerusalem, bathed in the Jordan River, and visited the Church of the Holy Sepulcher along with many other sacred sites (Coulter 1996, 65, 77). Both the Ottoman Porte and the Russian government encouraged pilgrimages. The latter created a special government agency, the Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society, to promote pilgrimages to Jerusalem and assist pilgrims with the logistics. This society provided subsidies to help make pilgrimages to the Holy Lands affordable, but even with the subsidies, the Russian pilgrim traveling circa 1882 still needed about seventy-five rubles, which was more than the average farmhand earned in a year (Coulter 1996, 73). Organizing and supervising pilgrimages emerged as a new form of pastoral care to help counter the secularizing forces of modernity (Greene 2012, 250 – 51, 253). The goals of pilgrimage were not always exclusively spiritual. Pilgrimage could facilitate business and vice versa (Coulter 1996, 70 – 71; Chulos 2012/13, 129). Furthermore, especially for women, pilgrimage may have offered a modicum of independence and respite from the daily grind (Worobec 2016, 374 – 75). With women making up a large share of pilgrims to Jerusalem by the end of the nineteenth century, there were reports that they did not always conduct themselves appropriately (Coulter 1996, 71). Such reports may reflect anxiety about women’s increasing autonomy and presence in public places or they may indicate that pilgrims were not always in pursuit of exclusively spiritual goals. Orthodox piety—designating sacred spaces, pilgrimages, monasticism, and elders —contributed to processes of social leveling, a theme that runs through the historical literature on Orthodox lived religion. Elders originated from every social class and people from all social classes made pilgrimages to monastic centers to seek spiritual care in them (Lupinin 2016, 330). During the Russian monastic revival, large numbers of monastics derived from the peasant classes. The monastic hostels that housed pilgrims at

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their embarkation points and guided them through the various phases of pilgrimages catered to all social classes. Pilgrims lived, ate, prayed, and traveled together. But pilgrimages could contribute to social stratification as well as to leveling, because accommodations were meted out according to social standing (Chrissidis 2012/13, 182). Just as Orthodox piety could diminish or reinforce social disparities, in an age of nationalism, religious expression could diminish or accentuate ethnic identities. Rather than contributing to Orthodox internationalism, Kitromilides argues that Russian imperial involvement in pilgrimages to the Holy Lands led to “serious conflicts among the Orthodox.” This involvement disrupted the premodern form of pilgrimage that had existed within the Orthodox commonwealth, which brought people together whose common language was faith (2019, 94 – 95). Kitromilides’s argument is worth investigating further. While Orthodox Christians regardless of ethnicity observed common forms of piety, the veneration of saints and the creation of sacred spaces intersected with the construction of national identity as interests of church and state often converged in creating and venerating national saints and sacred monuments. For example, the Belgrade Metropolitanate promoted the cult of Saint Sava (d. 1236), considered the founder of Serbia’s autocephalous church in medieval times, as a symbol of Serbian unification (Aleksov 2014, 87). The Belgrade Theological Seminary was renamed Saint Sava Seminary in 1900 (Pavlovich 1989, 211). Saint Pelagia’s cell on Tinos became a pilgrimage destination for Greeks long before the church canonized her (1971). The Romanov imperial court sought to make a national saint of the popular elder Serafim of Sarov (1759 – 1833, canonized 1903), although war with Japan (1904) and revolution (1905) disrupted this process (Nichols 2000/2001, 37). Yet those saints who were of special national importance to one or another ethnic group, such as Saint Sava, often were eventually venerated by other Orthodox Christians. Mount Athos had preserved since medieval times an “authentic Orthodox heritage of universalism and internationalism” (Kitromilides 2019, 97). It was multi-ethnic and played a key role in the transmission of ideas throughout the Orthodox world. Yet in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the Russian presence on the mountain and in the pilgrimage process became predominant as Russia asserted its influence in the Near East, the Holy Mountain was increasingly marred by ethnic tensions. After visiting the peninsula, the Ecumenical Patriarch Manuel Gedeon wrote in 1885 that “racial conflicts among monks belonging to different nations” were “disfiguring the mission and character of an Orthodox monk” (Kitromilides 2019, 96). The number of monks on the Holy Mountain grew from 6,000 in 1821 to 7,432 by 1902, with Russians gradually outnumbering Greeks (Frazee 1969, 40 – 41; Binns 2002, 243), despite Russians possessing just one of the six main monasteries on the peninsula (Saint Panteleimon’s). The ethnic patchwork of Mount Athos remains evident in the preservation of separate Greek, Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian, and Romanian monasteries, sketes, and individual cells that dot the peninsula. Then again, this patchwork also represents conscious efforts to preserve Orthodoxy’s varied cultural heritage and need not be interpreted only as a sign of ethnic division or conflict.

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Conclusion The rich and growing body of literature on the Russian Orthodox Church and on lived or popular religion in Imperial Russia contrasts with the paucity of research on the Orthodox peoples of southeastern Europe. Scholarly work on Orthodoxy in southeastern Europe in the nineteenth century tends to focus on the relationship between religion and nationalism and the role of Orthodox churches in the construction of national identity. A reorientation of the historical literature toward lived religion, sacred spaces, and Orthodox laity vis-à-vis the clergy would be most welcome and would complement work that is being done on lived religion in contemporary southeastern Europe. Another avenue for future research would be to explore the Orthodox press and its engagement with the socio-political and philosophical tendencies of the century, perhaps within the context of considering eastern European versions of the sacred-secular conflicts that ensued in western Europe with the spread of political liberalism and notions of individual civil rights. Due to the convergence of modernizing forces and Orthodox popular piety, there were a number of ways in which Orthodox Christians found themselves, temporarily or permanently, living beyond their national borders. The impact of these intercultural experiences and transnational Orthodox communities on Orthodox liturgical, theological, and educational movements, as well as on intra-Orthodox and interdenominational relations, would also be fruitful topics for further research. In particular, a study of Orthodox ecumenism that treats the inter-confessional dialogues of the nineteenth century not as isolated cases but as a whole would be useful. Attention to Orthodox communities in transnational contexts would provide a fuller and more complex picture of intra-Orthodox relations. This attention would thus present a broader evidentiary basis for considering the degree to which an Orthodox cultural commonwealth or “religious international” survived in spite of the destruction of the Orthodox political and religious commonwealth in southeastern Europe.

References and Bibliography Aleksov, Bojan. 2014. “The Serbian Orthodox Church.” In Leustean 2014a, 65 – 100. Altholz, Josef L. 2017. “Alexander Lycurgus: An Ecumenical Pioneer.” In Thresholds into the Orthodox Commonwealth: Essays in Honor of Theofanis G. Stavrou, edited by Lucien J. Frary, 127 – 46. Bloomington, IN: Slavica. Bailey, Heather. 2020. The Public Image of Eastern Orthodoxy: France and Russia, 1848 – 1870. Ithaca, NY: Northern Illinois University Press, an imprint of Cornell University Press. Batalden, Stephen K. 2004. “The BFBS Petersburg Agency and Russian Biblical Translation, 1856 – 1875.” In Batalden et al. 2004, 169 – 96. Batalden, Stephen K., Kathleen Cann, and John Dean, eds. 2004. Sowing the Word: The Cultural Impact of the British and Foreign Bible Society, 1804 – 2004. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Phoenix Press.

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Batalden, Stephen K., and Michael D. Palma. 1993. “Orthodox Pilgrimage and Russian Landholding in Jerusalem.” In Seeking God: The Recovery of Religious Identity in Orthodox Russia, Ukraine, and Georgia, edited by Stephen K. Batalden, 251 – 63. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Binns, John. 2002. An Introduction to the Christian Orthodox Churches. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Birchall, Christopher. 2014. Embassy, Emigrants, and Englishmen: The Three Hundred Year History of a Russian Orthodox Church in London. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Publications. Coleman, Heather J., ed. 2014. Orthodox Christianity in Imperial Russia: A Sourcebook on Lived Religion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Coleman, Heather J. 2022. “Ukraine and Russia.” In The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Europe, edited by Grace Davie and Lucian N. Leustean, 764 – 81. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chrissidis, Nikolaos. 2012/13. “The Athonization of Pious Travel: Shielded Shrines, Shady Deals, and Pilgrimage Logistics in Late Nineteenth-Century Odessa.” Modern Greek Studies Yearbook 28/29: 169 – 91. Chulos, Chris J. 2012/13. “Sacred and Secular Aspirations of Pilgrimage.” Modern Greek Studies Yearbook 28/29: 129 – 36. Clark, Christopher. 2003. “The New Catholicism and the European Culture Wars.” In Culture Wars: Secular– Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe, edited by Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser, 11 – 46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clogg, Richard. 2004. “Enlightening ‘A Poor, Oppressed, and Darkened Nation’: Some Early Activities of the BFBS in the Levant.” In Batalden et al. 2004, 234 – 50. Coulter, Debra. 1996. “Ukrainian Pilgrimage to the Holy Land, 988 – 1914.” Ukrainian Review 43 (3): 62 – 77. Demacopoulos, George E., and Aristotle Papanikolaou. 2013. “Orthodox Naming of the Other: A Postcolonial Approach.” In Orthodox Constructions of the West, edited by George E. Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou, 1 – 22. New York: Fordham University Press. Dixon, Simon. 2006. “The Russian Orthodox Church in Imperial Russia 1721 – 1917.” In The Cambridge History of Christianity. Vol. 5, Eastern Christianity, edited by Michael Angold, 325 – 47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dubisch, Jill. 1995. In a Different Place: Pilgrimage, Gender, and Politics of a Greek Island Shrine. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Frazee, Charles A. 1969. The Orthodox Church and Independent Greece, 1821 – 1852. London: Cambridge University Press. Freeze, Gregory L. 1983. The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Crisis, Reform, Counter-Reform. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Freeze, Gregory L. 2006. “Russian Orthodoxy: Church, People and Politics in Imperial Russia.” In The Cambridge History of Russia. Vol. 2, Imperial Russia, 1689 – 1917, edited by Dominic Lieven, 284 – 305. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Greene, Robert. 2012. “Bodies in Motion: Steam-Powered Pilgrimages in Late-Imperial Russia.” Russian History 39: 247 – 68. Hann, Chris, and Hermann Goltz. 2010. “Introduction: The Other Christianity?” In Eastern Christians in Anthropological Perspective, edited by Chris Hann and Hermann Goltz, 1 – 32. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Izmirlieva, Valentina. 2012/13. “The Title Hajji and the Ottoman Vocabulary of Pilgrimage.” Modern Greek Studies Yearbook 28/29: 137 – 67. John of Helsinki, Metropolitan. 1988. “The Finnish Orthodox Church.” In Ramet 1988b, 267 – 85. Kalkandjieva, Daniela. 2014. “The Bulgarian Orthodox Church.” In Leustean 2014a, 164 – 201. New York: Fordham University Press. Kenworthy, Scott M. 2010. The Heart of Russia: Trinity-Sergius, Monasticism, and Society after 1825. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Kitromilides, Paschalis M. 2019. Religion and Politics in the Orthodox World: The Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Challenges of Modernity. London: Routledge. Kivelson, Valerie A., and Robert H. Greene. 2003. Orthodox Russia: Belief and Practice under the Tsars. University Park: Pennsylvania State University. Kizenko, Nadieszda. 2021. Good for the Souls: A History of Confession in the Russian Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Koliopoulos, John S., and Thanos M. Veremis. 2002. Greece: The Modern Sequel, from 1831 to the Present. New York: NYU Press. Kuzmič, Peter. 2004. “The Bible Society’s South Slavic Bible in the Balkan Maelstrom.” In Batalden et al. 2004, 251 – 67. Ladouceur, Paul. 2020. Modern Orthodox Theology: “Behold, I Make All Things New.” London: T&T Clark. Leustean, Lucian N., ed. 2014a. Orthodox Christianity and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Southeastern Europe. New York: Fordham University Press. Leustean, Lucian N. 2014b. “Postscript.” In Leustean 2014a, 203 – 5. Leustean, Lucian N. 2014c. “The Romanian Orthodox Church.” In Leustean 2014a, 101 – 63. Lupinin, Nicholas. 2016. “The Tradition of Elders (Startsy) in 19th-Century Russia.” In The Tapestry of Russian Christianity: Studies in History and Culture, edited by Nicholas Lupinin, Donald Ostrowski, and Jennifer B. Spock, 327 – 52. Columbus: The Ohio State University, Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures. Michelson, Patrick Lally. 2017. Beyond the Monastery Walls: The Ascetic Revolution in Russian Orthodox Thought, 1814 – 1914. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Nichols, Robert L. 2000/2001. “Orthodox Spirituality in Imperial Russia: Saint Serafim of Sarov and the Awakening of Orthodoxy.” Modern Greek Studies Yearbook 16/17: 19 – 42. Papadakis, Aristeides. 1988. “The Historical Tradition of Church-State Relations under Orthodoxy.” In Ramet 1988b, 37 – 58. Pavlovich, Paul. 1989. The History of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Toronto: Serbian Heritage Books. Payne, Daniel. 2007. “Nationalism and the Local Church: The Source of Ecclesiastical Conflict in the Orthodox Commonwealth.” Nationalities Papers 35: 831 – 52. Peters, C. J. 1988. “The Georgian Orthodox Church.” In Ramet 1988b, 286 – 308. Prousis, Theophilus C. 2017. “A Russian Pilgrim in Ottoman Jerusalem.” In Thresholds into the Orthodox Commonwealth: Essays in Honor of Theofanis G. Stavrou, edited by Lucien J. Frary, 101 – 25. Bloomington, IN: Slavica. Raikin, Spas T. 1988. “The Bulgarian Orthodox Church.” In Ramet 1988b, 160 – 82. Ramet, Pedro. 1988a. “The Albanian Orthodox Church.” In Ramet 1988b, 149 – 59. Ramet, Pedro, ed. 1988b. Eastern Christianity and Politics in the Twentieth Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Robson, Roy R. 2007. “Transforming Solovki: Pilgrim Narratives, Modernization, and Late Imperial Monastic Life.” In Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia, edited by Mark D. Steinberg and Heather J. Coleman, 44 – 60. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Rock, Stella. 2007. Popular Religion in Russia: “Double Belief” and the Making of an Academic Myth. London: Routledge. Rossos, Andrew. 2008. Macedonia and the Macedonians: A History. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. Roudometof, Victor. 2000. “Transnationalism and Globalization: The Greek Orthodox Diaspora between Universalism and Transnational Nationalism.” Diaspora 9 (3): 361 – 97. Shevzov, Vera. 1996. “Chapels and the Ecclesial World of Pre-Revolutionary Russian Peasants.” Slavic Review 55: 585 – 613. Skendi, S. 1967. “Crypto-Christianity in the Balkan Area under the Ottomans.” Slavic Review 26 (2): 227 – 46. Spasović, Stanimir. 1999. History of the Serbian Orthodox Church and Serbian Nation. Libertyville, IL: St. Sava Serbian Orthodox School of Theology. Stamatopoulos, Dimitris. 2014. “The Orthodox Church of Greece.” In Leustean 2014a, 34 – 64.

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Stavrou, Theofanis G. 1988. “The Orthodox Church of Greece.” In Ramet 1988b, 183 – 207. Ursul, George. 1982. “From Political Freedom to Religious Independence: The Romanian Orthodox Church, 1877 – 1925.” In Romania between East and West: Historical Essays in Memory, edited by Constantin C. Giurescu et al., 217 – 31. New York: Columbia University Press. Ware, Timothy [Bishop Kallistos]. 1997. The Orthodox Church. London: Penguin Books. Werth, Paul W. 2014. The Tsar’s Foreign Faiths: Toleration and the Fate of Religious Freedom in Imperial Russia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Worobec, Christine D. 2016. “Russian Orthodoxy and Women’s Spirituality in Imperial Russia.” In The Tapestry of Russian Christianity: Studies in History and Culture, edited by Nicholas Lupinin, Donald Ostrowski, and Jennifer B. Spock, 355 – 88. Columbus: The Ohio State University, Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures. Worobec, Christine D. 2012/13. “Commentary: The Coming of Age of Eastern Orthodox Pilgrimage Studies.” Modern Greek Studies Yearbook 28/29: 219 – 31. Worobec, Christine D. 2009. “The Unintended Consequences of a Surge in Orthodox Pilgrimages in Late Imperial Russia.” Russian History 36 (1): 62 – 76. Yasamee, F. A. K. 2001. “Religion, Irreligion and Nationalism in the Diaries of the Bulgarian Exarch Yosif.” In Religious Quest and National Identity in the Balkans, edited by Celia Hawkesworth, Muriel Heppell, and Harry Norris, 203 – 17. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Zelepos, Ioannis. 2011. “Amateurs as Nation Builders?” In Conflicting Loyalties in the Balkans: The Great Powers, the Ottoman Empire and Nation Building, edited by Hannes Grandits, Robert Pichler, and Nathalie Clayer, 64 – 85. London: I. B. Taurus. Zernov, Nicholas. 1961. Orthodox Encounter: The Christian East and the Ecumenical Movement. London: J. Clarke.

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2 Islam

The presence of Islam and Muslims in Europe, of course, did not begin in the nineteenth century. Muslim rule in Sicily from the ninth to the eleventh century and in Spain from the eighth century until Grenada’s fall in 1492 is widely known, even if often romanticized in the myth of an Andalusian Golden Age. Less familiar is the Muslim presence in Europe’s eastern confines: in the Transcaucus (since the seventh century), in the Volga basin, and from the Urals to Crimea. The establishment of Muslim trade networks, then the expansion of the Golden Horde and the formation of Khanates led to the settlement of Muslims in these regions and also the conversion of local populations to Islam. Starting in the sixteenth century, these Muslims came under the political control of the Russian Empire, which at turns tolerated them and strove to convert them to Christianity. The Ottoman conquest created another massive presence of Islam on the European continent and this long before Constantinople’s fall in 1453. From the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, Ottoman control gradually expanded over southeastern Europe, even if the sultan’s troops twice failed to conquer Vienna (in 1529 and 1683). In the wake of these gains, the Balkans acquired a substantial population of Muslims: through the establishment of Ottoman administrative, military, and religious power structures; as a result of an active colonization policy, at least in some areas; and because of local inhabitants’ conversions to Islam. Still, those who professed the religion of the Ottoman power never outnumbered non-Muslims in the Balkans. In western Europe, too, Muslims were far from absent. They were merchants and seamen, residing in the main cosmopolitan ports and trading centers in continuously increasing numbers from the seventeenth century. In addition, there were diplomats in Western capital cities, Ottoman prisoners of war, such as those in Vienna after the siege of 1683, and other soldiers, such as the Muslim unit and later even a regiment in the eighteenth-century Prussian army. Moreover, beginning in the late fourteenth century, the westward migrations of Tatar soldiers from the Golden Horde resulted in the creation of small Muslim communities in Poland and Lithuania. Nonetheless, the nineteenth century saw many changes in Islam’s situation in Europe. In western Europe, visible, if not always permanent, Muslim communities arose. They were made up of students, traders, and a significant number of Muslim seamen on shore in the main European ports. In Marseille, the Muslim presence was also bolstered by pilgrims from the French colonies in transit to or from Mecca. There were also increasing numbers of converts, notably the Liverpool solicitor William H. (Abdul-

In large part, this chapter is adapted from material we previously published in Clayer and Bougarel (2017) and Clayer and Germain (2008). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110609059-004

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lah) Quilliam, the self-styled “Shaikh al-Islam of the British Isles,” who, following his conversion in 1887, founded Liverpool’s Muslim Institute and Mosque. Although some of its information is based on estimates, an 1897 statistical handbook of the world’s Muslim population sheds valuable light on the size of western Europe’s Muslim communities: 2,700 in the United Kingdom with 100 for Gibraltar, 2,600 in France, 800 in Italy, 750 in Spain, and 150 in Portugal. The handbook does not mention Germany, but there is evidence of a small Muslim community there comprising students, merchants, diplomats, and even two converts who were active proselytizers. A few years later, some 4 ,000 – 5,000 North Africans were registered as employed in France, including 2,000 Muslims working in Marseille’s oil-factories, refineries, and smelting works, mainly as unskilled workers. The other Muslim migrants worked mainly in Paris or in the coal mines of northern France. In Russia, there were approximately 14 million Muslims, including those in Central Asia and Siberia, whose political and demographic experiences differed greatly from their coreligionists in the “European” portions of the empire. Islam was officially tolerated and institutionalized in European Russia after the important conquests of Catherine II (1762 – 96) along the Black and Caspian coasts; an edict of 1773 formally recognized Islam and permitted the construction of mosques. But following the Crimean War and the 1865 Russian conquest of Circassia in North Caucasus, Tatar and Caucasian Muslims migrated en masse towards the Ottoman Empire, especially its European part (Williams 2000; Bobrovnikov 2006). In southeastern Europe, the nineteenth century was synonymous with the withdrawal of the Ottoman Empire and the reduction of the Muslim presence in these regions. Although it had already lost its Hungarian territories at the end of the seventeenth century, major Ottoman territorial losses commenced after 1800. Between 1829 and 1830, Serbian autonomy, Greek independence, and the autonomy of Moldova and Wallachia were all recognized. At the 1878 Congress of Berlin, the independence of Serbia (which acquired the regions of Niš, Pirot, and Vranje), Montenegro, and Romania were confirmed, and a small Bulgarian principality was created north of the Balkan range, while Bosnia-Herzegovina was placed under Austro-Hungarian administration. In 1881, Greece received Thessaly and Arta, and four years later the autonomous province of Eastern Rumelia united with Bulgaria. As a result of these transfers, the Ottoman Empire retained only Albania, Macedonia, Kosovo, Thrace, and Epirus. Although international treaties generally guaranteed some rights for Muslims in the new autonomous and independent (Christian) states, many were killed during or just after the conflicts that ended Ottoman rule. Others were expelled, fled to the remaining Ottoman territories to escape living under Christian jurisdiction, or were forcibly converted. Nevertheless, important Muslim communities remained under Bulgarian, Romanian, Serbian, Montenegrin, Greek, Cretan, or Austro-Hungarian authority. And in the Balkan lands still under Ottoman sovereignty, the proportion of Muslims increased due to the arrival of refugees, including from the Russian Empire, although some of these settled in Constantinople or in other Anatolian territories. In short, whereas in 1877 there were some 1.6 million Muslims in Rumelia, that is, the part of southeastern Europe under Ottoman control, they numbered more than 3 million in

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1911. In the discussion that follows, we focus on Islam and the experiences of these Muslims, while evoking here and there the situations of their coreligionists in the Russian Empire.

Networks of Islam, c. 1800 – c. 1878 In the early nineteenth century, there was no major difference between Islam as it was practiced and lived in the European part of the Ottoman Empire (but also in the Russian Empire) and the Islam of the empire’s Anatolian provinces. It was conveyed through the same institutions, which were often based in Constantinople, even though Balkan Muslims had more frequent contacts with non-Muslims, above all Christians. However, in both Rumelia and Anatolia, the form and practice of Islam was far from homogeneous, thanks to the multiplicity of networks and actors that interpreted and disseminated the religion of the Prophet Muhammad. What were these networks and who were these actors? Islamic practice was organized around mosques, or mescids for places of prayer lacking a minaret, where Muslims offered up their ritual prayers and where imams gave hutbes (sermons) on Fridays or on other occasions (when they were referred to as vazs). The cemaat (local community) met there around the imam, who often also gave lessons to young children (boys and to a lesser extent girls), teaching them the Quran and sometimes the rudiments of arithmetic and writing. In some towns, the mosque formed part of a complex that might also include a madrasa (medrese), that is, a school where religious specialists (ulamas) were trained in religious knowledge (Arabic language, the Quran, Quranic exegesis, knowledge of the hadiths—the deeds and sayings of the Prophet—Islamic jurisprudence, logic, rhetoric) and certain profane subjects. Some of them then became kadıs (judges) or müderris (teachers), who in turn taught young Muslims. The Gazi Husrev-beg Madrasa in Sarajevo (1537) counted among the most famous of such schools in Rumelia. But the most important of these establishments were the madrasas of Fatih and Süleymaniyye in Constantinople. Within the Islamic world, a development particular to the Ottoman Empire was the gradual emergence there of a hierarchy of religious specialists, the ilmiyye. This hierarchy could almost be regarded as a high clergy that was accountable to imperial authorities, with the şeyhülislam (“Head of Islam”), who was also the mufti of Constantinople, at the summit. This hierarchy included the kadıs and the müderris, whose respective importance (and remuneration) varied according to the town where they were employed. The madrasas were also organized in a hierarchy, led by Fatih and Süleymaniyye, which had the most esteemed and best remunerated teachers. The positions of kadıs and müderris in provincial society were distinct. The former presided over the sharia (Islamic law) courts and made judgments according to a body of law that included, in addition to sharia, kanun (secular legislation) and imperial orders. Additionally, they had notarial, administrative, and even municipal powers and duties. Importantly, kadıs were also consulted by non-Muslims. By contrast, the müderris fo-

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cused on transmitting religious and sometimes profane knowledge (medicine, mathematics, etc.). Frequently, the müderris became muftis, namely legal experts consulted to obtain fatwas, i. e. legal opinions on specific subjects. However, the mufti was also considered to be a town or region’s highest religious authority. Consequently, he could mobilize people socially and politically either in favor of or against political authorities. Only a small minority of Muslims in the Balkan lands studied in the local madrasas, usually the one closest to their place of birth. The most promising students, however, often left to study in the best madrasas of the peninsula, in Constantinople or, less often, in the Arab provinces. The Russian Empire’s Islamic institutions presented a similar and at least partly centralized aspect. An official hierarchy appeared by the end of the eighteenth century with the creation of a spiritual assembly (muftiate) located in Orenburg, which functioned as a sort of Muslim supreme court. It issued fatwas, named imams, and approved the construction of mosques. In principle, all members of the assembly were to be elected, but in reality the territorial governor appointed muftis such that the Russian state exercised considerable control over Muslims’ religious and legal practices. A similar structure, the Tauride Directorate, was set up for Crimea and the former PolishLithuanian Commonwealth after 1831, in part to limit the Orenburg Assembly’s influence. Here, a stricter hierarchy of religious elites (imams, shaykhs, waqfs, etc.) was established that also comprised the shaykhs of the Sufi lodges. Although these institutions helped foster a real blossoming of Muslim society in Russia, which by 1913 encompassed some 6,200 mosques under the two jurisdictions, their religious legitimacy remained a contested matter. As Vladimir Bobrovnikov has noted, certain ulema and even Sufi scholars “considered the power of muftis unpermitted innovations (bida’) from the Islamic point of view” (2006, 210). An important limit to these hierarchies’ power was the fact that mosque teachers were not the only sources of religious knowledge. It could also be acquired in a tekke, that is, in a dervish establishment led by a spiritual teacher, a shaykh. These institutions, variously called zaviye, dergah, or hankah/hanikah, were sometimes part of the complexes including mosques and madrasas but they could also stand by themselves. In the Balkan Peninsula, as elsewhere in the Muslim world, Ottoman expansion favored the setting up of mystical brotherhoods called tarikats (literally “paths”) at all ranks of society. These included, first and foremost, the Halveti networks, which in the classical period (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) were often close to the Ottoman authorities. But there were also such groups as the Naqshbandi, Bektashi, Kadiri, Rifai (whom Western travelers sometimes called the howling dervishes), Mevlevi (the famous whirling dervishes), and Melami. The Sufis, who were members of these networks, sought to achieve knowledge of the divine by following a mystical approach guided by a spiritual master, although the specific practices and rituals varied from one brotherhood to another (e. g., spiritual retreat, tireless recitation of formulae, dance and breathing techniques, chanting, mortification). Moving beyond the level of individual searching, the spiritual connections forged between disciple and teacher and among the disciples themselves, combined with the material resources that these

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religious groups often possessed, provided the brotherhoods with opportunities to exert notable social and political influence. The tekkes, frequently founded or endowed by leading imperial figures and local notables, typically possessed property in mortmain (lands, shops, mills, etc.) that generated income with which they could pay officiants and feed dervishes and passing guests. This system of waqfs (pious foundations) was not restricted to the dervish establishments, since most of the mosques and madrasas functioned in a similar fashion. Provincial notables also had an interest in these foundations, because they made it possible to circumvent the restrictions against passing property on to descendants. That is, while progeny could not inherit the land directly, their appointment as, for example, mütevelli (administrators) of a waqf, enabled them to benefit, in the form of a salary, from revenue generated by that property. In this context, mention need also be made of the türbes (tombs), which were often associated with the brotherhoods. These were objects of devotion in the form of individual visits or collective pilgrimages. In the Balkans, many of these tombs were burial places of saints implicated in the conquest of the regions or in the local history of Islam, and were visited by Muslim—and even non-Muslim—believers seeking the fulfillment of wishes, healing, and other needs. In the eyes of the local populations, repeated visits to certain particularly venerated tombs, such as the türbes of Ajvaz Dede in Prusac (Bosnia), Sari Saltik in Kruja (Albania), or Demir Baba in Deli Orman (Bulgaria), could replace the pilgrimage to Mecca, which required financial resources that not all Muslim faithful possessed. Through these various institutions, different Islamic currents and religious practices spread among the Muslims of Rumelia, who assimilated and adapted them according to their knowledge, expectations, and inclinations in the contexts of the times. During the nineteenth century, Balkan Muslims were all Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi school, or at least the authorities officially considered them as such. In fact, particularly in the peninsula’s eastern regions (Dobruja, Deli Orman, eastern Rhodope, Thrace) there were also Kizilbash groups (in Turkish: kızılbaş; literally “red heads”) who still retained the beliefs and practices inherited from the first period of the region’s colonization as influenced subsequently by sixteenth-century Safavid Islam. These beliefs and practices were far removed from the dominant Sunni doctrine. They included, in particular: worship of Ali (the Prophet’s son-in-law) and the first imams; the esoteric interpretation of the Quran; worship of certain personalities such as Bedreddin Simavi, Otman Baba, Sari Saltik, and Haji Bektash; Hurufism (a cabalistic-type doctrine that assigned numerical values to the letters of the Arabic alphabet); and specific rituals. However, it is wrong to regard them as Shiites, as is frequently the case in the literature, even if some of their descendants describe themselves as such today, often because of recent Shiite proselytizing. Moreover, the Kizilbash (today also called Alevis) were not alone in professing an esoteric Islam in southeastern Europe. Members of several different mystical brotherhood networks, especially the Bektashi with which some Kizilbash had close ties, also combined esotericism with mysticism.

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Such mixing, however, was not necessarily synonymous with heterodoxy. As in Anatolia, multiple brotherhood networks, Naqshbandi and Halveti in particular, stressed sharia’s importance. Numerous ulamas were also shaykhs, and many ulamas not only practiced an esoteric Islam but also performed magical acts (divination, astrology, making of talismans, etc.) following the example of the Bosnian kadı Muhibbi, who was active in the first half of the nineteenth century (Paić-Vukić 2011). But there were also times marked by orthodox, anti-brotherhood currents in the Balkans, such as the Kadizadelis in eighteenth-century Bosnia, who denounced practices (e. g., visiting tombs, listening to music, dancing during rituals) they judged to be heterodox. How did these Islamic networks evolve during the first three quarters of the nineteenth century? In the Balkan territories that remained under full Ottoman rule, a series of reforms gradually affected these institutions, especially after the Crimean War. The reform with the greatest impact on how Islamic institutions functioned was that concerning the waqfs. In 1826, Sultan Mahmud II created a Ministry of the Waqfs to improve and centralize their management but also to divert some of their income to the state, which needed to finance its reforms. This management, which in practice was centralized to varying degrees, hindered the functioning of some mosques but even more the Rumelian madrasas and tekkes. Above all, by obliging ulamas and shaykhs to find other means of subsistence, the reform altered their position in society. It also led to the creation of local bureaus of waqfs, in which local Muslim notables were involved and where economic and political concerns increasingly came into play. Furthermore, the 1826 reform took the supervision of religious foundations away from the kadıs. The kadıs, accused of corruption, were also the subjects of other reforms. In 1855, a School for Kadıs (muallimhane-i nüvvab) was founded in Constantinople to train them in a “modern” way. Then, in 1864; a reform of provincial administration set up new nizamiye (reorganized) courts alongside the sharia courts. As far as the müderris were concerned, their quasi-monopoly over education was only very slightly weakened. The ulamas, meanwhile, were hardly marginalized by this spate of broadly secularizing reforms. Indeed, David Kushner (1987) and others have shown that many ulamas played an active part in these reforms that, either because of their limited scope (especially in certain provinces) or because there were no other qualified officials, frequently left the ulamas well placed in society and in the workings of the administration. In Tsarist Russia, where reforms also tended to restrict the influence of Muslim elites, the main Sufi brotherhoods—Naqshbandis and Qadiris—were further targeted as being “anti-Russian.” After 1800, other factors contributed to the evolution of Islam in southeastern Europe. In some areas, Christians converted to Islam under varying degrees of pressure. In Epirus, notably, Ali Pasha of Ioannina (1740 – 1822) forcibly converted numerous Christians in the regions that came under his authority. In Kosovo and in northern Albania, too, Albanophone and Slavophone Christians alike converted to Islam to advance their social integration. On the other side of the Balkan Peninsula, Islamic networks were strengthened by new settlements of Muslims and by the massive presence of Ottoman troops fighting against Russia. Already by the end of the eighteenth century, for

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example, Šumen (in present-day Bulgaria) emerged as an important center of Islamic culture, both for the spreading of mystical currents and the production of Quranic manuscripts. The period seems, moreover, to be one in which Islamic orthodoxy was strengthened in the Balkans. The Ottoman authorities banned the Bektashi brotherhood in 1826 shortly after abolishing the janissaries. In Rumelia, as in Anatolia, their tekkes were destroyed or given to other brotherhoods and their property was seized. Even though the Bektashi order ultimately survived this blow, especially in the Albanian regions where it even expanded in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, other mystical networks that were far more attached to sharia grew in strength after 1800, particularly the Halveti (from Ohrid and Prizren to Tirana and Sarajevo) and the Naqshbandi networks (above all in Bosnia and the Bulgarian territories), which upheld sharia against infidels and heretics. The first part of the century also witnessed the expansion of other, less “orthodox” brotherhoods, such as the Rifais, the Sadis, the Kadiris, and the Shazalis, which further helped to strengthen the links among the region’s Muslims. With an increasing presence in the countryside, these groups made important contributions to the diversification of Islam across the Balkan Peninsula.

Muslims in the Non-Muslim States and the Ottoman Empire, 1878 – 1918 Despite the massive and continuous departures of Muslims for the Ottoman Empire after 1830, substantial populations of Muslims remained in the states that were carved out from the Ottoman territory: the Austro-Hungarian province of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria and, to a lesser extent, Romania, Montenegro, Serbia, and Greece. However, the international situation changed notably with the 1878 Treaty of Berlin, which, in a spirit of reciprocity, required the signatories to guarantee certain rights to Muslims in the newly independent states and to non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire. In each of the new countries (Bulgaria, Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia), specific treaty articles stipulated that religious affiliation could not disadvantage anyone’s enjoyment of their civil or political rights or their access to public employment and other sectors of activity. The treaty also affirmed that “the freedom and outward exercise of all forms of worship shall be assured to all persons belonging to [the country], as well as to foreigners,” and that “no hindrance shall be offered either to the hierarchical organization of the different communions, or to their relations with their spiritual chiefs.” Additionally, the treaty contained clauses relating to property rights. Muslim or other property owners who established their personal residence outside these new states “may continue to hold there their real property, by farming it out, or having it administered by third parties.” Joint commissions were also entrusted with settling “all questions relative to the mode of alienation, working, or use on the account of the Sublime Porte of

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property belonging to the State and religious foundations (vakoufs), as well as of the questions regarding the interests of private persons engaged therein.” For its part, the Ottoman Empire had to pledge to respect the rights of all, without distinction as to religion (including before the courts), and to assure the freedom and exercise of worship. It was likewise required to guarantee the rights of priests, pilgrims, and monks; recognize the right of protection for diplomats and consuls; preserve the status quo in the “Holy Places”; and guarantee the rights of the monks of Mount Athos. No obligations, however, were placed on Austria-Hungary, which the treaty mandated to occupy Bosnia-Herzegovina. Nevertheless, the Convention of Constantinople (or Novi Pazar Convention) signed by the two empires in April 1879 required the Dual Monarchy to recognize the sultan’s de jure sovereignty over the province (accordingly, Muslims could pronounce the sultan’s name at the beginning of Friday prayers) and guaranteed Muslims’ religious freedom as well as their ties to their spiritual leader in Constantinople. Meanwhile, in 1881, Greece approved a similar set of protections for its Muslims. The Convention of Constantinople, signed in July, namely obliged the state to respect “the lives, property, honor, religion and customs of the inhabitants of the districts [in Thessaly]” ceded to Greece. In addition, these inhabitants were to enjoy “exactly the same civil and political rights as Hellenic subjects of origin.” Furthermore, Greece pledged to respect the ties between Muslims and their spiritual leader. Finally, sharia courts were allowed to continue to deal with “purely religious” matters and Muslims were exempted from military service for three years. The Great Powers’ desire to guarantee the rights of those who were not yet referred to as “minorities” was important for retaining the Muslim populations in the new Balkan states. Nonetheless, throughout the entire period under consideration, additional laws were passed, decisions taken, and measures adopted at the national level concerning political and civil rights, property, religious institutions, schools, and the sharia courts, which created distinct conditions for the Muslims living in each state. Frequently driven by “nationalizing” and “civilizing” projects, these laws often contravened the international agreements. Ultimately, the enforcement of the latter depended on the will of and the constraints upon different types of agents acting at different levels (national, regional, local). This very multiplicity, moreover, helps explain the notable gaps between law and actual practice in the areas of politics, economics, and religion. It also helps to account for the difficulties that Muslims encountered on a daily basis, which prompted many of them to depart for Ottoman territories. In terms of religious life itself, the new states tended, to varying degrees, to seek control over the local Islamic religious hierarchy (similar to what they enjoyed vis-à-vis the Christian churches) and to weaken its ties with the Ottoman Empire. For example, the Christian-led states sought to appropriate the waqfs and control their income. They also claimed the right to appoint the highest religious officials, who formerly had been salaried by the Ottoman state, and integrate them into the civil service. In the case of Bulgaria and, especially, Bosnia-Herzegovina, where the Habsburg authorities went so far as to propose creating institutions that were de facto independent from Constantinople, these policies provoked serious tensions.

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In Greece, Crete, and Romania, the political and administrative authorities never really sought to reshape the Islamic institutions within their territories. Rather, they focused on dominating them. For example, in Thessaly, the four (and then five) recognized muftis were appointed and removed from office by royal decree and became civil servants paid by the state, just as were schoolteachers. There was no mention of kadı or sharia courts. The muftis, with the elected commissions, managed the waqfs at the local level. In Crete, which became autonomous in 1898 under the aegis of a Christian High Commissioner, the Constitution of 1899 granted Muslims rights and freedoms, but it did not create a new centralized religious hierarchy. Likewise, the integration of the “new territories” into the Greek kingdom in 1913 (Epirus, Macedonia, Crete, and the Aegean Islands) following the Second Balkan War did not result in the establishment of new hierarchical institutions. But then the postwar climate did not encourage such innovations either. Romania also instituted mechanisms of control, even restriction, and nationalization without establishing a true structure at the national level. The state seized the waqfs, including the highly important waqf of Gazi Ali Pasha in Babadag, redistributed their lands to the mosques, and agreed to pay Muslim officials’ salaries. From 1880, muftis on the public payroll were installed in Tulcea and Constanţa. The salaries of the imams at the largest mosques were likewise paid by the state, and all imams received state support as of 1904. Only after 1886 were sharia courts in operation, namely in Tulcea and Constanţa. There would be four more by 1914 following Romania’s acquisition of Southern Dobruja. The famous madrasa in Babadag was able to reopen only in 1889, but in 1901 it was transferred to Mecidiye/Medgidia, where it henceforth operated (in part) on the model of Romania’s public schools. Meanwhile, the small “traditional” madrasas were gradually closed, a development, it should be noted, that did not necessarily displease Muslim reformists. In Serbia and Montenegro, where Muslims were less numerous, Islamic institutions were now represented and directed by muftis, who were appointed by the respective heads of state but accredited by the şeyhülislam in Constantinople. The Serbian mufti was a civil servant and resided in Niš. He was responsible for the waqfs, which had largely been confiscated by the state, the enforcement of family law, and the religious hierarchy. After Serbia’s conquest in 1912 of what is today Sanjak, Kosovo, and Macedonia, he became the “grand mufti,” while other muftis were appointed for each of the conquered regions. In Montenegro, too, the kadıs were civil servants named by the sovereign upon proposal from the mufti. Lower religious officials continued to be paid locally from waqf-generated income or private donations. In 1908 – 9, tensions arose between the Montenegrin authorities and the mufti (a Pomak from Tikveš in Macedonia), which forced the latter to quit Montenegro for the Ottoman Empire. Only in 1912 did the king appoint a new mufti of local origin, which itself was a sign of the complex challenges associated with the position at the time. Political authorities in Bulgaria and Bosnia-Herzegovina were especially keen to create local Islamic institutions that would be fully independent of Constantinople. In Bulgaria, where the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Religion subjected religious or-

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ganizations to close oversight, the state proceeded timidly at first and achieved concrete results only with difficulty after acquiring full independence in 1908. Although the authorities wanted to limit and oversee the links with Constantinople by creating an independent hierarchy, this ambition was curbed by the question of reciprocity visà-vis the Bulgarian Exarchate, which remained responsible for Bulgaria’s Orthodox Christians and whose seat remained in Constantinople. In 1895, a first attempt was made to establish the mufti of Sofia as head of a religious hierarchy, which provoked sharp reactions in Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire. According to the temporary orders of 1880 and 1895, which regulated how local Islamic institutions functioned, the kadıs were removed and their prerogatives transferred to the muftis. This was, again, a typical development in post-Ottoman southeastern Europe. These muftis were now chosen by local Muslim communities, appointed and paid by the Bulgarian government, but still confirmed by the şeyhülislam. The archival record reveals that this situation caused significant friction when local political and administrative authorities interfered in the appointment or dismissal of muftis, or when Constantinople decided not to accredit them. The administration of the waqfs, which was entrusted to local councils, occasioned similar instances of interference and tension. In the end, the setting up of a national Islamic hierarchy in Bulgaria following independence still maintained a form of dual oversight. A protocol signed between Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire formalized the status of muftis, waqfs, and religious schools. It created the office of the grand mufti, whose incumbent was chosen from among the local muftis for a term of five years, subject to accreditation by the şeyhülislam. The grand mufti was head of all Bulgarian Muslims and was responsible for the waqfs and schools. In 1913, a new agreement between the two states provided for the founding of a school for kadıs (medrese-i nüvvab) to train religious officials locally. However, implementing these agreements proved complicated. The muftis and the grand mufti were elected in 1910, but a deterioration of relations between Bulgaria and the empire prevented the latter from being accredited. Five years later, the grand mufti even left the country because of the war. The position remained vacant until 1920, when it was filled according to the new “Regulations on the Organization and Administration of Muslim Religious Institutions in Bulgaria.” As for the training school for religious officials, it did not open until 1922. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, Austro-Hungarian authorities wanted to move quickly to forge Islamic institutions independent of Constantinople. In 1880, the şeyhülislam failed to impose its choice of a new mufti, but soon thereafter Habsburg officials also realized that local institutions would have to be put in place gradually. When in 1882, however, the şeyhülislam dared to name the mufti of Sarajevo as “mufti of Bosnia,” the Austro-Hungarian officials responded by appointing this same mufti, Mustafa Hilmi Omerović, to the new position of reis-ul-ulema (literally, chief of the ulamas). It then set up an ulema-medžlis (council of ulamas) comprising four members, which was modeled on the superior consistories that existed for the Protestant churches. The following year, a Commission of Waqfs was created (it would be strengthened in 1894),

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while the sharia courts were reformed and integrated into the Austro-Hungarian judicial system. Finally, a school to train kadıs opened in 1887. When the reis-ul-ulema retired in 1894, he was replaced by Mehmed Tevfik Azapagić, author of a fatwa that urged Muslims not to emigrate. But Habsburg authorities never sought menšura (accreditation) from the şeyhülislam for Azapagić, a step calculated to assert the full independence of the Bosnian hierarchy from Constantinople. This action, however, provoked critical reactions from Bosnian Muslims. In fact, from the 1890s, and in keeping with the claims of Serbian notables in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a number of ulamas and Muslim notables demanded full autonomy for their religious institutions in order to preserve the Muslim religion, which they believed to be in peril. They also insisted that the requirement for the reis-ul-ulema to be accredited by the şeyhülislam be scrupulously respected. The Austro-Hungarian authorities long opposed this movement for religious autonomy, which was linked to a demand by more radical elements for the province’s autonomy under the sultan’s sovereignty. Only after the province’s annexation in 1908 did the Habsburg authorities accede to demands for an autonomous administration of religious affairs, waqfs, and schools. Thenceforth, the emperor chose the reis-ul-ulema from among three candidates named by a curia. He was then accredited by the şeyhülislam resident in a state— the Ottoman Empire—that could no longer claim sovereignty over the province. During the First World War, the Austro-Hungarian authorities, who from 1916 occupied two-thirds of the Albanian state as defined in 1913, also put in place religious institutions there that were independent of Constantinople. At the head of these institutions were a mufti general (Myftiu i Përgjithshëm), who was also called the Kadı of kadıs, and a Higher Sharia Council comprising the mufti general and two other ulamas. Not only did these regulations make no reference to the şeyhülislam, they also merged the functions of kadı and mufti. In sum, before the First World War, the Muslims of southeastern Europe who had passed into non-Muslim sovereignty, even those of Bosnia-Herzegovina, continued to be linked to the Ottoman Empire. The Balkan states’ efforts to cut “their” Muslims off from Constantinople met with only partial success. In Bulgaria, Muslims still observed the official Ottoman celebrations and contributed to campaigns for assistance launched in the empire. In all the Balkan countries, Muslims regarded the sultan– caliph and the empire as their protectors and looked to Ottoman authorities to defend their rights. In Sofia, they could address their concerns through the Ottoman High Commissioner installed in the Bulgarian capital. Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina sent messages or delegations directly to Constantinople. In 1902, the main leader of the Bosnian movement for religious autonomy, Ali Fehmi Džabić, even traveled to the Ottoman capital. But he was unable to return due to the opposition of Austro-Hungarian authorities, who saw him as an agent of Sultan Abdülhamid’s “pan-Islamist” policy. In fact, while the sultan’s “pan-Islamism” was largely a construct of the Great Powers’ imagination, he was keenly attentive to the situation of Muslims abroad, especially those in the lost Ottoman territories. For François Georgeon (2003), the Caliphate, which Abdülhamid made into a key institution, was also an ideological response to

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the empire’s decline. Pan-Islamism was, furthermore, a case of mirroring the policies that the Great Powers and the Balkan states had pursued vis-à-vis Christians in the Ottoman Empire. As evidenced by his cautious support for the Bosnian movement for religious autonomy, the sultan–caliph could not satisfy all the requests from Muslim groups in the Balkans. Nevertheless, Ottoman authorities did take a number of actions to connect the Muslims of the Balkan states to ideological and cultural developments taking place in the empire. As Milena Methodieva and Akşin Somel (2004) have shown for Bulgaria, for instance, the Ottoman Empire intervened in various ways in local Muslim educational networks: through diplomatic overtures, financial support for the maintenance or opening of schools, appointment of teachers, payment of salaries, provision of books and maps, and awarding of grants that enabled Muslims to continue their studies in the empire. But Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina as well as those in Montenegro and other countries without Muslim secondary schools or institutions of higher education also benefitted from such grants and the chance to attend schools in the empire. In addition to the spiritual and political ties that still bound them to the şeyhülislam and the sultan–caliph, other unofficial channels enabled Muslims in the Balkans to maintain connections with the Ottoman Empire. On the one hand, the flows of migrants created new networks: members of acquaintanceship networks emigrated but maintained links with those who remained behind, some emigrants returned, and property owners had their assets managed by intermediaries while they lived abroad. Mobility and correspondence across these networks were common. On the other hand, the press, which developed both inside and outside the empire, helped to create a public space beyond the Ottoman borders for the dissemination of information. Thus, for example, when advancing their claims, the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina could easily refer to the situation in Eastern Rumelia, Egypt, or Romania, where religious leaders were accredited by the şeyhülislam. Moreover, beginning in the 1890s, new transnational networks emerged that intensified the links among the Balkan states and between these states and the Ottoman Empire, as seen above all in the networks of exiled opponents to the Hamidian regime. Some of them resided in Romania (such as Ibrahim Temo) and Bulgaria, while others left for Egypt or western Europe. Their journalistic initiatives and political activism provided another way to maintain ties with the empire, for they favored a politicization of ethnic and/or religious identities different from those promoted by the sultan, a politicization that was nourished, both inside and outside the Ottoman Empire, by the assertion of Balkan nationalisms.

Muslim Identities in the Balkans And what of the Balkan Muslims themselves during the nineteenth century? Did they build their own specific collective identities? The Ottomanism supported by the promoters of the Tanzimat reforms, for instance, developed more as an idea of common citizenship than of a nation. After 1865, the Ottomanism of the Young Ottomans became

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a synonym for patriotism, constitutionalism, and the extolling of Islamic values. The new Balkan Muslim elites, who closely followed what was happening in the Ottoman capital, received Ottomanism favorably, but they also took inspiration from it to formulate their own identity constructs that wove together notions of local pride and attachment to Islam. This was the case, notably, in Bosnia, where the introduction of reforms in the late 1860s was accompanied by the creation of the first official and unofficial press organs, which cultivated an Ottoman patriotism that was synonymous with reformism. This patriotism was also tinged with local pride. Exemplary here is Mehmed Šakir Kurtćehajić (1844 – 70), who launched a newspaper that disseminated an Ottomanism associated with notions of reform, progress, education, and science. But his views were also replete with a local Bosnian patriotism rooted in the province’s history and specific characteristics, while echoing, too, Serbian and Illyrian nationalisms. For such notables as Ibrahim-beg Bašagić (1840 – 1902), this local patriotism was also combined with a respect for Islamic tradition. In addition, a small segment of Balkan Muslim elites began to be receptive to a certain Turkism or pan-Turkism, which was inspired by a vision of Turkish peoples existing in a geographic continuum stretching from Central Asia to central Europe that Western Turkology was in the process of forging. The spread of these new ideas owed much to students from the Ottoman Empire, who started traveling to western Europe at mid-century alongside Hungarian and Polish exiles who had sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire after the failed revolutions of 1848. For instance, in 1870 Mustafa Celaleddin Pasha, a Pole who had converted to Islam, published Les Turcs anciens et modernes (The Ancient and Modern Turks) in Constantinople, in which he emphasized the ethnic affinity between Europeans and Turks who belonged, he argued, to the “Touro-Aryan” branch of the Aryan race. In the European part of the empire (including Constantinople), some members of the Muslim elite proved especially receptive to Albanianism, the idea that a discrete Albanian nation existed. Since the early part of the century, this idea had taken root among certain Westerners, Arbëreshë (Albanian-speaking, Greek-rite Catholics from Calabria and Sicily), and Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire who had been influenced by Hellenism. The first Muslim Albanianists appeared after the Crimean War. They were part of the new Ottoman elites who had been educated in the new Ottoman schools or had spent time abroad, and their constructions of Albanianism took form amid the emergence of the liberal Young Ottomans movement. Most importantly, during the 1860s, a number of factors encouraged Ottoman authorities and some intellectuals to consider regular use of Albanian. These included administrative restructuring and the projects to develop primary education, the rise of the provincial press, the distribution of books in Albanian by the Foreign and British Bible Society, and the threat of Hellenism. In the Ottoman capital, officials long discussed the choice of an alphabet for the language, but these discussions stalemated because the Ottoman government ultimately opposed introducing instruction in another language in its new schools. But neither could the Albanianists agree on how best to write Albanian. Orthodox

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Christian Albanianists supported the Greek, while their Catholic counterparts argued for the Latin alphabet. As for the Muslims, they divided among supporters of Arabic, Latin, and even invented alphabets. Moreover, Albanian-speaking Muslim elites could not fully support the identity constructions that arose in Orthodox Christian circles, which were closely influenced by Hellenism. Their way of modeling an Albanianism strongly associated with Ottomanism was necessarily different. A leading figure of this nascent Muslim Albanianism was Shemseddin Sami Frashëri (1850 – 1904). A native of Epirus (in the south of currentday Albania), this Ottoman intellectual was marked by the Oriental education he received from private tutors and even more by the time he spent at the Greek Zosimea secondary school in Ioannina. In his play, Besa yahud ahde vefa (Besa or the Given Word of Trust), performed for the first time in 1874 and published in 1875 in Constantinople, he places Albanians on the stage in front of the Ottoman public, in keeping with a desire to highlight “national virtues” and not the “foreign virtues” presented by the Ottoman theater. Similarly, in the play he defends the notion of dual loyalty: a loyalty to the Ottoman Empire as the general homeland (vatan-i umumi) and a loyalty to Albania, the special homeland (vatan-i hususi). However, there existed an important ambiguity in Frashëri’s Albanianist discourse. In the foreword to Besa yahud ahde vefa, he explained that he presented the life and customs of the Albanian people because the latter were “an integral part of the great Islamic nation and members of the Ottoman state.” He therefore emphasized the Albanian people’s Ottoman but also their Muslim identity, ignoring any Christian component. Once again, the weight of religious identifications made itself felt. The competing definitions of Albanianism reflected a dual process of stimulation and reaction vis-à-vis the West, on the one hand, and vis-à-vis Hellenism and Ottomanism, on the other. These developments were stirred firstly by the question of the destiny of the empire’s European territories and secondly by matters of education (broadly understood), the press, and written language. The Eastern Crisis, which erupted in 1875 – 76, triggered a fundamental shift in both areas.

New Demands for Reform In the 1860s and 1870s, the Young Ottomans movement that had formed around Namik Kemal combatted the autocratic Westernization promoted by the sultan and his reformist ministers. It argued instead for a liberal form of Ottomanism that was synonymous with patriotism, constitutionalism, and the glorification of Islamic values. In the context of the Eastern Crisis, its champions also appropriated Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani’s notion of the “Unity of Islam” (ittihad-i islâm). Al-Afghani (1838 – 97) was a Muslim of Iranian origin who traveled widely throughout the Muslim world and Europe, including two long stays in Constantinople after 1870. He promoted the salafiyya reform movement that envisaged a return to the Islam of the “pious ancestors” (al-salaf alsâlih). Refuting Ernest Renan’s famous 1883 public lecture on the incompatibility of

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Islam and science, he also endorsed scientific reason that, he believed, would lead the Muslim world towards progress. This movement, which was not always in line with Abdülhamid’s policy, spread rapidly at the end of the nineteenth century, in no small part thanks to Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida, who in 1898 founded the famous journal al-Manâr (The Lighthouse) in Cairo. This reformism, which affirmed Islam’s compatibility with “modernization” and strongly rejected materialism, was influenced as much by Islamic tradition as by European thought. It also affected the empire’s central provinces, an important zone of interaction for Muslims from Russia and the Caucasus. These Muslims, too, sought reforms, especially in education, a field in which Ismail Gasprinski (1851 – 1914), a Moscow-educated Tatar from Crimea, was a leading figure. After the 1908 Young Turk Revolution and its restoration of press freedom, forms of Islamism and reformism other than the Arab salafiyya surfaced in Constantinople that were more tightly aligned with Turkism or Ottomanism. Journals supporting these ideas also appeared, including Sırat-i müstakim/Sebilürreşad (The Straight Path/ The Font of Orthodoxy) and Beyanülhak (The Presentation of the Truth). They enjoyed wide circulation, including among southeastern Europe’s Muslims. At the same time, and in the same spirit, reforms of the religious education delivered in the empire’s madrasas were undertaken. In 1908, a new program was prepared for the theology faculty, which placed greater emphasis on the discipline’s history. Meanwhile, a specialized madrasa for training madrasa teachers was founded along the lines of the lay teacher training schools, which offered such new subjects as the history of religion and philosophy. In 1910, a “Regulation of the Reforms of the Madrasas” was published and, in the following years, several specialized and reformed madrasas opened in the Ottoman capital. Overall, the reformers—both religious and lay—wanted to introduce new methods into tafsir (Quranic exegesis), fikh (Islamic jurisprudence), and kalâm (theology), albeit in different ways, according to whether their reformist convictions were more or less modernizing, conservative, or nationalist. Regardless of their orientation, all shared the desire to renew Islamic thought in keeping with a tradition of Islamic revitalization and in adamant opposition to materialist ideas. The Balkan Muslims living outside the empire’s borders were likewise affected by these reformist currents. The generation of young lay people that emerged in the 1890s seized on them to advocate for reforms in different sectors and to question the authority of the incumbent, and especially the religious, elites. This phenomenon was clearly visible in Bulgaria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and in Romania. In Bulgaria, this new generation, educated in the rüşdiyes or the local madrasas (or, in individual cases, in both) and sometimes also in the Ottoman Empire, comprised mainly teachers and journalists. With the end of the Stambolov regime in 1894, they could establish newspapers, open kıraathanes (reading rooms), set up theater groups, and organize teachers’ associations. Through these new institutions, they opened a debate, to which the journalistic activity of the Young Turk exiles made notable contributions, and sought to introduce reforms. In all of this, they manifested a clear opposition to the traditional elites. The reformers were driven by their wariness of economic backwardness and political dependence, but also by a sense of moral decline that affected

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both the Muslims of Bulgaria and those of the Ottoman Empire to whom they remained linked as coreligionists in a greater umma (community of believers). But Bulgaria’s Muslims also confronted educational problems as well as the Bulgarian authorities’ interference in religious affairs, the management of waqfs, and the election of muftis. As regards schools, Bulgaria’s Muslim community possessed a number of rüşdiyes, mektebs, and madrasas that were now regarded as private establishments. While they were eligible for public subsidies, these rarely materialized, such that a significant funding gap opened between Muslim and Bulgarian (public) schools. Furthermore, many of these schools’ teachers were insufficiently qualified, which similarly frustrated the reformers. As elsewhere in Muslim Europe at the time, the Bulgarian debates initially focused on the issues of ignorance and the need for educational reforms. The reformers held that Islam itself did not stand in the way of progress in education and science, as demonstrated by the brilliant history of Islamic educational institutions. Rather, the problems stemmed from the religious elite’s moral corruption, controversies surrounding the waqfs’ administration, and the role of women, who were now to be educated. Politically, the reformers wanted Muslims to participate in Bulgarian public life in a community-based fashion, not as the independent individuals the notables—religious and lay—understood themselves to be and whose authority they were challenging. As the twentieth century began, the young Bulgarian Muslim reformers resolutely focused on school reform. They introduced new programs and teaching methods, which they called usul-i cedid, literally “new method,” and they strove to improve teaching standards. To this end, they created an Association of Teachers and, starting in 1906, organized regular conferences. They also opened kıraathanes, where their newspapers were read, and raised money to fund schools, for example at theater performances that equally sought to instill the new ideas. While they fought against the established elites by attacking them in their newspapers, their desire to change the status of women does not seem to have produced any concrete results. Nor did women participate in these debates. The situation in Romania was similar, save in terms of intensity. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, however, the position of Muslims vis-à-vis the authorities was distinctive since some lay and religious notables had early on been co-opted into the local administrative structures. Here, too, reformism was supported by a young lay generation that came of age in the 1890s. Faced with conservative elites against whom the movement for religious autonomy was developing, reformism was further reinforced by the Habsburgs’ own progressive policies, notably in the area of education. The issue of education and school enrollment was just as central for Bosnian reformers as it was in Bulgaria. Above all, they disputed the ulamas’ monopoly over the interpretation of Islam by promoting ijtihad (reasoned interpretation), while also disseminating among their local Muslim readership the ideas of such reformist authors as Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh, and Ismail Gasprinki. As in Bulgaria, the reformers used their newspapers to launch debates over the waqfs, the teaching of Islam, women, and even legal reform. They also advocated for employing the term “Muslim” (musliman)

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to refer to Bosnian Muslims instead of either “Turk,” which until then was commonly in use, or “Mohammedan,” a label introduced by the Habsburg administration. There were other differences between Bosnia-Herzegovina and Bulgaria. In the former, reformers argued for using the vernacular language with the Latin or Cyrillic but not the Arabic alphabet. Also, the issue of women was not just debated, real progress was made in enrolling girls in schools, especially in Sarajevo. In the 1910s, Muslim women in Bosnia began to establish a public presence by publishing literary texts, which anticipated their participation in associational life after the First World War (Giomi 2021). Finally, in the early twentieth century, a figure appeared on the Bosnian Muslim scene who occupied an important place between the milieus of the ulamas and the intelligentsia: the reformist ulama Džemaludin Čaušević (1870 – 1938). Born in the northwest of the province, he studied at the new School for Kadıs and the School of Law in Constantinople and then in Cairo, where he attended lectures given by the noted Islamic modernist scholar Muhammad Abduh. Upon his return to Bosnia-Herzegovina, Čaušević became a teacher of Arabic and then a teacher at the local School for Kadıs (Šerijatska Sudačka Škola). Already in 1903, he was appointed to the ulema-medžlis and found himself responsible for matters concerning religious education. He also disseminated the thinking of reformist authors in the newspapers he published in Serbo-Croatian, which used the Arabic alphabet. In 1913, he was elected to the head of the religious hierarchy and became reis-ul-ulema, a position he held until 1930. Although they remained minority positions among southeastern Europe’s Muslims, these reformist currents further diversified how Muslims thought about Islam in a society undergoing fundamental change. But what about religious practice itself and the way scholars have sought to represent it in their works?

Balkan Muslims between Practices and Representations There are relatively few sources that testify to the day-to-day practice of Islam by the Muslims of southeastern Europe during this period. The studies produced at the time by the region’s new academic institutions were often politically biased and frequently engaged in significant reification. Accordingly, they can be used only with caution. The same is true of the scholarship produced by Westerners, which in addition to these problems tended to overemphasize such themes as syncretism and heterodoxy. Still, evidence has come forward on which some preliminary conclusions may be drawn. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, Austro-Hungarian authorities created the Provincial Museum (Landesmuseum/Zemaljski Muzej) in 1888 to forge a specific Bosnian identity and distance the province from Serbian and Croatian nationalisms. Contemporary ethnographic work, which often focused on Muslim material culture and customs, followed these lines. Articles in the journal published by the museum and other studies carried out at the time present interesting information about the considerable prevalence of

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magical and healing practices and about the türbes and the tekkes. They have less to say about “orthodox” Islam. Antun Hangi’s book, Život i običaji Muslimana u Bosni i Hercegovini (Life and Customs of the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina; Sarajevo, 1906), also normalizes local Muslim practices, as seen in such passages as “Bosnian Muslim men and women perform the majority of their religious duties correctly. Our Muslims go five times a day to the house of prayer, the mosque, in order to pray to God.” Overall, though, this literature pays more attention to history and origins than to religious practices. Here, the theory that the Bosnian Muslims descended from Bogomil ancestors was central, especially as it was strongly bound up with the agrarian question. In particular, the theory’s assertion that the Bogomil nobility had voluntarily converted to Islam to retain their lands served to legitimize the agrarian status quo to the advantage of Muslim landowners: they were “indigenous people” who had owned the land since the Middle Ages. The Bogomil theory, which was taken up by local Muslims, such as Safvet-beg Bašagić, was partly refuted at the time by Serbian authors from Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia. They regarded the Muslims as “Islamized Serbs.” Yet their feelings about their Muslim “co-nationals” could be ambiguous. In his famous text, La Péninsule Balkanique: Géographie humaine (1918), the prominent Serb geographer and ethnographer Jovan Cvijić went so far as to argue that everything that was positive about the “Islamized Serbs” was owing to their local “Dinaric” origins, while everything that was negative stemmed from their religion. The Christian Bulgarians took a similar approach towards the Pomaks, or Bulgarian-speaking Muslims. Moreover, Serbian authors assumed a clear position with respect to Albanian Muslims. Most contemporary studies presented the Albanians as having converted to Islam immediately. In works like Jovan N. Tomić’s Les Albanais en Vieille-Serbie et dans le Sandjak de Novi-Bazar (1913), they are depicted as having supported the Turkish regime and becoming especially fearsome oppressors, driving out some Serbs and Albanianizing others. As did some of his compatriots, Tomić championed the position that in certain regions there existed “Arnautaši” (literally “Albanianized people”), namely Slavic populations who had been Islamized and then Albanianized. This argument’s political impact was significant, because it enabled Serbs to claim lands, such as present-day Kosovo, that were largely inhabited by Muslim populations whom they regarded as having originally been Slavs/Serbs. Some Greek authors (e. g., Dimitrios Hassiotis) promoted similar ideas, as when they contended that Bektashi Muslims were Greeks who were first Islamized and then Albanianized. Problematic in all these theories, however, was their tendency to deduce these Muslims’ “true” ethnic-national nature without accounting for Muslims’ feelings. In the case of Albania, Albanians themselves used Bektashism to further Albanianism. In 1826, Sultan Mahmud II banned this mystical Islamic brotherhood. However, it continued to exist semi-clandestinely, especially among the Ottoman elite and in the south of the Albanian provinces. Bektashism was unique in granting a central place to Ali (the Prophet’s son-in-law) and his family, who had been persecuted by the Umayyad caliphs, while also emphasizing esotericism and an initiatory path towards

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the level of the “perfect man,” which implied divine knowledge. Additionally, nineteenth-century Bektashi beliefs included the notion of the divine nature’s presence in every being and every thing. Over time, the fact that the brotherhood networks promoted the forming of strong bonds between adepts and their spiritual leaders, combined with various other characteristics of the brotherhood, were exploited by both the Young Turks and the Albanianists for political purposes. For instance, the brotherhood’s doctrine was presented as liberal and the Bektashis themselves as free thinkers: “freemasons” of Islam. The doctrine was also specifically linked to Albanian nationalism by Naim Frashëri. In his 1896 work, Fletore e Bektashinjet (The Little Book of the Bektashis), he sought to instill a national sentiment among the Albanian Bektashis by transforming the concepts of love and knowledge, which he now linked to homeland and nation rather than to the divine. Two years later, he published a long poem on the martyrdom of Hüseyin (the son of Ali) in Karbala, in which he promoted the unity of the nation against its enemies. In addition, many Western authors took an interest in Bektashism and its doctrinal “reinvention.” They stressed its opposition to Sunni Islam (just as did Alevism and Kizilbashi beliefs) but also its supposed proximity to Christianity. Frederick W. Hasluck, who traversed the Balkans and Anatolia in the early twentieth century, provided an accurate picture of the establishment of Bektashi tekkes in his two-volume work, Christianity and Islam under the Sultans (1929). But in this work, he also constructed his own theory about Bektashism, thereby contributing to its reinvention. In particular, he audaciously constructed a parallel between how the Seljuk sovereign Alaeddin purportedly used the Mevlevi brotherhood in the thirteenth century to attract Anatolian Christians and Ali Pasha’s recourse to the Bektashi brotherhood in the early nineteenth century to convert Albanian Christians. In both cases, Halsuck contended, it was a matter of exploiting mystical doctrines that were “conciliatory” towards Christianity to merge the two religions for political ends. Indeed, he asserted, one of the principal means the dervishes employed was to make sanctuaries accessible to both parties by associating them with Muslim and Christian saints, such that a sanctuary might be related to both Sari Saltik and Saint Nicholas. In this way, Muslim sanctuaries were rendered “ambiguous” so as to expand the brotherhood and convert the Christian populations. To this, Hasluck added a national element since, in that period of Albanianism’s development, Ali Pasha ostensibly sought to exploit the oppositions of Bektashi/Sunni, heterodoxy/orthodoxy to create an Albanian state that would be independent of the sultan. These oppositions were themselves reinvented during Abdülhamid’s reign as a result of his policy of “correcting” deviant beliefs. In the Balkans, this policy affected the Bektashis, the Kizilbash, Muslims who were not especially observant, and even cryptoChristians (in Kosovo and central Albania), in whom Christian missionaries also showed an interest. Beginning in the 1880s and 1890s, Ottoman authorities established Quranic schools and sent hocas (religious teachers) and preachers to certain regions, such as the Vilayet of Kosovo, especially since its Albanian Muslims were considered to be pillars of the empire. More generally, the teaching of Islamic morals was strength-

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ened in the modern-type schools to consolidate the loyalty of its Muslim subjects. The sultan even offered hairs from the Prophet’s beard to some of those subjects, such as the inhabitants of Durrës and Vlorë, early in 1908. While conversions to Islam did take place, notably in northern Albania and in the north of the Vilayet of Kosovo, they were only an indirect consequence of this imperial policy. Social pressure and the higher status enjoyed by Muslims in regions where Christians had few alternative strategies were by far the more determining factors. The expansion of certain brotherhood networks in the Balkans was also only indirectly attributable to sultanic policies. The sultan surrounded himself with shaykhs, among whom were members of the Naqshbandi, Halveti, and Kadiri networks, which extended into rural areas. The Naqshbandi network strengthened its presence in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where a new tekke was founded in Visoko shortly before 1914 by the shaykh Hadži Hafiz Husni Efendi Numanagić, who in that year became mufti of Travnik. Born in Fojnica, he was a scholar and mystic educated in Sarajevo and then in Constantinople, Medina, and Cairo. He serves as another example of how individuals moved among the Arab provinces, the Ottoman capital, and southeastern Europe. Nevertheless, this reinforcement of orthopraxy did not prevent currents deemed “heterodox” from developing in some regions. This was the case with Bektashism in the south of today’s Albania, which did, however, at times move closer to the “orthodox” currents. Furthermore, in the western part of the Ottoman territories, “Alevization” (the development of the cult of Ali and his family) occurred in some brotherhoods, while ritual practices that were normally rejected, including body piercing, became more popular. Generally speaking, the practice of magic remained very widespread: dervishes and hocas made amulets and talismans to provide protection against the evil eye for people, including Christians who asked for them, and to protect animals, fields, and homes. An important mystical current radiated from Macedonia. It was driven by the Egyptian-born Muhammad Nur al-Arabi, who died in Macedonian Strumica in 1888. His mystical path—a derivation of the Melami (“way of the blame”) movement and consequently called Melamiyye-Nuriyye—was the product of a reformed Sufism that rejected all external signs of belonging (including acceptance of sharia and the unveiling of mystic states), miracles, and the hereditary succession of shaykhs. The movement took hold not only in Macedonia and Kosovo, where there were also some women’s tekkes, but in Albania and the Ottoman capital, too. It gained ground especially among religious and non-religious men of letters, as well as among the military. Like the dönmes (crypto-Jewish Muslims living in Salonika), these circles provided favorable ground for the Young Turk Revolution. Melamis also played a leading role in the pro-Ottoman insurrection that broke out in central Albania in 1914 – 15 just after the country gained its independence. In accord with these secularizing tendencies, and especially in the Ottoman Empire, the region’s young Muslims, as members of the non-religious elite, began to be attracted to materialism and positivism, or they were at least partisans of laicization, which they would advocate or put in place following the Ottoman Empire’s collapse.

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Towards the Twentieth Century The Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, the Balkan Wars of 1912 – 13, and the First World War were major turning points for the Muslim presence in Europe. In Russia, the tsarist regime came to an end. In the Balkans, the political map was reshaped several times: during the wars themselves, then again with the Greek-Turkish war of 1919 – 22, and as a result of the dissolution of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. Ultimately, the new Republic of Turkey retained control of only a small piece of land in Europe, Eastern Thrace, while the rest of its former territory in the Balkans was divided among the existing states, including the Principality of Albania (created in 1913), the only one to have a majority Muslim population. After 1914, many Muslims fled the Balkans for Constantinople and Anatolia, but the League of Nations organized the most important exodus in 1923, namely the massive population exchange between Greece and Turkey. In western Europe, where Muslims were mainly immigrants from colonial territories, their presence became more important and more visible. In central and northern Europe, including Germany, which lost all its colonies in 1919, Muslims were mainly local Tatars, refugees from Russia, or people from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire and southeastern Europe. It was in this rearranged environment that new, “twentieth-century” Muslim religious networks took shape, and new social issues and political questions arose.

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Ćehajić, Džemal. 1986. Derviški redovi u jugoslovenskim zemljama sa posebnim osvrtom na Bosnu i Hercegovinu. Sarajevo: Orijentalni institut. Clayer, Nathalie. 1994. Mystiques, État et société: Les Halvetis dans l’aire balkanique de la fin du XVe siècle à nos jours. Leiden: Brill. Clayer, Nathalie. 2003. Religion et nation chez les Albanais XIXe–XXe siècles. Istanbul: Isis. Clayer, Nathalie. 2007. Aux origines du nationalisme albanais: La naissance d’une nation majoritairement musulmane en Europe. Paris: Karthala. Clayer, Nathalie. 2011. “Muslim Brotherhood Networks in South-Eastern Europe.” In European History Online (EGO), published by the Institute of European History (IEG), Mainz. urn:nbn: de:0159 – 2011050932. Clayer, Nathalie, and Xavier Bougarel. 2017. Europe’s Balkan Muslims: A New History. Translated by Andrew Kirby. London: Hurst & Company. Clayer, Nathalie, and Eric Germain, eds. 2008. Islam in Inter-War Europe. London: Hurst & Company. Coller, Ian. 2010. Arab France: Islam and the Making of Modern Europe, 1798 – 1831. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Cossuto, Giuseppe. 2011. Breve storia dei Turchi di Dobrugia. Istanbul: Isis. Crews, Robert D. 2009. For Prophet and Tsar. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dakhlia, Jocelyne, and Wolfgang Kaiser, eds. 2013. Les musulmans dans l’histoire de l’Europe. Vol. 2, Passages et contacts en Méditerranée. Paris: Albin Michel. Dakhlia, Jocelyne, and Bernard Vincent, eds. 2011. Les Musulmans dans l’histoire de l’Europe. Vol. 1, Une intégration invisible. Paris: Albin Michel. De Jong, Frederick. 1986. “The Turks and Tatars in Romania.” Turcica 18: 165 – 89. Dogo, Marco, ed. 2006. Schegge d’impero, pezzi d’Europa: Balcani e Turchia fra continuità e mutamento 1804 – 1923. Gorizia: LEG. Dogo, Marco, and Guido Franzinetti, eds. 2002. Disrupting and Reshaping: Early Stages of Nation-Building in the Balkans. Ravenna: Longo Editore. Duijzings, Gerlachlus. 2000. Religion and the Politics of Identity in Kosovo. London: Hurst & Company. Fortna, Benjamin C. 2002. Imperial Classroom: Islam, the State, and Education in the Late Ottoman Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Frank, Allen J. 2012. Bukhara and the Muslims of Russia: Sufism, Education, and the Paradox of Islamic Prestige. Leiden: Brill. Georgeon, François. 2003. Abdülhamid II: Le sultan calife. Paris: Fayard. Giomi, Fabio. 2021. Making Muslim Women European: Voluntary Associations, Gender and Islam in PostOttoman Bosnia and Yugoslavia (1878 – 1941). Budapest: Central European University Press. Grandits, Hannes. 2008. Herrschaft und Loyalität in der spätosmanischen Gesellschaft: Das Beispiel der multikonfessionellen Herzegowina. Vienna: Böhlau. Grivaud, Gilles, and Alexandre Popovic, eds. 2011. Les conversions à l’Islam en Asie Mineure et dans les Balkans aux époques seldjoukide et ottomane. Athens: École française d’Athènes. Hajdarpašić, Edin. 2008. “Whose Bosnia? National Movements, Imperial Reforms, and the Political Re-ordering of the Late Ottoman Balkans, 1840 – 1875.” PhD diss., University of Michigan. Immig, Nicole. 2009. “The ‘New’ Muslim Minorities in Greece: Between Emigration and Political Participation 1881 – 1886.” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 29: 511 – 22. Kane, Eileen. 2015. Russian Hajj: Empire and the Pilgrimage to Mecca. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Karpat, Kemal H. 2001. The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Katsikas, Stefanos, ed. 2009. “European Modernity and Islamic Reformism among the Muslims of the Balkans in the Late-Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Period (1830s–1945).” Special issue, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 29 (4). Katsikas, Stefanos. 2021. Islam and Nationalism in Modern Greece, 1821 – 1940. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Kefeli, Agnes Nilufer. 2014. Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia: Conversion, Apostasy, and Literacy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Khalid, Adeeb. 1999. The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Kiel, Machiel. 1992. “La diffusion de l’Islam dans les campagnes bulgares à l’époque ottomane (XVe– XIXe s.): Colonisation et conversion.” Revue du monde musulman et de la Méditerranée 66: 39 – 53. Köksal, Yonca. 2010. “Transnational Networks and Kin States: The Turkish Minority in Bulgaria 1878 – 1940.” Nationalities Papers 38: 191 – 211. Kushner, David. 1987. “The Place of the Ulema in the Ottoman Empire during the Age of Reform (1839 – 1918).” Turcica 19: 51 – 74. Lory, Bernard. 1985. Le sort de l’héritage ottoman en Bulgarie: L’exemple des villes bulgares, 1878 – 1900. Istanbul: Isis. Makrides, Vasilios, ed. 2005. Religion, Staat und Konfliktkonstellationen im orthodoxen Ost- und Südosteuropa: Vergleichende Perspektiven. Bern: Peter Lang. Mazower, Mark. 2000. The Balkans: From the End of Byzantium to the Present Day. New York: Modern Library. McCarthy, Justin. 1996. Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims 1821 – 1922. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Merdjanova, Ina. 2016. Rediscovering the Umma: Muslims in the Balkans between Nationalism and Transnationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Methodieva, Milena. 2021. Between Empire and Nation: Muslim Reform in the Balkans. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Methodieva, Milena, and Selçuk Akşin Somel. 2004. “Keeping the Bonds: The Ottomans and Muslim Education in Autonomous Bulgaria 1878 – 1908.” Turcica 36: 141 – 64. Mostashari, Firouzeh. 2017. On the Religious Frontier: Tsarist Russia and Islam in the Caucasus. London: I. B. Taurus. Motadel, David, ed. 2014. Islam and the European Empires. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mufaku al-Arnaut, Muhamed. 1994. “Islam and Muslims in Bosnia 1878 – 1918: Two Hijras and Two Fatwas.” Journal of Islamic Studies 5: 242 – 53. Müller, Dietmar. 2005. Staatsbürger auf Widerruf: Juden und Muslime als Alteritätspartner im rumänischen und serbischen Nationscode 1878 – 1941. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Nielsen, Jorgen. 1999. Towards a European Islam. New York: Palgrave. Oran, Baskın. 1994. “Religious and National Identity among the Balkan Muslims: A Comparative Study on Greece, Bulgaria, Macedonia and Kosovo.” CEMOTI 18: 307 – 23. Özervarli, Sait. 2007. “Alternative Approaches to Modernization in the Late Ottoman Period: Izmirli Ismail Hakkı’s Religious Thought Against Materialist Scientism.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 39: 77 – 102. Özgür Baklacioğlu, Nurcan. 2010. Dış Politika ve Göç: Balkanlar’dan Türkiye’ye Arnavut Göçleri. Istanbul: Derin Yayınları. Paić-Vukić, Tatjana. 2011. The World of Mustafa Muhibbi, a Kadı from Sarajevo. Istanbul: Isis. Popovic, Alexandre. 1994a. Cultures musulmanes balkaniques. Istanbul: Isis. Popovic, Alexandre. 1994b. Les derviches balkaniques hier et aujourd’hui. Istanbul: Isis. Popovic, Alexandre. 1994c. “Le waqf dans les pays du Sud-Est européen à l’époque post-ottomane.” In Le waqf dans le monde musulman contemporain (XIXe–XXe siècles), edited by Faruk Bilici, 199 – 213. Istanbul: IFEA. Popovic, Alexandre. 1997. “Les medrese dans les Balkans: Des premières innovations du milieu du XIXe siècle à nos jours.” In Madrasa: La transmission du savoir dans le monde musulman, edited by Nicole Grandin and Marc Gaborieau, 279 – 88. Paris: Arguments. Popovic, Alexandre. 2005. “La magie chez les musulmans des Balkans (III): L’apport de Tihomir R. Djordjević (1868 – 1944).” Balkanologie 9: 291 – 308.

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David Meola

3 Judaism

On August 19, 1836, a major event occurred in the East Frisian city of Emden (Kingdom of Hanover): the consecration and dedication of a new synagogue. Far from being an occasion that concerned only the local Jewish population, it attracted local magistrates and was important enough to be covered in local and regional newspapers. Notable too: even before the ceremony, plans were made to publish Rabbi Abraham Löwenstamm’s prepared remarks, in German, for the ceremony. These details reveal the synagogue’s dedication to be a triumphal, public event, marking the Jewish community’s rebuilding after disastrous floods along the River Ems. But they also show how, through his use of German, even a staunch defender of Jewish tradition, namely Löwenstamm, promoted a certain integration of Jews into civil society. No less significant is the fact that the event was presented and reported on in such a public manner—well before the Hanoverian government even considered emancipation—suggesting that Judaism had been accepted and no longer had to hide in plain sight (Bleich 2020, 354 – 57). A year later in Hanover, Landesrabbiner (Chief Rabbi) Nathan Marcus Adler held and then published a sermon in German to celebrate King William IV’s birthday (Des Israeliten Liebe zum Vaterlande, 1836). Here again, Adler’s willingness to employ the vernacular language and disseminate his views to the general public was emblematic of a central paradigm of Jewish life across Europe during the nineteenth century: acculturation to “modernity,” including through new modes of worship. Some Jews proved willing to make peace with this new society and the emergence of the modern state; others preferred to resist such pressures. In both cases, Jews’ responses to modernity brought about the creation and multiplication of “Judaisms,” each of which, to take Claire Sufrin’s characterization of liberal Judaism a step further, “reflected an earnest commitment to Jewish practice and thus to Jewishness” (2017, 339). Throughout the century, in fact, wide-ranging political, social, and cultural change pushed Europe’s Jews to rethink their notions of Judaism as religious practice and also its implications for Jews’ relationships to civil society. As seen above, the public and performative aspects of these events were as important as demonstrating acculturation to bourgeois norms. The form and content of this assertive, “public” Judaism reflected coexistence with Christian communities, and in southeastern Europe with Islam, but also such specific factors as the influence of the Enlightenment, the rise of nationalism, war, and the impact of liberal and democratic ideologies. Todd Endelman argues that Jews did not pursue acculturation “qua Jews … but were linked rather to broader forces of socio-economic change.” While this might suggest that Jews were passive participants in these processes, Endelman stresses that “the pace and extent of acculturation were in the hands of Jews, not the state or Christian society” (2017, 313). In short, acculturation was primarily an active Jewish response to external forces; it did not stem from prior internal developments within the community, even if it did have important consequences for Jewish life. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110609059-005

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These responses to external pressures were structured by the locations in which individual Jewish communities lived, the growth of that Jewish population, and the migrations that shifted large numbers of Jews westward (Table 3.1). Table 3.1: Jewish populations in Europe, 1800 to 1900

England France The Netherlands German States (not incl. Austria-Hungary) Austro-Hungarian Empire

Southeastern Europe (Balkans, Romania, Bulgaria, and Ottoman Empire) Russian Empire (incl. Poland)

1800

1900

20 – 30,000 40,000 23 – 30,000 250,000 100,000

n/a

250,000 87,000 100,000 590,000 1,3 million (400,000 in Galicia, 175,000 in Vienna) 300 – 450,000

1,5 million

5 million

Developments within Judaism tended toward acculturation and reform in western and central Europe—even in those communities that became known as modern Orthodox —while resistance to adaptation typified eastern and southeastern European Jewry. External pressures affected all Jewish communities, but particularly medium-sized ones, as smaller and bigger communities seemingly resisted change more effectively. Regardless, Jewish communities across Europe—except England—had to deal with the forced dissolution of the kehillot (autonomous Jewish communities). The smaller Jewish populations in England, France, and the Netherlands had traditional communities that adapted socially, but kept halachic Judaism nearly completely intact until late in the nineteenth century. By contrast, in central Europe—the German states and Austria—there was a significant Jewish population (more than triple that of western Europe), but emancipation did not precede integration as it did in western Europe. In fact, Jewish rights were at odds with prevailing notions of the central European “Christian state,” where “regeneration” (read: modernization according to Christian conceptions) of Judaism was seen as a precondition. This situation produced extensive internal debate within Jewish communities, prompting the development of first Reform and then Orthodoxy. Jewish communities had to decide how far—and in what ways—they would adapt and balance their religious practices to reflect the broader society’s version of (religious) modernity. As Naomi Seidman argues, the result was both “secularization and religious revival,” in which “unpredictable combinations of ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ [Jewish and non-Jewish] elements” emerged (2017, 984). It is of note that religious dissidents in central Europe received permission to exist legally only after emancipation had already been granted. While states in western Europe generally allowed Jews more freedom in matters of religion and central European states had a more ambivalent relationship to Jewish

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modernity (some states encouraged Reform while others discouraged it), eastern European states forcefully dissolved the Jewish community and actively encouraged Jews to leave Judaism behind. Despite these pressures, the overwhelming response in eastern Europe was to rally around traditional Judaism and Hasidism. Once eastern European Jews began fleeing Russia after 1881 for economic and antisemitic reasons, Hasidism also became a force in central and western European Jewish communities. Furthermore, these communities had to come to terms with the development of Jewish nationalism—Zionism—during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Finally, Jews’ discussions and decisions regarding acculturation rarely remained internal matters, since Europe’s peoples and states continually debated, commented on, and essentialized Jewish choices—or lack thereof—and their consequences for Jews’ status as full members of the modern state, society, and economy. Although Jews throughout Europe faced similar types of pressures over the course of the century, their responses to modernity’s challenges were strongly shaped by local conditions and sense of local needs. Accordingly, the discussion that follows is organized regionally. It begins with central Europe, an area where Judaism was especially contested both from within, with the rise of Reform and response of Orthodoxy, and from without, as Jewish religious and cultural practices were among the most important reasons cited by German states to deny Jews emancipation. The attention then shifts to eastern Europe, where the overwhelming majority of European Jews lived. Reform made few inroads here and those who espoused traditional Jewish religiosity had their own ideas about how modernity could be reconciled with their lives. A third section looks at how Jews in western Europe navigated life in modern states that conceived of citizenship in more secular terms and where traditional Judaism long remained the norm and Reform (or Liberal Judaism in England and the Netherlands) the exception. Finally, the chapter traces developments in southern and southeastern Europe, especially in light of the rise of nationalism and imperial decline.

Central European “Judaisms” By the late eighteenth century, the effects of the Enlightenment and politico-social change arising during the French Revolution and Napoleonic eras—“modernity”— brought Jews into closer contact and conversation with Christians. This situation demanded that Judaism respond progressively and perhaps even adapt aspects of Jewish life. Jews’ increasing participation in discussions about their lives and religion largely began with the involvement of Moses Mendelssohn (1729 – 86) and his supporters in the Berlin Enlightenment. Mendelssohn’s writings—notably, Kohelet Mussar (Teacher of Morals), Jerusalem, Phaedon, and the essay “What is Enlightenment”—and his political activities, including his defense of Jews’ ritual burial practices in Mecklenburg-Schwerin and of Jews charged with blaspheming Christianity in Altona, stand out. They created a hitherto unknown Jewish subjectivity, while also providing a blueprint for future Jewish advocacy within non-Jewish society (Sorkin 1996).

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As Leora Batnitzky has stressed, Mendelssohn’s actions effectively “created” Judaism as a religion that conformed to prevailing rational and Christian-inflected notions. A traditional Jew, Mendelssohn refused to accept the argument that Judaism was antiquated. But whereas Friedrich Schleiermacher would have Judaism be “a unique, separate dimension of experience” that compelled belief (“religion”), Mendelssohn proposed seeing it as a system that compelled action and thinking (Batnitzky 2011, 25). He also noted that Judaism had had generations of interpretations that allowed it to adapt to its always-changing environments and political situations. Accordingly, and given that nothing in Jewish law precluded it, Jews could—and should—participate in civil society and the modern state as citizens. Those who followed in Mendelssohn’s footsteps began the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment. The participants in this movement, the maskilim (educators), sought to redefine Judaism and Jewishness in modern terms. Following Mendelssohn, central European maskilim regarded their responses to the changing environment as part of the natural process through which Judaism evolved and acculturated. These responses were thus legitimate expressions of Jewish belief. In particular, these Jews had to react to fundamental challenges to the traditional kehillah and its dual leadership structure: rabbis attending to religious matters and lay elders (parnassim or shtadlanut) handling secular relationships with non-Jews and political authorities. Drawing on models developed in France, some German states formally abolished these kehillot during the Revolutionary era (1789 – 1815) and reorganized Jewish leadership by creating state-level consistories that directed educational and integration efforts. These consistories often aided the movement toward Reform. For instance, in the new Grand Duchy of Baden, the Oberrat der Israeliten Badens (Consistory of Badenese Israelites) acted as an authoritative interlocutor in reshaping Jewish life and served as the coordinating institution to petition for emancipation. It divided the Grand Duchy into rabbinical districts with head rabbis who were responsible for implementing and observing reforms. It was also responsible for ensuring that rabbis met the educational and linguistic standards Christians now demanded of them. The Oberrat accomplished many of its aims through the 1824 synagogue ordinance. One of its most contentious dictates was the requirement for German-language sermons. In most of Baden, this was not an issue, but many traditional rabbis resisted and often held only an annual German service instead of weekly ones (Meola 2023). Synagogue regulations like those of Baden show how German states programmatically sought to reshape Jewish practice in preparation for equality (Lowenstein 1981). They demonstrate, too, that Jews acculturated their practice toward Christianity, but not their dogmas or beliefs. Most synagogue liturgies remained unchanged, with the noted exceptions of the Hamburg Israelite Temple, which published a controversial new prayerbook in 1819, and the Berlin Reform Society during the 1840s. Another important change evident in these ordinances was the emphasis on orderly and decorous services, which conformed to (Christian) bourgeois notions of religiosity. Despite these reformist adaptations, the emergence of a Reform movement was generally thwarted

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by an alliance between traditionalists and governments that saw any changes to religion and tradition—Christian or Jewish—as potential threats (Meola 2023). At the same time, the question of what constituted Judaism’s essential core became hotly contested. Those who soon were at the center of Reform sought to return to what Abraham Geiger and others called reiner Mosaismus (pure Mosaism): eschewing the Talmud (collections of ancient Rabbinic writings that are a source of authority within traditional Judaism) and focusing on the original precepts of Judaism in the Torah. Moreover, Reformers saw in themselves the “universal-religious element” and the “living spirit … from which Protestantism derives,” which they believed would bring about Jewish-Christian rapprochement (Batnitzky 2011, 36 – 40). Reformers sought to influence future generations by integrating their beliefs about Judaism and secular topics into the curricula for new Jewish schools, such as those in Mannheim and Frankfurt (Liberles 1985). Indeed, Reform Judaism was profoundly performative. In addition to observing traditional commands to act and live in a certain way, this group of “modern” Jews stepped into the public sphere to show the Christian world how they lived, worshipped, and acted. Another avenue through which modernizers created Reform Judaism was scholarship. The creation of a Wissenschaft des Judentums (scientific study of Judaism; hereafter, Wissenschaft) was a foundational element of bringing Judaism into conversation with non-Jewish society. At its core, scholars of Wissenschaft used modern historical techniques and criticism of rabbinical texts to bring “objectivity” and historicism to the Jewish past and canonical texts. Moreover, Wissenschaft sought to make the case that Judaism and its traditions had evolved over time and that its practitioners wanted the “restoration of old and proper customs to their rightful place” (Yedidya 2010, 70). By the 1840s, spirited debates in public locations attested to the contentiousness between and among those who sought change and those who clung to traditional cultural norms and conceptions of Jewishness. Repeatedly, Reformers—whether “radical,” moderate, positive-historical, or conservative—brought inner-Jewish discussions into local and pan-German newspapers (Meyer 1988; Meola 2023). This dramatic shift in the locations of these discussions and performances reflected Reformers’ understanding of the power of public opinion and its potential to effect change among Jews. Christians also took part in these conversations, yet Jews were adamant that their beliefs and practices be adapted solely under their own auspices. They thus never yielded to and never haggled over Judaism before non-Jews. Nonetheless, their engagement in the German public sphere over “internal” religious matters showed a growing willingness to claim their rights and underscored their broader demands for emancipation (Meola 2023). Over the century, German Jewish communities shifted overwhelmingly toward Reform. German Jews wanted to incorporate new ideas into their secular and religious lives, and the changes they sought broadly corresponded to a bourgeois, Christian manner of compartmentalizing the private and public spheres. For example, Reform Judaism eschewed outdated or controversial prayers, such as those calling for a return to the Holy Land. It altered customary practices by reducing the number of days of sitting

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shiva (mourning) or eliminating the second day of major holidays like Rosh Hashanah. It also reformulated ideas about Judaism’s role in the world. Beginning in the 1840s, many communities even started to permit organ music (Sufrin 2017). In addition, Reformers commissioned new, ornate synagogues that gave Jews new worship space while simultaneously signaling to outsiders their newfound confidence and improved status (Frühauf 2009). Later, those who modernized Judaism felt they needed to do more than just argue against what they were not (Orthodoxy) and present themselves as a mainstream religion. Affirming that Judaism was the “authentic witness to the religion of reason” and that there needed to be a “will to Judaism,” rabbis like Caesar Seligmann (1860 – 1950) and Leo Baeck (1873 – 1956) and such scholars as Hermann Cohen (1842 – 1918) endorsed a new, “Liberal” Judaism that was formulated around the idea of “ethical monotheism” (Benor 2018, 248; Meyer 1988). So named to distinguish itself from radical Reform, Liberal Judaism coalesced into an official movement in 1908 (The Union for Liberal Judaism) with its own newspaper and, in 1912, its “Guidelines to a Program for Liberal Judaism” (Richtlinien zu einem Programm für das liberale Judentum). These guidelines were prescriptive and prompted Jews to work towards becoming the guiding light for humanity “through deed and example.” By focusing on individual observance, the guidelines also provided Jews with a blueprint for how they could consider themselves religious (Meyer 1988). Another area of concern for Reformers was the role of women and the strongly gendered nature of Jewish life. Traditionally, women helped maintain the home and were key partners in the household’s economic success, as exemplified in the memoirs of Glückel of Hameln (lived c. 1646 – 1725). Praying in Hebrew and Torah study were masculine activities, whereas praying in Yiddish, which happened at home using tkhines (voluntary, personal prayers for everyday life), was considered feminine (Freeze and Hyman 2007). Women were not counted as part of a minyan, the quorum required for communal worship; furthermore, there was a separate area in the synagogue for them (and children) to pray. During the nineteenth century, women’s roles in Jewish religious life and at home were redefined according to new, bourgeois standards. Reformers sought to “modernize” Jewish women’s part in synagogue activities, provide girls with a Jewish education alongside boys, and introduce a confirmation ceremony that would signify completion of that education. Moreover, this education fulfilled Reformers’ desires to place the onus of raising a Jewish family and keeping a Jewish home on women. Indeed, women were expected to maintain religious traditions in the home and were thus responsible for making sure “that the next generations would identify as Jews” (Kaplan 1991, 64; Freidenreich 2009, 136 – 37). If women never found equality in the synagogue, they still exerted significant influence on community life, above all by their involvement in communal and even “secular” organizations. As Marion Kaplan notes, “Many women viewed these benevolent groups as fulfilling a religious duty, not simply a charitable or social endeavor” (1991, 68; author’s emphasis). Jewish women thus found other ways to act out such Jewish values as tikkun olam (repairing the world)

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and tzedakah (justice) that were in line with modern, bourgeois philanthropic sensibilities. This did not mean, however, that those who wanted to keep Jewish traditions faded into obscurity. At each stage, traditionalists pushed back vehemently, and in effect, created Orthodoxy, although we should stress that Orthodoxy itself never developed into a single, coherent religious current. In their efforts to block Reform during the first half of the century, traditionalists found the conservative Prussian state to be a convenient ally. Prussian authorities closed the Beer Temple in Berlin in 1824 and, for most of the 1830s, refused to approve appointments of Reform rabbis. Only in 1840 did the Reform “faction” succeed in having Abraham Geiger appointed as rabbi in Breslau, a move that prompted the Orthodox to create their own unofficial, separate community. In addition, across Europe Orthodox Jews contested Wissenschaft by claiming that Torah could not be subject to historical criticism (as it was divine and beyond human critique). In particular, they developed historical scholarship that did not “break with tradition,” a crucial intellectual endeavor at the seminary Esriel Hildesheimer founded in Berlin in 1873 (Yedidya 2010). Orthodoxy and traditional Judaism, however, were not the same. The former minimally adapted to modernity while the latter refused to budge. In his 1832 SynagogenOrdnung for Hanover, Rabbi Adler instituted decorous changes that promoted “proper” behavior, required occasional German sermons, and established weekly prayers for the king and Hanoverian government, practices then broadly adopted by Orthodox rabbis in other German states (Rozenblit 2015; Bleich 2020). Another Orthodox response was to create their own press organs, a development that proved just as transformational for Orthodoxy as the earlier emergence of a German-Jewish public sphere had been for Reformers. The creation of Der Treue Zions-Wächter (The Loyal Guardians of Zion) notably gave Orthodox rabbis a crucial platform to oppose decisions of the Rabbinical Conferences of 1844 to 1846, which tended to be broadcast through such Reformleaning Jewish newspapers as the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums. More generally, Der Treue Zions-Wächter, and later Jeschurun (1855 – 70) and Der Israelite (after 1871), provided communicative media in which Orthodox values prevailed. Tellingly, though, their articles were written in German and Hebrew, attesting to the Orthodox community’s own public adaptation to modernity (Bleich 1980). Much like Reformers, the Orthodox also created modern educational institutions. The primary school for the (separatist) Israelitische Religionsgemeinschaft in Frankfurt and Hildesheimer’s rabbinical seminary in Berlin were important developments in this regard. The latter in particular aimed to create a “modern intellectual elite” that would contest the ground that had been ceded to Reform intellectuals, especially as the latter were overwhelmingly university-educated. Not all Orthodox rabbis, however, accepted the seminary as a legitimate answer to modernity, especially since Hildesheimer’s institution incorporated secular studies alongside rabbinical training. Those who disparaged Hildesheimer’s seminary, notably Moses (Hatam) Sofer of Bratislava, generally held the position summed up by the aphorism, kol hadash asur min

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ha-Torah—that which is new is forbidden by Torah—and constituted an ultra-Orthodox “muscular opposition” (Olson 2017, 1045). The disagreements among those who were Orthodox and traditional paled in comparison to those both had with Reformers. As Reform Judaism became more dominant in central Europe and its adherents began leading Jewish communities, Orthodox and traditional Jews expressed severe dissatisfaction about staying within a unitary community. Once German governments authorized minority religious communities to separate after 1870, Orthodox Jewish groups could decide to follow Samson Raphael Hirsch’s Trennungsorthodoxie (separation Orthodoxy) or Esriel Hildesheimer’s Gemeindeorthodoxie (communal Orthodoxy). In Frankfurt, Hirsch’s Israelitische Religionsgemeinschaft not only formed a separate community but encouraged complete separation from other Jews who did not live halachically (Liberles 1985). Hildesheimer, while arguing that Reform Judaism should be “raze[d] … to its very foundation,” still believed in “Jewish solidarity” (or Kelal Yisrael, the community of Israel) and would thus work with non-Orthodox Jews in such organizations as B’nai B’rith and the Alliance Israélite Universelle (hereafter, Alliance; Ellenson 2014, 7– 11). In the Austrian Empire, Reform was no less contentious an issue, but it found greater acceptance in the German-speaking territories than in areas further east, such as Galicia and eastern Hungary. The legacy of Josephist tolerance as well as cultural ties to the German lands to the north created real space for moderate reform. In practice, though, Reform was limited by the Austrian government’s conservatism and Austrian Jewry’s traditionalism (Meyer 1988). Reformers who came to Vienna, such as Rabbi Isaac Noa Mannheimer, determined that Reform had limited appeal in the empire and, thus, would have little “constructive purpose.” Consequently, Mannheimer’s “Viennese Rite,” which became the model for Reform in the Habsburg lands, made only minimal changes to existing practices. For example, it proposed a shortened synagogue service, limited use of piyyutim (liturgical poems), excluded prayers about the messiah, introduced confirmation, prohibited the selling of honors, and eliminated the Kol Nidre before Yom Kippur. In 1840, Mannheimer also published a prayerbook that “reflected a strong commitment to tradition” (Rozenblit 1989, 189). Apart from its institution of German-language sermons, the Viennese Rite became known for its blending of beautiful contemporary music and religion through the efforts of such cantors as Salomon Sulzer. It was also recognized for establishing “order, dignity, and decorum” without the introduction of an organ, which Mannheimer believed was too similar to Christian practices (Meyer 1988; Rozenblit 1989; Bleich 2020). In Pest (Hungary), Rabbi David Einhorn attempted to introduce more radical, Berlin-style Reform—with services on Sunday, prayers only in the vernacular, no wearing of kippot, and approval of mixed marriages—but the government dissolved the congregation in 1852 (Meyer 1988). Following the Constitution of 1867’s formal emancipation of Jews, there were attempts to institute further reforms in Vienna, but these met with strong resistance, especially the introduction of an organ. Rabbi Moritz Güdemann, for instance, contended that an organ “would provide an obscure, Christian-like atmosphere” (Rozenblit 1989, 205). Ultimately, the fact that Austrian law did not recognize separatist communities

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helped bring about a compromise that allowed most parties to save face: organ music was not introduced, but minor modifications to the liturgy were adopted. Even so, views about organ use in Vienna were neither absolute nor set in stone, as the Sephardic “Turkish” community introduced an organ in 1887 but restricted its use to weddings (Frühauf 2009).

Jewish Life in Eastern Europe Further east in the Russian Empire, including the Polish and Lithuanian territories Russia absorbed between 1772 and 1830, Reform Judaism made few inroads. Here, traditional Judaism had already been reshaped during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by Hasidism. Founded by the Ba’al Shem Tov (Besht), Israel ben Eliezer (1700 – 60), Hasidism introduced a new Jewish spirituality that transcended status distinctions among elites and commoners and built on the importance of Kabbalah (medieval, mystical writings that explore the inner meaning of the Hebrew Bible and traditional rabbinic literature) for everyday life. Most Hasidim lived in the areas of Congress Poland and the Pale of Settlement with other concentrations in Austrian Galicia and Hungary, an area that mirrored nearly the extent of the Yiddish-speaking world (Assaf 2008). The beliefs of the Hasidim did not differ greatly from those of other eastern European Jews, but how they practiced Judaism was both unique and controversial. As David Assaf notes, Hasidism was “never … a ‘movement’” but a “collective term for a great variety of groups” that focused on prayer, joy, and divine immanence (2008, 659). It was centered on the scriptural knowledge and spiritual qualities of the tzaddik (a righteous man, also known as a rebbe), who was seen as “an intermediary to holiness” (Jacobs 2008, 674), and his relationship with devotees (Biale 2017; Wodziński 2018; Gellman 2018). There were two central locations of Hasidic Jewish life, both of which expanded throughout the nineteenth century: the shtibl (prayer house), inside which men focused on communal religious, festive, and recreational activities (Stampfer 2013; Seidman 2017), and the rebbe’s court, to which followers could travel, be in the presence of their leader, and partake in fellowship (Biale 2017). During the nineteenth century, Hasidism prospered in the Austro-Hungarian–Russian borderlands as rebbes reached prominence in Ukraine (Israel of Rizhin), Poland (Menahem Mendel Morgenstern of Kotsk), and in White Russia and Lithuania (Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liady, founder of Chabad) (Davidowicz 1996). The rebbes reigned over their courts, while their followers created dynasties that spread an individual rebbe’s influence to other areas. On the ascendancy throughout the century, Hasidism struggled with the challenges at its end, from nationalism, antisemitism, and socialism to secularization and emigration. Much like other Jewish responses to modernity’s challenges, Hasidic groups organized politically, creating the Makhzikey ha-Das (Defenders of the Faith) and joining Agudas Yisroel, a traditional Orthodox-oriented political movement that resisted both Reform and Zionism. Each Hasidic court also created its own yeshiva (Assaf 2008; Bacon 2008).

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Hasidim’s rise during the eighteenth century also provoked the emergence of the Mitnagdim (opponents), who believed in “sober Talmudic scholarship” instead of corporeal “mystical rapture” (Nadler 2001, 514). Mitnagdim believed that only the rabbinical elite could truly understand what they were being taught, especially Kabbalah (Bartal 2011). But they also criticized the performative aspect of Hasidic life. Whether it was “preference to Kabbalah,” “pray[ing] in an unsightly, extravagantly wild, and noisy manner,” praying at non-prescribed times, or using Sephardic instead of Ashkenazic rites, such Mitnagdim leaders as the Vilna Gaon (1720 – 97) branded Hasidism a threat to the establishment and the “hierarchy of knowledge” (Flatto 2003, 103; Nadler 2008; Biale 2017, 89 – 91). The Vilna Gaon’s death in 1797 paved the way towards a “constructive coexistence” between Hasidism and Mitnagdim, with both directing their animosity toward modernizers, especially the maskilim (Biale 2017). Particularly significant for the Mitnagdim in defending traditional Judaism was the 1803 foundation of the Volozhin Yeshiva as an “advanced institute” of Torah study. It offered an intellectual model for traditional yeshivot throughout Lithuania via limited accommodation that “did not harm the essence of Judaism” (Levin 2009, 189). Another innovation within traditional Judaism was Israel Salanter’s musar movement. This was an inward-looking “educational and ethical” endeavor centered in Kovno (Lithuania) that spread to numerous yeshivot throughout Lithuania. The current, which was ideologically in-between the positions of the Mitnagdim and Hasidim, focused on Torah study and religious self-cultivation and sought to produce individuals with the ability to live a spiritual and moral life (Mirsky 2008). During the reign of Tsar Nicholas I (1825 – 56), the Russian government attempted to dramatically change Jewish life. First, it abolished the kahal, the autonomous Jewish council that governed the community. Then it announced the conscription of Jewish youths into the Russian army. During the twenty-five-year term of service, men would be unable to observe Judaism properly, a tactic the government hoped would prompt them to “leave the Jewish fold” (Nathans 2002, 29). This strategy was part of a governmental program known as “selective integration,” which during the second half of the century also witnessed the creation of a Jewish community (outside the Pale) in Saint Petersburg. In addition, to resist growing assimilationist pressures while still helping Jews integrate into Russian society, several wealthy oligarchs from Saint Petersburg and Odessa founded in 1860 the “Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia” (or OPE). This society was especially active in educational projects and published its own monthly periodical. It subsidized private Jewish schools and sought to reform talmudei torah to include both secular subjects and the Russian language. The OPE also wished to organize seminary-style training for Russian rabbis, a project that ultimately foundered. Indeed, while the OPE trained a new generation of more acculturated leaders and “contributed to the spread of middle-class values, democratic practices, and the establishment of a [Russian-Jewish] public sphere,” staunch resistance from Orthodox Jews, Zionist leaders, and the Russian government prevented the society from realizing its potential (Horowitz 2009, 12).

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Western Europe In western Europe, political changes associated with the French Revolution and liberalism promoted a formal decoupling of religion and citizenship. Although this did not lessen the pressure on Jews to assimilate (or at least undergo a certain acculturation), Judaism itself did not have to change to become acceptable. Consequently, well into the nineteenth century, there was little impetus for religious reform, though by the 1850s Reform, as well as Hasidism and Orthodoxy, did start to reshape the patterns of religious life, especially in France, Britain, and the Netherlands. The French Revolution fundamentally transformed the condition of French Jewry, both the Ashkenazi community of Alsace and Lorraine and the predominately Sephardic community of the rest of the country. The destruction of the Ancién Regime in 1789 and 1790 put an end to Jewish self-government centered around the kehillah. Then, on September 28, 1791, the French Assembly granted Jews full citizenship in the French nation. Significantly, citizenship was granted without any requirements for changes by Jews themselves, even though certain participants in the debates had argued that moral regeneration should precede accession to full citizenship. Under Napoleon, Jews’ status as French citizens was not only confirmed but reinforced when, in 1806, legislation named Judaism a state-recognized religion (culte), making it the peer of the three other recognized faiths: Catholicism, Calvinism, and Lutheranism. The laws that recognized French Judaism also created new structures for governing the Jewish community. As in the German lands, the central institutions were called consistories (consistoires israélites), but they operated rather differently in France. The French system was loosely centralized. In each region with a significant Jewish population, the state erected a consistory with its seat (and synagogue) in the town with the largest number of Jewish residents. According to the legislation of 1806, each consistory was composed of a chief rabbi, another rabbi, and three lay members. In Paris sat a national, central consistory comprising three of the regional chief rabbis and two laymen. The regional consistories enjoyed a monopoly on religious authority. They were charged with promoting modernization of Jewish life, maintaining order in synagogues, and administering funds collected for religious purposes. After 1815, they also played an important role in achieving educational reforms (Berkovitz 2017; Hyman 1998). The central consistory played more of a supervisory role. It oversaw the appointment of rabbis and resolved disputes that might arise from decisions taken by the local communities. Crucially, while the consistories were to look after the community’s religious needs, the legislation was silent on the actual content of Jewish faith and practice, an important difference from the situation in central Europe. As a result, for decades to come, the rabbis and the consistories continued to promote traditional Judaism. After 1815, schooling emerged as a particular site of tension in French–Jewish life. While Jewish parents (and communal leaders) were eager to have their children take advantage of new educational opportunities, they were wary of the secular, public

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schools whose curricula were centered around Christianity. Instead, Jewish children often attended either a “clandestine” traditional heder that operated outside the consistory’s auspices or, as these were formed, the new Jewish primary schools. With the passage of the Guizot law in 1833, these primary schools expanded in number and were staffed with Jewish chaplains and even served kosher food. Still, many municipalities refused to fund Jewish primary schools. In part, opponents claimed that Jewish schools promoted Jewish “separateness” (rather than integration) or that Jewish schools were inutile (useless). Nonetheless, Jewish leaders valued Jewish schools, for they limited the “traumatic effect of secular learning” and offered “the best defense against the growing indifference within French Jewry that threatened the survival of French Judaism” (Hyman 1998, 69; Haus 2009, 1). As the century progressed, a moderate religious reform set in. Authorities abolished the auctioning of synagogue honors, mandated quiet and decorous prayer, and instituted confirmation for both boys and girls. By the 1870s, French Judaism also contended with an influx of Jews from eastern Europe, who overwhelmingly preferred their shtiblekh (plural of shtibl) to the official synagogues. These immigrants’ desires also conflicted with the consistories’ charge to select rabbis and oversee religious life. Although the consistories expected the newcomers to adopt French standards of Jewishness, the recent arrivals refused to pray in the official synagogues. The Dreyfus Affair (1894 – 1906) complicated matters further, calling into question Jews’ very status as citizens and helping to precipitate the separation of church and state in 1905. Having lost their formal power to regulate local religious life, by the eve of the First World War consistories found themselves unable to control French Jewry. Indeed, they were forced to recognize that there was more than one way for individuals to practice their Jewishness (Hyman 1998). Across the English Channel, British Jews too continued to favor traditional Judaism well into the century. Until the 1850s, as David Cesarini has emphasized, “the maltreatment of Jews and the disparagement of Judaism was enshrined in English law” and many political and Christian leaders believed that Jewish conversion was the essential precondition for their emancipation (1999, 41 – 42). This situation did not itself prompt changes in Jewish life, although Reform did eventually make some headway. In contrast to Continental trends, the British state never imposed governing institutions on British Jewry; yet, centralized Jewish institutions—one religious and one secular—did exist. The religious dimension of Jewish life was led by the Chief Rabbi (the rabbi of London’s Great Synagogue), whose authority was recognized since 1758 by all of Britain’s Ashkenazi communities. For over half of the century, this position was occupied by an Adler: first, Nathan Marcus (in office, 1845 – 90), the former Landrabbiner in Hanover, then his son, Hermann (in office, 1891 – 1911). Nathan Adler demanded traditional services and dominated religious life throughout the country. Still, he endorsed changes that he felt were consistent with his understanding of halachic Judaism, for example, establishing men’s choirs, creating two Shabbat services to accommodate West Londoners, and encouraging accommodation to modern sensibilities (Endelman 2002). During the 1880s and 1890s, Orthodox communities made further

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modifications. These included introducing a triennial Torah cycle, a children’s service on Yom Kippur, and a confirmation service to mark the completion of a religious education course. In addition, they eliminated repetitions of the Amidah prayer and omitted most piyyutim. In essence, “traditional” British Judaism became more “genteel” and changes were made “to present Judaism in a more acceptable light” (Endelman 2002, 167– 68). The other major institution for British Jews was the Board of Deputies, which was charged with representing the community’s interests before the government. It was created during the reign of King George III and was composed of influential laymen from the community. So strong was the traditionalist element that for decades members of the West London Synagogue (established 1840) and other proponents of Reformed Judaism were kept off the Board. Furthermore, Moses Montefiore, a leading activist, philanthropist, and opponent of Reform, long blocked any consideration of Reformed candidates. Only in 1874 did the Board of Deputies accept a first Reformed member. The dominance of traditional and modern Orthodox Judaism, especially in the form advocated by the Adlers, can also be viewed as a response to the rise of Reform in Britain. There were two distinct waves of Reform: a first that emerged during the 1830s and a second during the 1880s and 1890s. The first wave was quite moderate, proposing only to abolish the second day of prayer for major festivals and introduce English sermons. Tellingly, Hebrew was retained as the language of prayer (whereas the Frankfurt Rabbinical Assembly of 1845 controversially endorsed German). Still, these changes sufficed to threaten the traditional establishment and prompted Chief Rabbi Hirschell (in office, 1802 – 42) to issue a “caution” that was also signed by the Sephardic Jewish community. Montefiore then exploited the caution to keep Reformers off the Board of Deputies. After 1840, the West London Synagogue introduced other reforms, incorporating an organ and forming a mixed-gender choir. Although Reform congregations arose in Manchester in 1856 and in Bradford in 1872, Reform remained unpopular. Several factors explain this limited interest in Reform. Above all, “there was no compelling need to alter the face of public Judaism.” In addition, numerous British Jews had already changed their lifestyles and preferred doing other activities on Shabbat. And those Jews who normally had little to no engagement with religion preferred traditional services if and when they chose to observe (Endelman 2002, 112 – 15). Reform’s second wave hit around the same time that Hermann Adler became Chief Rabbi. Similar in substance to German Liberal Judaism, this wave was more attuned to modern scholarship that saw Jews as a “religious brotherhood” and sought to lessen the gap between Judaism and Protestantism (Endelman 2002, 169 – 70). This movement, begun in 1902 and called the Jewish Religious Union (JRU), was led by Claude Montefiore and Lily Montagu, both from well-to-do families. The first rabbi of their new congregation—the Liberal Jewish Synagogue, formed in 1911—was Israel Mattuck (1884 – 1954), a graduate of Hebrew Union College (Cincinnati, USA). The JRU’s core conviction was that an individual could “adhere personally to a non-rabbinic form of Judaism without separating oneself from the Anglo-Jewish community or losing one’s own

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sense of Jewish identification” (Umansky 1984, 311). Even more important was Montagu’s leadership, the first woman to play a major role in Reformed/Progressive Judaism, and not just in England. She preached in the community, helped create six other JRU communities outside London and, in 1926, created the World Union for Progressive Judaism, which sought to unite similar movements and export Liberal Judaism to new areas. Although unique within Jewish circles, Montagu’s engagement was less exceptional in contemporary English society more broadly. As in France, eastern European Jews who migrated to Britain—a development that began well before the Russian pogroms of the 1880s—were ill-disposed towards the established Jewish congregations, which they regarded as versions of Reform that “smacked of Christianity.” The migrant Jewish community tended to pray in hevrot (small, informal groups) and their children were educated in hadarim or talmudei torah. However, these eastern European Jews did not necessarily adhere to all the strictures of traditional, halachic life, nor did they always go to shul. Like many other British Jews, they also became increasingly lax in their observance (Endelman 2002). In the Netherlands, Jewish life was similarly conservative. By the late 1700s, the community’s Sephardic (converso) core was increasingly diversified, above all in Amsterdam, by the immigration of Ashkenazi Jews from central and eastern Europe. Dutch rabbis also found themselves having to strike a balance between normative traditional Judaism and the reality that many Jews did not follow tradition in their daily lives. After the Revolutionary era, Reform found few adherents despite the community’s overwhelmingly secular nature. In 1815, the Dutch government established a fully lay Supreme Committee for Israelite Affairs (Hoofdcommissie), which initiated a “slow process of modernization, avoiding radicalism from both sides.” In addition to promoting a certain “Protestantization” of synagogue services, the Hoofdcommissie required rabbis to preach in Dutch and glorify the “new Dutch centralized fatherland and its King” (Brasz 2012, 74). Since rabbis now had to be Dutch citizens, Dutch Jewry also found itself obligated to train its own rabbis, motivating the transformation of Amsterdam’s existing beth hamidrash (Torah study “hall”) into a modern rabbinical seminary, the Nederlands Israëlitisch Seminarium (1839) (see also Michman 1987). In many ways, Dutch Judaism was very similar to that in England. Much of the opposition to Reform came either from indifference towards religion or from a small number of influential, fanatically anti-modern families. And when Reform did gain ground there towards the end of the century, it was in the Liberal variant that also prevailed in Britain and Germany (Brasz 2012, 2016).

Mediterranean Europe In southern Europe, Sephardic rather than Ashkenazi Judaism predominated. The Jewish presence in the Iberian Peninsula remained limited. In 1900, only some one thousand Jews resided in Spain. Portugal formally allowed Jews to “return” in 1800, but this community was also small. Throughout the region, from the Ottoman Empire to Italy,

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Jewish life underwent change because of political upheaval, from the Ottoman Tanzimat reforms (after 1836) to national independence in the Balkans and unification in Italy. Reform Judaism, however, was not directly implicated in these changes; in fact, the Ottoman Empire long forbade it (Cohen and Stein 2014). This resistance to Reform did not mean that Sephardic Jewish life was static. As elsewhere in Europe, Reform and modernity also made their way to Mediterranean Jews, above all through schooling. The Ottoman Jewish community can be regarded neither as monolithic nor as one in which rabbinical authority reigned supreme. While individual Jewish communities (known as qahal) observed both halachic and communal bylaws, the ma’amad (dignitaries) generally controlled day-to-day life and were responsible for hiring rabbis (Lehmann 2005; Ayalon 2017). However, Yaron Ayalon contends that the rabbinical elite in the Ottoman Empire were not able “to impose Jewish law broadly, as a principle guiding the lives of individuals and congregations” (2017, 324). There was not a unified, hierarchical rabbinate in the empire and there was no official Chief Rabbi (in Turkish, haham basi) until the Tanzimat era. Nor is it appropriate to describe Ottoman Jews as a unified millet (religious community). Not only did the empire generally treat its subjects as individuals, but the millet served principally to organize taxation, not religious life. Local rabbis sometimes did try to enforce order through herem (exclusion from the Jewish community), but this threat was often ignored and challenged by Jews who appealed to Ottoman authorities’ oversight (Ayalon 2017). Nonetheless, Devin Naar suggests that rabbis did have “considerable authority” to discipline community members, at least in Salonika (2016, 59 – 60). Jewish education in the Ottoman lands was controlled by local rabbis. Sephardic institutions for young children were known as meldars and talmudei torah, though over time these institutions became indistinguishable, while older children attended yeshivot (singular, yeshiva). Still, children frequently discontinued their education to work. As the Jewish educational system declined after 1830 and Jews from other parts of Europe arrived in the empire, the latter endeavored to promote school reforms that would also help to “modernize” Ottoman Jewry. In particular, the Alliance and the Frenchman Maurice de Hirsch founded (and funded) schools that aimed to improve Jewish morality and Jews’ ability to be economically productive laborers (Rodrigue 1990; Lehmann 2022). Nonetheless, local Jewish communities were often critical of these new schools because they prioritized objectives other than religious education (Rodrigue 1990). Even when the schools increased the amount of Jewish history taught, concerns remained. Recent research also makes clear that the Alliance’s schools aimed to promote neither Jewish nationalism nor Zionism. Instead, through schooling the Alliance wanted to create loyal Ottoman Jews who had knowledge, pride, and connection to Judaism and a Jewish identity (Rodrigue 1990; Lehmann 2005; Cohen 2014; Naar 2016). As Ottoman rule in the Balkans retreated after 1800, Jewish communities had to navigate the transition to living in new, independent, Christian nation-states that tended to see Jews as more sympathetic to the empire than to the new national communities. This was especially apparent in Greece, which achieved independence from the

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Ottoman Empire in 1830. Here membership in the body politic became predicated upon being Orthodox Christian. Until 1912, however, when Salonika was added to the Kingdom of Greece, the Greek Jewish community remained small (Doxiadis 2016). Salonika’s own Jewish community was an anomaly. One of the largest and wealthiest in all of Europe, Jews made up nearly 50 percent of the city’s population, a proportion rivaled only by Jewish populations in small central and eastern European towns. Jewish intellectuals also considered Salonika as one of the most Jewish cities in the world, expressed in the popular sobriquet “shabatoplis.” For in Salonika, the entire city closed down on Saturday (not Sunday) in honor of the Jewish Sabbath. Once the Kingdom of Greece annexed Salonika, however, Orthodox Christians pressured the government to pass a Sunday closing law. Henceforth, the local rabbinical court allowed Jewish butchers to open on Saturday mornings to sell to Christians, but it still encouraged the Jewish population to keep Shabbat (Naar 2016). The Jewish community in Salonika became more centralized during the nineteenth century, organizing a number of new services, including a seminary, soup kitchen, hospital, orphanage, and insane asylum. This expansion was possible under Ottoman rule because the local Jewish community enjoyed self-governing autonomy and officially “served as the ‘protector’ of its members, especially its destitute masses” (Naar 2016, 87). Until 1887, Salonika’s Jewish community was led by three rabbis—the Greek historian Joseph Nahama calls Salonika a “theocratic republic”—though their authority applied only to internal Jewish affairs (cited in Naar 2016, 91). External affairs were managed by the kahya or vekil, an intermediary who represented the community before the state. When the last of the prior triumvirate of rabbis passed away in 1887, a local haham basi was introduced to Salonika in the person of Jacob Covo. He emerged as a major supporter of the Alliance’s schools, introduced Turkish into the talmud torah schools for the first time (in 1889), and sought to inject Ottomanism into the community. Covo’s successor, Jacob Meir, was a similarly modern rabbi in a traditional, Sephardic manner. He aimed to strengthen observance, preserve Shabbat, and improve Jewish education. In the spirit of the times, he also made a point of intoning the Noten teshua lamelakkim, a centuries-old prayer that expressed support for the sultan (Naar 2016). Pro-Ottoman gestures were also evident in Constantinople’s large Jewish community. Its haham basi, who was also the community’s official representative to the government and served as Chief Rabbi for the entire empire, regularly sought to demonstrate Ottoman Jews’ patriotism. Accordingly, the synagogue and communal festivities became sites for commingling Jewish interests and those of the national state. During the 1877 Russo-Turkish War, the Ottoman Chief Rabbi Moshe Halevi denounced Russian aggression by calling Russia a “biblical [and ‘pharaonic’] Egypt,” but lauded the Ottoman Empire “as a foil, a promised land of refuge from the Spanish expulsion and a bulwark against Russia” (Cohen 2014, 36). Then, in 1892, amid the patriotic fervor shown by many Ottoman rabbis, Halevi marked the quatercentenary of the Ottomans’ welcome of Sephardic Jews by fusing this celebration with the first evening of Passover (Cohen 2014).

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Elsewhere in southeastern Europe, Jewish communities contended with colliding nationalist and imperialist ambitions, including outbreaks of antisemitism that often accompanied these movements: the assaults on Serbian Jews during the independence struggles of 1804 and Romania’s expulsion of Jews from rural communities between 1875 and 1878. The new nation-states also witnessed considerable conflict between Ashkenazic and Sephardic communities (Ristović 2016; Mitrović 2016). Unlike in the Ottoman Empire, where Ashkenazi Jews routinely adopted the Sephardic rite and joined the larger Jewish community, separate Jewish communities formed in the Balkan lands. In Belgrade, Ashkenazi Jews not only formed a separate community in 1869, they were also placed under the protection of the Austrian consulate as “German Jews.” In Wallachia (Romania) and in Bulgaria, Jewish life was largely structured in the Ottoman style. Since 1719, the Romanian community was usually led by a haham basi located in Iași, who had both religious and secular obligations. Haskalah made inroads here with the arrival of educated Jews from other parts of Europe. Galician-born Iuliu Barasch, the “Romanian Mendelssohn,” helped establish Bucharest’s first Haskalahinspired school, which offered instruction in German. Then, in 1857, he founded the first Jewish periodical in Walachia, Israelitul roman, which appeared in Romanian and French. Reformers like Barasch supported the emergent Romanian state, whereas Orthodox Jews tended to be indifferent to its development (Constantini 2016). On paper, the Bulgarian Jewish community was also guided by a haham basi, but for centuries the office remained unoccupied. In 1880, however, the new Bulgarian government required that it be filled. Its second occupant, the Galician Mordecai (Marcus) Ehrenpreis, played a critical role in the community’s interactions with the government and its responses to the rise of antisemitism in the early twentieth century (Dogo 2016). Across the Adriatic Sea, the Jews of Italy ventured into modernity between the worlds of western and central Europe, with some regions influenced more by French revolutionary developments and others by trends in the German states and Austria. By the onset of the Revolutionary era, the influence of Sabbateanism, an early modern messianic movement originating in Ottoman Smyrna, had promoted a certain secularist outlook among Italian Jews. Consequently, Haskalah found support among some traditional rabbis, as seen in the positive local reception of Napthali Herz Wessely’s Divrei Shalom Ve-emet (Words of Peace and Truth, 1782), which advocated for secular instruction for Jews, and the creation in Trieste of the Scuola pia normale siva Talmud torà, which offered a combined Jewish and secular education. Critically, the latter school seems to have developed independently from Berlin’s maskilim and gradually became a new source for Jewish Reform, at least within the Habsburg lands. More radical ideas about Jewish Reform appeared during the early nineteenth century. Notable in this regard is Aron Fernandes, whose Projetto filosofico … del populo ebreo (Leghorn, 1813) called for Jews’ regeneration, slandered the post-exilic rabbinical tradition tout court, and recommended reducing the number of obligatory commandments from 613 to 60 (Salah 2020). Jewish authorities, however, managed to ban the text, and Reform in Italy could only “simmer under the surface” until the 1860s,

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when traditionalists began forming separatist congregations (Salah 2020, 125). Reform was able to make a significant impact in Italy once Reformers took a more pragmatic turn and gave up their most radical ideas, and when traditionalists agreed to some changes, which made Italian Jewry increasingly resemble Jewish communities north of the Alps. In the nineteenth century’s second half, we also discern a movement in Italy to “renew” Judaism, above all, as in many parts of Europe, through education. With the primary goal of “making” Italians, the Italian state introduced compulsory education in 1859. Religious instruction was obligatory in the public schools, but the 1859 and 1877 laws allowed non-Catholics to forgo such instruction. In fact, the 1877 law removed religious instruction entirely and instead required civics lessons. Given this situation, Jewish schools developed a “catechism” program to provide Jewish students with some religious instruction. It featured a Jewish take on the Catholic practice of teaching religion via questions with set answers. As Silvia Guetta observes, “The classes were designed to instill in children a sense of belonging to the Jewish people, and to convince them that all actions in Jewish daily life are subject to the dictates of Torah … and that adherence to these dictates is necessary to guarantee justice and social harmony” (2020, 171). By 1870, Jewish girls also received an education, but unlike boys’ education, which prepared them to lead the community, girls’ education prepared them to transmit Jewish values within the home.

Conclusion: Judaism within a Modernizing World The multiple responses made by Jewish communities to their local environments and to influences from other areas of the Jewish world give credence to scholars’ claims that Jews in the nineteenth century invented a variety of Judaisms. Their often-vociferous disputes demonstrate the stakes for each group as they sought to claim legitimacy within society at large and vis-à-vis each other. Alongside these internecine clashes, Jews also had to contend with the rise of nationalism and, during the second half of the century, with a vigorous, racialized, and often aggressive antisemitism. While this new antisemitism did not necessarily provoke any direct changes in Judaism itself, Jewish communities still had to adapt to its central claim that Jews as a race, regardless of their actual religion, could never be part of the “nation.” Jewish defense organizations, which began with the Alliance’s formation in 1860 following the 1858 Mortara Affair, were one important response. Another was the creation of philanthropic societies dedicated to helping fellow Jews. Some wealthy individuals even developed sophisticated plans to solve Jews’ plight in eastern Europe, notably Baron Maurice de Hirsch’s Argentina gambit. Another response to gathering threats was to turn inward. Inwardness pointed in different directions, including towards Bundism, autonomism, and emigration (and Zionism). Bundism and autonomism provided Jews in eastern Europe with alternatives that allowed them to form distinctive and modern political and social cultures, elevate

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Yiddishkeit, and continue local adaptations of Judaism. Zionism, which advocated Jews’ emigration from Europe, was embraced by many, including Ahad Ha’am (1856 – 1927), Moses Hess (1812 – 75), and Theodor Herzl (1860 – 1904), who saw no future for Jews there. As states in Europe embraced racialized discourses and practices in the wake of the “new imperialism” and the Dreyfus Affair, Zionists argued for a national Jewish homeland. Some Zionists imagined this state as more “secular modernist,” while others saw Judaism as a “national religion” of this state, a tension that continues today in Israel. Still, these answers to modernity’s challenges amounted to a paradigm shift, as all these ideas arising from the world’s largest Jewish population rejected earlier attempts of fellow Jews in other European states at acculturation. Ironically, this situation led Jews to incorporate and blend non-Jewish ideas into an ideology in order to save European Jewry.

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Kaplan, Marion A. 1991. The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany. New York: Oxford University Press. Lehmann, Matthias. 2005. Ladino Rabbinic Culture and Ottoman Sephardic Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lehmann, Matthias. 2022. The Baron: Maurice de Hirsch and the Jewish Nineteenth Century. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Levin, Vladimir. 2009. “Orthodox Jewry and the Russian Government: An Attempt at Rapprochement, 1907 – 1914.” East European Jewish Affairs 39: 187 – 204. Liberles, Robert. 1985. Religious Conflict in Social Context: The Resurgence of Orthodox Judaism in Frankfurt am Main, 1838 – 1877. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Lowenstein, Steven M. 1981. “The 1840s and the Creation of the German-Jewish Religious Reform Movement.” In Revolution and Evolution: 1848 in German-Jewish History, edited by Werner E. Mosse, Arnold Paucker, and Reinhard Rürup, 255 – 97. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr. Meola, David A. 2023. “We Will Never Yield”: Jews, the German Press, and the Fight for Inclusion in the 1840s. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Meyer, Michael A. 1988. Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Michman, Joseph. 1987. “The Impact of German-Jewish Modernization on Dutch Jewry.” In Toward Modernity: The European Jewish Model, edited by Jacob Katz, 171 – 87. London: Routledge. Mirsky, Yehudah. 2008. “Musar Movement.” In Hundert 2008, 1214 – 16. Mitrović, Bojan. 2016. “Jewish Identity and the Competing National Projects in the Western Balkans (1848 – 1929).” In Catalan and Dogo 2016, 51 – 72. Naar, Devin. 2016. Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nadler, Allan. 2001. “The Scholarly Life of the Gaon of Vilna.” In Judaism in Practice: From the Middle Ages through the Early Modern Period, edited by Lawrence Fine, 513 – 20. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nadler, Allan. 2008. “Misnagdim.” In Hundert 2008, 1182 – 85. Nathans, Benjamin. 2002. Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Olson, Jess. 2017. “Orthodoxy and Ultra-Orthodoxy as Forces in Modern Jewish Life.” In Hart and Michels 2017, 1038 – 62. Ristović, Milan. 2016. “The Jews of Serbia (1804 – 1918): From Princely Protection to Formal Emancipation.” In Catalan and Dogo 2016, 23 – 50. Rodrigue, Aron. 1990. French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 1860 – 1925. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Rozenblit, Marsha. 1989. “The Struggle over Religious Reform in Nineteenth-Century Vienna.” AJS Review 14: 179 – 221. Rozenblit, Marsha. 2015. “European Jewry, 1800 – 1933.” In The Cambridge Guide to Jewish History, Religion, and Culture, edited by Judith R. Baskin and Kenneth Seeskin, 169 – 207. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Salah, Asher. 2020. “Jewish Reform in 19th Century Italy.” Filosofia Italiana (Filosofia Ebraica in Italia [XV–XIX secolo]) 1: 111 – 39. Seidman, Naomi. 2017. “Gender and the Re-Making of Modern Jewry.” In Hart and Michels 2017, 968 – 87. Sorkin, David. 1996. Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Stampfer, Shaul. 2013. “How and Why did Hasidism Spread?” Jewish History 24: 201 – 19. Sufrin, Claire. 2017. “Liberal Judaisms.” In Hart and Michels 2017, 337 – 62. Umansky, Ellen. 1984. “The Origins of Liberal Judaism in England: The Contribution of Lily H. Montagu.” Hebrew Union College Annual 55: 309 – 22.

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Patrick Cabanel

4 Protestantism Since the second half of the sixteenth century, Protestantism has been the third face of Christianity in Europe. Or more precisely, it makes sense to use the plural form “Protestantisms” to designate the multiple reformers and the many theologies, churches, geographies, and types of relations with the states that emerged from the Reformation as well as the divisions these churches have continued to experience—from liberalisms to religious revivals—thanks to the unstoppable tendency towards further fission. This plural form is evident, accepted, and fruitful, if also an object of sarcasm (e. g., Bossuet’s barbs in the Histoire des variations des Églises protestantes, 1688). But it makes difficult any synthetic presentation, even if the profound unity of Protestantism has been obvious to historians and sociologists, especially in the nineteenth century, from Charles de Villers to Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch. In this chapter, we shall discuss in succession the four principal Protestant traditions present in Europe during the nineteenth century as well as the three dominant models of their relationships with the state and society. Then we will examine major theological developments that traversed the Protestantisms in a rather homogenous fashion: the tendency toward liberalism and rationalism; historical-critical exegesis and the dialogue with modern ideas; pietism and revivalism; social Christianity and the missionary impulse.

Theological, Geographical, and Political Typologies By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the geography of European Protestantism had stabilized. Thanks to increasing tolerance, Protestants could (once again) enjoy a normal life in the Austrian Empire (the Edict of Tolerance of October 13, 1781), in France (Edict of November 29, 1787 regarding non-Catholics, followed by the August 1789 “Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizens”), and in Piedmont (Letters Patent of February 1848). Domestic missions and the ensuing conversions, whether of Catholics and Jews to Protestantism or, conversely, of Protestants to Catholicism, had only a marginal effect on the overall equilibrium. The century’s awakenings (or réveils) primarily affected populations that were already at least nominally Protestant, although Baptists in France enjoyed considerable success in the dechristianized industrial north and in Catholic Brittany. On this point, the situation cannot be compared with the rise of evangelism during the last third of the twentieth century. The only attempt at “mass” conversion took place with some success around 1900, the Los von Rom (Free from Rome) movement, which sought to return German Catholics in Bohemia (whom the Nazis later designated as “Sudeten-Germans”) to a “complete” German identity, namely by bringing them into the Lutheran Church. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110609059-006

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In short, there were four variations of “Protestant Europe”: Lutheran, Anglican, Reformed (Calvinist), and that of the “minor” Protestant communities that emerged from Dissent and other awakenings. These Protestantisms varied in importance and maintained very different relations with their nation and state because of their respective theologies and histories. The simplest example of this is Lutheranism: it blanketed almost completely the Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden) and two of three Baltic countries (Latvia and Estonia). With twenty million Protestant subjects (a bit less than 66 percent of its population), Prussia was Europe’s largest Protestant state. Its strong minority Catholic population was located largely in the Rhenish territories acquired after 1800, in Silesia, and in Prussia’s Polish lands, as well as in Berlin (due to Polish immigration). The northern part of German Europe was also overwhelmingly Lutheran, accounting for more than 90 percent of the population in the Kingdom of Saxony, the Mecklenburgs, Hamburg, Bremen, Lübeck, and the Thuringian states. In all these lands, the Lutheran Church was the state church. The king or prince was simultaneously the head of the church (summus episcopus), with the right to organize all matters pertaining to the church (jus circa sacra), but not questions of doctrine (jus in sacra). Scholars have long noted that the Reformation was established “from above” in the German principalities. That is, the princes set up “inspections” in the middle of the 1520s that formed the basis for the future Lutheran territorial churches. In the German states, the state churches (Landeskirchen) were under the sovereign’s control (landesherrliches Kirchenregiment), an arrangement that held until the Second German Empire’s collapse in November 1918. Although the church derived important privileges from its position as an official church serving the state, they came at the cost of its autonomy. Another distinctive trait was the political reading of the Lutheran two kingdoms doctrine (Zwei-Regimente-Lehre): the Church was not to concern itself with earthly matters, giving civil authorities a free hand, to the point of requiring full obedience to them (Luther only accepted that subjects confronted with an incompetent prince might emigrate). The nineteenth century’s major ecclesiastical innovation took shape in Prussia, where the ruling family, the Hohenzollerns, had converted to Calvinism, but most of the subjects were Lutheran. To overcome this division and mark the three-hundredth anniversary of the Reformation, King Friedrich Wilhelm III created the Prussian Union Church in 1817 (it remained in existence until Prussia’s dissolution in 1947). This union, however, was not driven by intra-Protestant ecumenism but rather by princely fiat. Furthermore, King Friedrich Wilhelm III imposed a liturgical fusion on the churches, including a common Eucharist service (with the new Agende of 1829). This reform did not find universal acceptance, and after several contentious politico-religious incidents, the Prussian Landeskirche came to include Lutherans, Reformed (mainly in the west), and United Protestants (Unierte). According to Article 15 of the Prussian Constitution of 1850, granted after the revolutions of 1848 – 49, this church managed its affairs autonomously. This did not imply, however, the separation of church and state à la française or even as in the United States, for the Landeskirche was now placed under the direct

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tutelage of the king (later, the emperor), whose authority was vested in the new Superior Council of the Protestant Church (Evangelischer Oberkirchenrat, EOK). The Scandinavian countries continued to have Lutheran churches with close ties to the state; in Sweden and Finland this was established by a law dating from 1686. Nonetheless, as in western Europe more generally, a new legal situation emerged with the granting of toleration—first de facto, then de jure—to religious minorities, notably Jews, Reformed, and awakened (or evangelical) Protestants. Sweden and Finland accorded legal toleration to the Jews in 1792, Denmark in 1814. The awakened churches had to wait though until the 1840s or, in Sweden, even 1860 to achieve religious freedom. The Danish Constitution of 1849, for example, declared that the Folkekirche (the new name of the national church) was “supported as such by the state.” In these lands where Lutheranism merged almost entirely with the nation and its culture, it is understandable that the awakenings and, later, secularization gave rise both to innovation and division. In the “third Germany,” a term coined by Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, characterized by the mixture of confessions in the southwestern region, a different model took form. It emerged from the confessionalization (Konfessionalisierung) that had made it possible to escape the seventeenth-century’s religious violence and was marked by a triple phenomenon: “delimitation” (Abgrenzung) among confessional groups; internal “normalization,” in which each bloc accentuated and codified its distinctive characteristics; and a relatively harmonious cohabitation. The latter was all the more easy once confessional affiliations had been internalized by everyone and an “invisible frontier”—what Étienne François called a “mental frontier” (1991)—separated the one from the other group. During the second part of the nineteenth century, religious coexistence in this biconfessional Germany underwent what some scholars have called “pillarization” (from the Flemish verzuiling, zuilen means “pillar”). That is, in Germany and Holland (with the latter offering a different example of a biconfessionalism, namely Reformed and Catholic), society was organized around two nearly impermeable “pillars” or “milieus,” Catholic and Protestant (the latter term is more prevalent in studies of Germany, see Blaschke and Kuhlemann 1996). Their members were integrated at each step of their religious and social lives: there were distinct hospitals, schools, youth groups, unions, insurance companies, political parties, newspapers, even pastimes for the children, families, and workers of each confession (or political beliefs, for the followers of socialism, which came to form a third pillar in the Netherlands and in Belgium). The Catholic pillar was the most integrated of all, right up to the political level (with the German Zentrum party, predecessor of the CDU and the Bavarian CSU). The Protestant pillar was less encompassing; the fact that its voices were split among several parties and that it was more permeable ensured that it also weakened more quickly. England and Wales presented a quite different type of Protestantism called Anglicanism. It was somewhat difficult to understand, especially by outsiders, because it represented a middle position between Catholicism and Lutheranism or Reformed Protestantism, a position that proved difficult to maintain because of Anglicanism’s

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very flexibility and inclusion of contrary ideas. It is worth recalling that Anglicanism was born of a rupture that was more political than doctrinal and that the Church of England was linked to the state by the 1701 Act of Settlement, which required that the sovereign, as “Supreme Governor of the Church,” and the immediate members of the royal family belong to it. The choice of a Catholic spouse even caused one to lose his or her place in the order of succession. The coronation ceremony was also religious, with the new sovereign receiving the crown from the archbishop of Canterbury. In short, the state imposed the choice of religion on its prince, not the reverse, hence one speaks of a system of “Church and State.” The Anglican Church, a type of Episcopalian church, is administered by Parliament, in which the archbishop of York, the archbishop of Canterbury and twenty-four bishops all sit. Until 1972, Parliament had to be consulted for any changes to the articles of faith or the Book of Common Prayer, first issued in 1549. Each session of Parliament also begins with a prayer. Until the nineteenth century, the Corporation Act (1662) and the Test Act (1673) required that any candidate to a public or elected position, even at the municipal level, be a member of the Church of England and sign a declaration rejecting transubstantiation (which targeted Catholics). Oxford and Cambridge universities were also closed to nonAnglicans. For many years, thus, Nonconforming Protestants and Catholics were treated as second-class citizens. The abolition of the Corporation (1828) and Test (1829) Acts began the political emancipation of, respectively, Nonconformists and Catholics; the process of Jewish emancipation and the broader social emancipation of non-Anglicans only commenced in the 1830s. Throughout the sixteenth century, England moved closer to “Protestantism,” as witnessed by the Prayer Book of 1552, the Thirty-Nine Articles (the Confession of 1571), and the translation of the Bible in 1611 (The King James or Authorized Version). Anglicanism comprises two principal currents: Low and High Church. The former, so named at the end of the seventeenth century by the members of the latter, can be defined as both the more Protestant and democratic of the two. High Church Anglicanism is closer to Catholicism, with its emphasis on the church fathers, the episcopate, and the liturgy. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the church was profoundly shaken by the Oxford Movement (also called the Tractarian movement), launched by the publication by two Oxford professors, Edward Pusey and John Henry Newman, of ninety Tracts for the Times between 1833 and 1841, which caused a great stir. In these texts, they proposed that Anglicanism offered a via media between Rome and the Reform, that their “Anglo-Catholicism” rested on the theology of the church fathers and the apostolic succession, and that the Thirty-Nine Articles could be read in the light of traditional Catholicism. These views provoked such an outcry that Newman was obliged to stop publishing the Tracts. In 1845, he converted to Catholicism, as did many other members of the Oxford Movement. But his departure did not halt the further evolution of Anglo-Catholicism within the Anglican Church, which continued to draw on Tractarian ideas. The Calvinist or Reformed world presented geographical and political situations quite different from the Lutheran and Anglican configurations, but they were also

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marked by their diversity. This was not a territorial Reformation, nor an urban one in the manner of Basel, Bern, Zurich, or Strasbourg, but rather a third type of Reformation that the historian Heiko A. Oberman termed the “Reformation of the Refugees” (2009). This Reformation ultimately centered around Jean Calvin and a city that was not “Calvin’s Geneva” (in the same sense that Zurich was Huldrych Zwingli’s city), but rather an arsenal (Oberman 2009) whose defensive towers were less important than were its major arteries leading to the world, from Italy to Scotland and from France to Poland. Starting with Calvin, a diaspora of refugees arrived in Geneva from all over Europe. From Geneva departed emissaries, founders (e. g. John Knox for Scotland) and books (The Institutes of the Christian Religion, Marot and Bèze’s Psalter), which were translated or adapted during the sixteenth century into numerous languages. Together, they constituted a Calvinist Reformation in the form of an international archipelago whose contours were still visible in the nineteenth century: a few Reformed states and especially many islands of minorities. Among the states were the Swiss Confederation, the Netherlands, and Scotland. Many of the Swiss republics or cantons (Geneva, Lausanne, Neuchâtel, etc.) had national (Reformed) churches, just as there was a Presbyterian Church (Kirk) of Scotland. In Switzerland, a country divided into Protestant and Catholic cantons (in 1847, the Catholic cantons’ efforts to protect their interests provoked the armed conflict known as the Sonderbund War), the situation was mainly biconfessional, just as in southwestern (and Rhenish) Germany. Until 1830, Catholics were in the majority in the United Provinces, but after the split with Catholic Belgium that year, the (northern) Netherlands became majority Calvinist (55 percent of the population, with another 5 percent belonging to some other Protestant denomination). The tradition here was one of pluralism and tolerance, including towards Jews, even though anti-papism was strong, as in England, and the new state’s national narrative stressed Protestantism and the House of Orange. Among the Calvinist minorities, we should note French Protestants (about 1.6 percent of the population if the predominantly Lutheran Alsatians are excluded, 2.3 percent if their numbers are included); the infinitely small group of Piedmontese Valdese (Waldensians who adopted the Reform in 1532 and obtained equal rights after February 1848); the Reformed minority of Bohemia-Moravia (2.3 percent of the population, including Lutherans of German origin); the important Hungarian community (about 20 percent of the population, mostly in Transylvania, which became Romanian in 1918); and a Polish minority group whose history is more important than the country’s image suggests. The relationships between these Protestantisms and the state varied greatly: in Switzerland, the Netherlands, Scotland (where the Kirk was an established church on the English model), and Hungary after the compromise of 1867, Protestants were closely associated with power. Elsewhere, they were destined to be minority groups who nourished a vivid Protestant memory because of notable military or judicial defeats: White Mountain for Protestants in Bohemia (1620), the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes for French Huguenots (1685), the “Piedmont Easter” of 1655 or the 1686 exile of the Waldensians. Such painful events of the past played an essential role, even if a somewhat paradoxical one, in the formation of minority identities. Furthermore,

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they explain the different ways in which these groups viewed Jews during the 1940s, encouraging solidarities based on a shared sense of victimhood. No overview of European Protestantism in the nineteenth century would be complete without mentioning the much smaller minority communities that derived from the radical Reformations of previous centuries, namely the Anabaptists and Mennonites in the Rhine region, and those that arose out of the contemporary blossoming of Protestant revivalism. Take, for example, the Netherlands, the land par excellence of Calvinist scissiparity. In 1849 its population included, apart from Lutherans (2.05 percent of the population): Mennonites (1.26 percent); a dissident Reformed church (the Christelijke Gereformeerde Kerk), founded in 1838 (1.31 percent); as well as the “Remonstrants,” a community formed in 1619 the day after the famous Synod of Dordrecht and opposed to the Calvinist definition of predestination (0.16 percent)—by 1909 their presence had tripled, thanks to the support of liberal Calvinists. In 1892, most of the Gereformeerde joined with the “grievers” (dolerenden) who followed the neo-Calvinist theologian Abraham Kuyper (1827– 1920) to form the Gereformeerde Kerken in Nederland, which comprised 8.4 percent of the population and embodied the theological “right.” All these changes came at the cost of the classic Reformed Church that eventually served only 44.2 percent of the population. This type of Protestant “sprawl” also existed within the Lutheran and especially Anglican traditions, a phenomenon largely explained by the powerful influence of Protestant evangelicalism throughout the century.

From the Enlightenment to Liberal Theology and Historical-Critical Exegesis The Enlightenment profoundly marked European Protestantism. This was not, however, the radical French Enlightenment (les Lumières), which opposed the only Christianity familiar to Voltaire and the Encyclopedists—Catholicism—and promoted anticlericalism and materialism. Rather, one must point to the Enlightenment that took shape in Europe’s Protestant zones: in England, Scotland, and the German lands (where the operative term was Aufklärung). Developing on Christian soil, this Enlightenment explicitly recognized its Christian roots and debts; it was even nourished by Christian teaching. These Enlightenments aimed first to modernize the Christian faith (or, in the case of Moses Mendelssohn in Berlin, the Jewish faith) and adapt it to modern times. To that end, Christianity had to be rid of its dogmatic straitjacket and the confessional mold it had inherited from the Age of the Reformation. It would thus become a “reasonable” Christianity, as seen in the titles of two influential works—John Locke’s The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) and Immanuel Kant’s Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason (Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft, 1793)—and not differ fundamentally from natural religion. Having lost the monopoly position it had enjoyed in the seventeenth century, Christianity now found itself having to contend with European society’s secularization, that is, a phenomenon characterized both by religion’s

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growing privatization and by the pluralization of competing knowledge systems (especially science and political utopianism). And from that moment on, to simplify the matter, two main answers emerged within the European Protestant world to these contemporary challenges to Christianity: liberal theology, which opts for a dialogue with modernity, and evangelicalism, which seeks to situate itself on a different, more personal plane, but also ends up rediscovering “the social,” as we shall see. Liberal theology was already so named at the end of the eighteenth century; it was the subject of the Swiss scholar Alois Emanuel Biedermann’s book Die freie Theologie (The Free Theology, 1844). It was closely linked to the development of the democratic ideal during the nineteenth century, but with contrasting outcomes. In Switzerland, liberal theology accompanied the victory of democratic forces, notably in Lausanne in 1845, and then following the Sonderbund War. In France, and despite its internal defeat during the national synod of 1872, or rather, thanks to this defeat that freed its leaders for other tasks, liberal Protestantism played a surprising role in the establishment of the Republic and secular schooling during the 1880s. Indeed, Ferdinand Buisson (1849 – 1932) and Félix Pécaut (1828 – 98), both former theologians, were leaders in the field of primary schooling. In Germany, by contrast, the victory of political conservatism after the revolutions of 1848 marginalized liberal Protestants, although they later rallied to the national politics of Otto von Bismarck. At this point, modern (liberal) Protestantism evolved into “cultural Protestantism” (Kulturprotestantismus), a term coined in 1905 by its opponents (Hübinger 1994). Supported by the typically German “educated bourgeoisie” (Bildungsbürgertum), cultural Protestantism penetrated the cultural domain in its broadest sense—art, science, economics, law—and took special interest in the dialectical relations among religion, modern culture, and the individual’s freedom to fulfill oneself. Its principal theologian was Professor Albrecht Ritschl of Göttingen (1822 – 89) and its principal forum the journal Die Christliche Welt, which Martin Rade edited from the publication’s foundation in 1887 until 1931. The strength of this neo-Protestantism (Neuprotestantismus), as Ernst Troeltsch called cultural Protestantism at the beginning of the twentieth century, was that it didn’t just try to adapt Christianity to modern times but that it also regarded itself as the matrix of modernity, much as Friedrich Schleiermacher had argued in Über die Glaubenslehre (The Doctrine of Faith, 1829): the Reformation’s aim had been to “create an eternal contract between living Christian faith and scientific research that had become completely autonomous.” We could also speak of a “genealogical affirmative” to explain liberal Protestantism’s comfortable rapport with modernity, contrary to both Catholicism and evangelicalism (see below). As Richard Rothe noted in his Theologische Ethik (Theological Ethics, 2nd edition, 1869 – 71), ecclesial Christianity would never again be coextensive with society (the dream of one “Christendom”) and it was futile to try to reconquer the lost space, as was the overactive and perhaps even desperate ambition of the Evangelicals. Rather, one must be convinced that the modern world’s ethos is, in its substance, Christian.

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This myth’s powerful fertility and its capacity to mobilize energies is well known. It traversed the century and even domains that had little to do with theology, as the following four books, each one different in its ambition and posterity, attest. First, the Essai sur l’écrit et l’influence de la Réformation de Luther (1804), by the Lorrainer publicist Charles de Villers, who settled in Germany and was a friend of Germaine de Staël and Benjamin Constant. Second, Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous De la démocratie en Amérique (1836). Third, De l’avenir des peuples catholiques: Étude d’économie sociale (1875), by the Belgian convert Émile de Laveleye, who, along with others (including the Frenchmen Michel Bréal and Gabriel Monod), intended to draw “confessional lessons” from the French military defeat against the Prussians in 1870. Finally, Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904 – 5), whose basic thesis the French socialist Alphonse Toussenel had already exposed in Les Juifs, rois de l’époque: Histoire de la féodalité financière (1845), which, its antisemitic remarks notwithstanding, is in fact the foundational text of modern anti-Protestantism. Neo-Protestantism’s other key trait was its historical theology: history, with such auxiliary sciences as philology, was the nineteenth-century’s leading discipline. Its methodologies gained a foothold in theology as soon as the latter was defined as specialized knowledge and maintained as an academic (university) discipline. This explains the central importance of German universities and their professors of theology, along with the recognized prestige of the German historical school, which developed a powerful critical approach to the Bible (the so-called “historical-critical approach”). By contrast, French theologians failed to pursue the promising paths opened up by the Huguenot Louis Cappel and the Oratorian Richard Simon in the seventeenth century (German theologians considered Renan’s 1863 Vie de Jésus worthless in terms of science). The pioneering work in this historical approach is Abhandlung von der freien Untersuchung des Kanons (Treatise on the Free Investigation of the Canon, 1771 – 75), by the Halle professor Johann Salomo Semler, who substituted a historical conception of the biblical canon for the former dogmatic one. Thereafter, German scholars devoted particular attention to the history of ancient Israel and the beginnings of Christianity, the history of dogma and that of the historical Jesus. Several hundred versions of the “Life of Jesus,” examined by the Alsatian Albert Schweitzer (Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung, 1906, translated into English in 1911), were published in the nineteenth century, working from fragments left by Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694 – 1768), edited posthumously in 1778, and lectures given by Schleiermacher himself. Because of the controversies it incited, the most notable version was David Friedrich Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet (1835), which questioned the date of the writing and, consequently, the apostolic authenticity of the Gospel of John. Strauss argued that the Gospels did not permit one to know the historical Jesus; they only presented a myth, that is, a plausible foundation narrative. The creator of historical-critical exegesis, Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792 – 1860), did not come to the same conclusion, but he confirmed the Gospel of John’s late provenance and, hence, shifted scholarly focus to the synoptic Gospels. He founded the modern history of dogma (Handbuch der christlichen Dogmengeschichte, 1847), while insist-

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ing that the books of the Bible, clearly rooted in history, must be studied with the same instruments used for the profane literature of Antiquity. The so-called Tübingen school, the university where Baur taught until his death, used the journal Theologische Jahrbücher to disseminate its ideas. After Baur, the great theologian Adolf von Harnack published his own three-volume Lehrbuch des Dogmengeschichte (1886 – 90), in which he argued that dogma should not be confused with the Gospel. The former was an instrument intended to make the latter and its pastness comprehensible. “In both its conception and its deployment, it was a work of the Greek spirit resting on the soil of the Gospel”; its relevance was lost with the Reformation. While historical theology remained well anchored within the German university, this was not the case in other university systems. In Britain, the Hibbert Trust, established in 1853 to contribute to the university training of future Unitarian ministers, launched a lecture series in 1878 featuring non-sectarian talks on religious history. Among the lecturers were the German-born Oxford professor Friedrich Max Müller, the British Egyptologist Peter Le Page Renouf, Ernest Renan and Albert Réville (both French), Abraham Kuenen (Dutch), Otto Pfleiderer (German), and Eugène Goblet d’Alviella (Belgian). In 1887, the Gifford Lectures were inaugurated in Scotland with similar scientific and comparative aims. On the Continent, the Dutch Higher Education Act of 1876 (which took effect with the school year beginning in October 1877), reorganized the country’s four faculties of Protestant theology. They kept their names, their buildings, their professors, and students, but the fields of dogma and practical theology were eliminated in favor of two new disciplines: “history of religions in general” and “religious philosophy.” The principal figure of this Dutch school, which had its roots in liberal Protestantism, was the Arminian pastor Cornelis Petrus Tiele, who coined the term godsdienstwetenschap in 1866.¹ His colleague, Pierre Daniel Chantepie de la Saussaye, a Dutchman of Huguenot background, published his Lehrbuch des Religiongeschichte (1887– 89) in Freiburg. Between 1870 and 1890, several religious history chairs were established: in Switzerland (Geneva, 1873, the first such chair in the world; then Lausanne, Zurich, Basel, and Bern); in three Hungarian institutions, most prominently at Pressburg/Bratislava; at Copenhagen, Christiania (Oslo), and Uppsala (Sweden); and in two Finnish universities. All these chairs were established within the Faculty of Protestant Theology, except in Geneva, where it was created in the Faculty of Letters. It is even possible to speak of a sort of “Protestant international” in this institutionalization of religious sciences: through these Protestant scholars’ translations and their correspondence with one another, a key step was taken towards the secularization of culture. Three capitals of Catholic countries were also involved: in Rome, the advocate of the new discipline was a former priest, Baldassare Labanca, while in Brussels, the convert to Protestantism Goblet d’Alviella introduced the new science at the city’s Free University. In Paris, the Protestant pastor Albert Réville (1826 – 1906) inaugurated the

1 Literally, “study of worship”; in the 1870s, Friedrich Max Müller promoted a similar term, Religionswissenschaft, which in English is currently rendered as “religious studies.”

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Chair of Religious History at the Collège de France in 1880 and, with his son Jean and a handful of other pastors and Protestant intellectuals, he effectively ran the religious sciences section created in 1885 at the École pratique des hautes études.

The Bubbling Up of Awakenings Conservative and “orthodox” theologians condemned a large part of the theological work we have just described. Harnack’s father, himself an important theologian at Erlangen, wrote his son that any man who supported the latter’s position on the resurrection was no longer, in his eyes, a Christian theologian. In fact, there was an obvious risk that Protestantism was taking in believing itself asymptotic with modern reason, science, and moral values, namely dissolution into a humanism—and other terms ending in -ism, including liberalism, socialism, democratism, and pacifism—without transcendence. Herein lies the radicality with which Karl Barth (1886 – 1968), who having participated in this liberal Protestantism as a young man, broke with it in the name of God’s verticality, which could not be compromised by the immanence of human constructions. The Basel-born Barth had been scandalized by the October 1914 Manifesto of the Intellectuals, signed by ninety-three professors, including his own teacher, Harnack, to support Germany’s war aims. In fact, clergy throughout Europe supported the war, but for Barth the question was much greater: it reflected the fundamental risk Protestantism faced in its dialogue with modernity. For many of its nineteenthcentury adversaries, liberal Protestantism paved the way for an evolution towards renouncing or forgetting Christianity. For some, both theologians (such as Edmond Scherer, 1815 – 89) and the lay faithful, this view of Protestantism was the final step before leaving the Christian fold. However, this exit had nothing to do with the ruptures or excommunications that troubled the Catholic Church at the time, notably with the Modernist crisis. Among ultraliberal Protestants, there was a form of extenuation of faith and, for the pastors concerned, a transmutation of their vocation into other forms of service: education, medicine, or social work more generally, including politics. Paradoxically, the movements of awakened Protestantism (evangelicalism) also attached great importance to social engagement, but this stance had a radically different starting point. They never stopped standing up to the “rationalizing” and “modern” tendencies within Protestantism. This tension between liberal/awakened or liberal/evangelical was central to its history and had been so since the sixteenth century, just as was, on another level, the friction between the territorial church (called multitudinist or Volkskirche), the local church (the congregation), and the small groups of believers who made a point of gathering to express their faith as “converted” Christians, whether or not they sought to separate from the official church. Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch both wrote about this particularly Protestant typology in works that have become classics. There too the roots ran deep, as attested to by the powerful pietist tradition within Lutheranism but also British Puritanism and the Dutch Nadere Reformatie (Further Reformation).

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In Pietism, the ecclesiastical bond is less important than individual faith, and the practice of this faith prevails over its doctrinal content. Small groups of the pious (collegia pietatis) thus gathered those believers who wished to worship together, without ever breaking with official parish services. The work considered to be Pietism’s founding text is Pia Desideria ou Désir sincère d’une amélioration de la vraie Église évangélique (1675), by the Alsatian Philipp Jakob Spener, which was both a severe critique of the state of the Lutheran Church and a program for improvement to be achieved through holding home meetings (“conventicles”), changes to Christian practice, and better sermons. Spener’s disciple, August Hermann Francke, experienced a conversion in October 1687 and wrote about it for the edification of others. This was the beginning of a literary genre, which helps explain the enduring success of autobiography in the Protestant world, but also a way to live one’s faith (being reborn) that characterizes Protestant revival movements to the present day. Another disciple, Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700 – 60), welcomed to Herrnhut, in Upper Lusatia, the Moravian Brethren expelled from Bohemia. A powerful movement developed with missions in Europe and North America (after 1740) and colleges where a part of Europe’s Protestant elite studied, notably, Schleiermacher, but also the great figure of the French réveil, the Swiss pastor Ami Bost (1790 – 1874). In this manner, Pietism and Awakening were directly linked. The Moravian Brethren’s decisive influence on John Wesley (1703 – 71) during his stay in America is well known. Methodism developed first within the Anglican Church, but on Wesley’s death it seceded. Wesley, George Whitefield (1714 – 70), and other Methodists all stressed the importance of personal conversion; their movement was noted for its enthusiasm, outdoor preaching, and evangelization among the working class. In his classic study, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), the British historian Edward P. Thompson demonstrated, in an argument that prolonged the theses of Max Weber and Richard Henry Tawney (in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 1926), how especially under the leadership of Wesley’s principal successor, Jabez Bunting (1779 – 1858), Methodism encouraged workers to submit to the industrial discipline of the beginning of the nineteenth century, their “internal restraint” serving to channel their energy into work. The paradoxical genius of British Methodism between 1790 and 1830 was that it was simultaneously the religion of the industrial bourgeoisie and of much of the proletariat. That the pious entrepreneur of Self Help (Samuel Smiles, 1859) saw in his success a fully Weberian proof of his election goes without saying. But the working class? For Thompson, the answer lay in the “community of substitution” that the Methodist chapels offered to many of the uprooted and even more so the “millenarianism of desperation” that prospered among the ruins of disappointed political hopes. At the same moment, several bankers as well as the Member of Parliament William Wilberforce (1759 – 1833) joined the group of evangelical social reformers called the “Clapham Saints” (or Clapham Sect) near London. And by 1850, Methodists had increased tenfold their number of places of worship, which were especially numerous in mining regions and the poorest urban neighborhoods.

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In total, if one includes Baptists and Congregationalists (both of seventeenth-century origins), Dissent involved 20 percent of the British population. However, while these older movements underwent a form of institutionalization, while still demonstrating their missionary zeal, new movements appeared at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, often linked to the powerful Protestantism of the United States. Between 1830 and 1850, the British Isles had already experienced the spectacular flourishing of Darbyism, named after John Nelson Darby (1800 – 92). In 1878, the Methodist pastor William Booth (1829 – 1912) founded the Salvation Army, a movement structured along military lines but from which, notably, women were not excluded (Booth’s oldest daughter, Catherine, nicknamed “the Marshal,” introduced the movement to Paris in 1881). The movement quickly took root in what became the British Commonwealth, Europe (there were more than seven hundred “officers” in Sweden in 1900), Latin America, and the Far East. Between November 1904 and Spring 1905, Wales experienced a spectacular revival (the Welsh Revival) after a prior episode in 1859. The grand preacher of the latter revival was the young Evan Roberts (1878 – 1951), who retired soon after. Some 100,000 people, one-tenth of the population, were converted and many fascinated foreigners, notably from France, rushed there to observe it. The Welsh Revival spread internationally, but its influence was most notable on the growing Pentecostal movement in the United States. Other European regions experienced remarkable evangelical revivals, Sweden in particular, where preachers were at times former émigrés to the United States who returned home to encourage conversion. Of note during the 1890s were John Ongman, founder of a biblical institute and the mission of Örebro, and, especially, Fredrik Franson, who preached the second coming of Christ, published Himlauret eller det profetiska ordet (The Heavenly Timeclock or the Prophetic Word, 1897), and sent thirty-five missionaries of the Scandinavian Alliance Mission to China in 1891. Selma Lagerlöf, Nobel Prize laureate for Literature (1909), described the apocalyptic ambience of these milieus in two novels, Jerusalem and The Holy City: Jerusalem II (1901 – 2). Danish Protestantism, too, was profoundly marked by the personality of Nikolaj Frederik Severin Grundtvig (1783 – 1872), a pastor, writer, and adversary of the Lutheran Church’s official theologians. Most of the targets and conquests of evangelization were Protestant societies or milieus, as we have seen, but such Catholic countries as France and Italy (where British Methodists were at work) and certain German states were also targeted. The four Protestant Bible societies active in France during the century, for example, distributed nearly 17.5 million Bibles, New Testaments, and extracts of the Old and/or New Testaments there. A key figure in this distribution was the biblical peddler who crisscrossed the regions, at times harassed by the authorities. Jews were also objects of an important missionary effort, as seen with the (Anglican) Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews, founded in 1809. By the 1880s, no fewer than forty-seven missionary societies (including those in North America) promoted evangelization among the Jews; even the tiny French Protestant community established a Société française pour l’évangélisation d’Israël in 1888.

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Since at least the eighteenth century, the Awakening was a truly international phenomenon, with centers in England, Scotland, and Switzerland that were in constant communication with the United States. Christian hymns were a significant element of this internationalism. The classical psalter (the Psalms of David set to verse) saw its brilliant career end during the nineteenth century, whether one speaks of Clément Marot and Théodore de Bèze’s work (1561), which initially targeted the francophone Reformed milieu (later, other vernaculars were adapted to the same melodies), or of its British equivalent, The Whole Book of Psalmes, collected to English metre (1562, modernized in 1696, and revised by Isaac Watts in 1719). These psalters were replaced by hymnals that were profoundly shaped by the different Awakenings and by the translations among English, French, German, even Welsh. The German-born Evangelical Henri Lutteroth translated the “Lutheran Chorale” into French for his Chants chrétiens (1835). Similarly, the American Methodist Ira David Sankey accompanied the great preacher Dwight L. Moody during a revivalist tour through Great Britain (1873 – 75) and collected, wrote, or arranged 1,200 hymns for his Sacred Songs and Solos (1st ed. 1873; final ed. 1907). He translated the famous “Dyma Gariad” from Welsh into English, which then passed into French via the intervention of another Evangelical, Ruben Saillens. In fact, without always being aware of it, late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Protestants sang a repertoire that was both centuries-old (many psalms were retained in the hymnals) and international. The Gospel circulated along similar paths, beginning with “Amazing Grace” by the Englishman John Newton (1779). The religious life of these Protestants varied greatly, as we can well understand, depending on whether they belonged to older Lutheran, Anglican, or Reformed churches or were touched by the Awakening. In the latter case, they were far more concerned with their conversion and its testimony; they lived their faith, genuinely chosen in their adulthood, in a more regular and fervent way, either in separatist churches or new denominations. The Free Kirk in Scotland, born of the Great Disruption of 1843, and the Free Church founded in Lausanne in 1845 offer two examples of churches divided in two and a culture that was generally multitudinous among those who decided to leave the official church. Throughout Protestant Europe, these “free churchpersons” built their own places of worship, generally called “chapels” to distinguish them from the church that remained the property of the official parish community they had left. From then on, Protestant cities and even their suburbs witnessed the realization in architecture of the divisions within Protestantism, as Baptists, Methodists, Salvationists, and other denominations built houses of worship. Baptist “chapels” even included an interior baptismal pool, since the debate over infant versus adult baptism still provoked strife. The faithful who remained members of the official churches, by far the more numerous, did not forsake them yet, except, for many, when emigration led them to cities. In the smaller towns and countryside, keeping the Sabbath and attending church were important parts as much of social as religious life. Children were baptized, marriages were blessed, and funeral services were presided over by the pastor. The latter was always a leading figure in the community; his wife played a key role in parish activities,

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especially those involving women and youth. The couple’s children were also expected to show exemplary behavior. The “minister of the Gospel” had normally completed a rigorous course of studies, culminating with a thesis, and the prestigious German universities attracted young theologians from all over Europe. In his parish, the pastor was a key player and often a scholar, that is a historian and author. He worked closely with the schoolmaster, contrary to the quarreling often observed between priests and teachers in Catholic countries. European novels readily featured pastors, as we see, following the example of Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), in the works of British authors Anthony Trollope (1815 – 82), William Makepeace Thackeray (1811 – 63), and especially the Brontë sisters and Jane Austen, all pastors’ daughters; but also the Swede Selma Lagerlöf (Gösta Berkubgs Saga, 1891), the Swiss Rodolphe Töpffer (Le Presbytère, 1832), and the Frenchmen Édouard Rod (Le ménage du Pasteur Naudié, 1898) and André Gide (La symphonie pastorale, 1919). In Protestantism, of course, the sacraments had been reduced to just two: Baptism and Holy Communion, which was available only a few times per year. The rite of passage par excellence was First Communion, usually taken for the first time around the age of fourteen, serving thus as the entry into the workplace and into adulthood. Advances in literacy and in the distribution of Bibles meant that most households possessed at least the New Testament, perhaps the full Bible as well, given to the newlyweds by the pastor. It also served as a family record—the term “home bible” (in German, Hausbibel) was commonplace—with blank pages that families filled with the dates of births, marriages, and deaths. The traditional image of Protestant piety suggests that the family read the Bible together, as Georges Bretegnier shows in his 1892 painting, La lecture de la Bible au Pays de Montbéliard (Figure 4.1), and that the psalms were sung even in everyday life, but it is not clear how far the image represented the reality. Frequently, the walls of Protestant homes were covered with wood plaques bearing biblical verses, or, in the case of wealthier families, with reproductions of historical or biblical images. For example, the Paraboles illustrées (1908), by the Swiss painter Eugène Burnand, were very popular in the Reformed French-speaking world. Even before the turn of the century, the Bible contributed to the family’s entertainment, providing a motif for such parlor games as Happy Families and the Game of the Goose. Even language was not free of biblical influences, hence such terms as pfarrerdeitsch (“pastors’ German”) in Alsace and “patois de Canaan” in French-speaking areas. Indeed, the nineteenth century seems to have completed the so-called “biblicization” of culture in Protestant Europe, and not just in the areas marked by Awakenings.

The Evolution from the Spiritual to the Social Among the characteristics of the Awakenings were their evangelical and missionary dynamism as well as their charitable and social engagements. They were responsible for the Bible societies, of which many were interdenominational, uniting Dissenters and Anglicans. Indeed, taking advantage of technical advances in publishing as well

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Figure 4.1: Georges Bretegnier, La lecture de la Bible, 1892. Oil on canvas, 58 x 72 cm. Image courtesy of the Musée Beurnier, Montbéliard, France.

as European improvements in schooling and literacy, the nineteenth century became a golden age of the Bible. The number of societies distributing it, often at no cost, multiplied. In Britain alone we find the Bible Society (1780), which targeted soldiers and sailors; the Religious Tract Society (1799); and the British and Foreign Bible Society (1804), a powerful institution that printed and distributed Bibles translated into a series of languages. Bible classes were offered to adults. Ellen Henrietta Ranyard (1810 – 79) founded her own biblical mission, the Bible women, who distributed Bibles door to door and read the Bible to women residing in disadvantaged parts of London. The institution then spilled over into Europe and its mission territories, as seen with the Bibelfrauen (Bible women) active in German-speaking Switzerland (Basel) and in Germany by century’s end. A properly German tradition was started with the founding in Halle of the Cansteinsche Bibelanstalt (1710) by Baron Carl Hildebrand von Canstein, whose efforts were reinforced after 1800 by the Württembergische Bibelanstalt (1812, in Stuttgart) and by the Bible Societies (Bibelgesellchaften) established in 1814 in Berlin, Dresden (Saxony), and Elberfeld (whose agents ventured as far as northern Italy and Algeria).

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Beginning in 1883 in Elberfeld, German high school students had access to Bible circles (Bibelkränzchen or Bibelkreise). In 1914, there were three hundred of these circles in over two hundred cities. But it was the British Congregationalist George Williams who created in London (1844) the first association of young Christian men, the Young Men’s Christian Association or YMCA, a group that experienced success worldwide, first in the English-speaking world; in German- and then French-speaking Switzerland—noteworthy is Henri Dumont’s chapter in Geneva (1852)—in France, with the Unions chrétiennes de jeunes gens (UCJG, 1852); and then in Germany, with the Christlicher Verein junger Männer (CVJM, 1883), which also established the Deutsche Christliche Studentenvereinigung (German Union of Christian Students, 1890). The YMCA World Alliance was founded in Paris in 1855. A female branch, the YWCA, was founded in London in 1885 and the World YWCA in 1894, with notably the involvement of Norway and Sweden. Whether affected by the Awakening or not, every Protestant community multiplied its “good works” after 1800; it was a major feature of the century. These programs anticipated state involvement, as in Germany, or compensated for its shortcomings, and this well before the welfare state came into existence. A case in point was education with the innovation of Sunday schools, which strove to teach children who worked the other days of the week. The initiative came once again from British and Anglican groups, notably the journalist Richard Raikes, who in 1785 spearheaded the foundation of The Society to Support and Encourage Sunday Schools. Notwithstanding controversies related to the respect of the Sabbath, the movement’s success was considerable: 300,000 British children were attending Sunday schools by the end of the decade and 5.5 million in 1910. The introduction of mandatory primary education, however, gradually transformed the Sunday schools, making them into parish institutions that provided catechism lessons. The Continent was also conquered, with Sonntagsschulen in Germany and Écoles du dimanche in France (as of 1814); thanks to the efforts of JeanPaul Cook, a national “Société des écoles du dimanche” was created in 1852. European Protestantism also developed an original feminine figure, the deaconess, who was roughly equivalent to the Catholic nun in hospitals (a situation that also provoked repeated accusations of their crypto-Catholicism). Communities of deaconesses appeared first in the German Lutheran world thanks to the efforts of pastor Theodor Fliedner, who founded the Kaiserswerther Diakonie near Düsseldorf in 1836. The institution spread rapidly throughout Germany, Alsace (Strasbourg, 1842; Neuenberg, 1877), and Scandinavia before arriving in the Reformed areas of Switzerland (Bern, Basel, and the Canton of Vaud during the 1840s) and France (Reuilly, 1841), as well as in Anglican Britain (1862). Important nursing schools were linked to the Deaconesses, especially those associated with Florence Nightingale (1820 – 1910) in London, her disciple Anna Hamilton (1864 – 1935) in Bordeaux, and Anna Maria Cederschiöld (1815 – 92), the founding director (Ersta Diakon) of the Diakonissanstalten in Stockholm (1851). Many other aspects of European social life were implicated. Aside from campaigns to abolish slavery—in England, William Wilberforce’s successful campaign led to the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833—Protestant churches directed their action

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towards such groups as the poor, orphans, domestic workers, prostitutes, prisoners, alcoholics (the Swiss pastor Louis-Lucien Rochat established the Blue Cross in 1877), the handicapped (with two pathbreaking institutes founded after 1860—the Bethel Foundation in Bielefeld, Germany and La Force in southwest France), and the sick. Most of these initiatives were marked by an evangelical spirit and strove above all to evangelize the poor and those who seemed to have fallen out of the parish network or had been “abandoned” by the official churches. In Germany, the heart of the movement was the Innere Mission (Inner Mission). Founded by Pastor Johann Hinrich Wichern (1808 – 81), it had begun by welcoming abandoned children to the Rauhes Haus in Hamburg. Wichern established a type of evangelical and charitable empire. Sometimes it was closely linked to the churches, at other moments it resembled rather a parallel organization with its own, specialized pastors. The Inner Mission oversaw almost all of these Protestant social endeavors in what became the German Empire; it was an empire within an empire, comprising farming colonies, food stations, societies overseeing the construction of social housing, savings banks, and hospitals. In Bielefeld, Pastor Friedrich von Bodelschwingh became director of the Bethel Institute in 1872, transforming it into one of the most important institutions within the Inner Mission. In Great Britain, 144 societies, often interdenominational in nature, were created during the 1850s alone to provide assistance to the working classes. The churches in fact realized that they were in the process of losing the working classes, as contemporary studies already suggested. Britain’s famous 1851 census of church attendance (the results were published in 1854) revealed that half of those surveyed did not attend church. This was especially true of the working-class population, which the survey described as “a world apart.” A generation later, two works offered a dramatic vision of those left behind by Victorian society: The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883) by Andrew Mearns, secretary of the London Congregation Union; and William Booth’s In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890). In 1880 in Berlin, only 13 percent of Protestants took Communion at least once a year; 26 percent of newborn babies were not baptized; 52 percent of marriages and 80 percent of burials were civil ceremonies. One of the reasons for this trend, observable throughout Europe (even in Catholic regions), was the inadequate distribution of places of worship: industrial zones, new cities, and suburban areas generally lacked churches. A first response was to launch campaigns for new church construction: 2,529 new structures were built in Great Britain during the first half of the century. During the second half of the century, Germany experienced more construction sites for new churches than it had seen since the Middle Ages, with no fewer than forty-two projects in Berlin alone during the decade 1889 – 99, which permitted a partial return of Protestant families to the church (Mayeur et al. 1995, 240, 675). Spiritual concerns were also pursued via social means. The well-known slogan of the Salvation Army was significant concerning the order of its priorities: soup, soap, salvation. Most Protestant initiatives were based on this restorative vision for society; it might lead to social reform but it was not a political project and even less a revolutionary one. Certain engagements, however, could lead them to the brink of political

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activism. A case in point is the powerful movement in favor of the Social Gospel, which sought to find answers to the growing inequalities created by the Industrial Revolution and the working classes’ loss of interest in religion. The Social Gospel flourished everywhere, even in France, where the pastor Tommy Fallot founded the Protestant Association for the Practical Study of Social Questions in 1887. In Great Britain, it took on different forms by the end of the century. The settlement movement sought to create community housing in the heart of disadvantaged neighborhoods for young Christians from good families, the first one being Toynbee Hall. Others offered religious and social services throughout the week (French pastors organized similar gatherings, called solidarités, for workers in the industrial north). The Christian Social Union, founded in 1889, even tried to develop a form of Christian socialism, but it never succeeded in connecting with the working masses. Social Christianity was especially powerful in a Germany marked by the action of Wichern and Bodelschwingh. But after 1870, it underwent a surprising shift towards politics due to the proposals of two controversial pastors. The first of these was Adolf Stoecker, who was the leading figure of the Zentralverein für soziale Reform (Central Association for Social Reform, 1877), which became the Christlich-soziale Arbeiterpartei (Christian-Social Workers’ Party) in 1878 and finally the Christlich-soziale Partei in 1880. Having become a professional politician, the pastor notably went from opposing capitalism to espousing antisemitism. His colleague, Friedrich Naumann, followed a different course, moving from social Christianity to social imperialism after launching the journal Die Hilfe in 1894. At the turn of the century, an important sector of German Protestantism also contributed to the development of a powerful sense of German nationalism that would be prominent among opponents of the Weimar Republic and then, in 1933, in the rallying of the German Christians (Deutsche Christen), who constituted a large majority of the Lutheran Church, to the Nazi regime. Meanwhile, the Prussian Oberkirchenrat, which in its edict of 1879 had recommended social action while banning political activism, changed its stance in 1890 and invited pastors to establish Christian trade unions (Arbeitervereine). The same year, the first Protestant Social Congress was organized in Germany, which soon established permanent institutions to carry out the Congress’s work in between the annual meetings. This energetic Christian social response, it should be noted, also owed much to the strength of Marxism in Germany. Since social questions were being posed in rather similar terms from one country to another, the Frenchman Élie Gounelle (1865 – 1950) proposed creating an International Federation of Social Christianity. However, the outbreak of the First World War prevented the holding of its founding conference, planned for Basel in 1914. Nonetheless, the contours of a first ecumenical organization, strictly intra-Protestant for the moment, had been sketched out. Drawing on this base, the Lutheran archbishop of Uppsala, Nathan Söderblom, took the initiative after the war to organize the World Conference of Life and Work, held in 1925 in Stockholm. Initiatives such as these demonstrate that European Protestantism was conscious of the major questions posed by political, social, and philosophic change. During the

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later decades of the nineteenth century and the early ones of the twentieth, Protestant churches everywhere were confronted with the increasing power of left-wing political parties, but also of secular movements, from free thought to scientism and materialism. It suffices here to mention the work of Charles Darwin and its considerable consequences for the older Christian view of the world. Among his disciples, often branded as “infidels” because they advocated conclusions concerning biology and race that Darwin himself never espoused, we should also note the German Ernst Haeckel (1834 – 1919), the philosopher of monism. At the turn of the century, a new crisis in the European conscience was evident. It clearly engaged all of Christendom but did so with special intensity within Protestantism and among intellectuals from Protestant backgrounds. The churches also supported the worldwide European imperialistic expansion. Even if the cartography of missionary activity did not completely match that of colonization, it is easy to see that the dynamism of pre-1914 Europe overseas had a clearly Christian and especially (Evangelical) Protestant face. After an eighteenth century dominated by the Moravian Brethren, a series of missionary societies were established in Britain: the Baptist Missionary Society (1794), the soon-to-be dominant London Missionary Society (LMS, 1795), the (Anglican) Church Missionary Society (1799), and the Methodist Missionary Society (1813). On the Continent, the list includes the Basel Missionary Society (1815), the Société des Missions évangéliques de Paris (1822), the Rhenish Missionary Society (Barmen, 1828), the Bethel Mission (1886), and the Mission vaudoise, which became the Mission Suisse romande in 1884. Danes, Dutch, Swedes, and Norwegians (notably in Madagascar) were also all present on the missionary front. Protestant missionaries from Europe were sent primarily to Africa (and Madagascar), but the German and Basel missionary societies were also active in Asia (China, India, and Indonesia), while French and Swiss missionaries tended to concentrate on the territory that became South Africa. With respect to that region, it is worth noting that Kuyper and neo-Calvinism had a major influence on the theological justification of apartheid among Afrikaners. During the 1820s and 1830s, the London Missionary Society collected for its museum in London many objects brought home by its missionaries returning from Polynesia. One could call this “iconoclasm by collection”: objects and gods, described as “idols” by the missionaries, were exhibited as trophies of their evangelizing victories. This symbolic violence could also soften into ethnographical curiosity, as evidenced in such writings as Lars Larsen Vig’s (Denmark, 1845 – 1913) work on Madagascar, Maurice Leenhardt’s (France, 1878 – 1954) book on New Caledonia (La Grande Terre, 1909), and the Alsatian Fernand Grébert’s (1886 – 1956) reflections about Gabon. Similarly, Émile Durkheim’s seminal work, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse: Le système totémique en Australie (1912), owed much to the information on aborigines collected by Protestant missionaries. European society, too, became the target of powerful missionary propaganda spread by a specialist press, books, annual missionary festivals, and returning visits by missionaries—all with a view to generate donations and vocations. Among the poster children of this propaganda were David Livingstone (1813 – 73)

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for the British and François Coillard (1834 – 1904) for the French and Swiss (he had been active in the plain of the Zambezi River), to be succeeded by the Alsatian Albert Schweitzer (1875 – 1965), who arrived in Lambaréné in 1913.

Conclusion The nineteenth century was a major epoch for European Protestantism, as attested to by the distinction of its theologians, philosophers, and sociologists; the force of its revivals; the abundance of its pious, social, and charitable initiatives; and its expansive missionary activity across the globe. The risk of exhaustion in evidence at the end of the eighteenth century had been successfully overcome by powerful movements of restoration and conquest. Without a doubt, since the sixteenth century this Protestantism (or these Protestantisms) had never been as radiant. The shadows, however, were also numerous. The Awakenings had created ruptures; liberal theology and historico-critical exegesis seemed to set the stage for a new burnout (the very one Karl Barth had hoped to combat); and the “masses” were lost, despite the efforts of the Social Gospel. From a historical perspective, it is essential here to accentuate a phenomenon proper to Protestantism (to a lesser extent also present in Catholicism): the constant dialectic between “liberal fatigue” and “revivalist replenishment” that, for centuries, has structured its existence. It is a constant that the contemporaries of the current evangelical revival, after several decades of secularization and “disenchantment of the world,” can surely better understand than many of their predecessors.

References and Bibliography Bebbington, David W. 1989. Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s. London: Routledge. Best, Jeremy. 2020. Heavenly Fatherland: German Missionary Culture and Globalization in the Age of Empire. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Blaschke, Olaf, and Michael Kuhlemann, eds. 1996. Religion im Kaiserreich: Milieus—Mentatlitäten—Krisen. Gütserloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus. Bratt, James D. 2013. Abraham Kuyper: Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing. Bruce, Steve. 1990. A House Divided: Protestantism, Schism, and Secularization. London: Routledge. Cabanel, Patrick. 2012. Histoire des protestants en France XVIe – XXIe siècle. Paris: Fayard. Coffey, John, ed. 2016. Heart Religion: Evangelical Piety in England & Ireland, 1690 – 1850. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Colonge, Paul, and Rudolf Hill, eds. 2000. Histoire religieuse de l’Allemagne. Paris: Cerf. Fath, Sébastien. 2005. Du ghetto au réseau: Le protestantisme évangélique en France, 1800 – 2005. Geneva: Labor et Fides. Fergusson, David. 2010. The Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth-Century Theology. Oxford: Blackwell. François, Étienne. 1991. Die unsichtbare Grenze: Protestanten und Katholiken in Augsburg, 1648 – 1806. Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag.

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Gisel, Pierre, ed. 2006. Encyclopédie du protestantisme. Rev. ed. Paris: PUF; Geneva: Labor et Fides. Hitzer, Bettina. 2006. Im Netz der Liebe: Die protestantische Kirche und ihre Zuwanderer in der Metropole Berlin (1849 – 1914). Cologne: Böhlau. Hölscher, Lucian, ed. 2001. Datenatlas zur religiösen Geographie im protestantischen Deutschland: Von der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg. 4 vols. Berlin: De Gruyter. Hölscher, Lucian. 2005. Geschichte der protestantischen Frömmigkeit. Munich: Beck. Hope, Nicholas. 1999. German and Scandinavian Protestantism, 1700 – 1918. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hübinger, Gangolf. 1994. Kulturprotestantismus und Politik: Zum Verhä ltnis von Liberalismus und Protestantismus im Wilhelminischen Deutschland. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr. Kuhlemann, Frank-Michael. 2001. Bürgerlichkeit und Religion: Zur Sozial- und Mentalitätsgeschichte der evangelischen Pfarrer in Baden 1860 – 1914. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Larsen, Timothy, and Michael Ledger-Lomas, eds. 2017. The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions. Vol. 3, The Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Léchot, Pierre-Olivier, ed. 2018. Introduction à l’histoire de la théologie. Geneva: Labor et Fides. Léonard, Émile-Guillaume. 1988 [1961 – 64]. Histoire générale du protestantisme. 3 vols. Paris: PUF. Liedtke, Rainer, and Stephan Wendehorst, eds. 1999. The Emancipation of Catholics, Jews and Protestants: Minorities and the Nation State in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mayeur, Jean-Marie, et al., eds. 1995. Histoire du christianisme des origines à nos jours, vol. 11, Libéralisme, industrialisation, expansion européenne (1830 – 1914). Paris: Desclée. McGrath, Alister. 2007. Christianity’s Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution—A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First. New York: HarperCollins. Moledijk, Arie L. 2021. Protestant Theology and Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century Netherlands. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moledijk, Arie L., and Peter Pels, eds. 1998. Religion in the Making: The Emergence of the Sciences of Religion. Leiden: Brill. Oberman, Heiko A. 2009. John Calvin and the Reformation of the Refugees. Geneva: Librairie Droz. Stunt, Timothy C. F. 2000. From Awakening to Secession: Radical Evangelicals in Switzerland and Britain 1815 – 35. Edinburgh: T & T Clark. Wolff, Philippe, ed. 2001. Les protestants en France: 1800 – 2000. Toulouse: Privat.

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5 Roman Catholicism When Pius VI died in 1799 many people in Europe believed he would be the last pope of the Roman Catholic Church. Pius was eighty-one years old, enfeebled, and a prisoner of the French who had seized Rome a year earlier in 1798. Pius’s plight can be taken as symptomatic of the problems of the church at the turn of the nineteenth century. His death came at the end of a decade that had seen churches shuttered and the clergy harassed and sometimes killed during the campaign of dechristianization in France in 1793 – 94, a political manifestation of the rationalist critique directed against Christianity during the Enlightenment. Just over seventy years later the First Vatican Council, an assembly at Rome of over seven hundred bishops called by Pius IX, approved the decree Pastor Aeternus, which declared the pope infallible when he spoke on matters of faith and morality. The Council also affirmed papal primacy, giving him a preeminent position in governing the internal affairs of the church. The history of Catholicism in the nineteenth century involves more than the history of the papacy, but the resiliency of the Vatican in expanding its authority in the face of multiple challenges was the most important development in the Catholic faith during this period. Ultramontanism was the key concept employed by contemporaries to describe the reach of papal authority in the nineteenth century. Discussions about the relationship of the pope, who resided “over the mountains” in Italy, to European states, bishops, lower clergy, religious congregations, and the laity have a long history, and “ultramontanism” was already in use in the early modern period to describe those who defended Rome against challenges from national churches. In France, Gallican opponents of ultramontanism held that ecclesiastical authority was exercised jointly by popes and councils, and defended the rights of local churches to worship and govern themselves based on traditional practices. Similar positions were embraced by Febronianists in Germany and by Josephists in Austria-Hungary, the latter named for their support of Emperor Joseph II (r. 1765 – 90), who insisted on an important role for the state in establishing and carrying out church policy. The fate of Pius VI demonstrates the considerable success achieved by opponents of ultramontanism by the end of the eighteenth century. The ability of the popes, their colleagues in the Vatican, and their supporters throughout Europe to recover from the low point of 1799 is a complex story that involves new and contested developments in theology, ecclesiastical structures, international politics, and the liturgical and devotional lives of ordinary Catholics.

Ultramontanism in Theory In 1799, the year of Pius VI’s death and arguably the nadir of the papacy in the modern era, the Camaldolese monk Mauro Cappellari published a book with the surprising title Il trionfo della Santa Sede (The Triumph of the Holy See). Cappellari took an extreme https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110609059-007

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position, claiming that the church depended on the pope, whose infallibility was inherent in his office and independent of conciliar or other institutional checks. Although at the time it appeared Cappellari’s book seemed nothing more than “the delusions of an intransigent monk,” it had a significant afterlife, since its author was to become Pope Gregory XVI, whose “confident, combative style marked the beginning of the modern, ultramontane Catholic Church” (Blanchard 2019, 215). Cappellari was not the only voice speaking in 1799 in favor of a Europe organized under the pope’s leadership. In Germany that year the poet Friedrich von Hardenberg, who wrote using the pen name Novalis, looked back fondly on the Catholic Middle Ages in the pamphlet “Die Christenheit oder Europa” (Christianity or Europe), describing it as an era when “one sovereign governed and unified the great political forces.” Over the next generation other writers built on this tradition, developing arguments that culminated in the declarations of the First Vatican Council. If one book were to stand as a manifesto for ultramontanism, it would be Joseph de Maistre’s Du Pape, first published in 1819. De Maistre, a diplomat in the service of the king of Piedmont, was a fierce critic of the French Revolution, whose attack on monarchy and religion threatened to destroy the political and social order. De Maistre argued that in the aftermath of the revolution, only the restoration of absolute monarchy, of which the papacy was the prime example, could reestablish peace and security. The pope, moreover, needed to be respected as the arbiter of disputes between secular princes, a theocratic sovereign standing above all others. De Maistre insisted: “The Sovereign Pontiff is the natural head, the most powerful promoter, the great demiurge of civilization; his powers on this point have no limits except in the blindness or evil will of princes.” De Maistre’s Du Pape, according to John O’Malley, “summoned infallibility out of its repose in the cloisters of academic theology and sent it, ready for battle, in the public square” (2018, 63). De Maistre’s argument illuminates the close link between ultramontane Catholicism and the alliance of throne and altar that characterized Europe in the wake of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Pope Pius VII (1800 – 23) was among the monarchs restored to his throne at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. He never took an extreme position on papal authority, but the loss of the Papal States and his experience as a prisoner of Napoleon from 1808 to 1813 convinced him of the need for a secure territorial base for the leader of the Catholic Church. This view was shared by all of the popes throughout the century, even after Rome was absorbed by a newly united Italy in 1870. Until it was finally resolved by the Lateran treaty with Italy in 1929, when the church gave up its claims to the former papal territories, the “Roman question” pushed Catholics towards associating their faith with the popes’ position that they needed to rule a state as well as a church. Ultramontanism was associated closely with the restoration of monarchical rule in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, but it could be turned in other directions as well. In 1830 the Catholic priest Félicité Lamennais, who along with De Maistre was a principal defender of papal authority, responded to the revolutionary wave that overthrew the Bourbon kings of France by imagining an alliance of “God

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and Liberty,” the motto that appeared on the masthead of his influential newspaper L’Avenir in 1830 – 31. Lamennais proposed that the pope, in this case the newly elected Gregory XVI, break from the church’s support for monarchs and align himself with popular movements for democracy and social reform. He had in mind in particular the cases of Ireland, where Catholics were denied political and civil rights by Great Britain, and of Poland, where they rebelled against Tsar Nicholas I in 1830. Lamennais was shocked and dismayed when Gregory condemned the Polish revolution and called on Catholics to obey their Orthodox ruler, a sign to him that the pope was more concerned with maintaining political order than upholding the rights of the faithful. Lamennais’s effort to link ultramontane Catholicism and liberty led him eventually to leave the church following an explicit condemnation by Gregory XVI in the encyclical Singulari Nos (1834). Arguments in favor of some form of accommodation with liberal ideas, such as the importance of individual human rights and the separation of church and state, managed to survive at the margins of the Catholic faith. Charles Montalembert, a devoted follower of Lamennais, chose to stay in the church, and in 1863 drew international attention for his speech at Malines, in Belgium, where he called for a “free church in a free state.” Montalembert also opposed the declaration of infallibility, a position that reinforced the hostility with which the ultramontanists regarded the dissident liberal minority. Throughout the nineteenth century the popes acted repeatedly to assert their authority against liberals both inside and outside the church and to defend the Catholic faith as the only possible solution to the political and social problems of the modern era.

Ultramontanism in Practice: Gregory XVI and Pius IX Gregory XVI’s condemnation of Lamennais and liberalism occurred in the context of the turbulent political crisis that accompanied his election to the papal throne in 1831. Popular uprisings in the Papal States against clerical rule evoked memories of the revolutionary era and led him to call on Austrian troops to restore order. This experience shaped his first encyclical, issued in 1832: Mirari Vos (On Liberalism and Religious Indifferentism). Here Gregory reaffirmed the position he had advocated in The Triumph of the Holy See and called on Catholic bishops to “instill in your people a zealous confidence in the papacy and a sincere veneration for it.” He linked this assertion of papal authority to a thunderous assault on the depravity of the times, condemning the doctrines of freedom of conscience, speech, the press, and the separation of church and state. At the source of all these evils was “indifferentism … a perverse opinion spread on all sides by the fraud of the wicked who claim that it is possible to obtain the eternal salvation of the soul by the profession of any kind of religion, as long as mor-

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ality is maintained.” Mirari Vos presented the Catholic faith as centered in the papacy, unequivocally opposed to liberal values, and the exclusive pathway to salvation. When Pius IX (r. 1846 – 78), the longest reigning pope in the history of the church, came to the throne, he took a number of actions that suggested a willingness to reach some accommodation between Catholicism and the modern world. He introduced administrative reforms that gave the laity some role in government, agreed to the construction of railroads, and granted amnesty to political prisoners. But, like his predecessor Gregory, Pius was shaken by a series of revolutions that threatened to destroy the Papal States. In 1848 he was driven from Rome, which was governed for a time by a republican regime led by Giuseppe Mazzini. French troops, responding to Pius’s call for help, defeated the Roman Republic in 1849 and remained there for the next two decades, allowing Pius to retain control of Rome even when most of the Papal States were absorbed by the Kingdom of Italy between 1861 and 1870. This perilous situation—a pope besieged by a modern state intent on destroying his temporal domain and challenging the rights of the church to govern itself—formed the background of Pius’s encyclical of 1864, Quanta Cura (Condemning Current Errors), and the accompanying Syllabus of Errors. These proclamations, following the pattern established by Gregory XVI, castigated a broad range of philosophical and political positions, including pantheism, materialism, rationalism, the separation of church and state, and freedom of religion. The eightieth and final entry condemned any statement proposing that “the Roman Pontiff can reconcile himself and come to terms with progress, Liberalism, and modern civilization.” Previous popes had condemned the perceived threat of liberal ideas, “but never with such a sweeping rejection of the reality of the world in which they lived” (O’Malley 2018, 105). Pius IX’s defiance of the modern world provided both a rallying point for Catholics and a target for liberals who saw in the Syllabus an attack on freedom of thought and a defense of the prerogatives of the church that could in no way be reconciled with those of the modern state. This chasm between the modern world and the Catholic Church was widened by the declaration of infallibility at Vatican I. Although this doctrine applied only to matters of faith and morals, Pius and his followers understood it to be a claim that dramatically expanded the authority of popes, who were no longer bound by the need for consensus on interpreting tradition and defining doctrine. The Council did more, however, than ratify the authority of the pope in Pastor Aeternus. In Dei Filius (Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith), the second major solemn decree to emerge from the Council, the cardinals sought to define and defend the Catholic faith in an age when secular intellectuals and scientists were increasingly skeptical about divine revelation and ecclesiastical authority. This position was defended with great public acclaim by the French scholar Ernest Renan, whose La vie de Jésus (1863) presented Jesus as a moral genius but denied his miracles and his claim to be the son of God. Dei Filius passed unanimously, affirming a set of beliefs that the cardinals understood as essential for all believers. It therefore stands as a useful point of reference for the Catholic faith tradition as it was understood in the nineteenth century.

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Dei Filius looks back explicitly to the Council of Trent (1545 – 63) as the basis for its reaffirmation of the Catholic faith, which it summarized in four chapters that addressed the existence of God, the necessity of supernatural revelation, the nature of faith, and the relationship of faith and reason. Dei Filius declares that “there is one true, living God, Creator and Lord of heaven and earth … who must be proclaimed distinct in reality and essence from the world.” This positive claim was accompanied by a condemnation of any attempt to identify God with nature or to embrace a materialist philosophy. God can be known through natural reason, but this alone is insufficient; revelation is “absolutely necessary” and available to humans through the divinely inspired Scriptures. But only “Holy Mother Church” is capable of “the true understanding and interpretation of the Sacred Scriptures: and for that reason, no one is permitted to interpret Sacred Scripture itself contrary to this sense.” Miracles and prophecies are signs that can point towards faith, which is nonetheless also a gift of God that people are free to accept. Only the Catholic Church is the “guardian and teacher” of the faith, which can never be opposed to reason. It is the church that “has by divine appointment the right and duty of condemning what wrongly passes for knowledge.” Furthermore, Dei Filius declared that the meaning of the sacred dogmas as taught by the church had been and forevermore would be the same. Each chapter was followed by a list of canons, eighteen in all, that condemned anyone who opposed Catholic teaching. All of them took the form of the final canon where the Council declared that “If anyone says that it is possible that at some time, given the advancement of knowledge, a sense may be assigned to the dogmas propounded by the church which is different from that which the church has understood and understands: let him be anathema.” In substance Dei Filius affirmed Catholic doctrines inherited from the past; in form it echoed the invective of the prophetic condemnations of Gregory XVI and Pius IX. Along with Pastor Aeternus, it established unequivocal positions that served as rallying points for Catholics, reassured about the absolute and changeless truths of their faith and defended by a leader whose teachings could not be challenged. This substantial achievement came, however, at a cost, for it built an even stronger wall around the church, insulating those within from the intellectual and institutional challenges posed by the modern world. There were fissures in the wall, which was not unbreachable, but it was fiercely defended, creating an atmosphere that was at the same time self-confident, defensive, and vigorously militant. This mentality contributed to the culture wars that marked the second half of the nineteenth century, in which the Catholic faith was attacked for its opposition to liberal values, intellectual freedom, and the claims of states to intervene in areas traditionally assigned to religion, in particular marriage and education (Clark and Kaiser 2003). In Germany, where the term Kulturkampf was coined, the decrees of Vatican I provoked concern about the loyalty of Catholics to the newly unified state, which was dominated by Prussia and its Protestant majority. A series of laws establishing state control over Catholic education and expelling religious orders led in turn to the mobilization of Catholics and the formation of the Center Party to defend their interests. In an ironic turn, Catholics in Germany enlisted the support of the pope to de-

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fend their liberty of religion against the encroachment of a hostile state dominated by Protestants. In Great Britain the former prime minister William Gladstone engaged in a pamphlet war in which he described the Catholic Church as “an Asian monarchy: nothing but one giddy height of despotism, and one dead level of religious subservience” (1875). In France, following the occupation of Rome by the Italian state in 1870 and the fall of the Second Empire of Napoleon III, some ultramontane Catholics hoped for a restoration of the Bourbon pretender Henri V, who would lead a French army into Italy and return Rome to the pope. Fears of such adventurism helped anticlerical politicians to take control of the Third Republic (1870 – 1940). In the 1880s the Republic passed anticlerical legislation restricting Catholic education and religious orders, and in 1905 it abrogated the Concordat that had governed relations between the Vatican and France, officially separating the church from the state. Similar conflicts arose in Spain, Portugal, and Italy, where Catholicism was more deeply entrenched. In Spain and Portugal church leaders condemned the seizure of monastic property in the 1830s and were adamantly opposed to attempts to introduce limited religious liberty. In the early twentieth century Catholic claims to a predominant role in society were met at times with violence, as in the “Tragic Week” of 1909, when eighty church buildings were burned in Barcelona. In Portugal resentment against church authority was an important factor leading to the overthrow of the monarchy in the revolution of 1910. In Italy the state of Piedmont in the north adopted liberal reforms in the 1850s that suppressed religious orders, confiscated ecclesiastical property, and exerted control over the educational system. These measures were vigorously opposed by Pius IX but were applied throughout the newly unified state in the 1860s. As a result the Vatican decree Non expedit in 1868 forbade Catholics from participating in Italian political life, a policy that was modified in 1905 to allow for votes against socialist candidates, but it was not fully rescinded until 1918. The triumph of ultramontanism at the Vatican Council thus fueled a culture war in which Pius IX was a central and founding figure, a supreme and beloved leader for Catholics and a symbol of repression and ignorance for their opponents.

Ultramontanism in Practice: Leo XIII Reaches Out to Modernity In many ways Leo XIII (r. 1878 – 1901) took Catholicism in new directions during his papacy. He is justifiably given credit for bringing the Kulturkampf to a close in Germany, winning important concessions for Catholic schools and religious congregations. He tried as well, less successfully, to wean French Catholics away from their attachment to monarchism and to encourage them to work with the Third Republic. In matters of doctrine Leo charted new directions for Catholicism. In Aeterni Patris (On the Restoration of Christian Philosophy, 1879), he placed the work of the thirteenth-century philosopher Thomas Aquinas in a privileged position as the basis for Catholic thinking on

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the relationship of faith and reason; in Rerum Novarum (On the Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor, 1891), he defined a new position for the faith in relationship to modern social problems. In the decades following Aeterni Patris Catholic intellectual life took on a new vigor as thinkers such as Jacques Maritain drew on Thomism to articulate rational arguments in defense of the Catholic faith. Catholic intellectuals were still bound by the teaching authority of the pope, but they proceeded with new confidence in their ability to use natural reason that was given an essential role in explaining the faith. However, in embracing Thomism the church also tied Catholic intellectuals to the medieval past, cast suspicion on all other philosophical approaches to religion, and insisted on the timelessness and fixity of Catholic teaching. Rerum Novarum has been called by Owen Chadwick “the most important encyclical of the nineteenth century” (1998, 315). Although it repeated prior condemnations of socialism and communism, which were seen as threats to private property and the family, Rerum Novarum also identified unrestricted capitalism as an evil that produced poverty among the new working classes. It defended the right of workers to organize and to strike and called on the state to intervene in the economy to mitigate the worst effects of industrial capitalism. In taking these positions Leo built on the “social Catholicism” that emerged in the early part of the nineteenth century. In France the layman Frédéric Ozanam and the Daughter of Charity Rosalie Rendu exemplified this movement through their work in founding the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul in 1833. In Germany Adolph Kolping, a Cologne priest and himself a former shoemaker, created a network of clubs for young workers that spread rapidly in the 1850s and became a model for German efforts to address social problems. In the wake of Rerum Novarum these practical efforts were now based on an analysis of modern capitalism and legitimized by a papal encyclical. Under the leadership of Leo XIII the Catholic faith made significant progress in addressing the political and social problems that challenged the church in the nineteenth century. But Leo continued to insist, as had his predecessors, on the dangers of the modern world as articulated in the Syllabus of Pius IX, which he fully endorsed. He insisted as well on the central role of the papacy in instructing Catholics on doctrines old and new and reminding them that their faith offered the only sure means of salvation. In carrying out this mission Leo made unprecedented use of encyclicals, letters to bishops on important matters of doctrine, church policy, and devotional life that were a major instrument of the ultramontane papacy. Encyclicals could address broad issues, as in Aeterni Patris and Rerum Novarum, but they also dealt with the problems of specific states and encouraged devotional practices. Leo XIII wrote, for example, ten encyclicals encouraging Catholics to pray the rosary. The growing use of the encyclical in general meant that Catholics in Europe and around the world were increasingly aware of papal teaching and subjected to papal authority.

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Table 5.1: The Nineteenth-Century Popes and Their Encyclicals Pope Pius VII (1800 – 23) Leo XII (1823 – 29) Pius VIII (1829 – 30) Gregory XVI (1831 – 46) Pius IX (1846 – 78) Leo XIII (1878 – 1903) Pius X (1903 – 14)

Number of Encyclicals 2 5 1 9 28 86 16

Source: Vatican website (http://w2.vatican.va/content/vatican/it.html) for Gregory XVI, Pius IX, Leo XIII, and Pius X; Papal Encyclicals online (https://www.papalencyclicals.net/) for Pius VII, Leo XII, and Pius VIII.

Ultramontanism in Practice: Leo XIII, Pius X, and the Modernist Crisis Throughout the nineteenth century the Catholic faith was defended by church leaders as a bastion of divine truth, social stability, and political order in an age of revolution. This position was based on what they saw as the continuity and consistency of the faith dating to its foundation in the time of Christ, what the English cardinal Manning called “the beauty of inflexibility” (1885). Some Catholic scholars opposed this position and sought to interpret doctrine within historical contexts. At the University of Tübingen, the Catholic theologians Johann Sebastian Drey (1777– 1853) and Johann Adam Möhler (1796 – 1838) proposed that the history of the church should be viewed as an organic unity, a living tradition guided by the Holy Spirit. This position was taken up and developed by the German church historian and Catholic theologian Ignaz von Döllinger (1799 – 1890). Influenced by the theology of the Tübingen school, Döllinger argued that the church should advance confidently into the future, keeping alive the doctrinal traditions of the past, but engaging, criticizing, and (when appropriate) embracing more recent ideas and developments in human history. This argument had practical significance for Döllinger, who proposed abandoning the Papal States as a drag on the church’s spiritual authority (Howard 2017, 18 – 21, 42 – 52). Döllinger defended as well scholars’ right to use the disciplinary tools available to them without fear of intervention or censorship by church authorities. In a similar but more cautious vein, Döllinger’s friend and student John Henry Newman, the English convert to Catholicism, argued that Catholic doctrines that were implicit or veiled in early Christianity emerged more clearly over time with the help of divine guidance. Using this understanding of the development of doctrine, Newman was able to accept the declaration of infallibility of 1870; Döllinger, however, failed to see such a connection between past and present and his refusal to submit led to his excommunication in 1871.

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The debate over historicizing Christianity formed a background for the development of neo-Thomism as the philosophical system favored by ultramontanes. The German Jesuit Joseph Kleutgen (1811 – 83) feared that the ideas of Döllinger and his colleagues would “submit Christian morality and doctrine to the capricious winds of change and the subjective judgment of scholars” (Howard 2017, 80). Conflict over historical methods became even more acute when Catholic scholars began applying critical approaches to the Bible. German intellectuals had again led the way in this field, questioning the literal truth of accounts in the Old and New Testaments and exploring the historical contexts that shaped how Scripture was recorded and doctrines defined. Starting in the 1830s the Protestant theologians David Friedrich Strauss (1808 – 74) and Bruno Bauer (1809 – 82) challenged Gospel accounts of the miracles of Jesus, a historicizing approach that won a broad audience when Ernest Renan, the French scholar and former Catholic seminarian, published La vie de Jésus in 1863. When Leo XIII addressed the issue of Catholic biblical scholarship in his 1893 encyclical Providentissimus Deus (On the Study of Holy Scripture), he was responding to the efforts of the Dominican priest Albert Lagrange, founding editor of the Revue Biblique (1890), and Father Alfred Loisy, a young professor at the Institut Catholique, to adopt the historical-critical method. They insisted that they could do so and still honor the sacred character of Scripture and the teaching authority of the church. Leo XIII’s encyclical made a gesture towards the need for a critical approach but feared its consequences as well, for “the sacred writings are wrapped in a certain religious obscurity” and therefore all who study them “must follow the Church as their guide and teacher.” Lagrange, Loisy, and other scholars accepted Providentissimus, but their work continued to cause anxiety, which culminated in the modernist crisis of the early years of the twentieth century. The crisis was initiated when Loisy published L’Evangile et l’Eglise (The Gospel and the Church, 1902), which criticized a recent work by the Protestant theologian Adolf von Harnack for defining the essence of Christianity as the relationship of an individual to God. In challenging Harnack, Loisy presented the church as a living, dynamic force adjusting to the needs of successive historical periods. This position, close to Döllinger’s view of church history, provoked a hostile response from those who saw it as undermining the principle that changeless truth was essential to the Catholic faith. Critics of Loisy and his colleagues were heartened by the full support of Giuseppe Sarto, who assumed the papal throne in 1903. Pius X (r. 1903 – 14) had spent his career as a pastor, not as an intellectual or diplomat, and was deeply suspicious of those who encouraged theological developments that broke with his predecessors’ teachings. The concerns of Pius and his colleagues spread beyond biblical scholarship to the efforts of Catholic philosophers such as Maurice Blondel (1861 – 1949), who challenged Thomism as the only philosophy capable of expressing and defending Catholic doctrine. Blondel was accused of subjectivism for arguing that the divine was immanent in human consciousness as well as a transcendent and external force. Although Catholic biblical scholars and philosophers such as Blondel had some personal dealings with each other they had different concerns and defended a variety

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of positions within their respective disciplines. They shared, however, a common agenda in seeking to connect the Catholic faith with modern ideas. From Pius X’s perspective, Loisy, Blondel, and others belonged to a single category of “modernists,” whose positions were analyzed and condemned in the decree Lamentabili Sane Exitu (With Truly Lamentable Results) and the encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis (On the Doctrines of the Modernists) in 1907. Lamentabili, in the manner of Pius IX’s Syllabus, condemned sixty-five propositions it claimed to find in the work of biblical scholars, and although it did not name him, it clearly targeted the work of Loisy. Pascendi was a more expansive document that used invective reminiscent of the encyclicals of Gregory XVI and Pius IX to castigate scholars who had infiltrated the church, intent on destroying it from within. “Blind that they are, and leaders of the blind, inflated with a boastful science … they pervert the eternal concept of truth and the true nature of religious sentiment.” In Pascendi Pius X condemned “modernism” without specifying any individuals or particular texts and established a number of measures to root out anyone in the church who might be associated with this diffuse movement. Bishops were instructed to be more diligent in ensuring that only Thomism was taught in the seminaries. They were called on to remove suspicious books from Catholic seminaries and universities and to establish diocesan watch committees that were “bound to secrecy as to their deliberations and decisions” and charged with taking “all prudent, prompt and efficacious measures” to suppress modernism. Reports on the progress of this campaign were to be forwarded to the Vatican every three years, an instance of how the ultramontane papacy exercised its authority. Pascendi was enforced in an atmosphere of fear fueled by denunciations to a secretive organization run by the undersecretary of state Umberto Benigni that targeted anyone with a scholarly profile as well as those suspected of being modernists. Owen Chadwick has described the assault on modernists as “the worst time for the Church in the modern epoch,” an abuse of power that encouraged an “integrist” Catholicism based on unqualified commitment to traditional teachings and papal authority (1998, 355). Pius X’s attack on the modernists was driven by a fear of new ideas, but he was also acting as a pastor, concerned that the heresies he battled threatened the salvation of souls. Pius’s pastoral concerns derived from his early experience as a parish priest, when as Giuseppe Sarto he became known for his simple and effective preaching style, for catechetical instruction, and for his courageous behavior during a cholera epidemic in the 1870s. From the perspective of Sarto and thousands of other parish priests, instructing their flocks and administering the sacraments was their central obligation. Pius’s concern with sacramental life led to a major reform in Catholic practice in 1910 that allowed children to receive their First Communion at the age of seven rather than twelve. In the decree Quam Singulari announcing this change, Pius argued that denying children access to the Eucharist contributed to a climate of immorality, for “destitute of this strong help, surrounded by so many temptations, they lost their innocence and fell into vicious habits.” The Catholic Church faced powerful political and intellectual challenges that led to papal declarations of hostility towards the modern

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world and an aggressive defense of Catholic doctrine. This posture, however, needs to be understood within a broad context of concern over Catholic practice and belief as experienced in the thousands of parish churches of Europe.

The Catholic Faithful: Religious Practice In the early nineteenth century the Catholic faith, with over 100 million adherents, was the largest religious Christian denomination in Europe, far outnumbering the 40 million Protestants and 40 million Orthodox. Jews constituted a minority of about 4 million people. Catholics composed the majority of those who lived in France, Iberia, Italy, and a number of states in southern and western Germany. Catholics were also the majority in the Polish-speaking lands governed by Russia, Prussia, and AustriaHungary. Catholics were a substantial minority in the United Kingdom after the 1801 Act of Union linking Catholic Ireland to England, and in the United Netherlands and Prussia following the territorial reorganization of Europe by the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The religious landscape in Austria-Hungary was particularly complex because of differences among nationalities and the presence of substantial minorities of Greek Uniate Catholics (tied to Rome but maintaining a distinct liturgy), Orthodox Christians, Protestants, and Jews. In Bohemia, for example, German-speaking bishops nominated by the emperor were suspicious of the local Slavic-speaking Catholic population and their clergy. In Croatia Bishop Strossmayer, who served from 1849 until 1905, defended the rights of Slavic-speaking Catholics and advocated for greater autonomy for southern Slavs within the empire. He was in favor as well of reconciliation with Orthodox Christians, a position which led him to be a prominent opponent of infallibility at the Council. It is difficult to measure the attachment of Catholics to their faith, which varied over time and across the different regions of Europe. Catholic leaders were convinced, however, that a deep reservoir of faith existed which needed to be protected from a minority-led movement intent on destroying the church. Their position was based in part on the experiences of the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, when the church was subjected to measures that went from regulation and harassment to bloody assaults on the clergy and the seizure of ecclesiastical properties. Government officials who aimed to control or eliminate Catholicism were often faced with a resistant population, especially in rural areas, that showed an attachment to their religion that led at times to armed conflict. Breton peasants in the Vendée region of western France fought to defend both church and king in a civil war during the 1790s that cost tens of thousands of lives. In Italy the sanfedisti (the army of the Holy Faith) rebelled against French occupiers who seized sacred ornaments, abolished religious confraternities and congregations, and regarded the Catholic Church as an ally of Old Regime monarchy. Religion thus played a role in fueling brutal conflicts in which atrocities were committed by both sides and religious motives were mixed with a concern to protect homes and survive in desperate conditions. Popular movements in defense of the church

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show nonetheless how an attachment to traditional beliefs and practices shaped how Catholics understood their place in this world and the next. Over the course of the century urbanization and industrialization disrupted the religious lives of millions of Catholics and in broad terms regular practice declined among the industrial working class and in the growing cities of Europe. But recent scholars have called attention to the many exceptions to this process of secularization (McLeod 2000, 171 – 216; Atkin and Tallett 2003, 178 – 82). Rural areas such as western France and northern Spain remained highly devout. Religious practice was also particularly strong in Ireland and the lands of Poland, where Catholicism was closely linked to a sense of national identity and opposition to rule by British Protestant and Russian Orthodox empires, respectively. In urban areas in northern France and the Rhineland in Germany, Catholic workers remained loyal to the church, which provided them with educational programs, associational life, and material assistance as well as the sacraments. Historians have noted as well the crucial role of gender, with women more likely to practice regularly than men, a process some have described as the “feminization” of Catholicism (Langlois 1984). Women played a more important public role in nineteenth-century Catholicism as well, in charitable organizations led by lay women and especially in the rapidly expanding congregations that staffed schools and hospitals. In devotional life a huge production of sentimental pious images and literature was aimed at a female audience, with Mary a particular focus of attention. These devotions emphasized the emotional element in religion but they also carried messages about the need for political and social engagement (Popiel 2021). Assessing attachment to the faith has often been based on quantitative studies of regular attendance at Sunday Mass and the yearly reception of Easter Communion. There are, however, other measures that can be applied in trying to understand the Catholic faith’s role in shaping Europeans’ lives. Those who might skip Sunday Mass often relied on Catholic rituals to mark the crucial stages of their lives. Baptism celebrated the beginning of life and opened up the possibility of eternal salvation. Until Pius X’s reform of 1910, reception of First Communion between the ages of twelve and fourteen marked the end of childhood. Matrimony announced the entrance into adulthood and the establishment of a family. And Extreme Unction eased the passage from life to death and could reassure survivors about the ultimate fate of their departed loved ones. Clergy who tried to limit access to the sacraments provoked heated responses from their parishioners. Funeral services marked by the ringing of village bells and processions from the home to the church and then to the cemetery were an especially sensitive point of conflict. In 1828, in an incident that was not uncommon, the mayor of Varennes, a small town in France, broke into the parish church and presided over a funeral service for Michel Mignon, who had died of drunkenness. Abbé Briffaut, the parish priest, refused to officiate because Mignon had died without the Last Sacraments and presumably in a state of mortal sin. Briffaut also tried but failed to have Mignon buried in a shameful corner of the cemetery reserved for suicides. Perhaps fearing he had gone too far in alienating his parishioners, Briffaut showed up at the cemetery at the last minute to give a final blessing to the deceased Mignon. A similar

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concern for retaining a connection with the laity helps explain why, over the course of the century, the clergy became more tolerant in administering the sacraments (Kselman 1993, 101 – 8). In doing so they were responding to their sense of pastoral responsibility. This more tolerant behavior was shaped as well by the increasing influence of the moral theology of Alphonsus Liguori (1696 – 1787), who opposed excessive rigor on the part of the clergy.

The Catholic Faithful: Religious Devotions In addition to the sacramental system, the Catholic faithful participated in a broad range of devotional practices. Communities and individuals went on pilgrimages to shrines of saints, thanking them for past favors or requesting help during such crises as droughts, diseases, or an invading army. Catholic devotions were an enduring part of the faith tradition but had been subjected to withering criticism by philosophes such as Voltaire. These attacks may have had limited effect on religious behavior in general, but in the eighteenth century they shaped an attitude among literate elites, including many of the clergy, that looked on the practices of rural Catholics as mere superstition. The shock of the revolutionary decade produced a shift in elite attitudes in which devotional life was regarded with more sympathy. The key work here was François-René de Chateaubriand’s Génie du Christianisme, which set a new tone for defending Catholicism and idealized the simple faith of rural folk. Chateaubriand insisted that any response to the Enlightenment critique of religion must begin with an appeal to the emotions, for the teachings of the Gospel “are not rooted in the head, but in the heart” (1802). Chateaubriand linked the pious practices of rural people with the broader Romantic movement, a view shared by other influential writers as well, such as Joseph Görres and Clemens Brentano in Germany and Frederic William Faber in England. Their work helped foster a more positive attitude in ultramontane Catholicism towards pilgrimages, shrines, and miracle cults. This adjustment was accompanied, however, by an intensified effort to manage popular piety so that it would converge with the doctrinal and political interests of the ultramontane church. This process of encouraging and managing popular piety can be seen in the pilgrimage to Trier, Germany, in 1844, and in the development of the shrine at Lourdes, France in the second half of the nineteenth century. Trier in 1844 was the site of a landmark moment in German Catholicism, when more than half a million Catholics came to the Rhineland city to honor what they believed was the tunic Jesus wore before his crucifixion (Blaschke 2021). Rhineland Catholics, incorporated into Prussia at the Congress of Vienna, constituted a minority looked on suspiciously by the Prussian bureaucracy. Tensions turned into open conflict in the 1830s over the issue of mixed marriages between Protestants and Catholics. In 1837 the archbishop of Cologne, Droste zu Vischering, spent over a year in prison because he insisted that the Catholic parent raise their children in the Catholic faith. Pope Gregory XVI offered his full support, making mixed marriages into a cause célèbre for

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ultramontanism. When Frederick William IV came to the Prussian throne in 1840 he sought to restore peace by negotiating a settlement in which the church’s position was upheld. To celebrate this victory Bishop Wilhelm Arnoldi announced an exposition of the robe in 1844 and oversaw the careful organization of Catholic pilgrims from Germany and beyond. Miraculous cures were reported and the massive crowds drew the attention of journalists throughout Europe. As Jonathan Sperber has written, the Trier pilgrimage established a new style of pilgrimages focused on “a highly organized, collective, and clerically led public manifestation” (1984, 71). This combination of popular piety and clerical management in Ireland has been described by Emmet Larkin as a “devotional revolution” in the mid-nineteenth century (1972). Among the bewildering variety of devotions that appealed to Catholics in the nineteenth century, those dedicated to Mary were of particular importance. Marian devotion was deeply rooted in the shrines and parish churches of Europe but became even more prominent as a result of a series of Marian apparitions, beginning with the revelation of the “Miraculous Medal” to Sister Catherine Labouré, a Sister of Charity in Paris in 1830. By far the most important apparitions occurred at Lourdes, a small town in southern France, in 1858. Bernadette Soubirous, the visionary of Lourdes, was an impoverished, sickly, and illiterate shepherd girl of fourteen, but she was consistent and forthright in claiming that Mary appeared to her eighteen times, asking for a chapel to be built on the outskirts of town and leading her to discover a stream that quickly became known for its thaumaturgic powers. After winning church approval in 1862 the shrine developed rapidly, as pilgrims came from parishes and dioceses throughout France and the world, traveling on trains that first arrived in Lourdes in 1866. In the last third of the century the “National Pilgrimage” overseen by the Assumptionist fathers brought thousands of sick pilgrims, assisted by their healthy colleagues, to Lourdes every summer, demonstrating to themselves, and to the French state, the sustained appeal of the miraculous. By the end of the century Lourdes had become a major international shrine, drawing over a million visitors a year (Kselman 1983; Harris 1999). Apparitions were reported elsewhere in Europe as well, most of them involving children from impoverished families. In the village of Marpingen in Germany, for example, thousands of pilgrims gathered at a site where three young girls claimed to see the Virgin in 1876. The Catholic authorities refused to sanction the apparitions at Marpingen, a common but not universal response of bishops concerned about keeping control over popular piety (Blackbourn 1994). Apparitions at Knock in Ireland (1879) and Fatima in Portugal (1917), however, were approved by the church and became the basis for shrines that continue to draw pilgrims in the twenty-first century. Pilgrimages to Knock and Fatima took on political meaning as well, expressing Catholic resistance to British rule in Ireland and the anticlerical measures adopted by the Portuguese republic established in 1910 (Zimdars-Swartz 1991; Hynes 2009). Marian devotions, and the cult of Our Lady of Lourdes in particular, were directly related to the ultramontane movement in the nineteenth century. Papal encouragement of Lourdes was linked to the apparition’s endorsement of the doctrine of the Im-

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maculate Conception, which claimed that Mary was unique in being born without the stain of original sin, an honor bestowed on her as the future mother of Jesus. Although this position had defenders starting in the Middle Ages, it was only declared to be official church doctrine in Pius IX’s apostolic constitution Ineffabilis Deus of 1854. This was “the first time a pope had solemnly defined a dogma” and thereby “anticipated the definition of infallibility at the council” (O’Malley 2018, 103). In 1858, when Bernadette asked the apparition to identify herself, she announced, “I am the Immaculate Conception.” From the perspective of the church, this statement amounted to supernatural ratification of the earlier declaration, thus enlisting Mary in the cause of expanding papal authority. The church in turn promoted the cult at Lourdes, reinforcing the symbiotic relationship between popular piety and the institutional church that was a major characteristic of nineteenth-century Catholicism. The pilgrimages to Trier and Lourdes were major public events, assertions of Catholic belief that God had not withdrawn his hand from the world and demonstrations of the loyalty and devotion of believers to their church. Catholics also expressed their devotion in a more quotidian dimension through memberships in confraternities and reading religious publications that appealed to an increasingly literate population. As with pilgrimage shrines, confraternities underwent significant development in the nineteenth century. Some of the older forms of male confraternities, such as the Penitents who assisted at funeral services and other parish ceremonies, often came into conflict with the parish priest. Their decline was accompanied by the growth of national and international associations of devotees tied together by publications dedicated to the promotion of specific devotions. For instance, the Archconfraternity of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, founded in Paris as a parish society in 1836, grew to over a million members in Europe and North America by the 1860s. It spread through the distribution of a manual and a magazine that reported on the cures and conversions attributed to the prayers of its members (Kselman 1983, 166 – 70). Devotions were promoted as well by the circulation of millions of colorful holy cards produced with the new lithographic technology. These images encouraged sentimental attachments to Jesus, Mary, and the saints and emphasized their suffering as models to emulate. In the second half of the century, photographs of Catholic celebrities, in particular Bernadette Soubirous and Pope Pius IX, connected believers to contemporary figures at the forefront of ultramontane Catholicism (Rosenbaum-Dondaine 1984). Many of the holy cards that passed through Catholic hands offered believers access to indulgences, a practice that allowed them to reduce the time that they or their loved ones would spend in purgatory. Indulgences had been a principal target of the Reformation, but they were defended at the Council of Trent as an integral part of Catholicism’s spiritual economy. According to Catholic doctrine, the church administers an infinite store of grace earned by Christ, Mary, and the saints that can be applied to the souls of the dead who had avoided Hell but could not be accepted into Heaven until they had paid a penalty for their sins. In the nineteenth century the Sacred Congregation of Indulgences and Holy Relics exerted increased authority over this practice by publishing the Raccolta, an approved collection of prayers and practices for gaining

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indulgences. The number of approved indulgences grew enormously in this period; in 1903 the English-language translation of the Raccolta ran to seven hundred pages. Protestants and anticlericals criticized the aggressive marketing of indulgences, which nonetheless offered solace to Catholics concerned about the afterlife.

The Catholic Faithful: Associations, Congregations, Communication Catholics lived their faith through a belief in doctrine and participation in sacramental rituals and devotional practices. During the nineteenth century they also joined together in associations that linked their faith to practical and political needs. Some scholars have viewed these associations as separate subcultures or milieus that allowed Catholics to defend themselves in the culture wars between expansive states and the church (Yonke 1994). Olaf Blaschke has borrowed from the historiography of early modern Europe to describe the nineteenth century as a “second age of confessionalization” in which Catholics organized themselves behind carefully guarded religious boundaries defended by a clergy increasingly committed to the values of ultramontanism (Blaschke 2000). Historians are now qualifying this emphasis on insularity and exploring how Catholics worked across as well as within confessional boundaries (Zalar 2019). Without question, though, associations played an important role in how Catholics lived their faith. In addition to the Kolping associations noted earlier, the German Volksverein, founded in 1890 by Franz Brandts, a textile entrepreneur, and Franz Hitze, a priest and parliamentarian, offered educational programs and supported the development of trade unions and progressive social legislation. Catholic associations might contribute to a stronger identity with the ultramontane church, but they also allowed for significant lay leadership and involvement in issues that might not always align with the Vatican’s interests. This was the case, for example, with Brandts in the Volksverein and with Le Sillon, the French movement in support of democracy and social reform organized by the layman Marc Sangnier in 1894 (Misner 1991, 263 – 67, 298 – 305). Sangnier’s desire to create distance between his movement and ecclesiastical authority, comparable to the quest for independence by modernist biblical scholars, raised suspicions and led to Pius X’s condemnation of Le Sillon in 1910. Catholic associations were often the result of initiatives by religious congregations, which played major roles in the lives of the faithful through their work in parishes, schools, and hospitals. Monastic orders revived as well, though they never recovered the property and prestige they had in the eighteenth century. But the restored Benedictine monastery at Solesmes in France, led by Dom Prosper Guéranger, sparked a revival of Gregorian chant that was part of a larger wave of interest in the Catholic Middle Ages. Guéranger also promoted the adoption of the Roman liturgy in place of local traditions, another part of the ultramontane program. In general, however, congregations active in the world were most prominent in the nineteenth century (Chadwick 1998,

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484 – 532). The Jesuits, disbanded in 1773, were restored by Pius VII in 1814 and grew throughout the century, with over 16,000 members by 1910. They played a major role as teachers in secondary education, as preachers of missions that sought to increase the fervor of Catholic parishes, and as publicists associated with the cause of ultramontanism. The influential Jesuit newspaper, La Civiltà Cattolica, founded in Rome by the Jesuits in 1850, became the unofficial voice of Vatican policy. The Jesuits’ success made them an especially important target for anticlericals, for whom they represented a secretive organization dedicated to destroying the emerging liberal states and accumulating power for themselves and the papacy. Congregations often played a crucial role in serving the needs of Catholics when these could not be met through the diocesan system. Franciscans were called on to minister to Catholics in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the occupation of the Ottoman Turks from the fifteenth century to 1878. In Turin, Italy, John Bosco founded a community of Salesians in 1859 dedicated to helping adolescent boys in cities where parishes did not keep pace with the growth of urban populations. At his death in 1888, 774 Salesians were spread across Italy, France, Austria, and several Latin American countries. This expansion beyond Europe was another feature of Catholic congregations in this period. European Catholics could find solace about the vitality of their faith in the post-revolutionary era by reading of its success in missionary publications such as the Annales de la Propagation de la Foi, founded in Lyon in 1822 and quickly available in English and German. In the last third of the nineteenth century European congregations became closely associated with the rapid expansion of European power in Africa and Asia, a process that created ties and tensions with states that regarded missionaries as useful in providing health and educational services but as difficult to control (White and Daughton 2012). The expansion of literacy among Catholics in the nineteenth century owed a great deal to the teaching congregations that staffed a growing system of Catholic primary schools. In Ireland and France, Christian Brothers were among the leaders in opening schools for boys. In France membership in female religious orders grew from 12,000 to 135,000 between 1808 and 1878 and such orders were teaching over half of the girls enrolled in primary schools in 1880. The School Sisters of Notre Dame, founded in Bavaria in 1833, spread throughout Germany and then to the rest of Europe and to North America. Nursing orders, such as the Daughters of Charity, provided health services for the poor as well as the rich, earning women like Sister Rosalie Rendu the love and respect of Parisians for her devotion. Female congregations offered services to the laity, but they also provided unique opportunities for women to gain an education and become founders and leaders of major institutions, running schools and hospitals at a time when such careers were closed to lay women. Catholics who learned to read were encouraged to find their material in the exploding market of Catholic publications, some of which have been referred to in this essay. The many occasions on which popes condemned freedom of the press and the active maintenance of an Index of Forbidden Books, which was retired only in 1966, indicate how worried the clergy were about the temptation to read works that

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might draw the faithful away from the church. But the press also played a major role in promoting and disseminating a sense of the pope’s importance for Catholics. In the middle years of the century the defense of ultramontanism was led by the Jesuits through La Civiltà Cattolica and in France by Louis Veuillot, the editor of the daily L’Univers. At the end of the century the French daily La Croix, published by the congregation of the Assumptionists, drew on the techniques of the mass press to reach an audience of over 500,000. La Croix became notorious for its involvement in the Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s, in which a Jewish officer was falsely accused of spying for the Germans. Writers and artists for La Croix depicted Dreyfus as a traitor, a representative figure of the animosity that Jews bore towards Christians. Pope Leo XIII and the episcopal leadership kept their distance from the Dreyfus Affair, though David Kertzer has shown how the papacy played a role in the rise of modern antisemitism (2001). At century’s end La Civiltà Cattolica also published articles giving credence to the blood libel, the accusation that Jews murdered Christians to use their blood in their rituals. In this same period Vatican officials actively encouraged the antisemitic program of the Austrian ChristianSocial party, despite the opposition of some members of the Viennese church hierarchy. The Vatican preferred the term anti-Judaism to antisemitism, basing its hostility towards Jews on religious rather than racial grounds. This important distinction was not, however, a main theme in the journalism that promoted a sense that Jews were a malevolent group interested in undermining or destroying the church. The fear and aggression that characterized ultramontanism lent themselves easily to hostile Catholic rhetoric about the Jews.

Conclusion In the nineteenth century the Catholic faith was still defined by essential doctrines inherited from the past: the redemptive power of the death of Jesus, the efficacy of the sacraments for obtaining grace and saving souls, the cult of the saints, and the exclusive authority of the church to teach religious truth. But these were now defended by popes declared to be infallible and who asserted an absolute power in governing the church. Although they grew out of a tradition of papal authority, these were significant and controversial changes in the Catholic faith. They were accompanied by innovations in the ways in which the faith was communicated through new devotions spread by a print culture designed for an increasingly literate Catholic audience. These innovations in doctrine and method offer an ironic comment on the history of ultramontane Catholicism, whose leaders insisted that the church could not and would not change with the times. Their efforts were in one sense successful, for in 1914 the church was in many ways a vigorous institution. The church was anxious about the continuing threats posed by the modern world, but certain about what it taught and supported by a clergy and laity organized into increasingly centralized, hierarchical structures. The vitality of ultramontane Catholicism was based, however, on an unrelenting opposition

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to increasingly potent developments in the modern world: the emergence of formidable states and new political ideologies, the appeal of democracy and individual human rights, and critical approaches to traditional religious doctrines. This tension between the church and the modern world that emerged in the nineteenth century established a legacy that continues to shape the Catholic faith in the twenty-first.

References and Bibliography Atkin, Nicholas, and Frank Tallett. 2003. Priests, Prelates and People: A History of European Catholicism since 1750. New York: Oxford University Press. Blackbourn, David. 1994. Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Nineteenth-Century Germany. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Blanchard, Shaun. 2019. The Synod of Pistoia and Vatican II: Jansenism and the Struggle for Catholic Reform. New York: Oxford University Press. Blaschke, Olaf. 2000. “Das 19. Jahrhundert: Ein Zweites Konfessionelles Zeitalter?” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 26: 38 – 75. Blaschke, Olaf. 2021. “Types of Pilgrimages in Germany between Early and High Ultramontanism: The Examples of Trier (1844) and Marpingen (1876).” In Cultures in Conflict: Religion, History, and Gender in Northern Europe, 1800 – 1900, edited by Johannes Ljungbert, Alexander Maurits, and Emile Sidenval, 27 – 58. Berlin: Peter Lang. Callahan, William J. 2000. The Catholic Church in Spain, 1875 – 1998. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. Chadwick, Owen. 1998. A History of the Popes: 1830 – 1914. New York: Oxford University Press. Clark, Christopher, and Wolfram Kaiser, eds. 2003. Culture Wars: Secular–Catholic Conflict in NineteenthCentury Europe. New York: Cambridge University Press. Harris, Ruth. 1999. Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age. New York: Viking. Howard, Thomas Albert. 2017. The Pope and the Professor: Pius IX, Ignaz von Döllinger, and the Quandary of the Modern Age. New York: Oxford University Press. Hynes, Eugene. 2009. Knock: The Virgin’s Apparition in Nineteenth-Century Ireland. Cork: Cork University Press. Kertzer, David I. 2001. The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism. New York: Vintage. Kselman, Thomas. 1983. Miracles and Prophecies in Nineteenth-Century France. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Kselman, Thomas. 1993. Death and the Afterlife in Modern France. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Langlois, Claude. 1984. Le catholicisme au féminin: Les Congrégations françaises à supérieure générale au XIXe siècle. Paris: Cerf. Larkin, Emmet. 1972. “The Devotional Revolution in Ireland, 1850 – 1875.” American Historical Review 77: 625 – 52. McGreevy, John T. 2022. Catholicism: A Global History from the French Revolution to Pope Francis. New York: W. W. Norton. McLeod, Hugh. 2000. Secularisation in Western Europe, 1848 – 1914. New York: St. Martin’s. Misner, Paul. 1991. Social Catholicism in Europe from the Onset of Industrialization to the First World War. New York: Crossroad. O’Malley, John W. 2018. Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Popiel, Jennifer. 2021. Heroic Hearts: Sentiment, Saints, and Authority in Modern France. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

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Rosenbaum-Dondaine, Catherine. 1984. Un siècle d’images de piété. Paris: Musée-Galerie de la Seita. Sperber, Jonathan. 1984. Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. White, Owen, and J. P. Daughton, eds. 2012. In God’s Empire: French Missionaries and the Modern World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yonke, Eric. 1994. “The Catholic Subculture in Modern Germany: Recent Work on the Social History of Religion.” The Catholic Historical Review 80: 534 – 45. Zalar, Jeffrey T. 2019. Reading and Rebellion in Catholic Germany, 1770 – 1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zimdars-Swartz, Sandra. 1991. Encountering Mary: From La Salette to Medjugorje. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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6 Popular Religion On February 11, 1858, in Lourdes in Pyrenean France, fourteen-year-old Bernadette Soubirous received the first of eighteen apparitions of a woman standing in a rock formation above a grotto located along the river that runs through the village. At first a cause of local consternation, Bernadette’s conviction that the image declared herself to be the “Immaculate Conception,” the formula used by the Holy See four years earlier when promulgating the doctrine of the Virgin Mary’s preservation from original sin, transformed the visionary’s experiences into a national wonder. By the turn of the twentieth century, the Lourdes Grotto, whose spring waters offered healing hope to malades everywhere, had become “one of the greatest shrines in Christendom,” attracting hundreds of thousands and eventually millions of pilgrims annually (Harris 2000, 9). The apparitions at Lourdes were just one episode in an eruption of Marian devotional piety amid a general religious revival that registered everywhere in Catholic Europe during the “long nineteenth century.” There were, in fact, similar apparitions reported elsewhere that also occurred in circumstances of destitution involving poor and vulnerable children, above all girls: in France (Paris in 1830, La Salette in 1846, Pontmain in 1871); in Marpingen in the German Saar Valley in 1876; in Knock, Ireland in 1879; and in Pompeii, Italy in 1884 among other locations. It certainly gratified Louis Veuillot (1813 – 83), the pugnacious ultramontane journalist, to remark that in view of such events, the century after Voltaire should be known as “Mary’s century” (Mínguez-Blasco 2021, 94). The richness of “Mary’s century” amounted to more than claims of apparitions. Lourdes itself and all it entailed as a picturesque pilgrimage site of prayer and processions concentrated the historical forces of the age. In short order, it became more than a site of healing, a way of “taking the waters” for the pious poor in the manner of spa towns for the rich. It also became a booming tourist attraction with capitalist-religious kitsch for sale and leisure entertainments of coffee consumption, people watching, and postcard writing in a commingling of sacred and profane that appalled religious purists from one end of Europe to the other (Kaufman 2005). More belligerent detractors included bourgeois liberals of all varieties, who stood aghast at religious enthusiasm in the era of secular education and reasonable civil life they intended so adamantly to usher in; medical professionals, who claimed absolute command of healing and the prestige it conferred; and socialists everywhere, who discerned in popular spirituality, above all when it enjoyed clerical endorsement, a new threat to their campaign to liberate the masses from religious heritage and disclose to them their true interests. Catholic pilgrimages to Lourdes, then, were at once unmistakably religious and comprehensively enmeshed in the broader developments of the time. We can say as much about other forms of popular devotion, from Protestant care of abandoned children in Manchester and Orthodox petitions to Saint Sava for national independence in Serbia to Jewish Hasidic appeals to endure poverty in Poland and Muslims’ prayers to https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110609059-008

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Allah during their expulsions from the Sanjak of Scutari. These and similar practices open up and clarify all manner of reflections on the nature of European modernity. These reflections have to do with the presence of religiosity in emergent secular states, gendered relations of power, strategies of inclusion and exclusion in expanding public spheres, industrialization and its impact, identity creation and maintenance, the reach of science, the coalescence of national cultures, and many other matters that lie at the heart of European history in the crucial transitional period between the French Revolution and the First World War. The “persistence” of the sacred in popular religion was, to be sure, as much a part of this history as were emporium shopping, patronizing a zoo, or standing in a factory line (Doney 2022). Scholars did not arrive at these conclusions directly. The historical study of religion had normally privileged ecclesiastical institutions, authorities, and doctrines. Beginning in the 1960s, scholars set these emphases of “Church History” in wider contexts by focusing attention on popular religion, which implied the beliefs and practices of common people that facilitated their encounters with the sacred in everyday life. While they often aligned with historic patterns of religious expression, these beliefs and practices could also be elective, improvisational, and extra-liturgical in a way that challenged or even subverted received traditions. Various academic approaches contributed to this reorientation of the field. Social-historical and microhistorical techniques identified the groups, locations, and practices of popular belief. Ethnographic studies emphasized the mentalities, collective attitudes, and symbolic patterns of devotions among diverse populations. Approaches grouped under the label of the “cultural turn” decompartmentalized religion, clearing space to recognize belief in aspects of public and private affairs that were thought to be secular. The history of women revealed the emotional substance and intimate appeal of many popular beliefs that offered women meaning when secular explanations of their concerns failed. The study of “lived religion” made scholars aware of the gap between the normative creeds of established traditions and the faith practices of ordinary believers, which could be far more ambiguous, contingent, and spectacular (Orsi 1985). These methodological developments, which included a greater willingness to accord to believers a presumption of meaningfulness apart from the circumstances in which they acted, expanded the terrain on which the experience of the sacred could be discerned. More recently, however, the apparent gulf between “official” beliefs and practices sponsored by religious elites, on the one hand, and the “popular” beliefs and practices of the laity, on the other, has closed. As we will see below, with some exceptions, the clergy could be far more accommodating of popular beliefs and practices than historians had realized. It was not uncommon for them to lead the laity where the laity already wanted to go, either because they shared the same beliefs or because they warmed to these beliefs in utile strategies of pastoral direction. The laity, meanwhile, did not tend to formulate systematic ideas about their commitments, nor did they draw hard distinctions between their beliefs and those of “official,” clerically-determined faith. Rather, clergy and laity existed in an adaptive relationship, each with its own agency and each responding to the other. Together, they produced “powerful and com-

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plex cultural expressions of transcendent meanings, passions, and beliefs entwined inescapably with the whole of life” (Steinberg and Coleman 2007, 1). This more flexible and accommodating view anchors this chapter, which examines popular beliefs and practices from multiple traditions on the colorful, congested, and always changing landscape of modern European religion. In making our way through this landscape, we will follow two main guideposts: first, revolutionary ideas and politics and, second, social change.

Revolutionary Ideas and Politics At Borodino, in September 1812, and in deliberate contradistinction from the largely secular French army arrayed for battle against it, Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov ordered that the Icon of the Smolensk Mother of God be venerated along the length of the Russian line. It ended up near the Semenovskoe flèches at the southern extreme of the position, where Guards infantry prayed to it in their squares while under French artillery canister fire. They were right to pray, for the invasion of their native soil was just the beginning of the affront to “Holy Russia.” When they reached Moscow, French soldiers and their allies plundered churches and monasteries of their valuables. Demanding to know the locations of ecclesiastical treasures, they tortured or killed the monks who maintained them. If they did not find the wealth they sought above ground, they desecrated churchyard graves to find it reposing with the dead below. They bayonetted icons, split them with axes, and used them for target practice. They scattered the relics of martyrs and saints, stabled their horses in pilgrimage convents, and turned churches into slaughterhouses, defecating on their floors and urinating on their walls before these buildings, too, burned to ashes in the city’s inferno. The outrages Napoleonic armies committed against the religious sensibilities of common people, which drew their justifications and patterns of behavior from Jacobin attacks on Catholic peasants during the Wars of the Vendée of the French Revolution (1793 – 96), were not limited to Russia. They occurred everywhere along the swath of French conquest and occupation, inspiring faith-based resistance not only to the violence, taxation, requisitions, billeting, conscription, and other abuses pertaining to the imposition of French public authority but also to the pillage of churches, mass theft of masterpiece religious art, and destruction of religious symbols for which the French and their allies were universally reviled. This resistance took many forms. It included the defense of particularistic religious cultures in the Central Italian Apennines, the adamant reassertion of religious customs in the Austrian Tyrol and, famously, ferocious guerrilla banditry and urban warfare in Iberia. Here attestations of miracles, prophesies, and visions of the Virgin inspired crusading men and women to fight against the French with sticks, stones, knives, and even household scissors (Tone 2007). The widespread trauma inflicted by the Napoleonic onslaught often goes overlooked in studies of nineteenth-century popular religion. And yet, this trauma, to say nothing of its memory, decisively shaped popular religious behavior after 1815. For ex-

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ample, memories of the desecration of churches in the German Rhineland, an orgy of blasphemy so offensive that priests refused to say the Mass in them, fueled popular religious enthusiasms that helped ignite the Catholic revival in Prussian lands by midcentury. This revival, which became pan-European in scope, enjoyed important institutional support from the papacy. Its increasing renown, among Catholics at least, derived in no small measure from memories of Pius VII’s humiliating persecution by Napoleon Bonaparte and of the rough removal of cherished religious art from Italian lands by French occupation authorities, only a portion of which was ever returned. These insults against the universal church, intensified in their impact by the systematic secularization of ecclesiastical properties, the vast suppression of religious houses, and substantial material destruction of church buildings and all they contained, fed the cultural anguish at the heart of the emotive and powerfully defensive movement in ultramontane piety. In a similar way, Willem I (1772 – 1843), king of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands after 1815, adopted an anti-Catholic religious policy. It recalled in the minds of offended believers memories of abuses committed by French revolutionary officials in Belgian lands beginning in 1794. These memories played no insignificant role in inciting the 1830 revolution against Willem that led to Belgian national independence. Bad recollections of the revolutionary age returned in the minds of Russian Orthodox believers as late as the early years of the twentieth century, when Bolsheviks looked gleefully to the Jacobins for inspiration. In Spain, the legacy of bitterness begun during the Napoleonic Wars endured across the whole sad spectacle of hatred between church defenders and liberal reformers from the revolutionary age to the civil conflicts of the 1930s. Such memories thus played a resonant role in pious perception. They convinced the common people of Europe of the threat that secular ideologies and the political movements they spawned could pose to their cherished beliefs. In response, and in the general disorder of post-Napoleonic Europe, these people reasserted their beliefs in pious awakenings and revivals, and in styles both approved and disapproved by their religious authorities. We see these kinds of awakenings and revivals across Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Catholic revival was a many-splendored thing. It encouraged traditional forms of piety, such as pilgrimages, Corpus Christi processions, reception of Easter Communion, and the wearing of scapulars and other items. It also made way for new forms of piety, such as participation in the cult of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which became international in popularity. Stressing Christ’s boundless and compassionate love for human beings, the Sacred Heart of Jesus spoke both to the pain of revolutionary persecutions and to revivalist enthusiasms intended to atone for waning religious commitments in conditions of gaining secularity (Jonas 2000). Other beliefs and practices had roots in the past but returned with renewed fervor. These included missions preached by order priests in crescendos of spiritual urgency, intensified veneration of objets de piété, a surge in claims of ecstatic visions, and a marked rise in the number of stigmatic cases. Stigmatic cases in particular attracted the attention of clergy, as well as that of medical doctors. Just as at Lourdes, clergy appealed to physicians

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to examine and verify the claims of stigmatics, who tended to be poor women residing in peripheral areas. Among them were Anna Katharina Emmerich in the German Münsterland, whose marks first appeared in 1813 shortly after Jérôme Bonaparte, king of Westphalia, suppressed her convent; Maria von Mörl in the South Tyrol, who drew tens of thousands of Catholic visitors amid widespread confessional conflicts with Protestants and liberal provocateurs grounded in Napoleonic politics; Maria Domenica Lazzeri in Capriana in Trentino, who was said to bear the Crown of Thorns; and Louise Lateau from the village of Bois-d’Haine southwest of Brussels, whose case was studied (inconclusively) at the highest levels of the Belgian medical establishment. Scholars have explained these extraordinary experiences as credible in the eyes of participants because they frustrated the interventions of begrudging scientists or as indications of female power in the male-dominated fields of religion and learning. In these and many other cases, affirming clerical involvement, especially at the upper-ecclesial levels, was a departure from Baroque-era skepticism about popular religious excess. In the context of the nineteenth-century’s great church-state battles, Catholic clergy were more inclined to incorporate popular religion, even in its more sensational varieties, into official cult and practice, if only as a sign of abiding devotional intensity (Kselman 1993). Some beliefs had to be rejected on doctrinal grounds (see below). But in general the embrace of popular religion was part of a grandiose strategy, endorsed and in many respects led by the Holy See, to construct a counter-world for Catholics within the states of Europe. This counter-world, in which the energy of popular religion was meant to fuse with formal practice and correspond with mutually reinforcing social institutions, voluntary societies and, in some places, political parties, was structured to bracket Catholics off from both religious competitors and secular temptations. Authorities hoped that this separation would, in turn, prevent religious “indifference,” a term of spiritual diagnosis that suffused diocesan as well as papal assessments of contemporary affairs throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. In the Prussian lands before national unification in 1871, this coordination of popular belief, formal cult, and social integration under clerical leadership produced a mass Catholic movement. One of its highpoints was the remarkable pilgrimage in 1844 to the Holy Coat of Trier in the southern Rhineland. It drew more than 560,000 participants and unfolded in a context of recent state persecution of bishops over marriage policy and pervasive Protestant-liberal mockery in the press of Catholic popular belief. Similar developments occurred in Spain. Here popular religion, which had always figured subtly in formal practice, took on an increasingly political edge as the conflict between liberal reformers and their absolutist opponents deepened. This conflict, rendered in apocalyptic terms by provocateurs on both sides, incited sustained pious resistance as Catholics within and without the clerical establishment attempted to recover from Napoleonic attacks and restore morality and doctrine among the faithful. In an atmosphere of constant government harassment and liberal agitation, believers also looked to the papacy, which became intimately involved in Spanish affairs by the 1830s. The Vicar of Christ, Rome declared, “will comfort the weak and console all, stimulating them to maintain themselves firm in their faith and to defend themselves

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against the diabolic spirit of the revolutionary government of Madrid” (Callahan 1984, 166). Standing firm in defense of their faith meant participation in popular devotions, whose enormous appeal offset in part the decline in liturgical services due to the decimation of active clergy during the Napoleonic years. These devotions included enrollment in religious groups emerging from the old confraternities. One of these groups was the Archconfraternity of Our Lady of Grace and Our Lady of Carmen. It served the interests not only of spiritual excitement but of convivial recreation in updated patterns of leisure. Another faith-based activity was popular evangelization in a new, modern style. It featured effusive professions of personal faith that reflected the rising individualism of the age. Still other practices were domestic missions complete with exhortatory preaching and such traditional observances as novenas, visits to altars, and enlistment in the cults of patron saints and of the Blessed Sacrament. All these practices flourished among a church membership as aware of the storms battering them as they were determined to survive an epoch of oppression that, like the persecution of Christians under the Roman Empire, was supposed to usher in a new era of steadfast faith among individuals bound together by spiritual kinship. It is in this sense that we may concur with Margaret Lavinia Anderson who observes that the Catholic revival’s spiritual effervescence has to be seen as emanating from conflicts over public space that “inculcated in nineteenth-century Catholics not only a faith but an identity” (2000, 33). This effervescence appeared not only in German and Spanish lands but in France, Belgium, England during what John Henry Newman (1801 – 90) called English Catholicism’s “second spring,” partitioned Poland, and post-famine Ireland, whose “devotional revolution” Emmet Larkin studied so memorably (1972). Protestant revivalism in the first half of the nineteenth century turned on many of the same pivots. Enlightenment rationalism’s aridity had done little during the century before to satisfy important religious groups—German Pietists, English Methodists, inheritors of Moravian spirituality in Bohemia, Scandinavia, and the Low Countries— who desired a more intense, personally transformative, and lasting encounter with God in line with key Reformation doctrines. This dissatisfaction comported with general criticisms of institutional churches. In the eyes of the revivalists, the churches as part of the ancien régime were hidebound in helping believers make sense of the titanic intellectual and political alterations introduced by the Enlightenment, the shock of French revolutionary violence, and the Napoleonic Wars. There was something seriously wrong with the tendencies of the times, revivalists agreed, which called for a radical renewal of faith atoning for sin, improving morality, and remaking the world with eager anticipations of enduring peace and evangelical unity. All the revivals in Protestant lands grew from such soils and therefore bore common attributes. These attributes included, in the first instance, attempts to cultivate fervent love of God through heartfelt personal conversion to Jesus Christ as Savior and Redeemer. This conversion, which presupposed sincere repentance for one’s failings, sanctified the self and thus ensured salvation in this life. This gift of unmerited grace demanded, in turn, firm commitments to a more genuine and avidly pursued be-

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lief and practice. One observed these commitments through regular prayer, including charismatic prayer, upon an intensified awareness of the animating presence of the Holy Spirit in one’s soul and community. Reverent reading of Scripture opened one’s heart to the admonitions and encouragements of God as one’s life unfolded under providential care. Attendance at Sunday worship and other gatherings, such as revival meetings, where fiery preaching could produce spontaneous expressions of faith, joy, and freedom from sin, confirmed one’s ardent devotion in a way that echoed postEnlightenment romantic sentimentality. Finally, once saved, true evangelical believers exhibited the fruits of renewal by reforming society. Reformation meant turning one’s back on games, dancing, cards, alcohol, and other distracting and potentially demonic social amusements. It meant fortifying the spiritual domain of one’s home through godly daily life, which included observing Sabbath proscriptions against labor for money and retail shopping. Finally, it meant religious activism, discussed below, that both advanced one’s own moral and spiritual development and honored insistent biblical precepts to serve others. These inducements to faith-based action, which directed popular religion to address the circumstances of the times, proved enormously attractive. They reached not only rising bourgeois elites, whose leading presence in religious activism proved so decisive. They also reached the urban and rural poor, who responded readily to intensified reverence in religious practice, vigorous sermonizing in language they could grasp, and an approach to the religious life that was available to everyone regardless of past complacencies or compromises of soul. The impassioned revivals to which all these individuals contributed took place across the landscape of Protestant northern and central Europe and, indeed, throughout the Atlantic World. In German lands, the revivalist movement or Erweckungsbewegung developed nearly everywhere: Württemberg in the southwest, Franconia in northern Bavaria, Siegerland and Wuppertal in the Lower Rhineland, and in the former Hansa cities of Bremen and Hamburg. In Berlin, it drew from the ideas of the romantic philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768 – 1834), who emphasized piety as an emotional experience characteristic of a mature self-consciousness. Revivals in the Scandinavian lands of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden were influenced variously by the Lutheran reformer N. F. S. Grundtvig (1783 – 1872) and later by the deeply personal religiosity endorsed by Søren Kierkegaard (1813 – 55). They featured daily devotion to the Bible, many forms of faith-based fellowship, missionary outreach to the unchurched both at home and abroad, and a remarkable affection for the singing of hymns, which animated the revivalist élan of Sunday domestic repose and weekly assembled prayer (Jarlert 2012b). Among the Dutch and Swiss, revivalism implied the same kinds of activities along with great attention to evangelical work designed to lift up the poor and immiserated, work that figured in a vibrant Christian humanism that rejected the abstract detachment of Enlightenment rationalism. Perhaps the best-recognized forms of Protestant revivalism were seen in England. Famous in the first third of the nineteenth century for their camp meetings and ecstatic prayer sessions, revivals here converted all manner of people to more active lives of

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faith: the rural poor, vulnerable artisans and textile workers in the midlands and northern towns, and others experiencing the effects of economic uncertainty, notably miners and quarriers, whose religious concerns were intensified by incipient social conflicts. Miners’ attraction to revivalist enthusiasm continued into the twentieth century, when common people in the mining valleys of Wales erupted in spontaneous expressions of spiritual emotion that played no small role in introducing Pentecostalism to Britain (Hall 1972). These several examples demonstrate the fervor and enduring relevance of revivalist sentiments that developed not only against the backdrop of French revolutionary and Napoleonic calamities but amid the great social changes introduced by economic modernization.

Social Change When considering European social history in the years from 1789 to 1914, it is important to remember that most people lived on the land. This distribution was especially true among Jews, Orthodox Christians, and Muslims residing in the overwhelmingly agricultural Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires to the east and among Catholics living in backwater regions of Bavaria, France, Ireland, Italy, and Spain. And while people living in these areas underwent in varying degrees the modern disruptions of the peasant economy—enclosure of common lands, demise of seigneurial privileges in favor of monetary transactions, emancipation of serfs, market consolidation of local farms, migrations of surplus labor to cities or abroad through emigration —as a rule, existence here was more unruffled than in Europe’s emerging urban centers and therefore more traditional in its ways. Unsurprisingly, in these rural regions popular religion remained a force. The focus of sustained academic interest over the past fifty years of scholarship, we now possess a detailed picture of what popular religion in rural Europe looked like and the roles it played in everyday communal life. Reflecting a remarkably resilient supernatural view of the world, the beliefs and practices pertaining to it situated individuals in a cosmic whole of nature, place, and ethereal horizons that sacralized life’s events and the settings in which they occurred. Some beliefs and practices were part of received traditions. For example, in the Christian Orthodox lands of Russia, the Balkans, and the Danubian Plain, they included pilgrimages to well-established holy sites that drew participants, both male and female, in massive numbers (Lupinin 2016; Worobec 2016). For Russian pilgrims, these sites stretched from the Solovki Monastery near the Arctic Circle to Jerusalem in the Holy Land and everyplace in between: shrines of interceding saints, repositories of miraculous icons, hermitages of the great ascetics and mystics of the age. At these sites, pilgrims took Communion, venerated relics, attended services for the dead, and received spiritual direction, strengthening themselves to endure life’s challenges in solidarity with others, with Mary, Mother of God, and with the saints in heaven. Among Catholics in rural Poland, practices included blessings of the land for a good harvest, participating in traditional customs and fairs marking the liturgical cal-

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endar, and praying the “Living Rosary,” during which each member of a group of fifteen individuals said part of the rosary mysteries (Kloczowski 2000). In pre-famine Ireland, parish-centered piety featured solemn masses and festival processions of candles, while in southern Italy there were widespread devotions to religious statues. In this context, we need also note the great mystical eruptions of the period. In Orthodox Russia, the Hesychast practice of monological prayer, centered above all on the Jesus Prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me”), enjoyed a renewal. It spread beyond the monasteries to a wider population thanks to the translation of Hesychast writings into Slavonic at the end of the eighteenth century. It also enjoyed affinities with elder or Startsy spiritual counsel, which urged in all believers the development of an “interior hermitage” through the contemplation of God with a simple, calm, and pure heart (Lupinin 2016, 328). In the Muslim Balkans, the Bektashi order, a Sufi mystic group that by the nineteenth century had incorporated traditions from both Shia and Sunni Islam, continued to exert its pull, above all in Albania. Its appeal rested upon traditional beliefs in God and the prophets, honoring the truths contained in the Quran and Hadith, and the recitation of the Muslim daily five prayers. It added to these core commitments prayers for the welfare of humans everywhere and an imperative to seek the advice of experienced spiritual guides or babas, who led believers to repentance and inner refreshment. Finally, in the Ashkenazi Jewish areas of eastern Europe, there was Hasidism, perhaps the greatest spiritual force of the age. It appeared in the Ukraine in the 1750s and spread “like wildfire” throughout the Russian Pale of Settlement, Congress Poland, and the Habsburg lands of Galicia, Bukovina, and northeastern Hungary. It was a form of Jewish mysticism that insisted believers could achieve direct and deeply personal union with God without relying upon Talmudic study (Ury 2017, 80). A firmly traditional and separatist popular revival movement, Hasidism spoke intimately to the Jewish poor by avoiding the intellectualism characteristic of rabbinic observance, emphasizing instead the basic precepts of love for all, sincerity of heart, and joie de vivre. Other beliefs of popular religion in rural Europe derived from unofficial sources that enjoyed longstanding validity by communal affirmation. Above all, this means folklore, whose hold on the rural mind was as tenacious as its variety was ranging. Understandably, many folkloric beliefs had to do with warding off the rural catastrophes of bad weather, dearth, starvation, and epidemics. For example, peasants in the Dutch Netherlands believed that Saint Clare would deliver good weather if they made gifts of sausage to the convent of the Poor Clares in Eindhoven. In Begoña in Spain’s Basque Provinces, believers petitioned their priests to bless the sky with holy water against the threat of thunderstorms. In German lands there were forest and field cults to tame winter and expel corn demons (Weber-Kellermann 1965). Elsewhere, and in an age when medical doctors often did more harm than good, the intermingling of folklore magic and objects of material religion in the hope of miracle cures was ubiquitous. In Russia, for example, Christian believers applied everything from holy oil, wadding from saints’ coffins, and relic pieces of saints’ clothing to the sick and their body parts. In France, jumping over the ashes of village bonfires lit on the eve of the

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Feast of Saint John the Baptist, the famous feux de la Saint-Jean, was thought to ensure good health for a year (Kselman 1983). Among the Sarakatsani shepherds in the Pindus Mountains of Continental Greece, where the inculcation of Christian Orthodox doctrine was gravely uncertain, women made folk remedies out of lamb’s blood (Kokosalakis 1987). Just as ubiquitous were beliefs in occult and related phenomena that were hard to reconcile with official creeds and were therefore sometimes condemned explicitly: Irish fairies who lived in sacred bushes and incorporated sick children, turning them into “changelings”; witches in the Balkans who cast spells so terrible, Christian men sometimes hid their identities by adopting Muslim names; ghosts, hags, and werewolves afoot in the Low Countries that haunted Calvinist Protestants; and the sorcery of the “evil eye,” a prosperous occult concept that had one of the longest careers in the history of the European supernatural. In White Russian shtetls, Jewish women believed that if a child fell ill, and particularly if it yawned, it was oppressed by the “evil eye.” The only remedy was an exorcism, one of whose Yiddish incantations went, “There are three cracks / In the ceiling wide. / There the child’s evil eye / Will depart and hide.” Following the incantation and to complete the ritual, the woman spit three times (Connolly 1982; Ain 1990, 36; Mazower 2000; van Lieburg 2012). Accompanying such beliefs and practices were Nostradamus-like forecasting, divinization and mediumship, lucky charm and amulet wearing, often bizarre rituals connected to courtship and sexuality, and obdurate submission to the preposterous, medieval charge that Jews slaughtered Christian children every Passover to fix matzo with their blood. Scholars no longer dismiss folklore, despite its gradual disappearance nearly everywhere, in the modern history of popular religion. In the first instance, religious leaderships, even at the highest echelons, absorbed it, if possible, into the orthodoxy and orthopraxis of established traditions. They approved this absorption as a commonsense method of retaining the adherence of believers who insisted that the world was “porous,” to use Charles Taylor’s formulation, which is to say shot through with sacred purposes, powers, and personalities (2011). As uniquely effective “enchantments,” these purposes, powers, and personalities offered propitiating reassurance to people living in difficult and often unpredictable conditions. They provided immediate results through direct divine intervention in the natural world. And they spoke plausibly to a person’s moods and circumstances, restoring personal agency amid cascades of rural problems and affirming one’s place in the sacred order by forgiving past misdeeds, finding solace in the present, and spreading hope for the future. Folkloric beliefs and practices were also of great communal value. They bound individuals to a shared sacral time, identified good and evil according to recognized standards of judgment, demanded right behavior for the benefit of all, eased neighborly reconciliation, and made village life more cohesive and stable in an era of dislocations. In some places, the power of folklore, when blended with official religion, maintained exclusive communal identity despite powerful pressures of dissolution. This was the case among the Sephardic Jews of Monastir in the Macedonian highlands of Ottoman Turkey. Here oral folktales recounting the brave deeds of Jews expelled

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from Spain in the fifteenth century interlaced inseparably with Jewish faith and practice to create an enduring subculture passed on within the households of pious women (Cohen 2003). In other places, folklore held in common by members of different religious groups created unexpected alliances that softened the boundaries of exclusive community. This could be the case in the multi-religious Balkans, where Christians, Jews, and Muslims heeded the same itinerant “prophets,” sometimes participated in the religious festivals of different faiths, and adopted customs from otherwise rival traditions if they were enjoyable and made sense. One of the most striking outcomes of such blurred boundaries occurred when Balkan Orthodox Christians visited the Holy Land. Upon their return, they received the honorific title Hajji, which was normally reserved for Muslims who undertook the ritual pilgrimage to Mecca (Izmirlieva 2014). In short, if popular religion could be a source of contest, competition, and violence, it could also promote creative interactions that led to respect and mutual understanding. In recent years, scholars have been equally attentive to popular religion’s vitality in Europe’s cities, which for a long time were thought to be unfriendly environments for it. Urbanization, to be sure, presented critical challenges to Europe’s religious fellowships. And yet, religiously committed individuals and the congregations to which they belonged made impressive attempts to ameliorate the situation. The nineteenth century teemed with many species of devotional activism that addressed the needs of the laboring masses, fought back against socialist claims that religions cared only about salvation in the next life (rather than happiness in this one), and produced new kinds of sociability that helped bind people to their faith traditions. Such activism lay at the center of Protestant revivalism everywhere, drawing its inspiration from mutually reinforcing theologies. These included belief in the imminent realization of God’s Kingdom through the rechristianization of society and the evangelical imperative of outreach to the poor, not only to help those in trouble but to limit the occasions of sin to which they seemed pitiably exposed. These theologies were all the more attractive for their being endorsed by communal agreement and not imposed by ecclesial authority. In any case, they produced a sunburst of pious energy that brought spiritual light to bear on social problems. Prisoner visitations, prostitute rescue, temperance campaigns, the gathering up and domestic placement of abandoned children, widow relief, Salvation Army soup houses, savings banks, evening vocational classes, lending libraries for fortifying literacy, recreational activities sponsored by groups like the Young Men’s Christian Association, the famous YMCA, that spread Protestant modernity all over the world: you name it, Protestant pious associations provided it, and with heart-hammering ardor (see the introduction in Jarlert 2012b; Harald et al. 2021). To this impressive catalogue of accomplishments we have to add charitable and philanthropic work directed abroad in the missions. Among other benefits, it inspired humanitarian legislation to end the slave trade in Africa and widow immolation in India. Devotional activism among Catholics, often led by priests, was no less creative or urgent. It, too, was grounded in theological claims characteristic of nineteenth-century popular religion: the centrality of performing good works either as a sign of one’s salvation or a requirement for it; a growing awareness of the necessary linkage of person-

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al spirituality with one’s social role in the unfolding of a well-directed calling; a commitment to the idea that the world was worth fighting for, that it amounted to something more than the wrecked playground of the devil that could not be redeemed through holy action. Perhaps the most dramatic example of these theologies coming together was in the galaxy of associations named for specific saints and animated by the socio-spiritual charisms they were meant to express. Those committed to Christ-like care of the destitute appealed to Saint Elizabeth of Thuringia, the thirteenth-century princess to the poor. Coal miners seeking mutual aid gathered under the banner of Saint Barbara, long connected with light (and lightning!) and thus the patroness of those who used explosives. Industrial laborers stood together with Saint Joseph, the worker. To enroll in one of these societies—and there was a pious association for everything—was to execute a uniquely modern way of urban life that was both intentionally devotional and socially concerned. The same accents animated Catholic outreach everywhere. Charities in many countries helped clogged cities deal with cholera pandemics and repeated outbreaks of typhus, measles, and scarlet fever. Workers’ organizations in Belgium, Italy, and Germany supplied financial and pension aid, insurance against accidental death, and vocational instruction, fostering solidarity among people whom developing Catholic social doctrine insisted were dignified human beings worthy of respect, not lower-class plebs to be exploited. This approach paid off handsomely in Ireland, where the Jesuits’ working men’s sodalities achieved an average branch membership of 1,800 – 3,000 individuals (Holmes 2012). Meanwhile, by mid-century in Paris, some forty-three charities delivered poor relief in all its forms. The most famous of these was the venerable Society of Saint Vincent de Paul. Founded in 1833, it offered sanctification to its members through service to the poor. Its reputation and utility were so imposing, the needs it satisfied so broadly felt, that from the 1840s onward, in some countries a chapter could be found in nearly every parish. For their part, the Poles founded sobriety societies that diminished the consumption of vodka by some 90 percent (Kloczowski 2000). Dutch Catholics instituted the Confraternity of the Holy Family, which restored and strengthened domestic life among the working poor (Margry 2012). In England, the Third Order of Saint Francis, the so-called Tertiaries, organized both consecrated religious and laity for poor relief. It joined other philanthropic organizations whose members wore distinctive ribbons and crosses to Mass and bore decorated banners in processions to mark their denominational allegiance and proclaim their special allure. Very often, devout women were at the forefront of these initiatives. In one of the most decisive turns in the movement of women into the public sphere, women from the Christian confessions thronged to faith-based activism to address social ills (Holmes and Urquhart 1994). At one end of Europe, in England, Protestant women schooled disadvantaged children, organized blanket clubs, ran mothers’ meetings, staffed foundling orphanages, and worked in asylums. In villages undergoing the process of industrialization in Lancashire, Yorkshire, and the Midlands, they preached the Gospel in a form of “cottage religion,” alleviating despair, offering advice, and building community (Valenze 1985). And by 1820 there were already thousands of women engaged with the

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British and Foreign Bible Society, not only bringing the Word to the poor but encouraging their literacy and orienting them to education (Lane 2004). At the other end of Europe, in Russia, Christian Orthodox women participated in social work upon the argument that if they could transmit doctrine and proper morals at home, they could do so in public. Therefore, there was no good reason why they should not take on the education of children, for example, especially girls. And undertake it they did, not least as members of female monastic orders, whose numbers increased from 1,671 in 1796 to over 73,000 by 1914 and whose activities reached beyond education to include all manner of social concerns (Wagner 2007). Female religious orders blossomed in Catholic Europe, too, and with breathtaking impact. The number of nuns in Ireland, who tended to cluster around youth education and social relief activities—Ursulines, Presentation Sisters, Sisters of Charity—increased from 1,500 in 1851 to over 8,000 by the turn of the twentieth century. This figure does not count the armies of Irish nuns who deployed to perform similar works abroad (Peckham Magray 1998). The same developments occurred elsewhere, as in Poland. Here an explosion in the number of nuns allowed for the spread of girls’ education and the care of neglected people throughout Silesia and Galicia. Equally important in this connection was nuns’ involvement—both Orthodox and Catholic—in hospital care and nursing. In 1835 in Ireland, the Sisters of Charity established the first Catholic hospital in the country since the sixteenth century. In Spain the selfsame order was so respected for its hospital and asylum work that its membership nearly doubled in the span of fourteen years, from 887 in 1854 to 1,657 in 1868. Joining the nuns in the rising tide of medical charity were Protestant nurses, many of whom trained at the Deaconess Institute in Kaiserswerth, Prussia, founded in 1836 by the Lutheran Pastor Theodor Fliedner (1800 – 64) and his wife, Friederike. Instructed in scientific medicine to cure physical maladies and concurrently in the Bible to cure the sin-sick soul, they spread to many parts of Europe and even to colonial zones, where they played leading roles in the development of medical missions. The Institute’s most renowned pupil was Florence Nightingale (1820 – 1910), who arrived in Kaiserswerth in 1851 after studying nursing under the Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul in Paris. She became, of course, “the Lady with the Lamp,” who made the rounds of wounded soldiers at Constantinople during the Crimean War and the foundress of modern nursing. Voluntary societies addressing social ills were but one manifestation of urban popular religion. Despite the obstacles urban ways of life posed to realizing traditional patterns of devotion, people adapted to their circumstances and opened up new possibilities when others closed down (Steinhoff 2008). This adaptation involved the offering of new kinds of religious services with opportunities to hear preaching, expanded access to religious print through the establishment of confessional publishing houses, and the endowment of historical commissions, whose attention to the great events of their confessional pasts inspired new and popular festive commemorations. One of the simplest ways to bring people back to church buildings was the introduction of electric lighting, which was a marvel to be seen and was much talked about. In places where concen-

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trations of believers ran so high they exhausted their ministers’ resources, such as among Protestants in Berlin in the 1890s, churches instituted mass baptisms and even mass weddings to hold the faithful to important rites of passage (Jarlert 2012a). The churches also took advantage of devotions that already enjoyed respect. In England, urbanized Catholics came out in large numbers for the recitation of the Public Rosary and Benediction of the exposed Blessed Sacrament, the “twin pillars of Victorian and Edwardian piety” (Heimann 1995). In urban Poland, the fulfillment of basic religious duties, such as making an annual confession, receiving Easter Communion, and attending weekly Mass, which remained important to personal faith as well as to social acceptance, ran as high as 90 percent. In Orthodox Russia, religious adherence was as strong in urban as in rural areas, with very high compliance with annual confession and Communion requirements among both men and women and vast participation in such extra-liturgical piety as shrine visitations and icon processions (Freeze 2016). For those lost to the established churches, urban environments dangled alternative spiritualities. These included theosophy, which drew from Buddhism and Hinduism; Spiritualism, an import from America, which offered people the chance to communicate with their beloved dead; dissident religious movements on the fringes of traditions that eschewed doctrines, clerics, and rituals; and several forms of “confessional” secularism among both Christians and Jews, whose beliefs were so interpenetrated by scientific and metaphysical claims that the use of a microscope in one’s parlor could feel like a sacred act (Weir 2014; Habermas 2019). “Secular religion” may also be discerned in such urban devotions as the adoration of monarchs during city visits, the ritualized memorialization of war dead, statuary emplacements of revered political figures, and the festivals of national holidays. Perhaps none of Europe’s main religious traditions was affected more decisively by urbanization than Judaism and with lasting implications for popular belief and practice. We find urbanized Jews in many locations throughout the uneven spread of their Diaspora, with larger concentrations in leading cities like Paris, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, and Berlin in western and central Europe; Warsaw, Lodz, Lublin, and Siedlce in eastern Europe; and Salonika in Central Macedonia in the Balkans. In all these locations, but above all those in western and central Europe, urbanized Jews felt the tug of assimilation into broader societies. There were several reasons for it. The Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) of the eighteenth century’s second half urged Jews to modernize, which meant exposing dogmas and customs to rational criticism, abandoning or reforming practices of traditional faith, and pursuing secular education. These measures were intended to overcome cultural isolation and prepare Jews to capitalize upon the revolutionary concepts of civil equality and constitutional rights that opened up a spectrum of political, occupational, and social freedoms (Katz 1973; Judd 2017). The Christian communities in which these Jews lived, furthermore, if they were not hostile to emancipation as such, pressured Jews in myriad ways to demonstrate their worthiness for acceptance, which only encouraged greater compromises with Jewish tradition to the point of intermarriage, religious conversion, or surrender to atheism. These internal and external inducements to assimilate edged Jews “into the

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wider society, with new types of opportunity for personal fulfillment; a society in which the inhibitions of centuries could readily fade for innumerable reasons. The pressure to identify oneself with other interests and causes seemed to belong to the natural order of things” (Finestein 1993, 155). These several developments, which spoke directly to the meaning of Jewish identity and the justifications for distinctive Jewish existence, fragmented Jews along theological-ideological lines and resulted in great and ultimately irreconcilable internal disagreements. These disagreements registered in very different approaches to religious practice. While bourgeois women were more likely to engage in traditional customs at home, bourgeois men increasingly disregarded dietary laws; abandoned Sabbath synagogue worship, in part to conduct business on Saturdays; refused to abide by rabbinical judgments in the right expression of belief; and rejected any Jewish national identity (Rozenblit 2010). If they engaged in liturgy, especially in German Europe, they did so in the developing Reform tradition. Reform involved shorter, Protestantinspired sermons in the vernacular, careful attention to order and decorum, considered elimination of any prayers that might offend Gentiles, and the inclusion of instrumental music, preferably with organ accompaniment, which was another gesture to majority-Protestant practice. Conservative and Orthodox Jews, to say nothing of the Hasidim, who clung tightly to Jewish tradition, were horrified by these reformist trends. They argued that the observance of customary practices—keeping kosher; burying the deceased on the day of their death; saying prayers in Hebrew or Yiddish, not the vernacular; nourishing the messianic promise of return to Zion; attending synagogue services; obeying rabbinical guidance—was absolutely essential to preserving religious integrity against the threat of catastrophic disintegration. Respectability, they held, while laudable as such and desirable in contexts of pervasive anti-Judaic mistrust, should not come at the expense of communal survival. This stress on survival with integrity in conditions of religious pluralism figured centrally in the experiences of all the groups this chapter has considered. Integrity was so important because all these groups were implicated in societies wracked by divisive conflicts that stretched laterally across communal boundaries. These conflicts included political quarrels, disputes over access to public space and goods, different responses to the ideas and impositions of secular knowledge regimes, and hostilities grounded in symbolic provocations, whose emotions could be all the more biting for the prolonged crises of national belonging and exclusion from which they derived. Sometimes these conflicts resolved in suspicious coexistence or, if interests aligned, provisional cooperation. But all too often they led to fear, anger, resentments, and violence. Popular religion helped to express these negative feelings, as aggrieved antagonists instrumentalized piety to serve unholy ends. It is possible to share just a few examples of this history. In England, where a long tradition of lampooning everything Catholic as un-English “popery” existed, proper observance of Anglican piety sought to mark differences with fiercely unwanted Irish Catholic immigrants. In Imperial Germany, Catholic loyalists revived devotion to Saint Bonifatius (d. 754), the primordial missionary to the Germans, in a move deliberately intended to frustrate Protestant def-

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initions of the nation. Protestants responded in kind, arguing that no one who believed in the 1876 accounts of Marian apparitions at Marpingen could be expected to comprehend, much less defend, German Kultur (Blackbourn 1994; Bennette 2012). In the Netherlands, the constitution of 1848 declared the equality of confessions, but it also included an article restricting Catholic public devotions and rituals. Protestants cheered this so-called “procession ban” as an essential measure to maintain the historically Calvinist “national soul.” The linkage of Roman Catholicism and Polish national feeling was, of course, very tight—so tight that anniversary celebrations of important saints, especially Saint Stanislaw, and pilgrimages to venerate important icons, above all the Black Madonna of Częstochowa, carried prominent anti-Protestant and anti-Jewish overtones. Meanwhile, the gradual establishment of independent nation-states in the Balkans at the expense of the retreating Ottoman Empire drew lavishly upon popular religious ideas. All the Christian Orthodox peoples anxious for national independence here— Greeks, Bulgars, Romanians, and Serbs—developed identities rich in particularistic religious myths, memories, symbols, and devotional traditions. These identities mobilized militias not only to throw off the Ottoman yoke but to persecute Muslims in attacks so severe that they fled in waves back to Anatolia, nursing a revenge that contributed disastrously to the genocide of Armenian Christians during the First World War (see Leustean 2014). Finally, the tsars’ attempts to “resacralize” the Russian monarchy celebrated historic religious devotions to demonstrate the exclusive connection between Christian Orthodoxy and Russian national heritage. The policy roused Christian Judeophobia to such a pitch that it erupted in hundreds of pogroms in the decades before 1914 that drove some two million Jews to emigrate, first to central and western Europe and then to North America. Here too, religious loyalties, which played upon the emotions of popular beliefs and practices, were manipulated to serve the interests of intolerance, hatred, and aggression.

Conclusion If scholars have long argued for popular religion’s centrality to understanding religion’s place in nineteenth-century Europe, our understanding of popular religion has changed considerably since the pioneering work of the 1960s. Once considered a form of belief and practice that stood in opposition to clerically disciplined “official” cults, the two now stand in a negotiating or even complementary relationship as laity and clergy alike engaged in successive acts of creative religious reinvention. How else does one comprehend the Lourdes apparitions, with which this chapter began, than as an occasion of lay–clerical cooperation that advanced an important element of faith simultaneously popular and “official” in nature? Bernadette Soubirous and the Pyrenean poor may very well have “imposed” new Marian understandings on the Catholic Church, as the great historian Jaroslav Pelikan once observed (1996, 86). But this imposition could not have been unwelcome to the ecclesiastical hierarchy,

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whose leader in the years immediately following the Lourdes events, Pope Leo XIII, was so enthused by Marian piety that he wrote no less than ten encyclical letters on the merits of praying the rosary. Creative cooperation, indeed. Despite the clear evidence of secularizing tendencies in nearly every corner of Europe, and allowing for significant differences by tradition and region, religiouslycommitted individuals, both lay and clerical, remade and reasserted their pious traditions in these kinds of ways. This piety, which Lucian Hölscher defines as “a kind of mental interior within which individuals interpret[ed] the outside world and which guide[d] their actions,” proved to be a remarkably rich resource in addressing the challenges of modern change (2001, 34). It repaired connections to the past that had been severed by the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars, helping believers reorient themselves in the turbulent environments these events did so much to create. It expanded in scope and rose in intensity, incorporating new types of practices, groups, and movements that believers directed flexibly to the circumstances in which they lived, both in private affairs and in public culture. It reflected rising individualism after 1789 and accorded believers a measure of autonomy to fashion religious practices to fit their needs and to their liking, however effusive and dogmatically challenging they may have been and even as these practices tended to fall in line, over time, with clerical expectations. Finally, it recomposed members of religious communities amid the fissiparous pressures of the century, fortifying collective identities whose enthusiasms could be recruited to achieve contemporary objectives, sometimes with benevolent intent, sometimes with a menacing new militancy. For weal or for woe, popular religion largely held the loyalty of believers to Europe’s established religious traditions, which had yet to feel the withering impact of the catastrophes and contrary influences of the history confronting them beyond 1914.

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Leustean, Lucian, ed. 2014. Orthodox Christianity and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Southeastern Europe. New York: Fordham University Press. Lupinin, Nickolas. 2016. “The Tradition of Elders (Startsy) in 19th-Century Russia.” In The Tapestry of Russian Christianity: Studies in History and Culture, edited by Nickolas Lupinin, Donald Ostrowski, and Jennifer B. Spock, 327 – 52. Columbus: The Ohio State University, Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures. Margry, Peter Jan. 2012. “Dutch Devotionalisation Reforming Piety: Grassroots Initiative or Clerical Strategy?” In Jarlert 2012b, 125 – 56. Mazower, Mark. 2000. The Balkans: A Short History. New York: The Modern Library. Mínguez-Blasco, Raúl. 2021. “Between Virgins and Priests: The Feminisation of Catholicism and Priestly Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century Spain.” Gender & History 33: 94 – 110. Orsi, Robert A. 1985. The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880 – 1950. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Peckham Magray, Mary. 1998. The Transforming Power of the Nuns: Women, Religion, and Cultural Change in Ireland, 1750 – 1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pelikan, Jaroslav. 1996. Mary through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Rozenblit, Marsha L. 2010. “European Jewry: 1800 – 1833.” In The Cambridge Guide to Jewish History, Religion, and Culture, edited by Judith R. Baskin and Kenneth Seeskin, 169 – 207. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steinberg, Mark D., and Heather J. Coleman, eds. 2007. Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press Steinhoff, Anthony J. 2008. The Gods of the City: Protestantism and Religious Culture in Strasbourg, 1870 – 1914. Leiden: Brill. Taylor, Charles. 2011. Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tone, John Lawrence. 2007. “A Dangerous Amazon: Augustina Zaragoza and the Spanish Revolutionary War, 1808 – 1814.” European History Quarterly 37: 548 – 61. Ury, Scott. 2017. “Poland.” In The Cambridge History of Judaism. Vol. 3, The Modern World, 1815 – 2000, edited by Mitchell B. Hart and Tony Michels, 75 – 103. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Valenze, Deborah. 1985. Prophetic Sons and Daughters: Female Preaching and Popular Religion in Industrial England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Van Lieburg, Fred. 2012. “Reforming Dutch Protestant Piety, 1780 – 1920.” In Jarlert 2012b, 157 – 90. Wagner, William G. 2007. “‘Orthodox Domesticity’: Creating a Social Role for Women.” In Steinberg and Coleman 2007, 119 – 45. Weber-Kellermann, Ingeborg. 1965. Erntebrauch in der ländlichen Arbeitswelt des 19. Jahrhunderts auf Grund der Mannhardtbefragung in Deutschland von 1865. Marburg: N. G. Elwert Verlag. Weir, Todd H. 2014. Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Worobec, Christine D. 2016. “Russian Orthodoxy and Women’s Spirituality in Imperial Russia.” In The Tapestry of Russian Christianity: Studies in History and Culture, edited by Nickolas Lupinin, Donald Ostrowski, and Jennifer B. Spock, 355 – 88. Columbus: The Ohio State University, Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures.

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7 Secularism and Unbelief In the long nineteenth century, secularism and unbelief in many forms and shades gained more and more visibility in public against a backdrop of creeping secularity. Both concepts were politicized, ideologized, radicalized, and institutionalized (Weltecke 2000, 19; Biale 2011). These transformations also implied changes concerning the contents and definitions of secularism and unbelief that were and still are the subjects of lively debates in research among both sociologists and historians of concepts (Lübbe 1965; Conze, Strätz and Zabel 1984; Borutta 2010b; Casanova 2011; Lee 2015). Unbelief was understood and persecuted as an enemy of morality, order, and truth. Whereas in previous centuries Europe’s predominantly Christian and Jewish societies featured proto-secularist views, along with stances critical of religion such as Baruch Spinoza’s, secularism and unbelief became increasingly differentiated categories as the nineteenth century approached, particularly with respect to basic public terminology, institutions, and law (Gorski 2014). By 1914, lifestyles associated with both concepts, which intersect but are not identical, had moved from the margins to broader social acceptance and came to include a multitude of attitudes ranging from skeptical mysticism to atheism, from attempts to reform traditional religion to demands for its complete replacement, from the idea of civil religion to aestheticism. Still, these definitions and characteristics of secularism and unbelief were always shaped by their relations to religion; they were not independent categories. Talal Asad, the anthropologist who has offered the latest and, because of its observational character, most promising approach to the field, points out that this framing goes in both directions: the secular and the religious are intertwined categories, united in a “grammar of concepts” composed of contingencies and permutations (2003, 25). The “modern” versions of secularism and unbelief developed against a horizon of vast social, cultural, and political upheavals. With the memory of the French Revolution still fresh and the era of nation-building ongoing, Europe was being shaped by industrialization, urbanization, and capitalism. Its communities came closer together, both spatially and temporally, thanks to the invention of the railway, other means of transport, and modern media communication. Europeans themselves looked upon a vista of seemingly infinite progress that sparkled with scientific discoveries, technical innovations, and mass production techniques, and a new leisure market. Colonial expansion and the increasing globalization of the economy brought the world to Europe and Europe to the world—with all the problems, violence, and injustices connected to both (Osterhammel 2015). All these developments, together with social inequality, poverty, wars, and mass migration, led to a rich plurality of possibilities grounded in new opinions on religion and “worldview,” a Kantian term connected essentially to the Enlightenment and its modernizing intentions (Weir 2014, 2024). This thriving ideologicalreligious pluralism found early backing among members of Europe’s middle classes, who gathered in societies and clubs and who were informed and entertained by https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110609059-009

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new and affordable mass media. But it also enjoyed the support of contingents in Europe’s growing proletariat, whose interests distributed among the various strains of socialism (Chadwick 1990). The already existing and established religious communities were not exempt from these changes, as recent research has made clear. Indeed, the Jewish communities and the Christian churches adapted to new situations and satisfied new needs, despite the substantial curtailing of their influence by state power and the loss of members due to disaffiliation and waning attendance. Adaptation strategies abounded including de-institutionalization and the promotion of feminized religious practices, the use of modern media to communicate the Christian and Jewish messages and establish alternative forms of faith commmunity, and the relocation of religious rituals to the domestic sphere (Blaschke and Kuhlemann 1996; Schlögl 2013, 271 – 90). In these and other ways, Christian and Jewish communities maintained their places at the center of modern societies and cultures. And yet they were in constant danger of losing members to one of the many new and appealing alternatives (Habermas 2011). These changes represented only one of modernity’s facets. It is vital to remember that in large areas of Europe, historic pieties, established patterns of rural life, and recognition of traditional kinship dependences endured. Nor did the promises of Western modernity affect the whole of Europe at the same time or in the same ways; instead, they were the projects of rather small but influential groups of modernizers active in politics, culture, and science. Their ideas about immediate, uninhibited progress had clear ideological implications that are at the center of research interests in historical secularism (Wagner 1993; Borutta 2010a; Dittrich 2014; Kosuch 2020). The various forms of historical secularism reflected these antithetical tensions characteristic of modernity as a whole. Despite certain secularizing tendencies that some historians noticed—not undisputed—in earlier centuries, such as in the Investiture Controversy, the Protestant Reformations, and in the influential deist philosophies of thinkers like Leibniz, Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau, secularism in the nineteenth century came forward as a maturing political concept (Gabriel, Gärtner and Pollack 2014). And even though secular tendencies had also manifested themselves within Judaism, the term developed conceptually against a Christian backdrop. Here it grew from a neutral description of administrative practices to a term connoting the expropriation and deprivation of long-existing rights formerly held by the churches (Lübbe 1965, 23 – 33; Borutta 2010b; Biale 2011). It did not take long for the term to reach beyond Europe in appealing to global relevance (Asad 2003, 23; Eggert and Hölscher 2013). Despite intersections and overlaps, secularism needs to be distinguished from both secularization, on the one hand, and the secular, on the other. The latter is best understood as an epistemic category closely connected to the religious in an unstable and shifting relationship. Secularization, by contrast, describes the historical process of differentiation of religion, including in religious and state institutions, and the decline of religious authority. Secularism, for its part, characterizes a worldview grounded in the separation of church and state. Paradoxically, and as a matter of comparative historical research, this separation was more pronounced in polities with long-established, influ-

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ential religious institutions. It was dramatic, for example, in France, where laïcité, which took shape during the 1870s, became the catchword for the strict separation of the powerful Catholic Church from the modern nation-state of the French Third Republic, while allowing equal conditions for all religions (Casanova 2011; Le Grand 2013; Baubérot 2017). However, neither “secularization” nor “secularism” implies anti-religion as such or inevitably. In fact, the idea of a linear process leading straight from alleged religious irrationality to enlightened reason needs to be historicized as an ideology advocated by Europe’s nineteenth-century secularists. These figures identified with a falsehood that connected religion with pre-modernity, believing, consequently, that religion had to be overcome if progress was to occur (Borutta 2010b). In contrast, current research has shown that polities could be both secular in the modern sense and deeply religious at the same time. The idea of religion’s allegedly historic connection to destructive conflict, which secularists hoped they could sever by confining religion to the private sphere, required a mindset shaped by experiences of violent confessionalization, anticlericalism, and culture wars that differed in form and intensity across the continent (Casanova 2011). Having said this, it is evident that nineteenth-century secularism did not lead necessarily to unbelief; rather, it expressed a multitude of stances and shades of meaning that could be new-religious, non-religious, or somewhere in between. This chapter focuses on forms of secularisms and unbelief that appeared in rich variety during Europe’s long nineteenth century (Eisenstadt 2003; Burchardt and Wohlrab-Sahr 2013). They were part of such disparate strands of thought as scientific materialism and monism, spiritualism and deism, freethought and freemasonry, socialism and anarchism, agnosticism and atheism. Despite intersections among them, the characteristics of these secularist positions differed significantly depending on their religious, confessional, and cultural backgrounds in Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, and Orthodoxy. These backgrounds were further differentiated according to the national and regional cultures in which they were set. Amid this heterogeneity we see connections, ambivalences, and factions. The complexity continued into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and it has been decisive in shaping modernity, including the Islamic world, which has been a focus of study, along with Western secularities, at a specialized research unit at the University of Leipzig: “Multiple Secularities: Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities.”

Secularisms in Catholic Cultures A first eruption of nineteenth-century secularism, which to a certain degree became a template for successive secularist advances, occurred during the French Revolution. The Enlightenment, with its emphases on reason and personal self-sufficiency, prepared the ground for the Revolution’s attack on the Catholic Church’s privileged status. This attack, particularly during the years 1792 – 95, featured the destruction of church

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buildings, statues, and other religious symbols; assaults on and the murder of priests and nuns, who were expected to break their solemn religious vows and marry while declaring their primary loyalty to the secular state; and the promotion of secular alternatives to religious rituals, feasts, and traditions. During these years, the Jacobins sacralized the Revolution itself. They celebrated republican symbols, martyrs, and values; they renamed streets with republican motifs; they introduced a new republican calendar, replacing the Christian order of holidays; and they turned church buildings into Temples of Reason. Robespierre, who was a deist, announced the Cult of the Supreme Being as a substitute for the Christian God. In addition, the regime secularized life rituals, such as baptism and funerals. For example, it established a special commission to assess French burial grounds and determined that Christian burials and cemeteries contradicted the principles of reason, human sentiment, and equality. Instead of locking up the dead in closed spaces, the commission noted in a report presented by François Antoine Daubermesnil on 6 brumaire an V (October 27, 1796), people should be given the choice to “burn or to bury the bodies of their loved ones in a place they consider appropriate for this purpose.” The new secular culture was also gendered. It was characterized by strong masculine denunciations of clericalism, which soldiers spread, for example, during the Coalition Wars, and by female performativity, which came through in secular festivals, where young women dressed in white robes incarnated republican reason, revolution, work, and virtue (Emmet 1989; Aston 2000, 259 – 78). The adversaries of the Revolution reversed these gendered dimensions of republican élan, a subject that awaits more detailed research. For example, they repurposed the visual imagery on copperplates, replacing the traditionally female figures of Infidelitas and Impietas with a new male figure symbolizing Atheism. Interestingly, both Christian loyalists and the deist Robespierre condemned the atheist outrage (Richter 2018, 289). In view of this reaction, one can hardly say that Catholicism disappeared, in France or elsewhere in Europe, or that the Revolution initiated a linear process of socio-cultural dechristianization. On the contrary, the majority of the French population never accepted the secular substitutes for Catholicism introduced during the Revolution. If people participated in the new rituals, they did so more out of curiosity or fear of punishment for non-compliance than out of commitment (Aston 2000, 260 – 61). After the Revolution and particularly in the Era of Restoration (1814 – 30), the Catholic Church revived impressively, regaining its former strength and in several areas even increasing its influence. As a result, periods of distance and hostility in the decades following the Revolution alternated with periods of church-state cooperation. Still, since the Revolution, the state dominated church-state relations in France and delimited the public privileges that institutionalized religious bodies enjoyed. This background is essential for comprehending the French concept of laïcité. Enshrined in the French constitution since 1946, laïcité “aims to emancipate all secular spheres from clerical-ecclesiastical control” (Casanova 2011, 57). Gathering meanings and intentions over the decades, it came to the fore in the 1870s, when organized secularists such as freethinkers demanded that public schools be stripped of clerical influ-

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ence (Le Grand 2013). Control of education, in fact, became a common focus for secularists not only in Europe but around the world (see Figures 7.1 and 7.2).

Figure 7.1: “The future belongs to him who controls the school.” Caricature from Kladderadatsch 28, no. 58 (December 19, 1875). The caption reads: “The Blacks [the Catholics], who are very displeased that the state is taking the schools from them, charge that the state is only using the school to dominate the population. But what is the Ultramontanes’ goal?”

Wresting control of schooling from the clergy points to another area of common focus for secularists: anticlericalism, the subject of many recent studies of historical secularism (Clark and Kaiser 2003; Borutta 2010b; Dittrich 2014; Kosuch 2020). Anticlericalism functioned as the glue that bound together secularists from different fields of activity. Freethinkers, for example, established their first associations in France in 1848. These associations, which numbered some nine hundred by the end of the century, promoted many ideas that implicitly or explicitly opposed the clergy and the culture they represented. Among these ideas were critical reason at the expense of faith, self-determination, scientism, materialism, monism, atheism, socialism, and anarchism. Such ideas, and the anticlerical attitudes they accompanied, were also advocated by freemasons, who after a series of sharp disputes broke with the Catholic Church completely in the 1880s. The study of freemasons has been and remains an enduring area of secula-

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Figure 7.2: Caricature by Watson Heston, “The Shadow in Our Schools,” The Freethinkers’ Pictorial TextBook (New York, 1890), 69.

rist research (Berger 2020). Other secularists broadcast their message to the French public and political community via the press. Backed by university faculties, print journalism dedicated to the cause, and international organizations like the Internationale de la Libre Pensée, which was founded in Brussels in 1880, they pushed anticlericalism constantly, especially in reaction to the clerical excesses during the Dreyfus Affair. Addressing all areas of public life that had been under the purview of priests, secularists bemoaned the strictures of religious dogmas and demanded the absolute separation of church and state; the removal of religious oaths, symbols, and buildings from the public sphere; civil funerals, marriages, and baptisms; and the creation of civil primary and higher education systems. Secularism and anticlericalism were thus at the heart of republicanism in the 1870s and 1880s, to which the history of anti-religious persecution, arrests, and executions during the Communard Revolt of 1871 offered particularly grim testimony (Lalouette 1997; Dittrich 2014, 72 – 90). The flourishing French secularism of the nineteenth century proved highly influential elsewhere. The Polish intelligentsia, for example, part of which had emigrated to France after the Polish state ceased to exist in 1795, took their cues from it. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the Catholic Church in Poland became the connective tissue holding together the nation, which had been losing its territory to Prussia and the Russian and Habsburg empires for more than a century. Despite substantial numbers of religious minorities living in the former Polish territories, the connection

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between Catholicism and Polishness—of a particular religion and the nation—became a core element of modern Polish identity. This union provoked the genesis of Poland’s first freethinker association, the Polska Liga Wolnej Myśli (Polish League of Freethinkers), which was founded in Paris in 1906. Its members, which included freemasons, adopted the values of other European freethinkers, particularly those of the French and Italians. In their journal Myśl Niepodległa (The Independent Thought), they advocated for the separation of church and state; for reason, science, and humanism; and for a historicizing approach to world religions and their beliefs. Above all, they shared the anticlericalism of secularists everywhere, which proved especially irritating to authorities in Poland, where a heavily clericalized Catholicism supplied the symbolic substance of national feeling. In 1907, secularists gathered in Warsaw for a major conference. Working under surveillance and amid the Catholic Church’s strict opposition to socialist, libertarian, and liberal views, they tried to assume an apolitical approach, distancing themselves from masonry, a primary target of Catholic opprobrium in Rome. Unlike in France, though, Polish secularism had to account for pervasive and powerful opposition that it was ultimately unsuccessful in overcoming. Its voice faltered in the face of this opposition, and when, after 1917, it appeared as over-cozy with the atheistic Soviets, it became a (self‐)censured and suppressed enterprise (Wagner 2020). Polish secularism, as well as secularisms in east-central and southeastern Europe generally, are now starting to attract the academic attention they deserve (Balík et al. 2016; Gleixner 2020; Wagner 2020; Sakellariou 2025). The situation in Spain offers yet another example of the myriad forms secularism could take. Spanish secularism, too, had to reckon with a well-established Catholic culture, and it had little legislative impact. Instead, secularism here was much more a phenomenon of the streets tightly connected to political agitation deriving from anarchist, socialist, and, as in France, republican sources. Unlike in Poland, however, secularism in Spain enabled the expression of a broad swath of popular political opinions, which elites aligned with the influential church did all they could to oppose. Censored and persecuted, Spanish secularists did not shrink from violence, particularly during the 1830s. Their radical demands for the abolition of religious orders, the expulsion of Jesuits, the introduction of civil life rituals, a public school system, and the privatization of religion all clashed with the longstanding prerogatives of the Catholic Church, the state’s only approved religion, and with a public that was in large part hostile to religious freedom (Dittrich 2014, 91 – 114). The development of secularism in Italy overlapped with the process of nationbuilding. As in France, Poland, and Spain, Catholicism was the dominant religion in Italy. But unlike elsewhere, in Italy not only was the Catholic Church a cultural force but large sections of the future Italian national territory belonged to the popes, who were both spiritual heads of the worldwide Catholic Church and worldly sovereigns and landowners. The status of the Papal States fell into question, however, already in the early years of the nineteenth century. Without substantial external support, territorial control of them became an open contest that increasingly involved

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troops with a national orientation. Historically, this support had come from France. As the century progressed, Italy’s nation-building and with it secular and secularist forces came to depend on the ups and downs of France’s own church-state relations. For example, in the years following the Second Italian War of Independence in 1859, the French state, distancing itself from the Catholic Church at home, cut back its support of the Papal States in Italy, which significantly advanced the foundation of the Italian nation-state in 1861 with its liberal and secular orientation. In any case, the physical presence of the leaders of Catholicism made Italian secularism special and the interplay of religious-secular opposing forces at the heart of the Risorgimento uniquely dynamic. Prior to 1848, Pope Pius IX had looked on the Italian national movement with a certain degree of sympathy. Philosophers, such as the priest Vincenzo Gioberti, even suggested that the pope might become the spiritual and cultural head of the unified nation. But after the revolutions of 1848 – 49, Pius IX and his successors changed their views on modernity in general and of the Italian nation-state in particular. As part of the encyclical Quanta Cura, the Syllabus Errorum (1864) listed the “condemnable errors” of the modern age. Among these were rationalism, socialism, freedom of religion, secularism, atheism, and liberalism. The papal bull Non expedit (1874) further prohibited political participation in the modern state, while definitions of doctrines like the Immaculate Conception of Mary (1854) and Papal Infallibility (1870) offended the champions of secular modernity. Hugely disappointed, leading Italian seculars and secularists started openly to oppose the church and its clerical establishment. Anticlericalism, which had long been a feature of Italian secularism, now became widespread, not least through the political and popular publications of national heroes like Giuseppe Mazzini and especially Giuseppe Garibaldi. Both strove to “purify” Catholicism by turning it into a civil religion of high moral probity and humanism. But even though seculars and secularists in the new state adopted laicist positions, including in the Statuto Albertino (the Italian Constitution of 1861 – 1948), which granted human rights, they could not prevent Catholicism from being codified as the state’s privileged religion, which ensured that the church flexed lasting influence on Italian culture, society, and public institutions. This compromise, which also enjoyed the support of many politicians of the Sinistra Storica (the Historical Left), spurred figures outside the realms of power to agitate for more ambitious steps toward secularist control. These supporters included freethinkers, namely the journalist Luigi Stefanoni, who founded associations and magazines, such as the Milan- and Parma-based Il Libero Pensiero: Giornale dei Razionalisti (The Freethinker: Journal of the Rationalists). In the preface to the first volume, Stefanoni described the efforts and aims of this mouthpiece of Italian secularism: “Freethought, an immediate movement, containing in itself the seed of truth, the affirmation of humanism and indefinite progress, the pure expression of a more or less hidden need felt by many that was suffocated by the nightmare of Christian dogma.” Together with Stefanoni, Italian freethinkers campaigned for state-run schools, freedom of speech, the emancipation of women, the privatization of religion, a scien-

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tific worldview incorporating Darwinian notions popular among Italian and other secularists, and for pacifist, anti-militarist political positions. After 1871, atheist societies, such as the Venetian Società degli Atei (Society of Atheists), joined in promoting these efforts. They published their anti-religious views in journals like L’Ateo (The Atheist) and La Ragione (Reason), which scholars have yet to study with the same intensity they have brought to other aspects of Italian secularism (Verucci 1981; Borutta 2010a; De Lauri 2014). Freemasons, who were also active in confronting representatives of organized religion, supported secularist positions in Italy ever more explicitly. As an anonymous article in the Almanacco del Libero Muratore (The Freemasons’ Almanach) observed in 1882: “Masonry has to concentrate all its actions and has to prepare to go into the field with all its powers to fight the final battle: civility against ignorance, light against darkness, humanity against revealed divinity.” In 1869, secularists from Italy and abroad combined their efforts under the umbrella of the Anticoncilio (Anti-Council), which was organized in Naples by the Italian journalist, politician, and Mazzini follower Giuseppe Ricciardi. As its name suggests, the Anticoncilio protested against the decisions of the First Vatican Council, the Catholic ecumenical council convened in Rome in 1869 – 70 that promulgated the Doctrine of Papal Infallibility in matters of faith and morals. Secularists everywhere detested this doctrine, which they saw as an obscurantist threat to the enlightened worldview they preferred. In any case, this first international meeting of secularists laid bare the problems they faced not only now, in 1870, but throughout the whole long nineteenth century. These problems included censorship and state persecution, on the one hand, and internal conflicts and difficulties establishing dialogue among representatives of different strands of secularist thought, which prevented the formation of a common agenda, on the other. Such hardships were difficult to overcome, and not just for secularists in predominantly Catholic countries.

Secularisms in Protestant Cultures Secularisms in Protestant cultures developed in different contexts from those in Catholic ones. To some extent, the Protestant Reformations, combined with such political revolutions as the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England, had facilitated secularizing tendencies: from comprehensive critiques of the Catholic Church, papal primacy, and the clerical establishment to the censure of particular teachings and practices, such as the veneration of relics and the sale of indulgences. With Protestants’ focus on Christian individuals freed from clerical control, access to the Bible as the only source of religious truth, and a personal relationship with God, the tapestry of historic Catholicism’s religious practices, social relations, and political power structures unraveled. Influenced by the Enlightenment, nineteenth-century secularists in Protestant cultures expanded upon these early advances, fighting clericalism in both the Catholic and the Protestant churches. But they were also able to mobilize a larger public already accustomed to the idea of more private, personal religion.

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There were other early inducements to secularism as well. At the transition from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, British philosophers, such as Anthony Collins and John Toland took up a rational approach to the Christian religion in their search for “truth.” Often equated with atheism, such freethinking and deist stances were not looked upon kindly by the public (Haarmann 2020). In the aftermath of the French Revolution, influential British radicals and their sympathizers, notably Thomas Paine, Richard Carlile, and Robert Owen, expressed their critiques of social and political misconduct in Europe and the United States. Paine fought against slavery, Carlile for the right to birth control, and Owen, who was himself rather patriarchal and conservative, campaigned for educational reform. Famously, Owen also established federally organized socialistic cooperatives to improve the working conditions of factory and artisan laborers. Critically, all these reformist, if not revolutionary, efforts comprehended the promotion of a new religious morality substantially different from what the Christian churches had taught: one that was individualist, deist, humanist, and “rational” (Royle 1974, 9 – 58; for the USA: Schmidt 2022). While British society remained Christian throughout the nineteenth century, secularism still managed to carve out space for itself, not least due to the work of activists like George Jacob Holyoake, an adherent of Owen’s who was a crucial figure in bridging the conceptual gaps between early radicals and the organized secularists in Britain appearing later in the century. Instead of the term “atheism,” which carried negative connotations, he preferred the term “secularism” as laid down in his journal The Reasoner. According to Holyoake, secularism—and here he differed from more radical atheist positions—was an inclusive concept that united deist and atheist strands and pointed toward goals shared by adherents to both. In the Principles of Secularism Illustrated (1870), he provided guidelines on how to form a secularist movement and corresponding associations on this basis. Secularism, Holyoake declared, meant in essence: the study of promoting human welfare by material means; measuring human welfare by the utilitarian rule, and making the service of others a duty of life. Secularism relates to the present existence of man, and to action, the issues of which can be tested by the experience of this life having for its objects the development of the physical, moral, and intellectual nature of man to the highest perceivable point, as the immediate duty of society: inculcating the practical sufficiency of natural morality apart from Atheism, Theism, or Christianity: engaging its adherents in the promotion of human improvement by material means, and making these agreements the ground of common unity for all who would regulate life by reason and ennoble it by service.

Due to his public trials and imprisonment for blasphemy, Holyoake became a sort of martyr to secularism. He attracted a large audience, including some women, whose participation in the movement he had encouraged. In the 1860s and 1870s, these women even managed to publicly address topics like philosophy, science, theology, and political theory that until then had been reserved mostly for men. In such ways, they challenged the “dominant Christian notions of womanhood” (Schwartz 2017, 104). Among these women were Harriet Law and Annie Besant. The latter was raised as a Calvinist but in adulthood aligned with the radical freethinker, atheist, and founder

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of the National Secular Society (1866) Charles Bradlaugh, who unlike Holyoake supported birth control and a liberal family policy. Ironically, Besant claimed, in My Path to Atheism (1885), that it was through her study of the Bible that she became an atheist: “[T]hose who study the Bible are in a fair way to become heretics. It was the careful compilation of a harmony of the last chapters of the four Gospels … that gave the first blow to my own faith … the tiny seed, which was slowly to germinate and to grow up, later, into the full-blown flower of Atheism.” Such examples demonstrate that from the 1860s, enthusiastic discussions of secularism in Britain were no longer limited to philosophers and literati. Thanks to secularism’s workerist, Owenite heritage, they expanded to include members of the lower and middle classes. Exponents of such heterogeneous strands as deism, atheism, pantheism, spiritualism, agnosticism, scientific materialism, socialism, and the Ethical Movement established forms of cooperation (Chadwick 1990). In the end, Bradlaugh’s radicalism won through among them. Yet despite its growing base, British secularism confronted obstacles even during its heyday. Its far-reaching program, which along with “classical” secularist demands for the separation of church and state included the promotion of republicanism and pacifism in a time of chauvinistic warmongering, to say nothing of its opposition to British imperialism, provoked resistance at many levels of British society. Bradlaugh, for instance, could not carry out his duties as delegate to Parliament because of his refusal to take the obligatory religious oath. He was imprisoned for his conviction, and it was not until 1888 that the Oaths Act finally legalized Bradlaugh’s position, allowing for an optional secular confirmation instead of an explicit reference to God during swearing-in ceremonies. Under the leadership of George William Foote, Bradlaugh’s former opponent and later successor in directing the National Secular Society, Bradlaugh’s movement declined, partly because of its success and partly because of the programmatic distance between Foote and the socialists, whose growing contingents played an ever-larger role in British secularism (Royle 1980). In Sweden, another divide between two men characterized the split between secularist camps. Secularism here blossomed amid the politicization of popular movements in Sweden’s expanding public sphere. Two manifestations of it were Hjalmar Branting’s inclusive socialism and Victor Lennstrand’s atheist utilism. While the socialist Branting worked for tangible goals such as universal suffrage to be followed by popular emancipation from paternalism of all kinds—including religious oppression—in an unspecified future, Lennstrand strove to re-establish society on a new moral foundation, one that would secure happiness and humanism by mobilizing organized secularism in a radical fight with religion. Both were imprisoned for their efforts, and with Lennstrand’s untimely death, Branting’s more conciliatory approach prevailed (Jansson 2020). Given Sweden’s rich secular history and culture, which offers promising prospects for dedicated study, it is surprising that Swedish secularism is only now beginning to attract the attention of international research. In contrast to some of the previous cases, secularism in Germany enjoys an established niche in research, especially as this research addresses secularist developments

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at the national level (Graf 1978; Kaiser 1981; Simon-Ritz 1997; Weir 2014, 2023). The regional and local characteristics of secularism, however, as well as the subject of unbelief, are still in need of closer attention. Secularism in Germany was carried by two different social currents that also intersected at times: bourgeois respectability with connections up to the government and the labor movement, which struggled with integrating bourgeois Christianity. It boasted significant support among national political leaders, thanks in particular to the Kulturkampf or “struggle for culture” carried out by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, which in the 1870s curtailed the public functions of organized Catholicism and relocated them in state institutions. Bismarck’s decrees secularized, among other things, marriage, education, and the investiture of clerics, which all became state responsibilities. He also expelled from the country or prohibited the public functions of religious orders, including the Jesuits (Figure 7.3).

Figure 7.3: “Between Berlin and Rome.” Caricature from Kladderadatsch 28, no. 22 – 23 (May 16, 1875). Bismarck and Pope IX play chess; the chess figures portray the church and state weaponry in the culture war. The caption reads: “The last move was very painful for me, but the match is thereby not yet lost. I still have a very good move up my sleeve. / That will also be the last one, and then in a few moves it will be checkmate—at least as far as Germany is concerned.”

However, neither Bismarck nor the influential but disparate German liberals aimed to dechristianize or revolutionize society. Rather, the Kulturkampf effectively endorsed liberal Protestantism as the national religion, while the government’s Anti-Socialist Laws limited the growth of the socialist movement through bans, censure, and other forms of persecution. The upshot was that nation-building in Imperial Germany, of which the Kulturkampf was a centerpiece, included both religious and secularizing ten-

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dencies, re- and dechristianizing movements, and anti-modernizing and modernizing trends (Smith 1995; Clark and Kaiser 2003). Bottom-up secularism in Germany mirrored the biconfessional nature of German social and cultural history since the Protestant Reformation that along with the secularization edicts of the Napoleonic period created confessional territories with large religious minorities. But even though secularism in Germany had its origins in Protestant bourgeois culture, it did not develop exclusively in Protestant areas or attract an exclusively Protestant public. In fact, secularizing ideas percolated up among Catholics and Protestants in the first organized secularizing—though still predominantly religious— movements of the 1840s. Both the Deutschkatholiken (German Catholics) and the Protestant Lichtfreunde (Friends of Light) criticized contemporary religious practices, dogmas, and power structures. In the heated atmosphere of the revolutions of 1848 – 49, their growing memberships also campaigned for political and social changes and tried to create a communal religious structure with state support outside the established Catholic and Protestant churches. Covered by the liberal press and supported by the popularity of figures like the dissident and defrocked priest Johannes Ronge or the politician Robert Blum, secularist criticisms attracted a broad middle- and working-class public. The movements brought together an assemblage of different ideas. Some Deutschkatholiken hoped to establish a national church separate from Rome in the spirit of the Reformation, and some sympathizing young Protestant theologians expected to obtain their recognition and livelihood. Yet other early secularists adhered to socialist ideas of radical religious criticism. The Lichtfreunde in particular advocated for a rational and ethical approach to religion, to which the state reacted harshly. At the same time, they popularized strong anti-papal and anti-Jesuit notions that prepared the way for the Kulturkampf. Their work proved decisive for later secularist enterprises and also gave voice to the women active in their 240 communities. In 1859, the complicated and thematically disparate elements of this confessional reform movement united in the Bund freireligiöser Gemeinden Deutschlands (Federation of Free Religious Communities in Germany), which introduced life rituals such as the Jugendweihe, a kind of civil confirmation (Graf 1978). In these early secularizing trends, then, German biconfessionality was to a certain extent overcome in the pursuit of shared goals. Secularists who chose outright unbelief did not fare as well. For example, even though irreligion was a personal choice guaranteed by Prussian law since 1847, those availing themselves of the option suffered public, professional, and judicial discrimination until the twentieth century. This was due partly to the patchwork of legal systems in the German territories, but it also demonstrates the fact that the empire remained fundamentally Christian despite secularism’s advances. Regardless of these hardships, unbelief and secularism in general bloomed during the 1870s and 1880s in the German Empire just as it did in other parts of Europe. Supported by educated liberal-bourgeois activists and driven by an adamant kulturprotestantisch anti-Catholicism, late nineteenth-century German-speaking secularists went further in their programmatic aims than did their predecessors. Some of their most influential spokesmen

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were natural scientists and physicians, such as Jakob Moleschott, Heinrich Czolbe, and Carl Vogt, who are the subjects of contemporary research (Meneghello 2017; Spenninger 2021). After the failed mid-century revolutions, these men hoped to change society step by step and place it on evermore confident scientific bases. In the course of their work, they secularized science and weaponized it to fight organized religion in public, seeking to replace the latter with their own ideological program, which combined elements of materialist naturalism, positivism, and Darwinism (Gregory 1977; Wittkau-Horgby 1998; Olson 2008). This program also promoted a kind of inner-worldliness and denied the existence of anything beyond matter, including God. Moreover, it rejected transcendental spirituality or final causes and postulated the human soul as a function of the brain. Pushing forward this scientifically based atheism more than any other was Ludwig Büchner, one of the founders of the Deutsche Freidenkerbund (German Freethinker League) in 1881. In addition to these “negative” secularist goals, there were “positive” ones, such as improving the living conditions of the poor and advancing health care, hygiene, education, and work opportunities, which reflected secularists’ sympathy with socialist positions (Weir 2014, 70). They also advocated for personal autonomy and broad political and social participation to achieve a greater state of equality and freedom for all in this world, which would render hope in a better afterlife superfluous. This agenda found steadfast support among German monists and their lead organization, the Deutsche Monistenbund (German Monist League), which came together in 1906. Monism, another branch of secularism at the center of much current research, also promoted eugenic, Social Darwinist, and racialist concepts expressed, for instance, by the leading monist, physician, and zoologist Ernst Haeckel (Weir 2012; Leber 2020). Together with the chemist, pacifist, and Nobel Prize winner Wilhelm Ostwald, Haeckel worked tirelessly to popularize scientific-secularist positions in German public life. As he observed in Die Welträthsel (The Riddles of the Universe, 1899): The atheistic scientist, who devotes his strength and his life to the search for the truth, is freely credited with all that is evil; the theistic church-goer … is at once assumed to be a good citizen…. Every intelligent man with normal brains and senses finds [the] true revelation in nature in impartial study, and thus frees himself from the superstition with which the “revelations” of religion had burdened him.

Led by figures like Haeckel, monism was offered as an all-encompassing, biological, secular worldview that appealed to other secularists in creating a powerful general movement for the separation of church and state on all levels. To this end, it again imagined secular life rituals as substitutes for religious ones. For example, Wilhelm Ostwald, head of the Monist League since 1911, published monist Sunday sermons. Monist positions in Germany also attracted international attention. The first international freethinker congress held in Rome in 1904 pronounced Haeckel the Anti-Pope (Simon-Ritz 1997; Breidbach 1998). And as in other secularist movements, there were also liberal Protestants active in monism, notably the organization’s first chairman, Albert Kalthoff (Auwärter 2020).

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Ethics from a secularist point of view were especially important to the Deutsche Gesellschaft für ethische Kultur (German Society for Ethical Culture), a part of the broader ethics movement that originated in the United States. Its members demanded that a new humanist morality not bound to religious knowledge be taught in school ethics lessons. Although not aggressively anti-religious, these ethical concerns only added to the complexity of secularism in Germany. Its varied associations, with the exception of the free religious communities, whose support was nevertheless robust, formed the Weimarer Kartell (Weimar Cartel) in 1907 to coordinate their efforts. By 1914, the unified German secularist movement represented some 70,000 people (Simon-Ritz 1997; Weir 2016). Compared to other European countries, freemasons in Germany were few in number and played no significant role in secularist agitation (Weir 2016, 195). In the years before the outbreak of the First World War, however, the foundations of secularism in Germany shifted. Long dominated by liberal-bourgeois secularists, whose concerns were primarily intellectual and cultural, leadership now passed to forces within the labor movement, who preferred to focus on social and political goals. Workers’ associations eventually subsumed other secular interests, and they institutionalized the movement with their organizational apparatus and trained personnel. As a result, secularism in Germany in the twentieth century suffered from classbased and political-ideological differences that undermined smooth and lasting cooperation among its diverse adherents (Kaiser 1981; Weir 2023).

Jewish Secularisms Because of its occasionally quasi-religious character, some scholars refer to secularism in nineteenth-century Germany as the “fourth confession” along with Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism (Weir 2014, 2016). While the confessional view is plausible, these secularisms, in particular the heterogeneous Jewish secularisms, demand more nuanced research before they can be integrated into such a general scheme of interpretation (Jobani 2016, 101). In any event, Jewish forms of secularism are not unknown to us. After governments in many parts of Europe granted civil rights to Jews, Jewish citizens started to interact more broadly with members of other religious traditions, producing serious attempts at their acculturation. Gaining speed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Jewish acculturation was directed mainly towards liberal Protestant environments. In Germany, elements of liberal Protestant culture opened doors to Jews on the basis of secularizing attitudes regarding doctrine and the leveling effect of the comparative study of religions, although the Wissenschaft des Judentums (Science of Judaism) never became a university discipline. The effects of this scholarly movement were long-lasting, though (Wiese 1999; Wyrwa 2001). In the course of the rapprochement, Jews participated in secularist associations as well and some became freemasons, monists, or freethinkers. Many acculturated Jews emphasized Judaism’s amenability to lib-

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eral progress and even asserted innate affinities between Judaism and secular modernity (Slezkine 2004). The attention of Jewish tradition to such matters as hygiene, nutrition, and health care appealed to modern science, while Jewish culture’s approach to education, civic commitment, social welfare, and public morality aligned with positions at the center of the secularist movements. Liberal Jewish rabbis and journals dedicated themselves to promoting this “modern” understanding of Judaism and the Jewish tradition. For example, one of the leading Italian Jewish periodicals, Il Corriere Israelitico (The Jewish Messenger), released articles with titles like “The Hygienic Measures Against the Cholera Are Copied in Large Parts from Mosaic Law” (by Dr. Forminici, 1867) and “Judaism and Darwinism” (1915). These articles held that the Jewish mission in the world was to improve morality and raise it to the highest possible level. The rhetorical attempt at alignment touched many aspects of everyday life. For instance, some rabbis and Jewish authors, and not only in Italy, argued that modern cremation, which secularists had chosen as a battleground against Christian traditions, was compatible with Judaism (Heike-Gmelin 2013, 76 – 7). Interpreting these trends in Jewish life is complicated. On the one hand, they indicate that acculturation satisfied secularist ends. On the other hand, in the minds of Jews themselves, they may not have been secularizing at all but part of a dedicated attempt, common to liberal members of all of Europe’s main religious traditions, to render Judaism a more ethical religion in the Enlightenment sense. That is to say, Jewish exponents of alignment with secularist positions may very well have intended their efforts as promotions of religion or a repositioning of Judaism as a confession in the modern world. Just like many Christian secularists, then, they were often disinclined to give up on their religion completely, even though there may have been atheists of Jewish origin in their midst, most of whom looked approvingly on Spinoza. Jewish secularists also criticized the transformation of secularist worldviews into quasi-religious dogmas or confessions (Weir 2013). In view of this complexity, it is unwise to assume the existence of a single secularist camp in Judaism that varied only by shades of worldview or the pursuit of goals arranged in different hierarchies by different factions. Rather, Jewish secularisms rose up from complicated and subtle motivations deep within the religion’s historic traditions (Biale 2011, 1 – 14; Weidner 2014, 296). Nevertheless, for Jewish secularists, secularism was both a means of criticizing religious traditions and an expression of acculturation and social participation in the cultural-political life of European nation-states. It was also a tool for achieving these states’ religious neutrality, which despite offering equality still discriminated against their Jewish citizens (Kosuch 2017, 2019). These realities affected Jewish and non-Jewish secularist cooperation. Given the different religious environments in which they existed, gentile secularists did not always fight the same battles as their Jewish counterparts. What is more, despite a generally welcoming stance toward Jewish members of secularist associations, many gentile secularists harbored the anti-Jewish and antisemitic prejudices of their time, expecting their Jewish comrades, for example, to abandon their religion completely as the only possible way of solving the “Jewish Question”

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(Weir 2013). A Jewish member in a secularist movement was not always one among equals. Initially, these differences seemed insignificant when it came to politics. Prominent leftists and radical activists of both Jewish and non-Jewish origin adopted the view of Karl Marx, a descendent of a prominent family of rabbis who was baptized a Protestant Christian, that religion was part of the capitalist system of exploitation. Marx himself went further, stating in “Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie” (“Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” 1843) that “religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” In the course of complete human—not just political— emancipation, Marx writes in “Zur Judenfrage” (“On the Jewish Question,” 1843), religion would become superfluous. Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish-Jewish cofounder of the German Communist Party, also endorsed socialism’s promise to secure this anti-religious emancipation. In the essay “Kościół i Socjalizm” (“Church and Socialism,” 1905), she asserts: “What is most important is that socialism strives to give the whole of humanity honest and upright happiness on earth, the best possible education, knowledge and hegemony in society to the people, and it is precisely this earthly happiness of all people and this clarity in their minds that today’s servants of the Church fear like a ghost.” Meanwhile, although they shared the same basic criticisms of church–state relations, clerics, and religious institutions, radical leftists like the German-Jewish anarchists Gustav Landauer and Erich Mühsam offered a different vision of the future. To them, Jewish uniqueness was itself a strength worthy of protection; it was a vital component of a future society based on true equality-in-diversity (Kosuch 2019). Researchers have spent much effort drawing these affinities between Jewish thought and secularist libertarian and leftist political positions (Löwy 1997; Kowalski 2018). But when it came to Jews, political secularism, like other secularisms, was unable to establish equality among its Jewish and non-Jewish activists. Jewish otherness continued to play a role in leftist political theory and practice. In their political rhetoric, for example, some leading figures of the secularist left only perpetuated the antisemitic image of the rich capitalist Jew who stood in the way of progress (Fischer 2007).

Secularism and Atheism in Orthodox Russia Tsarist Russia constituted another environment for the emergence of nineteenthcentury secularisms and unbeliefs. Russian radicals—including Alexander Ivanovich Herzen, Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin, Pyotr Alexeyewitch Kropotkin, and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin—powerfully influenced critiques of religion and fortified atheist positions worldwide (Marks 2004). Then again, even ultra-radical Russian intellectuals found it difficult to separate themselves from Christian-Orthodox cultural influences and language, prompting historian Victoria Frede to conclude that “Russian atheism of the nineteenth century was not secular” (2011, 147).

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Secularism’s gingerly divergence from Orthodox Christianity in Russia may be explained by four factors. First, Russia, which unlike western Europe opened its first university only in 1755, lacked an educational tradition that would have eased the reception of deist and Enlightened ideas or promoted an authentically Russian philosophical critique of religion prior to the nineteenth century. Westernization may have come by force with Peter the Great’s administrative and military reforms, but Enlightenment ideas in general, which Catherine the Great supported initially, were restricted again in the aftermath of the French Revolution for fear of coup attempts (Hildermeier 2013, 405 – 694). These developments also undermined the coalescence of freemasonry in Russia; freemasons contributed little to secularism here. Moreover, ties between state and church remained close throughout the long nineteenth century. The notion of Russia’s historical mission to bring spiritual renewal to the world was alive and well, drawing upon longstanding attitudes in the Russian Orthodox Church and from anti-Enlightenment Christian spiritualism, romanticism, and mysticism (Walicki 1979, 1 – 34). Second, a lively debate over the place and value of religion in public life, which was so elemental to the substance of the public sphere elsewhere in Europe, did not develop with the same intensity in Russia. Russian religious and theological discourse on the subject was impoverished, so a class of informed “experts” on it failed to materialize. The Western-educated elite who did appear were still receptive to mystical and liturgical literature. What is more, the Orthodox clergy, thought to be uneducated and poor in manners, lost influence in society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the absence of a confident secularist camp opposed by an equally confident and articulate clerical camp in an ongoing sparring match, secularists and unbelievers had a difficult time finding their footing against the massive weight and authority of Orthodox hegemony. Third, religious doubt and atheism were coded negatively in Russian culture, and this coding was very strong. Even the scientifically and philosophically informed radicals equated them with moral decline, crisis, decay, and suicide. It was not until the nineteenth-century’s second half that religious doubt and atheism took on more positive accents in Russian intellectual discourse. Finally, the close ties between the Russian state and the Orthodox Church encouraged a number of disciplinary measures that, while not unique to Russia, were intensified here due to the other factors discussed in this chapter. These included censorship and self-censorship, serious social and work-related discrimination, outright persecution, constabulary punishment, and exile (Frede 2011, 3 – 20). Despite all these limitations on the development of secularism in Russia, secularist ideas still found their way into public life. Religious doubters, for example, discussed their positions initially in Moscow-based clubs, such as Obchtchestvo lioubomoudria (Society of the Lovers of Wisdom), and later during the 1820s–1840s in the loosely organized Západniki (Westerners) frequented by disaffected young aristocrats. Inspired by the lectures of Hegel and Feuerbach, these literati and philosophers searched for truth as they understood it and sought coherence in life, spirit, and nature. They also hoped to abolish serfdom, emancipate individuals through education, refocus pub-

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lic discourse on man, not on God, and implement liberal reforms in the context of industrialization. In addition, they turned against “Slavophiles,” such as Aleksey Stepanovich Khomyakov, who in this period studied Schelling and held romantic views of Russian traditions, church rituals, the folkways of Russian village communes (obshchina), and village self-administration in town councils (mir). Though all these circles expressed secularist and atheist motifs, and while even the Slavophiles envisioned the separation of the state and the social-religious sphere, Russian Orthodoxy remained central to their thought. Unlike in western Europe, religious doubt, atheism, and secularist demands in Russia originated primarily from claims for social and political reform, not from critical revaluations of the Bible or of organized religion as such or its dogmas. This difference in emphasis in Russian secularism and unbelief persisted in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the religious doubts raised initially by aristocrats in those early Moscow clubs finally reached the urban middle classes and students critical of Russian monarchy. However, their increasingly explicit atheism was still directed primarily against the autocrat ruling by God’s grace and the restrictive policies of the church that sanctified him (Frede 2011). As the century progressed, atheism and political radicalism became only more closely intertwined. Such was the case with the Russian populist and socialist writer Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky. His famous novel Chto délat? (What Is to Be Done?, 1863) inspired many future Russian revolutionaries, including Lenin, but also Russian-born anarchists like Emma Goldman, Bakunin, and Kropotkin. All of these figures were passionate atheists and materialists, arguing that God—as Bakunin maintained in Gott und Staat (God and the State, 1919)—was merely “a reflection, a willo’-the-wisp that neither warms nor enlightens.” Even so, and to a greater degree than in other European secularisms, “Russian revolutionary ideas were infused with spiritual yearning and secular ideological substitutes for religiosity” (Marks 2004, 8). Many fin-de-siècle Russian secularists and unbelievers (including Leo Tolstoy), in fact, built upon the spiritualism and national messianism expressed earlier in the nineteenth century, translating them into language suitable for a political-revolutionary movement in search of freedom, inner-worldly harmony, equality, creativity, beauty, and the Absolute. Not least because of this deep entanglement of religion and secularity, Russian secularism and unbelief call for sophisticated research strategies to determine their place, value, and influence in modern Europe and the world (for Soviet atheism, see Smolkin 2018; Gleixner 2020).

Conclusion If there is a common denominator among European secularisms and unbeliefs in the nineteenth century, it is their variety. Both assumed shapes and contents according to the cultures, national environments, and particular religious backgrounds against which they developed, as we have just seen dramatically in the case of Russia. Jewish secularisms have their own history, even if Europe’s legally emancipated and accultur-

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ating Jewish populations were deeply affected by and participated in secularisms of Christian origin. The study of Jewish secularisms also makes clear the need to differentiate the motivations and goals of their most vocal proponents. In view of the inextricable entanglement of three “confessions”—Jewish, Christian, and secular—this differentiation requires subtle calibration of the terms “religious” and “secular,” a calibration that will have to be readjusted further as more research in this promising field occurs. Protestant and Catholic secularisms and unbeliefs, for their part and despite their close interrelations, were characterized by their own dynamics. Due to the temporal and spiritual powers of the Catholic Church, secularism in Catholic countries often took on rigid and uncompromising forms, such as French laïcité or the nationalism of the Italian Risorgimento, which led not only to conflicts over national unification but to “culture wars” against the church. Elsewhere, as in Poland, where Catholicism aligned tightly with national culture and aspirations, secularists had a difficult time establishing a secure public voice. Protestant secularisms, by contrast, could capitalize upon longstanding theological and cultural-critical positions, such as the primacy of an individual’s spiritual relationship with God, traditions of social engagement in organizational life that prefigured secular alternatives, and a pervasive critique of the (Catholic) clergy. The more eager embrace of science and scientific worldviews in Protestant lands also paved the way for the adoption here of monism and materialism, two forms of secularism dependent upon not only science but also the latter’s popularization through compulsory secular schooling and the press. Above all, the history of modern European secularism and unbelief demonstrates that lines of development were in inseparable interplay. This tremendous religious, intellectual, social, and cultural complexity, which reflects the ambivalent paths followed by men and women in modern life, requires great care in choice of method. It also calls for an expansive research agenda, whose desiderata would include: secularists’ social networks in national communities, the reception of secularist ideas and individuals in home environments, the transnational and global spread and entanglement of actors and their ideas, the regional peculiarities of secularist developments, the influence of secularists’ ideas on political decision-making processes, and the contributions secularists made to questions of gender and concepts of living a self-determined life.

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Gregory, Frederick. 1977. Scientific Materialism in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company. Haarmann, Daniela. 2020. “Freidenkerei, Libre-pensée, Szabadgondolkodás: Concepts of Freethinking during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.” In Kosuch 2020, 35 – 83. Habermas, Rebekka. 2011. “Piety, Power, and Powerlessness: Religion and Religious Groups in Germany, 1870 – 1945.” In The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History, edited by Helmut Walser Smith, 453 – 80. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heike-Gmelin, Axel. 2013. Kremation und Kirche: Die evangelische Resonanz auf die Einführung der Feuerbestattung im 19. Jahrhundert. Berlin: LIT Verlag. Hildermeier, Manfred. 2013. Geschichte Russlands: Vom Mittelalter bis zur Oktoberrevolution. Munich: C. H. Beck. Jansson, Anton. 2020. “Friends and Foes: Two Secularisms in late Nineteenth-Century Sweden.” In Kosuch 2020, 155 – 78. Jobani, Yuval. 2016. “The Lure of Heresy: A Philosophical Typology of Hebrew Secularism in the First Half of the Twentieth Century.” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 24: 95 – 121. Kaiser, Jochen-Christoph. 1981. Arbeiterbewegung und organisierte Religionskritik: Proletarische Freidenkerverbände in Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Kosuch, Carolin. 2017. “Zwischen Gesetz und Technik: Die Feuerbestattungsfrage des 19. Jahrhunderts als Prisma italienisch-jüdischer Selbstverortung.ˮ Acta Historica Leopoldina 71: 155 – 71. Kosuch, Carolin. 2019. “Retrieving Tradition? The Secular-Religious Ambiguity in Nineteenth-Century German-Jewish Anarchism.ˮ In Negotiating the Secular and the Religious in the German Empire: Transnational Approaches, edited by Rebekka Habermas, 147 – 70. New York: Berghahn Books. Kosuch, Carolin, ed. 2020. Freethinkers in Europe: National and Transnational Secularities, 1789 – 1920s. Berlin: De Gruyter. Kowalski, David. 2018. Polens letzte Juden: Herkunft und Dissidenz um 1968. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Lalouette, Jacqueline. 1997. La Libre Pensée en France, 1848−1940. Paris: Albin Michel. Leber, Christoffer. 2020. Arbeit am Welträ tsel: Religion und Sä kularitä t in der Monismusbewegung um 1900. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Lee, Lois. 2015. Recognizing the Non-Religious: Reimagining the Secular. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Le Grand, Sylvie. 2013. “The Origin of the Concept of Laïcité in Nineteenth-Century France.” In Religion and Secularity: Transformations and Transfers of Religious Discourses in Europe and Asia, edited by Lucian Hölscher and Marion Eggert, 59 – 76. Leiden: Brill. Löwy, Michel. 1997. Erlösung und Utopie: Jüdischer Messianismus und libertäres Denken, Eine Wahlverwandtschaft. Berlin: Karin Kramer. Lübbe, Hermann. 1965. Säkularisierung: Geschichte eines ideenpolitischen Begriffs. Freiburg and Munich: Karl Alber. Marks, Steven G. 2004. How Russia Shaped the Modern World: From Art to Anti-Semitism, Ballet to Bolshevism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Meneghello, Laura. 2017. Jacob Moleschott—A Transnational Biography: Science, Politics, and Popularization in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Bielefeld: Transcript. Olson, Richard G. 2008. Science and Scientism in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Osterhammel, Jürgen. 2015. The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Richter, Susan. 2018. “Der Atheismus ist männlich, nackt und schön—Analyse eines neuen Darstellungsphänomens in der Französischen Revolution.” In Verfolgter Unglaube: Atheismus und gesellschaftliche Exklusion in historischer Perspektive, edited by Susan Richter, 287 – 320. Frankfurt am Main: Campus.

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Royle, Edward. 1974. Victorian Infidels: The Origins of the British Secularist Movement, 1791 – 1866. Manchester: University of Manchester Press. Royle, Edward. 1980. Radicals, Secularists and Republicans: Popular Freethought in Britain, 1866 – 1915. Manchester: University of Manchester Press. Sakellariou, Alexandros. Forthcoming 2025. “Secularist Implications in Satirical Poetry of 19th-Century Greece: The Case of Andreas Laskaratos and his Criticism of the Religious Establishment.” “Secularist Poetry,” edited by Carolin Kosuch and Clare Stainthorp. Forum in Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 23. Schlögl, Rudolf. 2013. Alter Glaube und moderne Welt: Europäisches Christentum im Umbruch, 1750 – 1850. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Schwartz, Laura. 2017. Infidel Feminism: Secularism, Religion and Women’s Emancipation, England, 1830 – 1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Simon-Ritz, Frank. 1997. Die Organisation einer Weltanschauung: Die freigeistige Bewegung im Wilhelminischen Deutschland. Gütersloh: Chr. Kaiser. Slezkine, Yuri. 2004. The Jewish Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Smith, Helmut Walser. 1995. German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870 – 1914. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Smolkin, Victoria. 2018. A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Spenninger, Claus. 2021. Stoff für Konflikt: Fortschrittsdenken und Religionskritik im naturwissenschaftlichen Materialismus des 19. Jahrhunderts, 1847 – 1881. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Verucci, Guido. 1981. L’Italia laica prima e dopo l’unità 1848−1876: Anticlericalismo, libero pensiero e ateismo nella società italiana. Rome and Bari: Laterza. Wagner, Barbara. 2020. “Secularity in the New State: The Case of Poland.” In Kosuch 2020, 131 – 54. Wagner, Peter. 1993. A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline. London: Routledge. Walicki, Andrzej. 1979. A History of Russian Thought: From the Enlightenment to Marxism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Weidner, Daniel. 2014. “Säkularisierung.” In Enzyklopädie Jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur, vol. 5, edited by Dan Diner, 295 – 301. Stuttgart: Metzler. Weir, Todd. 2012, ed. Monism: Science, Philosophy, Religion, and the History of a Worldview. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Weir, Todd. 2013. “The Specter of ‘Godless Jewry’: Secularism and the ‘Jewish Question’ in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany.” Central European History 46: 815 – 49. Weir, Todd. 2014. Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weir, Todd. 2016. “Säkularismus (Freireligiöse, Freidenker, Monisten, Ethiker, Humanisten).” In Handbuch der Religionsgeschichte im deutschsprachigen Raum. Vol. 6.2, 20. Jahrhundert: Religiöse Positionen und soziale Formationen, edited by Lucian Hölscher and Volkard Krech, 189 – 218. Paderborn: Schöningh. Weir, Todd. 2023. Red Secularism: Socialism and Secularist Culture in Germany 1890 to 1933. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weltecke, Dorothea. 2000. “Der Narr spricht: Es ist kein Gott”: Studien zu Atheismus, Unglauben und Glaubenszweifel vom 12. Jahrhundert bis zur Neuzeit. Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Wiese, Christian. 1999. Wissenschaft des Judentums und protestantische Theologie im wilhelminischen Deutschland: Ein Schrei ins Leere? Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Wittkau-Horgby, Annette. 1998. Materialismus: Entstehung und Wirkung in den Wissenschaften des 19. Jahrhunderts. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Wyrwa, Ulrich. 2001. “Die Emanzipation der Juden in Europa.” In Handbuch zur Geschichte der Juden in Europa. Vol. 2, Religion, Kultur, Alltag, edited by Elke-Vera Kotowski, Julius H. Schoeps, and Hiltrud Wallenborn, 336 – 52. Darmstadt: Primus.

Part II: Cultures of Knowledge

Anthony J. Steinhoff

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Scholarly perspectives on the relationship between religion and education in nineteenth-century Europe have long been dominated by the secularization thesis. Owen Chadwick’s classic, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (1975), anchors one key line of argument, namely that after 1800 religion, as a sort of knowledge and truth, was increasingly marginalized. Theology was dethroned as the queen of sciences, especially at the university, while scientific learning—and the methodologies that undergird it—were held to provide surer access to truth. A second approach is exemplified by research into the “culture wars” of the century’s final decades, in which states and religious communities clashed over control over schools and education programs (Clark and Kaiser 2003). In part, this is a narrative of modernization, with the state extending its influence into areas, like education, that had long been the preserve of such non-state actors as faith communities (Brockliss and Sheldon 2012). But the modern states’ claims on schools also stemmed from a new sense of schools’ missions: they had become central sites for preparing citizens and not just forming pious men and women. While the relationship between religion and education clearly shifted after 1800, it is evident from the studies published since the 1980s that neither secularization nor modernization paradigms adequately describe or account for this change. European states still maintained that religious knowledge was essential to the preparation of citizens. With the notable exception of republican France, religious education thus remained an integral part of primary and even secondary school curricula. Disputes over schooling certainly arose, to wit the spectacular “school wars” seen from Italy to the Netherlands. But conflict was just one side of the coin; the other was continued cooperation between religious and secular agents and the recognition of their mutual interests in schooling. Furthermore, throughout the century religious knowledge helped establish social capital, while also informing and even reaffirming gendered notions of social difference. Recent research has also shown that religious communities’ concerns vis-à-vis schools and schooling cannot be reduced to questions of power. Religious leaders deemed religion to be at the heart of all education, making it unthinkable that faith communities be excluded from it. But the stakes were not just philosophical and pedagogical. Education was indeed essential to faith communities. Through schooling, youth acquired the knowledge, sacred and secular, considered necessary for membership in a religious community. After 1800, schools also played important roles in recruiting men but also women to religious life. Secondary schooling and advanced study prepared men (and to a lesser degree women) for religious ministry, which often led to employment in the (state) established church. In short, education mattered to faith communities in the present, fostering their very identity qua religious community, but also in the future. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110609059-010

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This chapter explores evolving understandings of “religious knowledge” while also investigating its target audiences, dissemination, and consumption. In addition, it examines how notions of religious knowledge contributed to notions of social and political difference over the long nineteenth century. The chapter looks first at the theory and practice of religious instruction, particularly for the youth. The next section considers education and preparation for ministry. What kind of training was judged necessary for ministers? To what degree did the content of this training evolve as European society itself changed after 1815? The chapter closes by examining shifting public understandings of schooling and education and their consequences for European faith communities. As will become clear, if schooling was a frequent and often spectacular flash point in the late-century culture wars, there remained considerable room for collaboration and cooperation on educational issues.

Propagating Religious Knowledge in the Faith Community As the nineteenth century began, Europe’s major faith communities each had clear ideas about what kinds of religious knowledge were indispensable for its members. Christians, Jews, and Muslims all needed to know basic prayers, teachings, even religious music (e. g., particular chants or hymns). Likewise, they should know how to conduct themselves as a member of the community by keeping fundamental obligations (e. g., keeping kosher, attending Mass, giving alms). In the Protestant tradition, knowledge of the Bible, preferably through personal reading, was promoted. Furthermore, both the Jewish and the Muslim communities encouraged men to study canonical texts (the Torah, the Quran), which necessitated that they learn such sacred languages as Hebrew and Arabic. Although each of the faith communities regarded the acquisition of religious knowledge as a life-long process—hence the importance of sermons during religious services, and, in some contexts, adult catechesis—religious instruction targeted first and foremost the youth. In part, this followed from the widespread belief that religion was intimately involved in rearing and socializing children. But it also reflected the conviction that one needed to possess this core religious knowledge to become an adult member of the faith community. Accordingly, communities devoted particular attention to the formal preparation for such rites of passage as First Communion (Roman Catholicism), confirmation (Protestantism) and bar mitzvah (Judaism); in the latter two cases the rite even included a child’s formal demonstration of knowledge before the community (e. g., answers to the catechism, the ability to read and chant from the Torah scroll). For much of the nineteenth century, formal religious education constituted only a part of the religious instruction boys and girls received. Indeed, informal instruction (or religious acculturation) within the family circle prevailed in much of Europe. Chil-

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dren were taught to say the prayers that accompanied meals. They also learned from older family members how to keep days of fasting. In Protestant homes, fathers often read to the family from the Bible; in Britain and in German Europe, fathers, but increasingly mothers too, provided catechism lessons to their children (Martin 2019). In Sweden, Lutheran parish officials even visited homes to examine children’s knowledge of the catechism (Westberg 2019). The family home was pivotal to the religious training and socialization of girls, precisely because several faith traditions—Jewish, Muslim, but also Catholic—did not particularly value formal schooling for them. In Jewish communities, mothers taught their daughters traditional prayers and how to run households in accordance with ritual laws. In eastern Europe, it was also at the home where Jewish women read (and learned to read) Tsenah urenah, a collection of “bible stories” written not in Hebrew but in Yiddish. Similarly, women had their own prayer literature, the tkhine, which were organized around their weekly routines and were typically read or spoken at home and alone, rather than collectively in the synagogue (Stampfer 2016, 175 – 76). Pastors and priests also provided instruction to the youth of their parish or village. But the frequency and the quality of such lessons depended on the clergy’s availability—rural areas were notoriously ill provided with clergy during the century’s opening decades—and their training and talent as instructors. In Christian communities, this instruction was typically limited to the period just prior to First Communion or confirmation. With the notable exception of France, where the Napoleonic state established a monopoly over the new secondary schools (lycées) and the university faculties in 1806, the formal institutions of learning that did exist in Europe during much of the first half of the nineteenth century were closely tied to existing faith communities. In Protestant areas, parishes routinely maintained schools to ensure that children learned to read and, thereby, acquire direct access to Scripture. Religious subjects— Bible stories and sacred history, catechisms, hymn singing—dominated the school curriculum, but children also learned writing and basic mathematics. In Ottoman Europe, each religious community (Armenian Christians, Greek Orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslims) was responsible for educating its members. Consequently, schools were by definition “religious” institutions. The Islamic character of schools for the Muslim community was unmistakable. The elementary schools (mektebs) emphasized the memorization of the Quran, whereas the advanced schools (madrasas) promoted the learning of Arabic, Islamic law, the hadith (sayings and deeds of Muhammad), and Muslim history (Somel 2001). Similarly, eastern Europe’s Jewish communities supported formal schooling in the form of the heder, which focused on teaching Jewish youth to read and speak Hebrew as well as learning the Torah and such canonical texts as the Mishna (the “oral Torah”). However, whereas Islamic schools were largely public institutions, the heder were private initiatives, organized by individual tutors rather than by the faith community. In the Russian Empire, the Ministry of Education created a number of “parish schools” after 1802, but only in the 1830s did a true, clergy-run system emerge with some two thousand schools by 1839 (Sorenson 1992, 186).

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Faith communities also engaged in educational projects that were regarded, at least initially, mainly as charitable works. The British Sunday School movement was the most prominent and influential of these initiatives. Launched in 1780 by Evangelicals in Gloucester, Sunday schools aimed to teach needy working-class children the fundamentals of reading, writing, and arithmetic while also ensuring their contact with the faith. By 1800, some 200,000 British children were attending these schools, and at mid-century the number had risen to some 2 million (Laqueur 1976). Avidly promoted by Evangelical missionaries, the Sunday School movement soon gained adherents on the Continent, above all among awakened Protestants (both Lutheran and Reformed). After 1850, the emergence of mass schooling prompted a major reorientation in the Sunday school ideal. Not only did Sunday schools develop into general instruments for parochial religious education, but even Catholic parishes started to embrace them (Voigt 2007; McCartney 2019). The Jewish talmud torah likewise was viewed primarily as a charitable, communal institution, offering a free religious education to disadvantaged boys and orphans. Starting in the 1830s, however, institutions such as London’s Jews’ Free School arose to provide a more general education (and even food and clothing) to needy Jewish children (Singer 1987; Zalkin 2006, 9 – 11). With time, the schoolhouse occupied a larger role in youth’s religious education. In part, this reflected the steady expansion of schools and schooling in Europe after 1815. Several states—Denmark (1814), France (1833), Greece (1834), Spain (1838), Romania (1864), Britain (1870)—passed laws that obligated towns and cities to open, staff, and maintain primary schools. In Prussia (already in 1763), Denmark, and Greece, this obligation accompanied the introduction of compulsory primary education. Elsewhere, notably Switzerland (1874), Italy (1877), Great Britain (1880), and France (1882), the establishment of compulsory primary education came later. In short, with the major exception of Russia, most school-aged children had some contact with formal schooling by 1914, even if regular attendance at schools was not assured until well into the twentieth century. This development meant that an ever-greater number of European youth, boys and girls, participated in the programs of religious education that schools offered. Most of the contemporary curricular plans, especially those for primary schools, present religion as their first subject, even if more total hours per week were typically given to secular subjects. Under the 1836 Greek primary school law, for example, religion was allotted only three hours weekly, compared to twelve hours each for reading and writing. The at least symbolic emphasis on religion reflects faith communities’ ongoing involvement in primary education and a broad consensus that a main objective of primary education lay in fostering a sense of morality among the state’s subjects. Hence, even the Russian education ministry’s peasant schools imparted a “heavy dose of religious instruction” (Eklof 1990, 33). After 1850, primary schools typically devoted from two to six hours per week to religion. In the early grades, this instruction centered on learning Bible stories (at least in Christian schools), prayers, and hymns; in later grades, lessons on religious history and catechism were added. Schools also routinely incorporated religion into such subjects as reading and language study. In Prot-

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estant schools, for example, primers for reading routinely included selections from the Bible; in Greece, psalters were also used during reading classes. In the mektebs, too, Quranic texts were used to teach reading and Arabic. The fact that primary schools were generally organized by denomination also facilitated the diffusion of religious influences throughout the school day. Daily Mass attendance, for example, was often integrated into the schedules of Catholic schools, while Anglican schools made chapel service a regular part of each day. In Greece, all schools (primary and secondary) were required to start and end with a prayer service, and school children were required to attend Greek Orthodox services on Sundays and Feast Days. Evidence from late nineteenth-century Alsace suggests that religious knowledge played an important role in the social differentiation promoted by different school types (Steinhoff 2008, 293 – 337). Consistent with the primary school’s vocation to provide basic education to the masses, Alsatian schools’ religious instruction curricula concentrated on the fundamentals. In rural areas, priests and pastors often gave the lessons. Catholic schools emphasized memorizing the diocesan catechism, whereas Protestant schools privileged Bible stories and reading biblical texts. The curricula for Bible stories, which differed from one school type to another, reveal too how this instruction promoted notions of confessional and gender difference. Most importantly, Catholics and Protestants used distinct titles to refer to the same stories. But girls’ schools were also expected to cover stories highlighting female figures (Ruth, Mary and Martha, etc.) that were absent from the lists for boys’ schools. In addition, secondary schools (lycée, gymnasium, real school) adopted a much more scholarly approach to religious instruction, especially in the upper forms. In Alsace, these schools normally reserved only two hours a week to religion. In the middle and final grades, class time was devoted to the history of the Bible, to church history, doctrine, and ethics. In Strasbourg’s Protestant gymnasium, students even learned to read Scripture in the original Hebrew and Greek. Religion as Bildung, that is, a type of education that sought to cultivate the combined moral, intellectual, and aesthetic excellence of the human self (Bruford 1975), was thus an experience reserved almost exclusively to boys of the middle and upper classes. Noteworthy too is that in much of Imperial Germany, and not just in Alsace, secondary school religion classes were taught most often by university-trained instructors with a specialization in religion, and not by clergy. On paper, at least, the programs of religious instruction offered by Europe’s schools, particularly during the second half of the century, are impressive. They reveal an intent to provide youth a robust base of religious knowledge on which religious ministers could build during their preparations for the different rites of initiation. By century’s end, instructors were also engaging with pedagogical specialists to improve the quality of religious education. Protestant educators in Germany even sought to reduce both the amount of repetition in the traditional curriculum and the high degree of memorization expected of children. In this way, they also hoped to encourage students to regard this instruction more positively and thereby maintain a more active interest in religion. While there is no clear way to evaluate how students felt about the schools’ religious education courses, the expansion of schooling and, even more so, the

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imposition of obligatory schooling meant that, by 1914, most school-age youth did receive a good dose of religious instruction at school. Since primary school curricula were planned to span the entirety of the period of compulsory schooling, youths at these institutions had a fair chance of encountering most of the program, even if attendance continued to be irregular in much of rural Europe because of family labor needs during planting and harvest. By contrast, because many youth attending Europe’s secondary schools never completed the upper forms (which would have required attending school after it was no longer compulsory), it was more common for secondary school pupils not to receive their school’s full program of religious instruction. A rare clerical voice opposed to religious education in the school was the Danish Lutheran cleric Nikolaj Frederik Severin Grundtvig (1783 – 1872). He contended namely that formal religious instruction should be delayed until individuals were old enough to think independently about religious concepts and teaching. Grundtvig’s positions were largely motivated by his concerns about religious freedom, but his attention to religious “continuing education”—namely instruction that served to complement and build upon previous religious lessons—for older youths and even adults, serves as a useful reminder that most religious communities did not view religious knowledge acquisition as a process that ended once one left school. Indeed, throughout the century, a range of initiatives sought to regularize such continuing education (Ottewill 2019). Parishes and religious associations established libraries and reading circles. Religious newspapers printed articles about historical events and church teachings that targeted the lay public. Likewise, the public missions organized by such Catholic orders as the Redemptorists or, later, by such Protestant figures as Elias Schenk (1831 – 1913) all had major catechetical components.

Educating Religious Leaders Although general agreement existed regarding the types of religious knowledge that members of a particular faith community should acquire, ideally in their youth, the same does not hold true for the communities’ religious leaders, whether pastors, priests, rabbis, or imams. In part, such discrepancies stemmed from different ideas about the very nature of “religious leadership” within a community and how individuals should be prepared for it. Over the course of the century, however, external forces also prompted considerable discussion over religious leaders’ training. Viewing ministers as public officials, European states increasingly required religious leaders to have similar types of training, preferably in state establishments (or, less frequently, stateaccredited institutions). Social changes ensuing from the emergence of a more industrial and urban society also prompted church officials to modify traditional programs of study to make them more attuned to the needs of the times. Nonetheless, considerable variation remained in 1914, both within and among the different faith communities.

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Before turning to the issue of preparation for religious leadership, a few reflections on the concept and on the changing social background of these men, and to a lesser degree women, are warranted. Although faith communities rarely talked about “religious leadership” as such during the nineteenth century, this term—rather than a denominationally specific term like “minister”—is used here to facilitate discussion across faith traditions. Indeed, while religious knowledge was frequently a marker of social status and normally a requirement for holding certain positions within the faith community, the social or cultural “power” associated with these positions varied considerably from one tradition to another. At one end of the scale, we find the Catholic priest, whose training and ordination established him as the community’s ecclesiastical leader: he had privileged access to Scripture, was the sole celebrant of the sacraments, and was held by church teaching to occupy an essential mediating position between the lay faithful and the Divine. At the other end, we find the Jewish rabbi, who was normally revered by the community for his wisdom and learning but who traditionally had little formal power (however, after 1800, as David Meola notes in his chapter for this volume, state-instigated reforms in France and in the German lands did transform rabbis into communal authorities). Within the Protestant fold, by contrast, although ministers were expected to have advanced training, ordination did not coincide with the end of their formal studies. Instead, the rite was performed only in anticipation of their taking on a pastoral position. If the clerical office did confer a certain religious power on the minister, the Reformation doctrine of the priesthood of all believers limited this authority and ensured that laity also occupied influential positions in the church and the parish community. Social position also conditioned who had access to the requisite training for religious leadership. Although it is difficult to generalize across time, place, and faith community, certain trends can be identified. First, there was a gradual improvement in religious leaders’ educational attainment after 1800. Overall, this was a consequence of the progressive introduction of mass and compulsory schooling in Europe. In some cases, for example France, the expansion of schooling markedly aided the recruitment of men to Catholic ministry: parish priests identified promising young boys and helped them obtain places in the primary schools and petits séminaires, which then sent the best and brightest to the diocesan seminaries. By contrast, the opening of new educational opportunities to Jewish youth in France and the German states increasingly encouraged families to have their sons train for the professions or commerce, rather than for the poorly remunerated rabbinate (Kaplan 2009). In much of Protestant Europe, the requirement that pastors obtain a theology degree prior to ordination ensured that most pastoral candidates came from middle-class backgrounds. As Frank-Michael Kuhlemann highlights in his study of Protestant ministers in Baden (2002), the Protestant pastorate maintained a close connection to the middle-class (bürgerlich) milieu down to 1914. However, the more that members of the lower middle classes began to attend the gymnasium, whose “diploma” (the Abitur) was required to attend university, the more that the sons of schoolteachers, merchants, and mid- and lower-level civil servants entered the pastoral ranks. In Russia, reforms implemented in the 1880s effective-

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ly transformed the seminaries and theological academies into schools reserved for the sons of the ecclesiastical class, diminishing their role as sites for ministerial preparation (Destivelle 2010, 64). In the newly established Balkan states—Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia—theological seminaries and universities were established to combat the widespread problem of a woefully undereducated Orthodox clergy (Leustean 2014). Nonetheless, as Anastassios Anastassiadis notes, for decades the theological faculty at the University of Athens was understaffed and poorly attended. In fact, as late as 1920, roughly 87 percent of Greece’s Orthodox clergy had, at best, only an elementary education (2020). If Olaf Blaschke’s contention that the nineteenth century marked the beginning of a second “confessional age” (2000) remains controversial, it nonetheless usefully underscores a century-long trend towards greater professionalization of religious leadership. For present purposes, “professionalization” needs to be understood mainly as a raising of educational expectations placed on these men and even a certain standardization of religious training. Particularly on the Continent, most Protestant churches required by 1800 that men seeking ordination hold a university theology degree. Over the course of the century, this bar was progressively raised. By the 1850s, the German state churches generally required that prospective candidates for ministry study at least six semesters at a university theological faculty and then sit for a formal examination on that material. Then, in the 1870s, state churches began instituting a second theological exam, normally taken after completing a one-year internship (either as vicar or at a preachers’ seminary), which evaluated a candidate’s theoretical and practical knowledge. Overall, the Catholic Church was slower to raise both standards and expectations. As Ralph Gibson has noted (1989, 80), the teaching staff at French seminaries remained of poor quality until the 1830s. But then, the Sulpician order, which dominated French seminaries well into the century, notoriously valued piety over intellect (Boudon 1995). However, in religiously pluralist regions (Alsace, Switzerland, the Rhineland), or where Catholics were in a minority position (England, the Netherlands), confessional competition incited local bishops to demand more rigorous preparation of their candidates for priesthood. Only during the 1860s, as bishops from Italy to Ireland recognized that their priests were generally intellectually unable to meet the challenges posed by growing anticlericalism, irreligion, and modern science (e. g., Darwinism), did Catholics make more concerted efforts to improve clerical training. Increasingly seminaries required prospective seminarians to have the equivalent of a secondary school education to attend seminary; moreover, they made the seminary curricula more rigorous and raised educational requirements for seminary teaching staffs. The establishment of Jewish seminaries for the training of rabbis can be seen as an analogous development, which was particularly promoted by reform-minded Jews (maskilim). The first true seminary in eastern Europe was the Szkola Rabinów in Warsaw (1826 – 63); it did not ordain rabbis but did facilitate its students’ integration into other advanced institutions of learning. Merging academic scholarship with traditional learning, the Warsaw Szkola combined university preparatory courses with rabbinical

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training, establishing a model followed in Padua (1829), Metz (1830), Amsterdam (1836), and Vilnius (1847). In 1854, funds from the Jonah Fränckel trust permitted the foundation of the Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau, which strove to offer rabbinical training more akin to a university program. Hence, its rabbinical department—the seminary also had a preparatory division and a training program for religion teachers—only admitted students entitled to attend university. When the Metz seminary moved to Paris in 1859, it adopted a new curriculum inspired by the Breslau school, and in 1893, a Breslau seminary alumnus helped found a similar establishment in Vienna. Budapest’s rabbinical school, which opened in 1877, operated as a state institution whose faculty was appointed by the Ministry of Religion. Consequently, at the end of the course of study in the “upper department,” students were required to sit for a Jewish theological examination. Whereas Hungary’s orthodox community opposed the opening of the Budapest seminary, in 1873 the German Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer opted to promote orthodoxy by establishing a specifically orthodox seminary in Berlin. In contemporary discussions of educational training for religious leadership, one fundamental question emerged repeatedly: was it necessary to become a theologian to be a good pastor, priest, or rabbi? Within the Protestant fold, the question gained special prominence because of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s theological and institutional interventions. Called to help create the Faculty of Protestant Theology at the new University of Berlin (founded 1809), Schleiermacher defined theology as a positive science (positive Wissenschaft) to justify its continued place at the university. He argued that theologians needed to be “rooted in the philosophy faculty” but also pursue “the study of pure science.” However, this was a positive science not in a Comtean sense, but because the knowledge was both necessary for achieving practical tasks and was connected to the ecclesiastical community (Purvis 2016, 148 – 49). Schleiermacher may have aspired to find the “finest balance” between theoretical and practical activity, but in practice the emphasis on university preparation for ministry tended to tilt the balance towards rigorous academic study, not just in Berlin but also in Bonn, Jena, Zurich, Copenhagen, Lund (Sweden), Leiden and, by the 1840s, even in the faculties of Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh. Schleiermacher’s own Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums (Short Presentation of Theological Studies, 1811) offered a systematic synthesis of theological knowledge that provided the model for a new style of theological textbook, the theological encyclopedia. The introduction of required theological examinations—focusing on biblical studies, historical theology, dogmatics, and practical theology—further emphasized the academic nature of ministerial preparation. Influential as it was, the German university model was far from universal, even among Protestants. In Britain, Anglican bishops wished ministerial candidates to have a bachelor’s degree from an English university, but this was not formally required until after 1918. By the 1840s, many new theological colleges were established in Britain to help meet the need for more ministers. Typically, these institutions offered “supplemental” theological training to students who had completed a course of study in another field. Within the Nonconformist and Evangelical communities, a certain anti-intellectual spirit was evident. In 1856, the influential Baptist minister Charles H.

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Spurgeon (1834 – 92), founded the Pastor’s College to counter the overly academic emphasis of other Baptist seminaries. Its admission criteria privileged evangelical zeal over educational achievement, while the curriculum itself emphasized practical theology and missionary work (Brown 1987, 370). British Methodists, too, resisted an overly intellectual approach to ministerial training. At the turn of the century, fewer than 15 percent of those entering Methodist ministry were university graduates. The textbooks frequently used in Nonconformist seminaries also suggest a curriculum focusing on the preparation and delivery of sermons as well as church organization and administration. Similar tensions between the theoretical and practical preparation for religious leadership were also apparent within Europe’s Catholic, Orthodox, and Jewish communities. Although much of this training did not occur in formal university settings, it did require a serious commitment of time and mental energy. Throughout the century, the Vatican sought to maintain the Tridentine regulation that preparation for the priesthood occur mainly in episcopal seminaries. Catholic faculties of theology did exist, for example, at the University of Vienna and, after 1834, at the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium), but these institutions primarily trained Catholic scholars not parish priests, who continued to be prepared at the local diocesan seminary. In France, the internal organization of these seminaries was left entirely to the bishops; however, in Austria seminary programs were subject to state regulation, even while the Concordat of 1855 was in effect. An Austrian decree of 1858, for instance, set forth a four-year program of study for all seminarians that included such subjects as Christian dogma, the Old and New Testaments, exegetics, church history, moral theology, pastoral theology (including catechetics), and church law. Prussia established a Catholic theological faculty at the new University of Bonn in 1818, as did Württemberg at the University of Tübingen (1817), but this was exceptional; moreover, those preparing for ministry at these institutions still had to complete the practical training offered by the seminary (Cologne) or the “Wilhelmsstift” (Tübingen). Only in 1873, as part of Otto von Bismarck’s campaign against political Catholicism (the Kulturkampf), were the Prussian Catholic episcopal seminaries closed and candidates for the priesthood required to attend university theology lectures for three years. In Russia, the system of ecclesiastical (Orthodox) schools was reorganized at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Until the 1860s, the four-tiered system, which culminated with seminaries (for preparing clergy) and academies (for training scholars and seminary teachers) was open only to members of the clerical estate. According to an 1814 statute, the seminary program covered six years, but only the final two years were devoted to theology and emphasized hermeneutics, dogmatic theology, moral and pastoral theology, the history of church liturgy and the Holy Scriptures. Significantly, in keeping with the classical (philosophy and rhetoric-based) program of the initial years, the language of instruction was Latin, except for the courses in Slavonic literature and Scripture. If these reforms gave the curriculum greater coherence, the prevalence of scholastic approaches and the emphasis on rote memorization generally prevented students from becoming “functional” thinkers. To be sure, Russian authori-

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ties were generally wary of autonomous thinking, especially on theological matters. Yet even Chief Procurator Nicholas Protasov had to admit in the 1830s that “the present seminary graduate was incapable of transmitting or explaining Orthodoxy to his own parishioners, much less carrying the Church’s mission to its foes” (Freeze 1983, 126). In 1867, the Holy Synod approved a new regulation that declared that the seminary’s primary function was to prepare clergy; thereafter, admissions were more tightly regulated to reflect better the church’s demand for clergy. But the curriculum itself underwent only minor changes; instruction in Russian was increased, but the course of study still resembled that of a Western secondary school with a theological capstone. Whereas notable voices within Russia’s Orthodox Church sought to reduce the importance of classical knowledge, Jewish reformers (and state officials) in western and central Europe tended to argue the opposite: rabbinical education needed to have a much larger “secular,” namely classical component. In the 1840s, Jewish leaders in France determined that, to promote Jewish integration, rabbinical candidates should have completed the equivalent of a secondary (lycée) education. Religious learning at the séminaire israélite would continue to “focus on Talmud and Hebrew, exegesis, biblical history, and homiletics,” but students would also study Latin and Greek, ancient philosophy, and literature (Haus 2009, 80). Likewise, the rabbinical seminaries at Breslau, Berlin, and Budapest promoted the Jewish heritage and tradition, while also striving, à la Schleiermacher, to reconcile “positive” Judaism with contemporary life. The rabbinical program at Breslau, for example, stretched over seven years and covered such subjects as the Hebrew Bible, exegesis, Hebrew and Aramaic, Talmud, religion and ethics, Jewish history, and the history of Jewish literature (Seidel 2005, 138). By contrast, in Russian Lithuania, no specific, structured program for rabbinical training was ever established; its Jewish community continued to rely on its network of yeshivot. This said, while the yeshiva was not specifically an institution for preparing rabbis, after long years of study there men did receive much of the basic training necessary for the job: not just advanced study of the Torah and rabbinical writings but also many subjects relevant to the adjudication of halachah (e. g., tort law, laws of Sabbath, marital laws, dietary laws). In addition, advanced yeshiva students typically worked with experienced rabbis to develop their preaching skills and demonstrate their scholarly abilities. Jewish and Orthodox officials were not alone in confronting questions about the relevance of religious leaders’ preparation and training. During the second half of the century, Protestant and Catholic churchmen also had to grapple with the issue. One problem arose from the extension of schooling. In Britain, for example, ministers struggled to communicate and spread the Gospel to congregations whose members were increasingly better educated than they were. Similarly, church officials on the Continent, Protestant and Catholic alike, often granted that the educated bourgeoisie’s disaffection from the church reflected the clergy’s “simplemindedness.” On a broader level, however, the dilemma reflected the quickening pace of social and economic change. While, from the 1830s into the 1860s, Jesuit theologians at the Collegio Romano did develop a curriculum that would provide Catholic seminarians with a foundation

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in modern social conditions, economics and science, such training remained rare in Catholic seminaries and faculties until the end of the century (Shea 2017). Protestant and Catholic candidates for ministry did routinely study practical (or pastoral) theology, but until the 1870s these courses essentially ignored the dynamics of pastoral care and ministry in the urban environment. Hence, church officials not only pressured theology faculties and seminaries to devote greater attention to contemporary conditions in the practical theology coursework, they also strove to shore up candidates’ practical training. The University of Berlin, notably, established a “practical seminar” alongside the “theological” seminar in 1877. The creation of a second (Protestant) theological examination, taken after candidates had completed a one-year internship under the supervision of an experienced pastor, similarly encouraged the transition from “book learning” to actual ministry. Moreover, such journals as the (Protestant) Zeitschrift für praktische Theologie (Frankfurt am Main, 1879) and the (Catholic) Il Monitore Ecclesiastico (Rome, 1876) published articles that focused on current questions of ministry and pastoral practice.

Faith Communities, Schools, and the State Although Europe’s faith communities became even more dependent on public schools after 1800 to disseminate religious knowledge, their claims on schools and on school curricula were steadily undermined. In recent years, scholars have largely identified the modern state and liberalism as the primary catalysts behind this development (see the chapters “Church and State” and “Religion and National Politics” in this volume). Certainly, from Spain to Germany and from the Netherlands to Austria-Hungary spectacular clashes between church and state broke out over education. Yet, the picture is more complex than these narratives usually concede, precisely because, especially after 1848, schooling’s very vocation was being reconsidered. Namely, schools were becoming sites where different social and political actors competed to promote a particular social vision, following the motto: “Who has the youth, has the future.” If some faith communities, especially those in minority situations, ardently defended their educational prerogatives, others chose to ally with the state and/or progressive forces to safeguard, even improve what they regarded as truly essential: the schools’ religious education programs. Indeed, for all the heated rhetoric exchanged over schools, a broad consensus still held that religious instruction belonged in the school program, especially at primary schools. In retrospect, it is easy to understand why the relationship between faith community and school was being reevaluated. Advocates of increased access to education, and even more so compulsory primary education, were rarely motivated by religious zeal but rather by secular concerns. Secondary schools (the French lycée, the German gymnasium), for example, had the primary charge of preparing young men for the professions and civil service. As noted earlier, primary schools aimed to provide basic instruction to the sovereign’s subjects: reading, writing, arithmetic, and morality

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(religion). But as the case of early nineteenth-century Prussia reveals, the schools’ promotion of loyalty to the sovereign also encouraged a sense of attachment to the state. By mid-century, states like France and Britain increasingly viewed schooling as a means to foster a sense of citizenship among newly enfranchised men, not just in a state but in a nation-state, whose religious complexion was, in many parts of Europe, far from self-evident. In such newly independent countries as Greece (1828) and Bulgaria (1878), state authorities expected the fledgling school systems to promote the spiritual rebirth of the nation. Furthermore, the debates over the introduction of mass and obligatory schooling, whether in Denmark, Italy, or the Netherlands, reveal a considerable attention to its practical benefits: it should prepare citizens but also competent workers (especially for the emergent tertiary sector). In addition, liberals and other progressive forces championed schooling to advocate secularizing social and political reforms: a public more capable of independent thought, they believed, would undercut the power of traditional aristocratic—and ecclesiastical—elites. In part, the state’s emergence as a central player in schooling after 1815 follows from its desire to instrumentalize the school for political ends. But it also reflects a fundamental reality: only the state had the resources to set up schools, hire and pay teachers, set curricular standards, and ensure regular oversight of schools and teachers in what became a public system. This said, the massiveness of the enterprise meant that various forms of public-private partnerships—especially with faith communities— were possible, even necessary, especially during the century’s early decades. Prussia provides an early and important example. Already by the 1820s, the state had assumed responsibility for establishing, staffing, and maintaining secondary and primary schools. Some private establishments existed, mainly in cities, but these rapidly became rare. Nonetheless, all institutions were subject to the same state regulations and oversight. Until the 1870s, however, Protestant pastors and Catholic priests generally served as primary school inspectors, which provided the established churches a valued voice in school affairs and a crucial level of supervision of religious instruction in the confessionally-organized primary schools. In Britain, by contrast, the state was much slower to develop a true public system. Apart from Ireland, where Catholic emancipation in 1829 necessitated the creation of a “national” (i. e., state funded) system in 1831, England and Scotland depended completely on private (“voluntary”) schools until the 1870s. The 1870 English Elementary Education Act created a system of public (“board”) schools in the quest to establish universal schooling. However, whereas the parallel Education Act for Scotland (1872) transferred the existing denominational (Kirk and Free Kirk) schools to regional school boards, in England the board schools only complemented, rather than replaced the existing networks of voluntary institutions. The French case is also illuminating. Whereas the state established a monopoly over secondary education already in 1808, only with the 1833 Guizot Law did it start to require municipalities to organize primary schools for boys. However, since the law did not require towns to run the schools themselves, in numerous localities these obligations were fulfilled by having religious organizations (usually members of teaching orders) provide the schools and their personnel. The 1850 Falloux Law fa-

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cilitated the opening of private secondary schools (or “collèges,” to distinguish them from the state “lycées”), while also granting the recognized faith communities the right to approve texts for religious instruction and participate in school inspections. Thus, on the Third Republic’s birth in September 1870, a considerable degree of primary and secondary schooling in France was in private, namely Catholic, hands. When Minister of Education Jules Ferry determined to make primary schooling universal, lay, and compulsory after 1879, thousands of new schools and teachers were required to accommodate a school population that exceeded five and half million students. The private (confessional) sector could satisfy some of this new demand, but most was assured by the state with the costs covered jointly by municipalities, departments, and the central government. Administratively, the state’s growing interest in educational affairs found expression in the creation of new ministerial departments, which frequently also had responsibility for ecclesiastical affairs. Thus, in the German states—including Austria—the Kultusministerium (literally the Ministry of Religious Affairs) was also in charge of public instruction. A similar arrangement existed in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden but also in Greece and Romania (e. g., the Ministry of Religious Confessions and Public Instruction). In France, the Ministry of Public Education was frequently coupled with the Ministry for Religious Affairs (cultes) between 1820 and 1870, whereas in the Netherlands, the education portfolio was overseen within the Ministry of the Interior. In 1802, Tsar Alexander I created a “Commissioner for Public Schools,” which by the 1820s had become a full-fledged Minister for Public Instruction. Nonetheless, the (Orthodox) Holy Synod retained important prerogatives vis-à-vis public education, especially after it began to develop its own, completely independent system of parish schools in the late 1830s. By contrast, Spain and Italy (after 1859) both lacked distinct departments for religious affairs; they also created ministries of public instruction that were formally independent of the local (Catholic) churches. Nevertheless, following the 1874 Restoration, the Spanish state reestablished a certain Catholic influence over public education, granting the church a say in teachers’ appointments and textbook selection. An 1878 law also allowed bishops (and their representatives) to inspect schools. In short, by the nineteenth century’s final decades most European states had effectively declared education to be a state concern, even if they also acknowledged the faith communities’ (subordinate) interests in educational affairs. While this situation created a potential for tension, which duly emerged from the 1860s on, outright conflict on educational matters was, in fact, rare. When it occurred, it also tended to focus on specific issues rather than questioning the general relationship between religion and schooling or even religious instruction’s presence in school curricula. Arguably, the Roman Catholic community had the most difficult time adjusting to new developments in public education. In large part, its opposition reflected a fundamental position that parents and the church had primary responsibility for schooling, not the state. But its defensive posture also stemmed from a desire to protect Catholic youth from “non-belief,” whether in the form of other faith traditions, freethought, or

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atheism. In short, the Catholic Church wanted Catholic children only to attend Catholic schools. It thus resisted efforts to integrate Protestants and Catholics into the same school, as in Ireland after 1831 (rather successfully) and in Baden after 1865 (less successfully). After 1870, Dutch Catholics exploited divisions within the Reformed community to establish their own, state-supported school system, which became a major element of the emerging Dutch Catholic zuil (pillar). If Catholic leaders begrudgingly accepted the imposition of state curricula and supervision of Catholic schools in the German states, they insisted that only Catholics could oversee Catholic schools. Consequently, after Alsace became a German territory in 1871, the Catholic bishop of Strasbourg, Andreas Raess, preferred to close the Catholic petits séminaires in Strasbourg and Zillisheim between 1874 and 1880 rather than allow them to be inspected by school officials of Protestant background. Catholic distrust of the state and of liberal forces— not just in Ireland but also in France, Spain, and Italy—likewise led the church to oppose the introduction of compulsory schooling, especially for girls. In the latter case, the church felt that this was properly a matter for parents; if girls were to be schooled, they would be better served by Catholic establishments run by teaching congregations (see Curtis 2000). After 1850, anticlerical and secular sentiment increasingly targeted religion’s ties to schooling. Here too Catholic positions were particularly but not exclusively challenged. Across the Continent, liberals raised questions about the contemporary relevance of the church’s teachings and intellectual positions. When Pope Pius IX published the Syllabus of Errors in 1864, with its rejection of civil control of public schools, opposition to rationalism, and defense of scholasticism, many liberal leaders concluded that the Catholic Church should no longer play a role in schooling. During the 1870s, anticlerical republicans framed France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War as a failure of Catholic education. Since Catholic leaders had joined forces with the monarchists to thwart the republican cause after 1871, republicans understandably wanted to limit the church’s influence on schooling once they won control of the executive branch in 1879: not only was Catholic teaching of suspect value, but it aimed to undermine the Republic. The Ferry educational laws, approved between 1881 and 1882, thus instituted compulsory, free, and non-religious education in the public schools. However, the Catholic school system itself, which hewed to the principle of liberté d’enseignement (liberty of instruction) was left largely untouched until 1901, when, in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair, the expulsion of religious congregations forced the mass closure of Catholic establishments (see also Mély 2004). In Prussia, such liberals as the education minister, Adalbert Falk, allied with Minister-President (and Imperial Chancellor) Otto von Bismarck to limit ecclesiastical influence on schooling. It is often forgotten that one of the opening volleys in the Prussian Kulturkampf (culture war) was the 1872 School Supervision Act, drafted by Falk, which ended both the Catholic and the Protestant churches’ oversight of Prussia’s primary schools. Moreover, it barred clergy from teaching secular subjects. The following year, the Prussian state targeted the Catholic community specifically, decreeing in

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May 1873 that all Catholic candidates for the priesthood had to obtain a theology degree from a university faculty. The same year that the Prussian and German culture wars largely ended, 1879, Belgium experienced a “school war.” In June, the parliament’s liberal majority passed a new Education Act that required each municipality to maintain at least one “neutral” primary school, eliminated religious studies courses, and established a state monopoly over educational policy. Catholics regarded the act as a declaration of war and their reaction was swift. Bishops forbade the faithful from sending their children to public schools and Catholics who backed the new educational system faced excommunication. Mobilizing around the issue in the 1884 elections, Catholics won a convincing majority and spent the next ten years not just restoring the status quo ante but also instituting state recognition and financial support for the newly constructed system of Catholic schools. This clash over schooling galvanized Belgium’s Catholic community, fostering the rise of a powerful Catholic political movement that dominated Belgian politics into the First World War. Catholic communities were not alone in feeling threatened by state educational politics. In the Russian Empire, the tsarist governments viewed schools as prime agents of ethnic integration by which it meant, ideally, Russification and conversion into the Orthodox community. To that end, the government sought to impose Russian as a language of instruction, even in the faith communities’ own private schools. In the 1830s, the state began requiring those who wished to operate any school to have good Russian language competency. It also started requiring religious leaders of all “foreign” faiths— Catholic, Lutheran, Jewish, and Islam—to acquire advanced Russian skills. In 1832, the University of Dorpat made the study of Russian obligatory, even in the Faculty of Protestant Theology. After the 1861 uprising, Polish was completely banned from schools in the western regions of the empire, a measure that Poles understood as an effort to suppress the Polish people and their Catholic faith. In 1892, Russian authorities went further, placing all their parochial schools under the Ministry of Education, which effectively forced Catholic children to attend what were now “Orthodox” establishments. Russia’s Jewish and Muslim communities tenaciously resisted the new language rules, fearing their potential implications for the faithful. They similarly mistrusted state efforts to impose curriculum guidelines and supervision on their schools. In 1888, Muslim clerics were finally obliged to learn Russian, but they rejected the state (“Russian-Tatar”) schools, which even ordinary Muslims understood were designed to Christianize them (Werth 2014, 174 – 76). Throughout eastern and central Europe, in fact, questions of language, schooling, religion, and national identity became thoroughly intertwined, especially after 1848. As James E. Bjork (2008) observes in his study of Upper Silesia, this situation also made for some odd circumstances. The clerical hierarchy in Breslau defended Catholic schools and parochial rights regarding religious instruction, but it—and many parish priests —opposed instruction in Polish, the mother tongue of many of their parishioners. By contrast, in Bohemia, Galicia, and Styria, local clerics often played key roles in petition campaigns to have primary schools teach in Czech, Polish, or Slovenian, precisely

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because they believed that the mother tongue, the language of faith, and the language of the school should be one and the same. In the Balkans, the newly independent states of Greece, Romania, Serbia, and Bulgaria all made education a state responsibility, but the new state schools were then charged to promote a sense of Christian Orthodox national identity. For the region’s Muslim populations, the new educational situation was doubly troubling: not only was the line between civics and religious proselytization thin (and often ignored) in the new schools, but the new educational obligations caused scarce resources to be diverted from their own schools (Greble 2021, 47– 50). In religiously pluralistic regions of Europe, there were also many instances where educational politics pitted one faith community against another. In France, for example, Jewish leaders regularly complained that primary schools (at least after 1833) refused to offer Jewish religious instruction to their children and that, after 1850, rabbis were not invited to sit on the local school commissions, as were their Catholic and Protestant counterparts. Lutheran and Reformed leaders in Alsace-Lorraine likewise protested vigorously, although ultimately without effect, that the 1872 ordinance introducing compulsory schooling there favored Catholic interests at their expense, since girls only had to attend until the age of thirteen (Protestant tradition held that boys and girls should attend school until they were confirmed at age fourteen). And by century’s end, Anglican and Catholic clergy in England resented how Nonconformists had come to dominate the system of board schools and exploited them to promote a non-denominational version of Christianity. Lastly, it must be stressed, faith communities had reasons to support the modernization of schooling, even if this also required ceding some traditional prerogatives to state authorities. In the Scandinavian countries, the decentralized school system remained reliant on ecclesiastical structures until the beginning of the twentieth century. The Lutheran parishes formed the basis of school districts, Lutheran ministers sat on school boards, and church officials were largely responsible for school inspections. Towards the end of the century, however, church leaders acknowledged that it was in the interest of church and school to have the state, particularly at the local level, take greater control over schooling. In large part, this stance reflected the teaching profession’s professionalization, a phenomenon that affected much of northern and western Europe at the time. While the clergy were specialists in theology and religious education, they could not pretend to be up to date with the latest pedagogical trends in all the subjects that were taught, even in the primary schools. But developments in Scandinavia also reveal the churches’ willingness to see the state as a “natural” partner. John Boli, for instance, portrays Swedish schools’ assumption of responsibility for religious instruction of the youth and, after 1900, the greater autonomy of school boards, not as a “subjection of the church to civil authority” but rather as an educational partnership between ecclesiastical and civic institutions (1989, 145). The Protestant churches of Alsace-Lorraine provide a further example of how faith communities sought to work with, rather than against state agents to achieve key educational objectives. In the early 1900s, the Lutheran Church conducted an inquiry into the state of religious education in the territory’s primary and secondary schools. The

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findings were discouraging: at every level, the subject was being neglected, which, church leaders surmised, likely contributed to the youth’s diminished religious sentiments. Instead of attacking the school system, however, Lutheran leaders reached out to officials in the educational ministry as well as local teachers and pedagogical experts. Working together, they developed new, modern curricula for religious instruction. Starting in the 1906 – 7 school year, the territory’s secondary schools began using the new curriculum (which the Lutheran and Reformed churches had endorsed in 1905). The revised curriculum proved such a success that, in 1907, work began on a similar plan for the primary schools. In 1908, this text too was approved. However, hoping that Catholic and Jewish leaders might also wish to reform the sections of the curriculum dealing with “their” religious instruction programs, the implementation of the Protestant reforms was delayed until 1911. Tellingly, the Catholic and Jewish communities both refrained from pursuing reforms, preferring to keep their distance from what they dismissed as a “Protestant” school administration (Steinhoff 2008, 332 – 36).

Conclusion and Perspectives Without question, education contributed significantly to the construction and development of religious culture in nineteenth-century Europe. Each faith community depended on informal and formal educational activities to promote religious knowledge acquisition, transmission, and application. Education helped girls and boys but also women and men learn how to be members of a faith community, thereby also preparing its successful reproduction. In addition, education involved the formal training of community leaders and scholars—rabbis and imams, priests and pastors, theologians and ulama—individuals charged, to varying degrees, with the task of mastering a certain cultural and intellectual heritage and interpreting it in view of present-day needs. Moreover, the various faith communities’ educational practices and preferences played pivotal roles in their efforts to differentiate themselves from one another and, to varying degrees, from secular society. Religious education thus did not just seek to convey an awareness of religious difference through lessons on holy writings, “church” history, or ethics. It also embedded these differences in distinct, socialized practices: children of different faiths either attended distinct schools or were separated by faith community for the religious education courses. Accordingly, the formal programs of religious education, coupled with ongoing ties between faith communities and schools, contributed to perpetuating religion’s salience as a social and cultural marker in Europe. Of course, a critical development in this history was the expansion of formal schooling: the requirement that local communities establish and maintain public schools and the progressive introduction of compulsory primary education. In the process, schools themselves became major sites for religious instruction, where more and more children received greater amounts of formal religious education. The trend towards the professionalization of religious leaders, most clearly apparent with Protes-

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tant ministers and Catholic priests, also resulted in these men engaging in more rigorous periods of study. The reverse side of the coin, though, was that faith communities were no longer the only ones with claims on schools and schooling. While existing scholarship has noted the multiple ways in which faith communities had to cede ground to the state on this front, it has also tended to paint a picture using only black and white tones, eliminating the gradations of gray that are also critical, if less acknowledged or studied. There were indeed many voices in the century’s final decades that clamored for the elimination of religion and church from the school, following the socialist mantra that “religion is a private matter.” Nevertheless, it was only after 1917– 18 that other European states began to join France in questioning seriously religion’s place in public schooling.

References and Bibliography Adler, Eliyana R. 2010. In Her Hands: The Education of Jewish Girls in Tsarist Russia. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Anastassiadis, Anastassios. 2020. La réforme orthodoxe: Église, État et société en Grèce à l’époque de la confessionnalisation post-ottomane (1833 – 1940). Athens: École française d’Athènes. Bjork, James E. 2008. Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European Borderland. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Blaschke, Olaf. 2000. “Das 19. Jahrhundert: Ein Zweites Konfessionelles Zeitalter?” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 26: 38 – 75. Boli, John. 1989. New Citizens for a New Society: The Institutional Origins of Mass Schooling in Sweden. London: Pergamom Press. Boudon, Jacques-Olivier. 1995. “L’épiscopat français et le développement des hautes études ecclésiastiques au XIXe siècle.” Revue d’histoire de l’Église de France 81 (206): 219 – 35. Brockliss, Laurence, and Nicola Sheldon, eds. 2012. Mass Education and the Limits of State Building, c. 1870 – 1930. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Brown, Kenneth D. 1987. “Ministerial Recruitment and Training: An Aspect of the Crisis of Victorian Nonconformity.” Victorian Studies 30: 365 – 83. Bruford, Walter. 1975. The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation: Bildung from Humboldt to Thomas Mann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chadwick, Owen. 1975. The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clark, Christopher, and Wolfram Kaiser, eds. 2003. Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clayer, Nathalie, and Xavier Bougarel. 2013. Les Musulmans de l’Europe du Sud-Est. Paris: Kartalah. Curtis, Sarah. 2000. Educating the Faithful: Religion, Schooling, and Society in Nineteenth-Century France. De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Destivelle, Hyacinthe. 2010. Les sciences théologiques en Russie: Réforme et renouveau des académies ecclésiastiques au début du XXe siècle. Paris: Éditions du Cerf. Eklof, Ben. 1990. Russian Peasant Schools: Officialdom, Village Culture, and Popular Pedagogy, 1861 – 1914. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Freeze, Gregory L. 1983. The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Crisis, Reform, Counter-Reform. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gibson, Ralph. 1989. A Social History of French Catholicism, 1789 – 1914. London: Routledge.

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Greble, Emily. 2021. Muslims and the Making of Modern Europe. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Haus, Jeffrey. 2009. Challenges of Equality: Judaism, State, and Education in Nineteenth-Century France. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Kajon, Irene. 2016. “The Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau and the Rabbinical College of Padua: A Comparison.” Transversal 14: 45 – 53. Kaplan, Zvi Jonathan. 2009. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea? French Jewry and the Problem of Church and State. Providence, RI: Brown University Press. Kuhlemann, Frank-Michael. 2002. Bürgerlichkeit und Religion: Zur Sozial- und Mentalitätsgeschichte der evangelischen Pfarrer in Baden 1860 – 1914. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Laqueur, Thomas Walter. 1976. Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools & Working-Class Culture, 1780 – 1850. New Haven: Yale University Press. Leustean, Lucian N., ed. 2014. Orthodox Christianity and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Southeastern Europe. New York: Fordham University Press. Martin, Mary Clare. 2019. “Catechizing at Home, 1740 – 1870: Instruction, Communication and Denomination.” Studies in Church History 55: 256 – 73. McCartney, Caitriona. 2019. “British Sunday Schools: An Educational Arm of the Churches, 1900 – 39.” Studies in Church History 55: 561 – 76. Mély, Benoît. 2004. La question de la séparation des Églises et de l’école dans quelques pays européens: Allemagne, France, Grande-Bretagne, Italie, 1789 – 1914. Paris: Éditions Page deux. Ottewill, Roger. 2019. “Churches and Adult Education in the Edwardian Era: Learning from the Experiences of Hampshire Congregationalists.” Studies in Church History 55: 494 – 510. Purvis, Zachary. 2016. Theology and the University in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Seidel, Esther. 2005. “The Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau (1854 – 1938).” European Judaism 38: 133 – 44. Shea, C. Michael. 2017. “Ressourcement in the Age of Migne: The Jesuit Theologians of the Collegio Romano and the Shape of Modern Catholic Thought.” Nova et vetera 15: 579 – 613. Singer, Steven. 1987. “Jewish Education in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: A Study of the Early Victorian London Community.” The Jewish Quarterly Review 77 (2/3): 163 – 78. Somel, Selçuk Akşin. 2001. The Modernization of Public Education in the Ottoman Empire, 1839 – 1908. Islamization, Autocracy and Discipline. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Sorenson, Thomas C. 1992. “Pobedonostev’s Parish Schools: A Bastion Against Secularism.” In Religious and Secular Forces in Late Tsarist Russia, Essays in Honor of Donald W. Treadgold, edited by Charles E. Timberlake, 185 – 205. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Stampfer, Shaul. 2016. Families, Rabbis and Education: Essays on Traditional Jewish Society in Eastern Europe. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Steinhoff, Anthony J. 2008. The Gods of the City: Protestantism and Urban Culture in Strasbourg, 1870 – 1914. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Tzartzas, Georgis. 1988. Schule im gesellschaftlichen Umbruch: Die Entwicklung des modernen griechischen Bildungswesens (1833 – 1862). Münster: Waxmann. Voigt, Karl Heinz. 2007. Internationale Sonntagsschule und deutscher Kindergottesdienst. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Werth, Paul W. 2014. The Tsar’s Foreign Faiths: Toleration and the Fate of Religious Freedom in Imperial Russia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Westberg, Johannes. 2019. “Basic Schools in Each and Every Parish: The School Act of 1842 and the Rise of Mass Schooling in Sweden.” In Basic School Acts and the Rise of Mass Schooling, edited by Johannes Westberg, Lukas Boser, and Ingrid Brühwiler, 195 – 222. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Zalkin, Mordechai. 2006. Modernizing Jewish Education in Nineteenth-Century Eastern Europe: The School as the Shrine of the Jewish Enlightenment. Leiden and Boston: Brill.

Mark D. Chapman

9 Theology

The nineteenth century proved to be one of the most creative periods in the development of theology in Europe. It was a time that saw rapid changes in theological method that rivaled those of the Reformation; in part, these stemmed from the wider intellectual, social, and political culture that had been sweeping through Europe since the beginning of the Enlightenment at the end of the seventeenth century. Theology was shaped by the general scientific and intellectual developments that affected all aspects of learning, especially the changed approaches to the study of history and the primacy of empirical knowledge. While what were later termed “historicism” and “naturalism” were reshaping all the disciplines across the curriculum, theology proved to be more at risk than other branches of learning. Since it had traditionally been established on a theory of revelation of a supernatural knowledge that was based on the unquestioned authority of the churches and their texts, theology was especially threatened by a method that subjected all presuppositions to testing and critical scrutiny. As this chapter will show, theology became the focus of some of the most heated conflicts between critical-historical study and what came to be called a “dogmatic” method which relied on the old supernatural authorities. At the same time, theology was no mere intellectual pursuit, but a central concern of the Christian churches that still formed the political and ideological backbone of society in much of Europe. Moreover, because of the close connections between church and state during much of this period, theology remained intimately implicated in existing authority structures within church and state. Consequently, theology was bound to be affected by changes to the political structures and ecclesial cultures in which the churches were embedded. In particular, churches and states were interested in theology’s role in the education of clergy. Those who intended to serve in the (state) churches, whether Protestant or Orthodox Christian (at least in Russia), generally had to study theology at state institutions and follow curricula that were ultimately under the scrutiny of civil authorities. In Catholic countries, where theological education was largely the preserve of confessional seminaries controlled by the church, there nevertheless remained close ties between church and state. This arrangement also meant that, to varying degrees, the state determined who taught theology and, thus, which theological viewpoints found expression in theological establishments. In this fashion, the century’s massive political changes came to have a profound effect on the very nature and structures of theology. In the course of the eighteenth century it became increasingly clear that theology formed part of wider authority structures, both political and ideological (see Purvis 2016). While theologians might have engaged in thinking about God and God’s dealings with the world, they did so as functionaries of the state and its institutions, which were both academic and ecclesiastical. In particular, the articulation of theological ideas was based on a conception of the divine that also underpinned the authority and structures https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110609059-011

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of the state. The fate of theology was consequently intimately tied up with politics (Chapman 2014). Before the massive changes at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, political authority across much of Europe was usually concentrated in a prince or ruling elite. Although their dominions ranged from large and relatively centralized nations such as France and Britain to tiny duchies in the German lands, these states offered only very limited scope for religious diversity, even in countries with more accountable systems of government, as in the United Kingdom. With rare exceptions, only one church was officially permitted. In those jurisdictions that allowed for a degree of pluralism, such as England, where there were large numbers of Nonconformists who did not submit to the established Church of England, Dissenters were nevertheless barred from higher education and holding public office. While they were allowed to establish “Dissenting academies” in which theology was taught, these functioned principally as institutions that only educated ministers. Across Europe, state churches and their theologies, both Protestant and Catholic, were protected and privileged, and in general served the political order (even in England, other forms of Protestantism were tolerated only to the extent that they did not threaten political authorities). This meant that the challenges to the traditional systems of theology that began to emerge in the late eighteenth century were often seen as threats to the established order. A good example comes from Hamburg, where the well-known author Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694 – 1768) claimed that Jesus was a mortal prophet rather than the Son of God. Fragments of his writings were published by the philosopher and playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1721 – 81), which led to a major conflict with Johan Melchior Goeze (1717– 86), who presided over the Lutheran church of Hamburg. Defending the traditional orders of society and the unity of confession, he stood against rationalism and any challenge to the established orthodoxy (Kopitzsch 1990). The political structures favored the state churches and often closely controlled the churches and educational institutions. For instance, from the Reformation onwards, Lutheran rulers in the German lands exercised the function of summus episcopus, which meant that local secular rulers assumed many of the powers that had been hitherto wielded by Catholic bishops. Hence, rulers could exercise control not simply over the churches but also over the institutions of higher education, which had hitherto usually been under the church’s control. This situation persisted until the Protestant churches’ disestablishment following Germany’s defeat in the First World War (Hope 1995). Similarly, in England bishops were appointed by the ministers of the Crown and were often chosen for reasons of political loyalty rather than pastoral talent or theological acumen. Furthermore, well into the nineteenth century England had only two universities, Oxford and Cambridge, which were restricted to members of the established Church of England until 1871, and where significant patronage remained with the Crown and its ministers. In Roman Catholic areas of Europe, too, heads of state routinely played a major role in episcopal appointments, even if the latter remained subject to papal confirmation. Under such a political system, which was almost universal across Europe before the French Revolution, theology was even less able than

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other disciplines to develop in ways that were free from state control. Given the close connections between the political, ecclesiastical, and academic worlds, it is thus hardly surprising that the political transformations unleashed by the French Revolution provoked major change in the universities, the churches, and their theologies.

Revolutionary Change It was against the background of the French Revolution that theology underwent profound change throughout Europe as the nineteenth century began, for this political maelstrom had notable and rapid effects on all forms of cultural life, especially in education and the church. Universities were regarded as institutions whose primary function was the education of the administrators and functionaries of the state, which meant they were often in the first wave of reforms. Clergy too were caught up in this process since they too served as state functionaries in so far as they promoted the well-being and harmony of the social unit through its ideological structures. Moreover, the Revolution prompted the widespread secularization of land, the closure of religious institutions and monastic houses as well as the deprivation of the landholdings of the church, all of which profoundly altered the ecclesial and academic context in which theology was previously embedded. In the wake of the French Revolution and the revolutionary wars a wholesale transformation of higher education occurred across most of continental Europe. Along with these sweeping reforms of the university system, there was also a major reorganization of the structures and authority of the churches. This combination meant that theology was affected more than any other academic discipline. This socalled “Age of Revolution” (Hobsbawm 1962) led to the closure of many ancient universities, including the University of Paris, which had been one of the greatest centers of (Catholic) theology, in 1793. While a University of France was established by Napoleon in 1806, which included a faculty of theology at Paris, the new institution was quite different from the older university (Tuilier 1997). Sometimes universities went through several changes in quick succession during the revolutionary and restorationist periods at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In Flanders, for instance, the University of Leuven/Louvain, established in 1425, had become one of the great centers of Catholic learning by the eighteenth century. Under Habsburg rule, it attracted scholars from across Europe, but France’s conquest of the Austrian Netherlands in 1797 led to its closure. In 1817, following the defeat of Napoleon, the University of Leuven/Louvain was reopened as a state university under the authority of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. When Belgium declared its independence in 1830, the state university was closed. However, in 1835 the Catholic University that the Belgian bishops had established at Mechelen was transferred to Leuven and renamed the “Catholic University of Leuven” (Denis 1958). Once more, the university that had established itself by 1835 was a completely different institution from that of 1797.

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In Germany, too, French victories led to the closure of a number of institutions, most notably the Prussian University of Halle in 1806. Only after Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815 could sustained attention to the universities be given, albeit in a new geopolitical context. The political map of Europe after 1815 was very different from that of 1789, especially with respect to the German lands: hundreds of rulers, including all the former Catholic prince-bishops, were absorbed into larger political units (Rohls 1997, 459 – 593). In addition, the post-1815 German states founded new academic institutions and promoted curricular reforms so that the universities could function more effectively as the main sites of training for administrators and functionaries of a modern state. This meant that the German university system, which since the Reformation had dominated the shape and direction of Protestant theology, was rapidly transformed (Howard 2006). In the Rhineland, for instance, the former territories of the elector archbishop of Cologne were secularized and transferred to Prussia following the Congress of Vienna. As part of the settlement, in 1818 King Frederick William III of Prussia established a new university at Bonn with two theological faculties, one Roman Catholic and one Protestant (previously at Duisburg), principally to prepare clergy in Prussia’s new western dominions. While the churches had a degree of influence over the examination system and theology faculty appointments at Bonn (and elsewhere), the final authority rested in the so-called Kultusministerium (literally “ministry of religion”) that regulated all aspects of religion along with the universities and medicine. As the century progressed, many Prussian ministers, especially the highly influential Friedrich Althoff who led the ministry’s university affairs division from 1882 to 1907, were often in conflict with theologians who appeared to challenge the traditional teachings of the church and, by implication, the stability of the wider society. The intimate connections among church, state, and universities were especially evident in the frequent disputes over biblical and credal interpretation. Similarly, in other parts of Germany, universities were established or reestablished to accommodate the changed political realities. Württemberg, which acquired wide swaths of Catholic territory between 1800 and 1815, now also needed to make arrangements for its Catholic subjects. Initially a Catholic university was established at Ellwangen in 1812, the seat of the new diocese, but when the latter was moved to Rottenburg, the university was dissolved. In its place, a Catholic faculty of theology was established at the state university at Tübingen in 1817, alongside the existing Protestant faculty. Both faculties soon became important centers of theological study, especially in the application of critical-historical methods to theological research.

Enlightenment and Reform Changes in political regimes across Europe were closely related to broader religious, social, and scientific developments emerging from the Enlightenment, which took on a distinctive shape in different nations and territories. Given its traditional reliance on supernatural authorities and revelation, theology was often in the forefront of dis-

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cussions about the use of scientific methods during what was called the “Age of Criticism” (cf. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason), especially when these were applied to the documents and teachings of the Christian faith, which for Protestants meant above all the Bible. While in some places the Enlightenment was perceived as highly anticlerical and anti-supernatural (as in France), in others it was contained within the authority structures of the time (as in much of Germany and in Britain) (Porter and Teich 1981). In Prussia, for instance, the critical principles of the Enlightenment flourished during the reign of King Frederick the Great (1740 – 86). The principle of criticism, it seemed, could be allied with the despotism of the Prussian state; this meant that there was the clear and practical possibility of a degree of union between Enlightenment and religion. Consequently, unlike in France, the Enlightenment was not necessarily seen as being anti-religious (see Rendtorff 1982). In Hanoverian Göttingen, for instance, the theologian and philosopher Ludwig Timotheus von Spittler (1752 – 1810) wrote: “On the whole we have achieved an extraordinary amount through this revolution of the last thirty years, and it will probably one day be characterized as one of the most radiant periods of the history of the Lutheran church” (cited in Sparn 1985, 18). This critical method, however, could easily appear threatening to the state. In Prussia, for example, Friedrich Wilhelm II (r. 1786 – 97) named the conservative Protestant cleric Johann Christoph von Wöllner (1732 – 1800) his minister of justice and head of the Office of Worship. In 1788, Wöllner issued an edict that famously outlawed freedom of expression and forbade Protestant ministers from teaching anything other than their churches’ official teachings. Educational institutions, including universities, were increasingly put under surveillance and publications were subject to censorship. It was in this context that Kant wrote his polemic, Der Streit der Fakultäten (The Conflict of the Faculties, 1798), which promoted liberty of thought for all faculties against what he regarded as the outmoded supernatural authoritarianism of theology. According to Kant, education was principally about learning how to think freely and without compulsion. This was obviously a challenge to theology, a discipline traditionally based on revelation and the submission of the intellect to ecclesiastical authority. Matters changed very rapidly with the coming of Napoleon. In the eighteenth century, Prussia’s most important university at Halle had become a great center of Enlightenment but also of Pietism. There was a focus on the study of original languages as well as the new disciplines of philology, history, and anthropology, which were shaped by an increasing sense of mission to the non-European world that helped expand horizons. As Prussia faced threats from the French, it placed new pressure on its universities to provide an education that would help the state respond to the crisis. It was in this context that Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768 – 1834), the most important figure in nineteenth-century Protestant theology, was to make his name. He was appointed by King Frederick William III to a theological professorship at Halle in 1804. In many ways Schleiermacher exemplified the blend of Pietism and Enlightenment that he had imbibed through his earlier education. His charge, as a Reformed theologian, was to help the competing Protestant confessions of Prussia (Lutheran, the

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confession of the majority, and Reformed, the confession of the Royal Family) to move closer together. In October 1806, Napoleon’s crushing defeat of the Prussian forces at Jena–Auerstedt, followed by the humiliating peace Treaty of Tilsit of 1807, compelled Prussia to make substantial territorial concessions to France, including Halle. Shortly afterwards, the University of Halle was closed, prompting Schleiermacher’s move to Berlin. There, as one of the leading intellectuals of the time, he became instrumental in the founding of a new university in the Prussian capital that would replace Halle. Moreover, with the University of Berlin, Prussian officials, notably Baron von Stein (1757– 1831) and the great linguist and diplomat, Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767– 1831), had a rare opportunity to create a new kind of university, one liberated from the old medieval hierarchy of faculties and dedicated to the pursuit of science (Wissenschaft) (Markschies 2021, 1 – 15). While the new university was “modernized” so that it could meet the demands of a modern state, Schleiermacher’s engagement ensured that theology still had an important place there. Nonetheless, there were particular problems facing theology’s inclusion in this first university based on the “idea of science.” Namely, a discipline that relied on supernatural authorities and revelation and was thus ostensibly exempt from criticism could easily appear an anachronism in the modern university. Indeed, theology, which had been considered the highest of the faculties and the queen of the sciences, was under threat of being dethroned and replaced by the philosophical faculty, which embraced nearly all other aspects of learning. In such an environment, theology had to earn its place. Some, including the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762 – 1814), felt that there was little room for traditional theology. In his plan for the university’s curriculum he wrote: “A school for the use of Reason could not concern itself with theology if the latter were still to insist that there is a God who wills something without reason, that no one understands the content of that will, but God must communicate it to him directly by a special ambassador, that such communication has taken place and can be found in certain obscurely written holy books, which one must understand correctly in order to achieve salvation” (cited in Anrich 1956, 154 – 55). Under such a model, theology would have to give up its invulnerable status and subject itself to the same principles as any other study, such that its very raison d’être could be lost. To survive, it would have to be “historicized” and brought into contact with all the other phenomena of human history. This would mean, however, that religion itself would be in danger of losing its distinct identity. Theology, by implication, might be reduced simply to a few specialist skills required for ministry rather than remaining a serious branch of scientific enquiry. Schleiermacher, who was given responsibility for setting the direction of the new university’s Faculty of Theology, was quite aware of these problems. In Gelegentliche Gedanken über Universitäten in deutschem Sinn (Occasional Thoughts on Universities in the German Sense, 1808), he contrasted the development of specialist schools for professional education (such as those that had emerged under French influence) with the ideals of a modern university, where one pursued knowledge for the sake of knowledge (Nowak 2001, 181; Markschies 2021, 40 – 58).

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Indeed, against the background of modernization and Enlightenment, theology’s very survival was threatened. Schleiermacher’s solution to the existence of theology in the modern university was ingenious: he reconceived the discipline not as the science of sacred learning but rather as a set of related academic studies that were all ultimately geared towards equipping minsters to undertake a particular set of practices. This transformed the earlier understanding of theology as the exposition of a set of divinely revealed propositions into a body of scientific knowledge required for a set of social practices. In this sense, theology was treated like medicine or law that furnished a body of knowledge and methods to be put into practice: “The so-called positive faculties [law, medicine and theology],” Schleiermacher wrote, “each arose from the need to establish an indispensable practice securely on theory and the tradition of universities” (cited in Pannenberg 1976, 249). The logic was straightforward: as the state church was entrusted with the pastoral care of the people, so the state universities were charged with imparting the knowledge and perspectives that ministers needed to undertake this indispensable practice. At the same time, the content of theological knowledge itself was redefined. Rather than being a set of propositions based on revelation, it was reshaped into a form of systematic reflection on the phenomenon of religion that was ultimately based on the human experience of what Schleiermacher called the “feeling of absolute dependence” (Gefühl schlechthinniger Abhängigkeit). Theology thus became the study of the human phenomenon of religion and its scriptures and institutions rather than the study of God. It was a way to describe and analyze feeling, which he had earlier described as the “sense and taste for the infinite” (Sinn und Geschmack für das Unendliche). This meant that theology was closely related both to the methods that had emerged in the empirical sciences as well as to the pietist schools in which Schleiermacher was educated. Schleiermacher and his first colleagues at Berlin’s Theology Faculty—the biblical scholar Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette (1780 – 1849); Phillipp Marheinecke (1780 – 1846), a historian of dogma; and the church historian August Neander (1789 – 1850)—also sought to construct a curriculum that would bridge the divide between the church and academic learning, that is, between dogma and science. Schleiermacher’s famous Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums (Brief Outline of the Study of Theology, 1811/1830) describes the shape of this curriculum, which began with piety, that is, religious experience, and the clarification of theological terms (the “essence” of religion), before moving into the study of Scriptural exegesis, the history of dogma and the church, and finally the preparation for such ministerial tasks as preaching and pastoral care. Importantly, each of these aspects was to be studied using the same methods employed for any other literary or historical phenomenon: the different disciplines of theology were thereby thoroughly historicized. Consequently, even though theology was ultimately defined in relation to the practice of ministry—educating what Schleiermacher called “princes of the church”—the content of its various subdisciplines was to be studied according to scientific principles. Thus, the Bible was to be treated like any other book. Church history became simply the study of a particular institution

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through time and was to be approached like any other history. Indeed, in contrast to earlier ways of studying church history, the church was no longer to be protected from the assault of the scholar; the scientific method had to prevail. For Schleiermacher, all this meant that theologians would also have to teach courses in the philosophical faculty—the faculty based on free enquiry—and pursue their studies with a critical and open spirit. This reworking of the nature of theology implied too that it would cease to be something distinct and immune from the encroachments of the rest of learning: it had no special “dogmatic” methods and could not defend itself by appealing to miracles or revelation, for ultimately it was based on human experience. At the same time, theology was also studied in the new Prussian University of Berlin to help the institutional church perform its key tasks in the wider society. That is, while much of theology was principally an academic pursuit, it was also related to what Schleiermacher called “practical theology,” the set of skills required for leadership in the church. As he noted in the Brief Outline, “This was the preserve of those who were able to unite an interest in the church with a scientific spirit” (§258). Importantly, practical theology developed to embrace the techniques of pastoral ministry as well as homiletics, liturgy, and the study of church leadership. Later in the century journals were also founded to discuss practical theology and pastoral ministry, such as the Zeitschrift für praktische Theologie in 1878. Schleiermacher himself remained a highly active churchman. He served as Reformed minister at the Dreifaltigkeitskirche in Berlin, where he preached many hundreds of sermons. His roles as theologian and churchman were inseparable in a society in which religious ideas and practices were at the very heart of life. Theology, like the church it served, remained at the center of public life.

Restoration, Reaction, and Secularization Schleiermacher’s reform of the theology curriculum at Berlin proved deeply influential across the universities of the German-speaking world and beyond: while he left no school, his methods and his views on the curriculum were in evidence across the Protestant world. They even shaped the pursuit of theology in some parts of Catholic Europe. At the University of Tübingen, Catholic theology professors were often in dialogue with their Protestant colleagues, at least during the 1820s and 1830s. The lectures of the Catholic theologian Johann Adam Möhler, professor from 1828, even attracted many Protestants. He was drawn into debate with one of his Protestant counterparts, the New Testament scholar Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792 – 1860), one of the most important historians of the early church and a pioneer of the historical method, especially in the study of the New Testament. While more indebted to Hegel than Schleiermacher, in his mature work Baur nevertheless promoted a strongly critical and historical approach to the Scriptures (Bauspiess et al. 2017). Naturally, however, the efforts to introduce a critical and historicized approach to theology met with significant criticism: many university theologians sought some sort

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of return to the old world (a so-called “repristination”) as well as the reestablishment of the cultural hegemony based on the invulnerable world of unquestionable absolutes. Such theological movements accompanied a form of political restorationism to which such Christian theocratic thinkers as the Savoyard diplomat Joseph de Maistre (1753 – 1821) made important contributions. But with Napoleon’s defeat, the need for modernization also seemed less pressing, which meant that other voices with very different conceptions of theological method could gain influence in the theological faculties. In the Roman Catholic world, for example, the most influential theological movement, especially after 1850, was neo-scholasticism, which became the official system for seminary education and opposed the sort of historicization of thought that led to forms of modernism. In England, where the discipline of theology was far less developed than in most of continental Europe, many of the most prominent theological writers resisted the rise of critical thinking in theology. In particular, the High Church revival of the 1830s in the University of Oxford known as Tractarianism aimed to recast theology as a contemporary application of the early church’s teachings. Thus, rather than apply the criticalhistorical method, Tractarians promoted an uncritical view of the church fathers’ authority in order to establish the authority of their own Church of England against the spirit of reason and liberal modernization. Its leaders, including John Henry Newman (1801 – 90), John Keble (1792 – 1866), and Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800 – 82), thus sought to restore the vision of the early church in order to resist political change and promote a semi-theocratic and anti-democratic vision of society organized under the Crown (Skinner 2004). That said, Tractarians were not fully free of the spirit of the times since they mined history for truths and approached it quite differently from earlier scholars. In material culture, such theological principles were to reorientate architecture towards an imagined version of the Middle Ages, leading to a vast rebuilding project in the Gothic style dominated by such figures as Gilbert Scott in Britain and Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc in France (see also Chapter 11 in this volume). Similar historicized theological principles also affected the churches’ social teaching, with new religious communities and institutions being established across the Continent to serve the poor. These again were often modeled on pre-modern ideals of social welfare. In the German Protestant churches, this led to the beginnings of diaconal work under Theodor Fliedner (1800 – 64) in Kaiserswerth, Johann Hinrich Wichern (1808 – 81) in Hamburg, and Wilhelm Löhe (1808 – 72) in Neuendettelsau. In time, the conservative ideal of the Christian nation expressing itself in service of the poor offered a counterweight to the vision of organized labor and later socialism. Such theologies of social action were often the product of the high church revivals that returned to idealized versions of Luther and the early Reformation, which explains too why their initiatives frequently reinforced, rather than lessened, a sense of (Protestant) denominational difference. Later in the century, many theologians from a wider range of backgrounds began to engage with social issues to address the problems of industrialization, which led to the establishment of the Evangelisch-Sozialer Kongress in Germany in 1890 and the

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Christian Social Union in England in 1889. Both groups actively promoted social research. As the century wore on, the conflict between conservatives and liberals persisted. In place of what they derided as the conservatives’ dogmatic method, liberals, most notably the Heidelberg theologian Ernst Troeltsch (1865 – 1923), one of the leading theological voices of the early twentieth century, now advocated historical approaches. This in turn prompted several biblical scholars, particularly associated with the University of Göttingen, to approach theology from the point of view of the history of religion. Indeed, where most theologians had hitherto approached Christianity as sui generis, such biblical scholars as Johannes Weiss (1863 – 1914), Hermann Gunkel (1862 – 1932), and Wilhelm Bousset (1865 – 1920) began to connect the Christian and Jewish traditions with the wider history of religion and literature, forming the so-called “history of religion school.” Other scholars, including Rudolf Otto (1869 – 1937) and Friedrich Max Müller (1823 – 1900, who spent most of his career in Britain), also began to work on comparative religion, but tellingly their positions were normally in the philosophical and not in the theological faculties. With greater freedom being granted to Jews in many parts of Europe through the nineteenth century, Jewish religious thought underwent a transformation with increased assimilation and contact with thinkers from beyond the Jewish world. Abraham Geiger, for example, established the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentum in Berlin in 1872 which developed a “science of Judaism.” Even though this establishment was outside the official university system, it nevertheless helped consolidate liberal forms of Judaism. In particular, it influenced Claude Montefiore (1858 – 1938) who, after university studies at Oxford (after it had been opened to Jews), helped establish the academic study of Judaism in England at the end of the century (Kessler 2001). Despite these changes, Christian theology continued to dominate public discourse during the nineteenth century’s final decades. To understand theology in the nineteenth century, it is important to note that both the historical-critical and the “dogmatic” methods were contained within the state universities and churches; very few theologians operated in a freethinking world outside the universities. While some, many of them educated in Protestant theological faculties, such as David Friedrich Strauss (1808 – 74), who studied at Tübingen, or Bruno Bauer (1809 – 82), at Berlin, became well known as pioneering religious thinkers, their influence at the time was actually modest. This was equally true of the more conservative Danish thinker, Søren Kierkegaard (1813 – 55). Later in the century, anti-religious figures such as Ernest Renan (1823 – 92) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) gained a wider following among secularists, but also among such lapsed theologians as Franz Overbeck (1837– 1905) in Basel, whose radical views notably influenced such figures as Karl Barth (1886 – 1968) after the First World War. Nevertheless, most debates took place within or between the theology faculties rather than between theologians and groups of secularists. Still, religious controversies often played out on a public stage (Winnebeck 2016). In Britain this was exemplified by the controversies surrounding both William Robertson Smith (1846 – 94) at the University of Aberdeen, who was

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criticized for applying scientific study of religion to the Bible, and the Scottish anthropologist James Frazer (1854 – 1941), who applied universal categories to the study of religion. Both contributed to the Encyclopedia Britannica. The profoundly public dimension of theology illustrates religion’s continued importance in the nineteenth century: it was very far from secularized (McLeod and Ustorf 2003). There has been a significant historical debate, particularly in Germany, over whether the nineteenth century can be regarded as a “second confessional age” (Blaschke 2000), which challenges the dominant role of secularization as a heuristic tool. It would seem, however, to be more reasonable to see the efforts at “confessionalization” (such as the Oxford Movement or the neo-Lutheran movements of Germany) as being themselves by-products of modernity: they may have been reactions to change, but they adopted approaches to the past that would have been impossible without a sense of the historicization of all thought. The very production of critical editions of the writings of the church fathers, for example, which occupied many conservative scholars in England as a result of the Oxford Movement, was ultimately a fruit of modernization. Rather than seeing the nineteenth century as a period of secularization, it seems more appropriate to see it as a period of religion’s transformation into a phenomenon that was compatible with modernity and which most people still regarded as fundamental to society’s well-being.

Theology as Cultural Debate Theology frequently became the locus for tensions between different social and ideological visions that themselves drew on distinct understandings of history. Again illuminating is the example of Prussia, where disputes between reformers and restorationists often played out in the universities. Having grown in size and influence after 1815, Prussia quickly moved in a conservative direction, a development that was resisted by some reform-minded academics, including numerous theologians. At the celebration of the three-hundredth anniversary of the Reformation in 1817 that was held at the Wartburg Castle, for instance, a group of nationalist students called for further reform that threatened the stability of the newly established German Confederation. Two years later, the murder of the anti-liberal dramatist August von Kotzebue, by Karl Ludwig Sand, a radical theological student, provided Austrian and Prussian authorities an excuse to crack down on dissent and university radicalism throughout the Confederation. At the University of Berlin, De Wette appeared sympathetic to reform, which led to his dismissal in 1818 (Rogerson 1992). Similarly, Schleiermacher’s brother-in-law, the poet Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769 – 1860), was dismissed from Bonn. Schleiermacher himself was under threat of transfer to Königsberg on the margins of the country. De Wette’s replacement as Old Testament Professor, Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg (1802 – 69), was much more in tune with the spirit of reaction and played an important part in providing a theological defense of the restorationist political order. Adopting an

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extreme theological and political conservatism, he became editor in 1830 of the most important journal of restoration theology, the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung. Hengstenberg maintained a strong doctrine of verbal inspiration that attacked both rationalism and Pietism. Asserting the idea that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, a theory that had already been challenged by most biblical scholars of the time, he wrote: “Such a work as the Pentateuch can be maintained as genuine, only as long as it is expounded as a sacred book. An inability to penetrate its depths— the exposition of it as a profane author—the diluting of its meaning, contain (in the germ) the denial of its genuineness” (cited in Rogerson 1984, 87). Hengstenberg’s counterpart in Oxford, Edward Pusey, Regius Professor of Hebrew, was equally vociferous in his conservative interpretations of Scripture and resistance to political and theological liberalism. The conflict between reform and restoration (or reaction) was often accompanied by theological controversy, especially over the approach to theological texts and how far they were to be treated as immune from literary and historical criticism. Even those who were initially sympathetic to the critical method began to challenge the supremacy of academic forms of reason in approaching theological subjects. For instance, Schleiermacher’s Berlin colleague, the church historian Neander, who was also deeply influenced by Pietism and who claimed “Pectus est, quod facit theologum” (the heart makes the theologian), moved away from critical-historical study of the church towards a discussion of biographies centered on conversion and testimony (in a manner similar to that of the British Evangelicals). For Neander, theology may have been a description of piety, as it was for Schleiermacher, but he sheared off its critical edge. The Restoration era was also accompanied by revivals, the most important of which was the Awakening (Erweckung) that deeply influenced Neander’s pupil, Friedrich August Gottreu Tholuck, who became its leading theologian. Although his appointment was resisted by Schleiermacher, he became a professor in Berlin in 1823 and then in Halle in 1826. His theology focused on sin and personal redemption rather than social and political change.

Later Debates and Discussions As the century progressed, debates over the theological application of historical-critical methods continued to animate theologians. A number of scholars pursued a rigorous historical and critical approach to the discipline, while others resisted such developments. Still others saw themselves as mediating between the two positions. A good illustration is offered by Albrecht Ritschl, the most influential Protestant theologian around the period of German unification in the 1860s and 1870s (Zachhuber 2013). Influenced by Baur and the Protestant Tübingen School, Ritschl sought to ensure that theology was not dependent on scholastic metaphysics but required what he termed a “value judgment” of faith. This faith was that of the Christian community which provided the fundamental datum of theology: again, there was an experiential core to the-

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ology. In accepting faith though personal judgment, however, theology came to rely on a special world of the spirit that existed in parallel to the world of the natural sciences, from which it was immune. While this gave theology a degree of independence and certainty, Ritschl observed, it also made it difficult to connect it to the wider historical world. As professor at Göttingen from 1864, Ritschl attracted a number of students, some of whom, including Wilhelm Herrmann (1846 – 1922), followed in a similar direction, while others engaged in a critique of his method and sought to integrate theology with the wider world of learning, often adopting a thoroughgoing historical method. This was particularly true of the “history of religion school,” whose most prominent theological leader was Ernst Troeltsch. Professor at Heidelberg from 1894, he dominated theological debate and discussion at the turn of the twentieth century and advocated an integrated approach to all aspects of learning and life in what he called a cultural synthesis. This form of theology was sometimes referred to as Kulturprotestantismus or “cultural Protestantism” (Hübinger 1994; Chapman 2001). Accordingly, theology functioned to provide a set of higher values for the wider society but was not itself immune from historical and critical investigation. A thoroughgoing application of the historical method in all areas of theology including the study of the Christian tradition challenged his opponents’ reliance on the dogmatic method, which still held sway among many theologians across the German Empire. Both Troeltsch and Herrmann were deeply influential on the next generations of scholars, including Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann (1884 – 1976), and Paul Tillich (1886 – 1965). At century’s end, German theology had become by far the most influential internationally. Students from the United States as well as England and Scotland flocked to study in Germany, frequently taking back their ideas and reshaping their own theological approaches (Aubert and Purvis 2021). Germany’s international impact is well demonstrated by developments at the theology faculties at Oxford and Cambridge. As the universities modified their curricula and removed some of the compulsory theological requirements, especially after the university reforms of the 1850s, the faculties were forced to organize an undergraduate curriculum in the 1870s. At Oxford this initially came under the influence of the successors to the Tractarians as well as Pusey himself and was dominated by polemics against the critical method. By the end of the century, however, the theological faculty was being reshaped by scholars such as William Sanday (1843 – 1920), who approached theology using the critical-historical methods that they had imported from Germany, including the introduction of the research seminar (Thompson 2008; Inman 2014). As in Germany, where there had been several high-profile disputes over allegiance to the creeds, so too in Britain did public controversies arise between theologians and church leaders over the limits of biblical interpretation and the use of scientific methods in the study of sacred things. A particularly notable case was the outcry following the publication of Essays and Reviews in 1860, in which several Oxford academics had sought to apply the historical method to biblical studies (Ellis 1980). Again, discussions between theologians and church leaders frequently played out at a public and political level. Even though the century saw the rise of the natural sci-

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ences and a vast expansion of the humanities, theology, along with the churches it served, remained central to academic and cultural discourse. Across much of Europe, theology remained a central subject in the universities and one of the largest faculties, despite the rise of the newer subjects of study. As late as 1900, 10 percent of Germany’s professors remained theologians; other faculties may have expanded but theology remained central. Some theologians were extremely prominent in public life. The great patristics scholar at the University of Berlin, Adolf von Harnack (1851 – 1930), for instance, became one of the most trusted advisers to Emperor Wilhelm II as well as head of the Prussian State Library and the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft, the forerunner of the Max Planck Institute (Markschies 2021, 84 – 267). Others, including Troeltsch, became public intellectuals who attracted large audiences to their lectures and took part in political life. At most German universities, such liberal professors as Troeltsch and Harnack were complemented by so-called “positive” or conservative theologians, including Reinhold Seeberg (1859 – 1935) at Berlin, whose students included Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906 – 45). Catholic Europe generally fared somewhat differently. The revolutionary movements of 1848 and the nationalist campaigns that followed tended to associate the Catholic Church with the ancien régime. The papacy itself came under threat, which led to a clamping down on dissent that inevitably affected the development of theology. Then in 1864, Pope Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors denounced much of the thinking that had influenced the course of theology and society in the Protestant world. It also implied a return to a rigid form of propositional scholasticism that allowed little space for critical thought and opposed revelation to history. While some scholars offered a degree of resistance to this form of theology, there was little success. Pope Pius X’s condemnation of “modernism” in the encyclical Pascendi Dominici gregis (1907) silenced such figures as Alfred Loisy in France and the Irish Jesuit George Tyrrell in Britain (Jodock 2000; Lannoy 2020). An increasingly centralized control of theology from Rome led some governments to abolish (Catholic) theology altogether at state institutions. In 1885, notably, the French republican government closed its six faculties of Catholic theology, even though none of them had ever received canonical recognition. Thereafter, faculties of Catholic theology existed only at the Catholic universities founded in 1875, whose right to grant degrees was also contested by the French state (Neveu 1995). Thus, in much of Catholic Europe theology was associated with seminary rather than university education. Even the great Catholic universities such as Louvain became vigorously antimodernist in the years up to the First World War. Ironically, perhaps, the greater control of the Catholic theological faculties in Germany by the state allowed for a far greater liberty of thought. The nineteenth century also saw significant changes in the Orthodox Christian world, especially in Russia, which had become increasingly influenced by Western ideas. The changes to the universities under Nicholas I from 1828 to 1835, which forced many students to leave the country, meant that when they returned, they often brought with them many Western influences. This had a powerful effect on theological thinking in the academies, although it was derided by some as reminiscent of Western scholas-

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ticism (Berdyaev 1948, 156). While such academic and seminary theology remained firmly under the control of the church, there were other powerful developments in religious thinking across the wider society, which were shaped by the broader intellectual climate and often resisted Westernization. Prominent figures such as the lay Slavophile Alexsei Khomyakov (1804 – 60) were instrumental in trying to free religious thought from what they perceived as rationalism and developed the idea of sobornost or catholicity or togetherness. With the breakup of the Ottoman Empire from the midcentury, other Orthodox churches, such as those of Serbia and Greece, gradually began to build up their own theological traditions, reflected in their assertion of independence from Western rationalism and in their search for a sense of Orthodox unity. This was later to lead to a flowering of theological thought in the twentieth century under such figures as Nikolai Berdyaev (1874 – 1948) (Ladouceur 2019).

Conclusion The shifting political identity of the European continent and the rise of the nation-state during the nineteenth century make any pan-European approach to the history of theology complex and contested. Nevertheless, there are enough parallels and similarities among the trajectories of theology in different countries to permit the drawing of a number of conclusions. First, the subject matter and the content of the theological disciplines changed in response to the wider development of academia and the evolving nature of the state’s authority structures. At least among more reform-minded and liberal scholars, theology became a second-order reflection on religion and a set of historical studies of texts and traditions. Second, theological debates often expressed political and social presuppositions that were connected to more general approaches to reform and resistance to liberalizing and democratizing tendencies in society at large. Third, theology, like the churches it represented, remained at the center of public debate right up until the outbreak of the First World War. Far from being a secular age, the nineteenth century can be viewed as a hyper-religious age in which the nature of religion was increasingly contested and debated by theologians whose understanding of God and God’s world was deeply influenced by their perceptions of authority in the wider social and political realms.

References and Bibliography Anrich, Ernst, ed. 1956. Die Idee der deutschen Universität: Die fünf Grundschriften aus der Zeit ihrer Neubegründung durch klassischen Idealismus und romantischen Realismus. Darmstadt: Gentner. Aubert, Annette G., and Zachary Purvis, eds. 2021. Transatlantic Religion: Europe, America, and the Making of Modern Christianity. Leiden: Brill. Bauspiess, Martin, Christof Landmesser, and David Lincicum, eds. 2017. Ferdinand Christian Baur and the History of Early Christianity. Translated by Robert F. Brown and Peter C. Hodgson. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Berdyaev, Nicholas. 1948. The Russian Idea. New York: Macmillan. Blaschke, Olaf. 2000. “Das 19. Jahrhundert: Ein Zweites Konfessionelles Zeitalter.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 22: 38 – 75. Chapman, Mark D. 2001. Ernst Troeltsch and Liberal Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chapman, Mark D. 2014. Theology and Society in Three Cities: Berlin, Oxford and Chicago, 1800 – 1914. Cambridge: James Clarke. Denis, Valentin. 1958. Catholic University of Louvain, 1425 – 1958. Leuven: Catholic University of Louvain. Ellis, Ieuan. 1980. Seven Against Christ: A Study of “Essays and Reviews.” Leiden: Brill. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1962. The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789 – 1848. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Hope, Nicholas. 1995. German and Scandinavian Protestantism, 1700 – 1918. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Howard, Thomas Albert. 2006. Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hübinger, Gangolf. 1994. Kulturprotestantismus und Politik: Zum Verhältnis von Liberalismus und Protestantismus im wilhelminischen Deutschland. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Inman, Daniel. 2014. The Making of Modern English Theology: God and the Academy at Oxford, 1833 – 1945. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Jodock, Darrell, ed. 2000. Catholicism Contending with Modernity: Roman Catholic Modernism and Anti-Modernism in Historical Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kessler, Edward. 2001. “Claude Montefiore and Liberal Judaism.” European Judaism: A Journal for the New Europe 34: 17 – 32. Kopitzsch, Franklin. 1990. “Politische Orthodoxie: Johan Melchior Goeze.” In Profile des neuzeitlichen Protestantismus, edited by Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, vol. 1, 71 – 85. Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn. Ladouceur, Paul. 2019. Modern Orthodox Theology: Behold, I Make All Things New. London: T & T Clark. Lannoy, Annelies. 2020. Alfred Loisy and the Making of History of Religions: A Study of the Development of Comparative Religion in the Early 20th Century. Berlin: De Gruyter. Markschies, Christoph. 2021. Berolinensia: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Berliner Universität und ihrer Theologischen Fakultät. Berlin: De Gruyter. McLeod, Hugh, and Werner Ustorf, eds. 2003. The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750 – 2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Neveu, Bruno. 1995. “L’enseignement universitaire de la théologie catholique en France de 1875 à 1885.” Revue d’histoire de l’Église de France 206: 269 – 94. Nowak, Kurt. 2001. Schleiermacher. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Pannenberg, Wolfhart. 1976. Theology and the Philosophy of Science. London: Darton, Longman and Todd. Porter, Roy, and Mikuláš Teich. 1981. The Enlightenment in National Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Purvis, Zachary. 2016. Theology and the University in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reiss, Hans, ed. 1991. Kant’s Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rendtorff Trutz, ed. 1982. Glaube und Toleranz: Das theologische Erbe der Aufklärung. Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn. Rogerson, John. 1984. Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century. London: SPCK. Rogerson, John. 1992. W. M. L. de Wette, Founder of Modern Biblical Criticism: An Intellectual Biography. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Rohls, Jan. 1997. Protestantische Theologie der Neuzeit. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Skinner, Simon. 2004. Tractarians and the “Condition of England”: The Social and Political Thought of the Oxford Movement. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sparn, Walter. 1985. “Vernünftiges Christentum: Über die geschichtliche Aufgabe der theologischen Aufklärung im 18. Jahrhundert in Deutschland.” In Vierhaus 1985, 18 – 57. Thompson, David M. 2008. Cambridge Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Enquiry, Controversy and Truth. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.

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Tuilier, André. 1997. Histoire de l’Université de Paris et de la Sorbonne. 2 vols. Paris: Nouvelle Librairie de France. Vierhaus, Rudolf, ed. 1985. Wissenschaften im Zeitalter der Aufklärung im 18. Jahrhundert in Deutschland. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Winnebeck, Julia. 2016. Apostolikumsstreitigkeiten: Diskussionen um Liturgie, Lehre und Kirchenverfassung in der preußischen Landeskirche 1871 – 1914. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt. Zachhuber, Johannes. 2013. Theology as Science in Nineteenth-Century Germany: From F. C. Baur to Ernst Troeltsch. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jeffrey T. Zalar

10 Publishing and Reading It was with adamant determination to safeguard Protestant heritage that in early 1851 a group of pastors and bourgeois notables established The Geneva Society of Religious Publications. Distressed by the overthrow of patrician power in the working-class revolt of 1846, outraged at Catholics who took up arms to fight for their confessional interests in the Sonderbund War of 1847, and disdainful of freedoms granted by the Swiss Constitution of 1848, they intended the Society to defeat the compounding evils from which these developments sprang: the moral corruption of the poor, the malignant influence of Catholics “invading” the birthplace of Calvinism, and radical political reformism. The weapons of their offensive were to be pious texts distributed on a mass scale across the landscape of Protestant Switzerland. These “good” texts, the Society believed, would counteract the toxic menace of “bad” alternatives that suffused the reading public and planted the bitter seeds of rebellion (Pitteloud 1986). But the race was poorly run. Despite a prodigious effort, the Society never achieved a readership beyond the most religious individuals. Most Swiss Protestants were unwilling to accept a reading regime limited to pious texts. The Society became increasingly hidebound in discerning reputation. In-house confidence in the logic of its worldview diminished. Sales plummeted. And in November 1896, forty-six years after its proud beginning, the Society closed its doors for good. The rise and demise of the Society helpfully frame the history of publishing and reading and European religious culture in the period from 1800 to 1914. Europe’s “reading revolution” began in the late eighteenth century among Protestants in the Continent’s central and northern lands. It appeared soon thereafter in Britain, France, and eventually in territories south and east. Leaders of all religious traditions were chary about the spread of literacy and the new protocols of “extensive” reading that the revolution entailed. Literacy meant reading in silent isolation. As a rule, silent reading apart from interpretive authorities had never been an approved method of popular text engagement. Without benefit of the guidance these authorities were able to provide, the clergy suspected that lay readers absorbed in silent concentration would form partial, false, or illicit interpretations of texts in the ungoverned spaces of their minds that could only lead them into sin and error. And because individual acts of interpretive failure multiplied among communities of readers, mass literacy impended general hermeneutical confusion that would undermine the credal definitions and moral claims these communities required for survival with integrity. Just as worrisome were the practices of “extensive” reading. Historically, if they read at all, members of Europe’s religious communities read “intensively.” That is, they consumed honorific texts repeatedly until, ideally, their contents had so fundamentally shaped their wills that they could “imitate” in everyday life the figures these contents represented. But “extensive” reading—the consumption of varied and ephemeral texts to satisfy a personal itch rather than affirm a communal tradition https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110609059-012

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—raised serious questions about the status of honorific books and readers’ relationships to them. Individuals reading extensively might “humiliate” an acclaimed devotional text, like Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ (c. 1418 – 27), by placing it next to a romance novel or humorous tract on the same bookshelf. Meanwhile, in a reading culture that valued texts like newspapers that were here today and gone tomorrow, books with sacred resonance like the Bible might lose their charm of lasting importance. These twin challenges of silent and extensive reading—interpretive chaos and desecrated texts—confronted religious leaders with an unprecedented cultural situation. They responded to it with cautious optimism. They recognized that popular reading was an undeniable fact of modern existence that threatened to destabilize religiously grounded solidarity by irreversibly enlarging the worlds in which believers lived (François 1989). But if popular reading could be managed, these leaders reasoned, if people could be convinced or compelled to “read into” their religious cultures through the regular consumption of pious texts approved by clerical authorities and distributed on a mass scale, perhaps the hazards of the reading revolution could be avoided. And if they were avoided, then readers would not be drawn into broader and even apostate publics where faith and morality died. They would remain loyal to their religious communities instead, holding at arm’s length the enticing alternatives offered by metastasizing book markets. But as the members of The Geneva Society of Religious Publications learned to their dismay, the appeal of religious books, however favorably it may have rung out in individual hearts and homes, was no match for these alternatives’ siren songs. Almost from the first moments of their literacy, readers found themselves enmeshed in overlapping contexts of meaning that drew them to books dangling just outside the borders of their religious traditions. These contexts included erupting democratic politics, the fragmentation of societies by class, sizable demographic transfers from countryside to cities, religious pluralism and the struggles to which it led, the novelty of compulsory schooling, and the popularization of science that impugned religious authority and defied religious knowledge. The printed word in every conceivable style and in massive quantities articulated the details of all these developments, making reading the decisive method by which people established both their public identities, as reading became a chief signifier of social standing, and their private identities, as reading became a central act of leisure. In many if not most cases, the consumption of religious texts helped form and fortify these identities. More important to the project, however, were secular texts whose reading so expanded believers’ curiosities, so powerfully aroused their “desires and dissatisfactions,” and so permanently “burst the boundaries” of their minds that any enterprise intended to hold them in disciplined patterns of religious obedience was doomed to fail (Rose 1992, 61 – 62). This chapter considers how the religious communities of Europe experienced the promises and perils of the book’s Golden Age. After a brief introduction to the nature and transformative impact of commercialized publishing, of which religious communities were quick to take advantage, it discusses literacy among religious groups and the

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efforts these groups made to promote it. While literacy spread unevenly due to numerous factors, everywhere the trend ran in the direction of full competence with evermore varied and sophisticated texts. Then the essay addresses religious reading cultures and the extent of their erosion under the pressures exerted by secular book markets. Vital to the maturity of these markets was the emergence of the modern public sphere, which decisively set the environment in which reading took place. The values, civic practices, expectations for conformity, and antagonisms of this sphere also expressed the terms by which the ethics of spiritual reading were reworked. Each religious community in Europe undertook this work in its own way and fashion, defining new norms and conventions of reading in an effort to accommodate the tremendously diverse interests its members brought to literate life.

Learning to Read The arrival of mass literacy was one of the most important intellectual and structural transformations in human history. From the first literate communities in ancient Mesopotamia, reading had been a privilege limited to elites who alone enjoyed the authority to decipher the “magical” signs of texts. Now this authority was democratized. There were a number of reasons for it. The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century preached the doctrines of sola Scriptura and the “priesthood of all believers.” These doctrines opened up the Bible to people increasingly eager to see it, while the justifications for doing so appeared in cascades of pamphlets churned out by the new printing presses that beckoned people into literacy through piety and polemic (Pettegree 2015). The eighteenth-century Enlightenment expanded education by introducing a set of attitudes about emancipation through reading that redounded to one’s sense of personal worth and communal reputation. Carried forward by new kinds of texts, such as journals, book reviews, novels, and encyclopedias, it set new priorities in public life for access to knowledge and freedom of entertainment beyond the purview of traditional authorities, including religious authorities (Wittmann 1999). The emblematic status of books and the prestige of book learning soared as never before. On the strength of both these developments, reading itself moved beyond the monasteries, convents, and inns of early modern communities to colonize every available setting in becoming one of the highest and most recognizable forms of social activity: salons and coffeehouses; reading rooms and clubs; lending libraries large and small, public and private; bookshops, boats, and railcars; streets, pathways, city parks, and every place in between, including homes, in which family collections appeared in both rural and urban areas thanks to the spread of money transactions and the commodification of books they presupposed. The market revolution in books became only more spectacular in scale and diversified in genre with the rise of commercial publishing ventures. These ventures began early in the nineteenth century thanks to their adoption of mass production techniques characteristic of industrial manufacture. Innovations in printing—metal type, typesetting machines, rotating presses, steel engrav-

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ing, lithography, and increasingly polished photographic technologies—allowed publishers to produce and sell billions of copies per year by the beginning of the First World War. Religious people played important roles in all these developments as their oral traditions, which continued to find expression well into the nineteenth century, gave way gradually to printed modes of communication. This basic change depended, of course, upon advances in literacy. Already in the early modern period, people in central, northern, and western Europe potentially had access to a wide range of religious books and other printed matter: moral exhortations, catechisms, prayerbooks, and, in Protestant communities, Bibles and Bible commentaries. These religious works were highly valued. They bore sacral significance as material objects that contained divine power. They also presented vocabulary, images, and themes that readers knew already from regular devotion. Their encounter in the recurring coded forms of texts eased the transition to literacy (Chartier 1989). Protestants learned to read by perusing in their family Bibles at home what they heard read out to them from the pulpit at church. Catholics learned to read from tracts with titles like Hail Mary, which included words they had mumbled a thousand times in personal prayer. In some cases, such as in Italy, laity who knew a few words in Latin from the Mass could learn their vernacular translations on the corresponding pages of bilingual prayerbooks. Orthodox Christians like Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821 – 81) learned to read by connecting words with pictures in illustrated collections of Bible stories. For their part, serfs in pre-emancipation parish schools cut their teeth on ceremonial books in Church Slavonic or, increasingly, Russian. And Christians and Jews everywhere learned to read from liturgical songbooks rich in biblical allusions taken from the Psalter. Histories of literacy often assign primacy of causation to the appearance of statedirected schooling. While schooling was of foundational importance, these practices of religious reading, which allowed people to mobilize theological preunderstandings to facilitate comprehension of what they read, promoted literacy among believers from one end of Europe to the other. And because these practices centered on texts held in high esteem, they only increased their readers’ respect for the printed word and the avidity with which they embraced it. By the turn of the nineteenth century, religious communities exploited the growing marketplace for print and the increasing literacy on which it rested. Given their theology and superior social position in relation to members of other religious groups in the hotspots of Enlightenment where they tended to live, we will not be surprised to find leading action among Protestants. Nowhere was this action more impressive than in Britain. In line with long traditions of religious philanthropy, British evangelicals seized upon the dissemination of cheap print as a new method of indoctrinating people as oral practices rooted in communities began to falter. This dissemination flowed from the overall evangelical perspective, discussed elsewhere in this volume, that regarded regular, heartfelt, and reverent reading of Scripture as the most effective way to hear God’s voice in the everyday life of faith. Promoting literacy, then, was a precondition for a grace-filled life. Accordingly, the zeal behind the effort bore fruit in the establish-

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ment of Sunday Schools, which introduced widespread literacy among the rural and protoindustrial poor. In supplying reading materials for both schools and homes, Bible societies took advantage of such new technologies as stereotype plates, which allowed for unlimited reproductions, unbleached paper made from recycled rags and, eventually, steam machinery (Howsam 2004). These innovations helped them expand their reach. The Religious Tract Society, for instance, founded in 1799, offered low-cost devotional texts to adults in Britain and overseas. In its first year, it generated some 200,000 of these tracts and over a million more by 1805. These texts included pamphlets and broadsheets as well as bound books, many of which contained personal accounts of dramatic conversions in the evangelical style. Publishing for children began in 1809 with simple tracts for sale at a farthing each and with characters like “Fanny Thoughtless” and “Tom Steady” to drive home the moral message (Butts 2006). Mission literature to expand literacy among children was also a going concern. By mid-century, youth journal editions published by the London Missionary Society had risen to 100,000 copies. The missions’ book initiatives also attracted a formidable number of women, a key sign of their movement into public life via religious activism. “Bible women” were fixtures, in fact, at revival meetings and along the countryside tracks of village itineracy, where they distributed Bibles and raised funds for publications. In cottage homes, some read out from the Bible to encourage the poor to read on their own. Middle-class ladies matched these efforts by hawking Bibles and other pious texts among the wretched and rough-reading residents of Victorian slums. Of great pertinence to the spread of literacy throughout Europe was the creation of the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS). It came together in March 1804 amid the evangelical revival and quickly established itself as the leading mass-market supplier of Scripture with translations in English, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, and Irish. Its success was so imposing that it inspired copycat concerns elsewhere. The first continental Bible society appeared in Nürnberg already in 1804. The Prussian Bible Society, which distributed over six million Bibles by 1914, followed a year later. In Russia, the Bible Society coalesced in 1812 with the support of Tsar Alexander I, who approved of any effort that raised the piety of his subjects in an era of secularist aggression. By 1826, it had dispatched over half a million Bible-related publications in over forty languages to all corners of the empire. But Protestant Bible activity had unintended consequences. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, agents of the BFBS traveled throughout Europe—the German lands, Sweden, the Austrian Empire, the Ottoman Balkans, Spain, Italy—searching for environments in which to found affiliate Bible concerns (Batalden et al. 2004). Their heavy colporteur activity, while not unwelcome among Protestants, rankled members of other religious groups. These latter responded by launching their own initiatives in devotional reading to counteract the “agitation” of uninvited confessional and religious enemies. In Spain, Catholic elites, who complained constantly about Protestant peddling of Bibles and apologetical texts, rushed to establish their own devotional publishing houses. Protestant proselytizing in Ireland provoked Catholics there to found a rival

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Catholic Book Society in the early 1820s, a confrontation that contemporaries called the “Bible War.” By 1837, the Society had distributed over five million books, tracts, and catechisms. These included such devotional gems as John Milner’s prayerbook The Key to Heaven and Richard Challoner’s urgent appeals to conversion in Think Well on It and The Garden of the Soul, two of the most popular spiritual books of the nineteenth century. The Society also supplied “spelling books, tablets, copy books, slates, pencils, quills and reams of paper” to poor schools to get Catholics reading—and reading loyally—as quickly as possible (Keenan 1983, 141). A decade later, a second enterprise, the Catholic Society of Ireland, was established. By 1840, it had sent some 40,000 more religious and moral books to 117 parishes to strengthen literacy among the poor and establish parish libraries. Library work was important to newly literate Catholics living in Belgium and the Netherlands, where the poor learned to read in catechism class, and in the mixed confessional communities of post-Napoleonic Prussia. Here Catholics, tired of Protestant harassments in the press and frustrated by the distribution of Protestant apologetics in their communities, which the Prussian government did nothing to prevent, kicked off major confessional library efforts in 1845. There were similar stimuli to literacy and religious reading due to Protestant Bible provocations among Jews and Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Balkans and among Orthodox Christians in Russia. In some places, missionaries were merely reviled for their tactless zealotry. In others, they were driven out by violent protests for their insults to icons, saints, and popular doctrines. In all these examples, we see that the fusion of reading and religious controversy did more for literacy than it did for interfaith relations. And so what progress did literacy make among the religious peoples of Europe? Much depended on factors not necessarily in their control. These included the state provision of mandatory schooling, the development of capitalist conditions for market penetration, the arrival of reliable roads and postal services, urban growth (city dwellers read before peasants), a broader diffusion of wealth (the rich read before the poor), and gender opportunity (men read before women). Among Christians, these factors trumped in importance such purely religious inducements to read as sola Scriptura. Protestant and Catholic farmers in the Netherlands read at about the same level of competence, as did Protestant and Catholic women in Germany at the time of national unification in 1871. Catholic boys enrolled in urban schools in the Polish diocese of Cracow read with far greater mastery than Catholic boys did in the villages of the French Pyrenees. In any case, the comparative history of literacy reveals a very uneven distribution of skills, determined substantially by economic region. In the more dynamic areas of central Europe, Scandinavia, and Britain, Protestants and urbanized Jews achieved literacy rates of between 50 and 70 percent by 1850 and nearly 100 percent by 1900. Jews in particular, at least in urban areas, took to books like no others, for reasons examined below. The Catholic story is more complicated. Some 60 percent of French Catholics read by 1850 and this pace was intensifying. But their coreligionists living in more sluggish or stagnant regions faced stubborn obstacles to literacy, including the lack of dis-

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posable funds to buy books. Acute poverty was so pervasive in Italy that at mid-century most adults still could not read. Even at the turn of the twentieth century, up to 70 percent of impoverished Spanish Catholics were illiterate, a figure that endured in Portugal until 1911. Although there was a culture of religious reading in both pre- and postfamine Ireland, as well as in Poland, literacy did not conquer the countrysides in these places until the end of the nineteenth century. Further east the light is dimmer still. Half of the conscript soldiers from Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania who fought with the Germans at Stalingrad in 1942 – 43 were illiterate. This figure gives little confidence that literacy in these lands was any stronger in the nineteenth century. And sure enough: literacy remained weak here due to such impediments as the delayed arrival of elementary schools, the seasonal patterns of their attendance as determined by agricultural work requirements, and the absence of market conditions conducive to print distribution. Some mountainous regions in the Slavic Balkans and western Greece, along with isolated agricultural zones like Bessarabia that were cut off by riverine systems, were so inaccessible that even by 1900 literacy was limited to fragments of the population. Estimates indicate that as late as mid-century in some areas, only 1 percent of Greek Orthodox clergy could sign their names (Kokosalakis 1987). Still, literacy spread, and consistently. In the case of Jews and Orthodox Christians in Russia, literacy rose from 21 percent in 1897 to around 40 percent by 1914. Research suggests that literacy was especially slow to make notable gains among Europe’s Muslim populations. To be certain, there were newspapers catering to Muslim interests, such as Bosnjak in Bosnia, which appeared in 1891 with Habsburg support and was read by and discussed among the Muslim literati. There were also pockets of elite reading such as among Arab intellectuals in Paris (Coller 2010). But most Muslims lived predominantly within oral cultures that held literacy at bay. Perhaps as few as 10 percent of all Muslims living in the Balkans read by 1900. Some scholars trace the shortcoming to principles and practices inherent in Ottoman Islam: resistance to printing as such, lack of a comprehensive educational policy, and a commitment to Qur’anic recitation in the madrassas so strict in nature that students could be adept at memorizing texts and still be functionally illiterate (Somel 1997). This said, more research is necessary before concluding that Muslim reading was indeed so limited. Granular appreciations of educational climates in Muslim areas have yet to appear. The circulation rates of some religious publications in the Balkans, such as those associated with Sufi Islam, remain undetermined (Clayer 2015). Muslim reading may very well have been more active than we expect. In any case, Muslims in the Balkans as well as Christians and Jews elsewhere had to come to grips sooner or later with modern literate life in all its spirit and splendor, with all its pitfalls and problems. For many people and the religious fellowships to which they belonged, this process began by the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when modern public spheres matured.

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Religious Reading Cultures in Consensus and Conflict Popular reading was a contributing element to and a decisive marker of modern public spheres. These public spheres, succinctly defined as “social spaces and forms of communication that enable private persons to participate in public affairs,” depended upon popular reading to draw individuals into civil society and inform them of the criteria of judgment that established respectable citizenship (Brophy 2004, 185). They represented, then, a new order of purpose and meaning characteristic of the dynamic societies we recognize as “modern,” in which individuals and groups constructed identities and adopted apposite practices to express them. Accordingly, they featured an explosion in the volume of print communication in every literary form that facilitated the definition of these identities and practices. This explosion allowed people who differed by age, social position, gender, region, and level of education, as well as by confessional or religious allegiance, to enter the arena of public life, establish ground to stand on within it, propound their views in the field of opinion, and gather like-minded others to support them. These were the environments in which “extensive” reading really took off, where people made private reading choices that enacted their public personalities as citizens responsible for the destiny of the increasingly national communities to which they belonged. It is impossible to overestimate the impact of public spheres for Europe’s religious communities. On the one hand, public spheres made these communities only more aware of their religious affiliations as their members drew attention to themselves through printed media. This attention could be benign as groups announced who they were and elaborated their identities in ways that accorded with their faith commitments. It could also be malign in stimulating conflicts with other religious groups and with the growing cohort of marginally affiliated or secularized individuals who increasingly asserted primacy in public affairs. Either way, the uncertainties of articulation within public spheres recommended to clergy and their allied elites that they take measures to control lay literacy. By these measures, they intended to compose individuals in tightly bound cultures of devotional reading that intensified fidelity to faith and equipped communities of belief to withstand the tempest of civil conflicts. On the other hand, public spheres drew down the cohesive resources of these communities. By exposing believers to proliferating reading alternatives in non-religious genres, they so variegated tastes that confessional or religious boundaries, always permeable as a rule, became impossible to defend. These alternatives—texts in popular and practical learning; political and even radical commentaries set on new philosophical foundations; entertainment print of every kind, above all fiction; class-based criticism—aroused a dedicated subjectivity of independent judgment that honed peoples’ awareness of belonging to multiple, overlapping communities of meaning (Brophy 2007). This awareness motivated people to accept texts from several subcultures and fragmented reading interests by personal inclination even within individual house-

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holds. This fragmentation canceled clerical dreams of imposing a common curriculum that cut across the lines of social division. It also overwhelmed the schemes of both government and ecclesiastical censorship (Cragin 2001; Clemens 2013; Zalar 2019). And so even as religious communities became more assertive in expressing their unique identities in public, they became more conflicted internally as their members dispersed across the broken intellectual landscape of modern societies. We will address each of these developments and their implications for reading in turn. Like the pastors and patricians of The Geneva Society of Religious Publications, with whose story this chapter began, many religious leaders attempted to bind their followers to definite and disciplined patterns of religious reading. This was everywhere the case among Protestants, who were only too happy to take advantage of their head start in literacy. They constructed their reading cultures rhetorically by denominational pride, love of Scripture, a healthy anti-Catholicism, and moral warnings against the “poison” and “pollution” of trashy print, above all in the forms of cheap periodicals and romantic and other escapist fiction. The consumption of this “bad” print, especially among women and children, was thought to be a waste of time, an “idolatrous” betrayal of God, and a transgression against the moral code worthy of shame (Carens 2015). It was far better, the Protestant publishing industry and its clerical and lay patrons made clear, to read within the boundaries erected by faith and moral probity. “The age of knowledge,” declared the 1850 annual report of one group, “is the age of temptation. To impart an ability to read, without providing a suitable supply of religious publications to promote the welfare of the soul, is conferring a partial, if not a questionable attainment, on the population of a country” (Scott 1992, ix). The efforts of this industry to reach Protestant readers were not unsuccessful. Throughout Protestant Europe, Bibles were ubiquitous. In many places, such as in Victorian England, Goethe’s Prussia, and among the Dutch Reformed, who since the seventeenth century had adored the “States Bible” or Statenbijbel, the Bible was the foundational text of national identity (Larsen 2012). Its phrases and vocabulary, worked into public discourse over centuries of time, supplied common knowledge and interpretive cues to everyday life. Bibles could be found in churches and schools, parliamentary offices, military barracks, naval and mercantile vessels, and in the associational institutions of the public sphere, such as fraternal and civic societies, trade groups, the YMCA and, of course, libraries and reading rooms. They also figured centrally in domestic devotions. Rare was the Protestant home without a Bible. These books, increasingly complete with engravings and other illustrations of evocative scenes like Noah’s ark or the Madonna and Child, were passed down from generation to generation to link family members along the pilgrim path back home to God (Carpenter 2019). They were basic texts of everyday leisure, too, above all on Sundays, when fathers in both hardscrabble and Biedermeier settings read to their families from the Good Book in appeals to faith, sobriety, hard work, and financial responsibility. The Protestant enterprise in pious reading went beyond Bibles. Religious periodicals were popular in every Protestant land. By the early 1890s, German Protestants alone read from some 235 publications catering to the different church communities

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and reaching millions of subscribers. These periodicals, like The Girl’s Own Paper, Leisure Hour, and Good Words in England, included Bible verses and wisdom, religious poetry, sermons, essays, and fiction that united literature, religion, and moral insight in a new form of devotion (Ehnes 2012). Just as popular were Protestant newspapers with their unique denominational emphases. By the middle of the 1880s, nearly onefifth of leading newspapers available in Strasbourg were religious or confessional in nature. Most of these were Protestant newspapers that variously provided public information, intellectual stimulation, and religious edification (Steinhoff 2008). Similar in objective was The Standard, the leading Protestant newspaper in the Netherlands. Published under the leadership of Abraham Kuyper (1837– 1920), the theologian, journalist, and politician, it offered an informed intellectual response to the times according to a neo-Calvinist worldview. All these newspapers took advantage of innovations in the mechanical print industry as well as layout structures that mimicked those of secular alternatives to declare their readers’ “modernity.” Other pious texts also abounded: collections of Sunday sermons, whose reading in some communities took the place of church attendance; devotionals with daily prayers and short meditations; edifying literature, poetry, and prose; catechetical handbooks for families; hymnbooks; church books with psalms for every occasion and time of day; and translations of spiritual classics and their commentaries. In Denmark, Protestants continued to read the Golden Treasure Chest, the spiritual compendium by C. H. von Bogatzsky (1690 – 1774). In the Netherlands, Reasonable Religion, a volume of practical theology by Wilhelmus à Brakel (1635 – 1711), remained popular. Swedish Lutherans also eagerly consumed mission literature. In Germany, organizations like the Evangelische Bücher-Verein (founded 1846) made available anthologies of passages taken from the works of multiple authors. One of these was the widely popular I Know that My Redeemer Lives! produced by the Grand Duchess Luise of Baden (1838 – 1923). The Catholic effort in popular reading was no less impressive. It enjoyed the support of the popes, who condemned repeatedly the sprawling diffusion of “pestilential” reading material whose “poison” ensured the spiritual corruption of all who consumed it. European bishops, who fell into line behind the popes, dutifully established guidelines for confessional publishing houses and review offices (generally led by a vicar general) to promote “good” books in their dioceses. They could also count upon lay elites to cooperate with local clergy in founding societies committed to these books’ distribution. This distribution occurred as a matter of charity, by individual sales, or through the establishment of lending libraries, which themselves began to appear in France, Germany, Ireland, the Polish lands, and Spain. The rhetoric of these initiatives added wayward reading to the catalogue of sins requiring confession, while devout reading joined sacrament, catechism, and representational art in the didactic toolkit of effective ministry. In these ways, the Catholic Church became a “reading church” committed to fortifying lay allegiance to faith, regular practice, and conservative political, social, and cultural views. “Thinking with the church”—sentire cum ecclesia—had long been a Catholic ideal. Now this ideal took on fresh meaning as believers were expected to maintain a Catholic judgment about the world through disciplined reading

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behavior that immunized them against the illnesses borne by the secular publishing industry. As the nineteenth century progressed, this Catholic reading culture diversified into journals, newspapers, and devotional works so varied in type and vast in distribution that it is impossible to overlook the popularity of religious texts in what theorists used to call “the century of secularization.” Periodicals, both weeklies and monthlies, appeared as early as the 1820s to provide rhetorical and combative defenses of the faith, especially in environments rich in confrontations with middle-class liberals: Der Katholik (1821) and Historisch-politische Blätter (1838) in the German lands; La Civilización (1830) in Spain; the Dublin Review (1836) and Tablet (1840) in Britain; L’Univers (1833) in France; L’Osservatore Cattolico in Italy (1864). In the words of the Jesuit historian John W. O’Malley, in these journals the church “found a vehicle that appeared with unfailing regularity and that could therefore not only respond to every crisis and every opportunity as soon as it arose but could again and again, within relatively short spans of time, din readers with their message” (2018, 82). While these journals targeted educated readers, there were also pious options for the working poor. With titles like Catholic Penny Magazine in Ireland, La Cruz in Madrid, Monika in Imperial Germany, and Mysl Katholicka in Russian Poland, they offered spiritual and vocational reassurance, appeals to sanctity to defeat the barbarism of the world, and inducements to obedience and doctrinal correctness. Catholic newspapers were everywhere, too. Subscribers to individual papers may have been few in number, but altogether Catholic newspapers reached millions of people all over Europe. At the heart of the papacy’s own press policy were L’Osservatore Romano, which the church purchased in 1861, and La Civiltà Cattolica, the Jesuit fortnightly. These papers became the official organs of the Holy See not only in Europe but throughout the world. Others, like the Kölnische Volkszeitung in Cologne and the Schweizerische Kirchenzeitung in Luzern, played major roles in communicating information about and mobilizing people to resist the Kulturkämpfe (culture struggles) between Catholics and liberals that determined the status of Catholicism in national public life. Meanwhile, pious print offered to readers at all levels new possibilities for experiencing spirituality, new avenues for encountering doctrine, and new sacralized matter to add to their already impressive collection of rosaries, medals, statues, and pictures. Taking advantage of the rapidly consolidating publishing industry and the lowcost items it produced, devotional literature bloomed in every color of the palette. Assisted by clerical and lay distribution groups—The Apostolate of the Heart of Jesus in Russian Poland, the Association for the Distribution of Good Catholic Books in Bavaria, Claret Publishing in Spain—circulation flourished to the tune of millions of individual items. These items included prayer and holy cards memorializing the deaths of friends; catechisms and religious primers; broadsheets and pamphlets; collections of sermons; an enormous volume of devotional writings, some of them translations of famous texts like Saint Francis de Sales’s Introduction to the Devout Life (1609); prayerbooks, songbooks, and schoolbooks; reflections on the rosary; apologetics; and special-interest spi-

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ritual publishing aimed at children, teens, young adults, workers, bourgeois men, homebound women, and families. Added to this array of options were efforts in fiction, which ranged in quality from saccharine and quickly forgotten stories of moral purity to novels of real accomplishment like Charles de Montalembert’s spiritual classic Histoire de Sainte Élisabeth de Hongrie (1836). There was poetry, too, not least the works of the Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 – 89), whose lyrical precision and double meanings, to say nothing of his spiritual depth, made him one of the most influential modernist poets of the Victorian age. We see similar efforts at expanding sacred presence through reading among Orthodox Christians and Jews. In post-emancipation Russia, church magazines for Orthodox Christians, who assigned high prestige to print, began to appear already in the 1860s. These issues complemented liturgical books that taught people how to sing the Psalter and the Hours as well as devotional texts, published in both Church Slavonic and Russian, that priests presented to a lay audience willing to read for religious edification. Local parishes organized cooperatives among their members for the exchange of books, which included translations of Scripture, volumes of saints’ lives, collections of verse, and Psalters to be read over the bodies of the dead (Brooks 1985). To the degree they could afford it, Jews built upon their admirable tradition of reading as an act of daily religious duty. Holy texts like the Hebrew Bible and honorific texts like the Hasidic classics Tales in Praise of the Ba’al Shem Tov and the Tales of Rabbi Nachman were popular throughout the shtetls of eastern Europe. Hasidic Jews were also devotees of Yiddish novels depicting Jewish life, such as Yisroel Aksenfeld’s The Headband (Dos Shterntikhl, 1861) and the short stories of Sholem Yankev Abramovitch (1836 – 1917) (Dauber 2007). In the cities of eastern Europe, to which Jews relocated in increasing numbers, there was a great revival of interest in Jewish magic books that lasted throughout the nineteenth century. Sitting at the intersection of religion, superstition, and popular medicine, they reminded Jews of their religious pasts in urban environments where it was easy to forget knowledge transmissions that had been at the heart of oral culture for centuries (Gellman 2021). In central and western Europe, specifically Jewish newspapers and journals, which multiplied significantly from the 1840s onward, could be found in nearly every household. In Britain, for example, newspapers like the Voice of Jacob and the Jewish Chronicle formed part of a Jewish literary renaissance, which was carried out in subcommunities of Jews in British market towns and seaports as well as in urban centers. Joining newspapers in this renaissance, which expressed Jewish commentary on literary affairs, politics, and international events that bore upon Jews abroad, were journals like Jewish World and Jewish Quarterly Review. And then there were Bible translations, subject books, and tracts that fortified religious solidarity and provided spiritual and vocational advice. The consumption of all this material synthesized Jewish customs of dedicated religious study with modern educational ambitions for personal enlightenment and communal uplift. “Just as the clubroom provided an alternative locus for Jewish affiliation outside of the synagogue, the shelf of books and stack of newspapers promised a novel form of Jewish association. The printed word could create an

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ethereal fellowship of letters freed from the constraints of geography” (Mendelsohn 2017). These religious reading cultures did more than build and express identities. They also mobilized the faithful in defense not only against “poisonous” popular literature but against other religious groups and secular opponents, all of whom jockeyed for positions of influence within the public sphere. In areas with mixed confessional populations, for example Britain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Germany, Protestants knocked Catholics down in the press, mocking their pious practices and ridiculing their beliefs in attempts to drum up support for anti-Catholic laws and public access restrictions. Catholics cried foul in their own publications, condemning the “false” Reformation, lampooning Protestant doctrines as ignorant of history, and accusing Protestants themselves of prejudice, abuse, and unfair application of religious liberty protections. Members of both groups, particularly Catholics, who seemed to stand for premodern and therefore condemned modes of communal discipline, drew fire from middle-class liberals at every angle. Published in provocative and, in fact, proudly blasphemous satirical journals like Punch in England and Kladderadatsch in Germany, liberal salvos relentlessly attacked members of traditional Christian groups as stupid in intellect, backward in social promise, and untrustworthy in politics and therefore undeserving of a say in public affairs. They directed especial hatred at the papacy and its supporters in the Jesuit order, whose international reach in power and manipulations of mind, they contended, threatened to undermine any new nation struggling for survival (Cubitt 1993). Members of aggrieved communities took liberals to task with unrelenting vigor, denouncing the liberal movement and all its claims in ways that only attracted more criticism as the two sides became locked in a bizarre codependency that did nothing for the durability of fragile national politics. Nationalism itself depended heavily upon the printed word. Its texts offered the possibility of unity in common purpose, but they also heightened interfaith tensions. These tensions played out in religious publications in regrettable ways, from attacks on unwanted religious minorities as dangerous to national coherence in Britain to appeals to ethnoreligious particularisms heedless of their implications for stability in the Austrian and Ottoman empires to anti-Judaic and antisemitic diatribes everywhere. These tirades contributed powerfully to such calamitous events as the Dreyfus Affair in France and blood libel riots in Imperial Germany. In eastern Europe, they played a pivotal role in popularizing antisemitic hatred. For example, in 1905, the tsarist police circulated the execrable tract, Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Quickly appearing in dozens of translations across Europe, it drew upon perceptions of Jewish “babbling” in secret conspiracies that allegedly undermined governments until they could be replaced by Jewish regimes. The fantasy was of a piece with general Christian revulsion for the “Jewish press,” which was one of the broadest and most tenacious anti-Judaic slurs of pre-1914 Europe. In all these ways, religious publishing and reading helped turn the public sphere into a battleground, enflaming prejudices and sharpening hatreds in quintessentially modern modes of personal and communal intolerance.

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Reading beyond Religious Boundaries Notwithstanding the importance of religious reading cultures to preserving faith and practice, scholars are more aware than ever of the willing participation of otherwise committed believers in secular book markets. These markets threw off a volume of print so dazzling to behold and delightful to taste that readers indulged in secular books with an appetite that confounded all attempts at restraint. Examples may be summoned from across the social spectrum. Middle classes everywhere erected totemic book cultures of their own to solidify social hierarchies. In these cultures, the signifying properties of secular books—classic texts enshrined in national canons, pathbreaking achievements in science, histories of great men, foundational texts in liberal political economy, encyclopedias—marked bourgeois homes with the emblems of social leadership. Workers and peasants were quick to comprehend the iron linkage of education and social ascent. For them, Flaubert’s maxim “read in order to live” was a matter of personal and collective urgency that produced book collections in homes, associations, and factory anterooms to serve the demands of self-improvement. Neither boys nor girls were satisfied with catechisms and moral scoldings that sought to enforce proper conduct. They wanted fables and deeds of derring-do and stories about princesses to fill in the gaps of time between school, church, and chores. Women of all traditions were entrusted with maintaining sincere religion in the home and as a rule they did maintain it, in part through encouragements to spiritual reading. But their own hunger for amusement fiction was so unappeasable, the neighborhood requirement to be in-the-know about steady sellers was so insistent, that they more than any other social group in Europe established the novel at the apex of popular reading interest (Mollier and Cachin 2007). As soon as capitalistic marketplaces for books came together, all these types of individuals became consumers in everyday leisure cultures whose fascinations with the new, demands of compliance, temptations, and intimacies in private realms made their reading impossible to control. Religious groups accommodated this reading as best they could. By mid-century, there was broad agreement among Protestants that reading served both public and private ends: the ostentatious display of approved literary tastes was an acceptable technique of social ascent even as the reading of devotional texts was a duty of faith. The public excellence of decorum, in other words, could coexist with the private excellence of piety in the expression of a coherent identity of virtue. Accordingly, and without abandoning the religious curricula they had always advanced, leaders in Protestant publishing began addressing broader interests. A case in point is Britain’s Religious Tract Society. Beginning in the late 1840s, it produced and distributed texts by the millions that it had never offered before: popular science, history, and geography; how-to and social improvement manuals; magazines with light fiction for family consumption. Its efforts vis-à-vis children’s reading remained lively, although the religiously didactic literature it employed to foster literacy earlier in the century was now accompanied by a cornucopia of essentially secular alternatives. It

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was a simple matter of market survival: society captains knew that their coreligionists wanted to read this material; they endeavored to offer it themselves before their secular-publishing competitors drove them out of business (Fyfe 2006). One sees the same marketplace savvy in evangelical fiction. Already by the first third of the century, sales of this fiction dipped due to the genre’s moralizing tone, sentimentality, and poor character development. And so authors and publishers restructured the genre along more entertaining lines to reach evangelical readers whose interests had grown beyond spiritual edification (Burstein 2019). Similar developments took place among Orthodox Christians in Russia. Here priests and bishops desired to maintain the bond between believers and religious texts. But they could not ignore the growing popular desire to escape grinding poverty through better employment. This employment, both at the higher echelons of peasant economy and in urban craft trades, required confident literacy. Clerics thus had no choice but to allow the peasants to read. And read the peasants did. They held on to their saints’ lives and moral tracts, but by 1914 they read “extensively” like everyone else: newspapers with public and war news, entertainment fiction, practical advice books, fairy tales, adventure stories, cheap almanacs, periodicals, and popular science texts (Brooks 1985). Catholics made concessions, too. Believers’ interest in devotional texts never wavered. And yet, these individuals also joined the general trend toward secular reading, despite the warnings against doing so handed down by their priests. Brides in rural France, for instance, still received copies of the Vie des Saints for their marriage trousseaux, but they read romantic fiction throughout their married lives (Lyons 1999). Industrial workers enrolled in faith-based cooperatives read appeals to the piety of Saint Joseph, but at the same time they could be fierce partisans of Émile Zola’s novels, whose works the Index Commission in Rome condemned opera omnia. The Index of Forbidden Books itself came in for withering bourgeois criticism. And this criticism did not emanate from liberal secularists alone, who rejected all ecclesiastical bans on reading, but also from otherwise loyal and leading Catholics in England, France, Italy, and Germany, who demanded the Index be revised or abolished as an embarrassment to the faith in an age of reading freedom (Hilgers 1904). The church’s unwillingness to recognize this freedom led, in fact, to serious repercussions. Consider, for example, the Society of Saint Charles Borromeo, the leading book and library concern in Catholic Germany. Founded in 1845 with firm church backing, it distributed pious texts to home and parish libraries as part of an effort to enclose Catholics within the boundaries of a confessional subculture. But by the early 1870s, readers abandoned it. While they cherished their pious volumes, they desired secular texts, too, and were not afraid to get them from unauthorized sources. Bleeding members, within twenty years the Society perched on the edge of collapse. In a lastditch effort at survival, its clerical and lay leaders widely expanded book offerings for the home and updated sclerotic parish library collections with fiction, self-help manuals, home economy readers, works in popular science, and other non-religious texts. As a result of this fundamental change, membership in the organization stabi-

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lized, then skyrocketed from 61,538 in 1895 to 261,815 in 1914, an increase of 425 percent (Zalar 2019). Secular reading among Jews was de rigueur and made an enormous impact on their self-consciousness. It is well known that from early in the nineteenth century urbanized Jews in central Europe pursued the art of neo-humanist Bildung or personal cultivation. At the heart of Bildung was regular reading, above all the classic literature of Goethe and Schiller, for intellectual and moral improvement to establish one’s bona fides for citizenship (Lässig 2004). Jews hoped that by reading and displaying the “right” books, they could achieve middle-class respectability and thereby national inclusion. Similarly, in such cities as Berlin, Warsaw, and Paris, Jews read publications by maskilim that sought, at least in part, to encourage social acceptance. Significantly, these readers also included eastern European women of upper station. Because they were prevented from studying Torah and because they were increasingly educated and left alone at home, they took advantage of “windows of opportunity” to read Yiddish and Russian fiction as well as texts in other European languages, including, in some cases, radical political and Zionist criticism. This reading produced a growing secularism as well as a rebelliousness against family controls that edged Jewish women into wider social circles (Feingold 1987; Parush 2004). Among Jews placed lower in society, reading went far beyond Torah studies in community heder and yeshivot. As literacy expanded, so too did the Yiddish popular press, which produced romance novellas, poetry, prose essays, and newspapers read by religiously committed and secularizing Jews alike. In other words, readers were not strict in their reading preferences. Despite rabbinic desires to hold them to traditional literature—weekly Torah readings, folktales of spiritual heroes, vernacular spiritual texts and commentaries, tekhine prayerbooks for women—they read, and increasingly, like communities elsewhere. This reading was extensive by personal interest: histories, popular science texts, encyclopedias, travel accounts, domestic economy and hygiene, periodicals, philosophy, public criticism, world literature in translation for men, and cookbooks and romance fiction for housewives. In Russia this reading took place in libraries, even in the shtetls of the Pale of Settlement, literary societies, teahouses, and among circles of friends engaged in book exchange. It also occurred right in front of synagogues, where peddlers appeared with their moral literature and Talmudic editions but also with less adulatory popular texts (Stein 2007; Veidlinger 2009). Among Sephardic Jews in the Balkans, leisure reading took place in homes, in schools founded by the French Jewish rights organization Alliance Israélite Universelle, and in new public spaces like reading clubs for men and women, boys and girls. There was a significant expansion of Jewish newspapers here, as well as in the number of novels circulating in Ladino translations. Among these translations were detective stories of the Nick Carter variety and other popular texts, low-cost and lowbrow, which passed from hand to eager hand (Scolnik 2010). Their Jewish readers, like gentiles everywhere in Europe, had crossed the Rubicon. There was no going back to “intensive” reading curricula limited to pious texts, a fact borne out by borrowing patterns in Eu-

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ropean libraries. By 1900, selections of religious books from these libraries were below 12 percent of all books circulating. Secular reading by the vagaries of individual taste and the impulsions of social utility had become the dominant modes of engagement with the public sphere.

Conclusion The decisive drift from primarily spiritual to predominantly secular reading was one of the most important and contested transitions in the cultural history of modern European religion. Religious texts remained popular as people of all traditions continued to appeal to the truths by which they professed to live. Indeed, some people read religious texts only, taking advantage of the avalanche of items produced by industrial-scale publishing. To this extent, reading continued to exert a consolidating force in faithbased communities. But reading religious texts to the exclusion of others became increasingly rare, especially among younger generations for whom “extensive” reading was a basic requirement of education, public participation, and social acceptance. This style of reading—open-minded, self-centered, acquisitive, adventurous—broke down the considered restrictions of religious reading cultures as the choice of what to read became a matter of individual conscience, not communal discipline. Some of the most fascinating individuals at the center of this history are therefore representatives of this communal discipline, such as priests, pastors, rabbis, parents, school marms, and others, including leaders of fin de siècle moral reform movements. They watched with dismay as their authority over reading, so deeply seated in the cultural history of the West, eroded to insignificance. Nineteenth-century literature provides many observations of this experience, as the following passage, set in Christian Orthodox Russia, from Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1879 – 80) illustrates: Alyosha: “And are you still reading bad books?” Liza: “Yes. Mama reads them and hides them under her pillow, and I steal them.”

No less telling is this exchange between Anglicans in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871 – 72): Mr. Featherstone: “I can’t abide to see her reading to herself. You mind and not bring her any more books, do you hear?” Fred: “Yes, sir, I hear.” Narrator: Fred had received this order before, and had secretly disobeyed it. He intended to disobey it again.

To read in the nineteenth century, even in communities of faith with commanding clerical and other personal authorities, was to read with an air of delinquency that quickly became an air of self-satisfaction. Such a development realized the worst fears of the-

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ologians, who had always worried about the dissolving effects on communal coherence of widespread silent and private reading. It prepared the way for yet closer approximations to secular ideologies and entertainment lifestyles that would all but rout religious cultures in the twentieth century.

References and Bibliography Batalden, Stephen, Kathleen Cann, and John Dean. 2004. “Introduction: Two Hundred Years of the British and Foreign Bible Society.” In Sowing the Word: The Cultural Impact of the British and Foreign Bible Society, 1804 – 2004, edited by Stephen Batalden, Kathleen Cann, and John Dean, 1 – 13. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press. Brooks, Jeffrey. 1985. When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861 – 1917. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Brophy, James M. 2004. “The Public Sphere.” In Germany 1800 – 1870, edited by Jonathan Sperber, 185 – 208. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brophy, James M. 2007. Popular Culture and the Public Sphere in the Rhineland, 1800 – 1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burstein, Miriam Elizabeth. 2019. “Hybridous Monsters: Constructing ‘Religion’ and ‘the Novel’ in the Early Nineteenth Century.” In Constructing Nineteenth-Century Religion: Literary, Historical, and Religious Studies in Dialogue, edited by Joushua King and Winter Jade Werner, 171 – 89. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Butts, Dennis. 2006. “Introduction.” In From the Dairyman’s Daughter to Worrals of the WAAF: The Religious Tract Society, Lutterworth Press and Children’s Literature, edited by Dennis Butts and Pat Garrett, 7 – 12. Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press. Caesar, Ann Hallamore. 2001. “Women Readers and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century Italy.” Italian Studies 56: 80 – 97. Carens, Timothy L. 2015. “Idolatrous Reading: Subversive Fantasy and Domestic Ideology.” NineteenthCentury Literature 70: 238 – 66. Carpenter, Mary Wilson. 2019. “From Treasures to Trash, or, the Real History of Family Bibles.” In Constructing Nineteenth-Century Religion: Literary, Historical, and Religious Studies in Dialogue, edited by Joushua King and Winter Jade Werner, 115 – 38. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Chartier, Roger. 1989. “Texts, Printing, Readings.” In The New Cultural History, edited by Lynn Hunt, 154 – 75. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Clayer, Nathalie. 2015. “Sufi Printed Matter and Knowledge About the Bektashi Order in the Late Ottoman Period.” In Sufism, Literary Production, and Printing in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Rachida Chih, Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen, and Rüdiger Seesemann, 351 – 67. Würzburg: Ergon-Verlag. Clemens, Gabriele B., ed. 2013. Zensur im Vormärz: Pressefreiheit und Informationskontrolle in Europa. Ostfildern: Jan Thorbecke Verlag. Coller, Ian. 2010. Arab France: Islam and the Making of Modern Europe, 1798 – 1831. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Cragin, Thomas J. 2001. “The Failings of Popular News Censorship in Nineteenth-Century France.” Book History 4: 49 – 80. Cubitt, Geoffrey. 1993. The Jesuit Myth: Conspiracy Theory and Politics in Nineteenth-Century France. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dauber, Jeremy. 2007. “Looking at the Yiddish Landscape: Representation in Nineteenth-Century Hasidic and Maskilic Literature.” In The Shtetl: New Evaluations, edited by Steven T. Katz, 140 – 78. New York: New York University Library.

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Ehnes, Caley. 2012. “Religion, Readership, and the Periodical Press: The Place of Poetry in Good Words.” Victorian Periodicals Review 45: 466 – 87. Feingold, Ben Ami. 1987. “Feminism in Hebrew in Nineteenth Century Fiction.” Jewish Social Studies 49: 235 – 50. François, Etienne. 1989. “Alphabetisierung und Lesefähigkeit in Frankreich und Deutschland um 1800.” In Deutschland und Frankreich im Zeitalter der Französischen Revolution, edited by Helmut Berding, Etienne François, and Hans-Peter Ullmann, 407 – 25. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Fyfe, Aileen. 2006. “A Short History of the Religious Tract Society.” In From the Dairyman’s Daughter to Worrals of the WAAF: The Religious Tract Society, Lutterworth Press and Children’s Literature, edited by Dennis Butts and Pat Garrett, 13 – 35. Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press. Gellman, Uriel. 2021. “Popular Religion and Modernity: Jewish Magic Books in Eastern Europe in the Nineteenth Century.” Polin Studies in Jewish History 33: 185 – 202. Hilgers, Joseph. 1904. Der Index der verbotenen Bücher: In seiner neuen Fassung dargelegt und rechtlichhistorisch gewürdigt. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herdersche Verlagsbuchhandlung. Howsam, Leslie. 2004. “The Bible Society and the Book Trade.” In Sowing the Word: The Cultural Impact of the British and Foreign Bible Society, 1804 – 2004, edited by Stephen Batalden, Kathleen Cann, and John Dean, 24 – 37. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press. Keenan, Desmond J. 1983. The Catholic Church in Nineteenth-Century Ireland. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books. Kokosalakis, Nikos. 1987. “Religion and Modernization in 19th Century Greece.” Social Compass 34: 223 – 41. Krienke, Hosanna. 2017. “The ‘After-Life’ of Illness: Reading against the Deathbed in Gaskell’s Ruth and Nineteenth-Century Convalescent Devotionals.” Victorian Literature and Culture 45: 35 – 53. Larsen, Timothy. 2012. A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians. New York: Oxford University Press. Lässig, Simone. 2004. Jüdische Wege ins Bürgertum: Kulturelles Kapital und sozialer Aufstieg im 19. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Lyons, Martyn. “New Readers in the Nineteenth Century: Women, Children, Workers.” In A History of Reading in the West, edited by Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, 313 – 44. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Mendelsohn, Adam. 2017. “Great Britain, the Commonwealth, and Anglophone Jewry.” In The Cambridge History of Judaism. Vol. 7, The Modern World, 1815 – 2000, edited by Mitchell B. Hart and Tony Michels, 133 – 63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mollier, Jean-Yves, and Marie-Françoise Cachin. 2007. “A Continent of Texts: Europe 1800 – 1890.” In A Companion to the History of the Book, edited by Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose, 303 – 14. Oxford: Blackwell. Nikolova, Nan. 1986. “The Role of Libraries in the Struggle for Popular Literacy in Nineteenth-Century Bulgaria: An Investigation of the Reading Clubs and Their Broad Educational Activities.” The Journal of Library History 21: 693 – 703. O’Malley, John W. 2018. Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Parush, Iris. 2004. Reading Jewish Women: Marginality and Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Eastern European Jewish Society. Translated by Saadya Sternberg. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press. Pettegree, Andrew. 2015. Brand Luther: 1517, Printing, and the Making of the Reformation. New York: Penguin. Pitteloud, Jean-François. 1986. “Philanthropie et lecture populaire: La société genevoise des publications religieuses, 1851 – 1896.” Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte—Revue Suisse d’histoire—Rivista Storica Svizzera 36: 413 – 42. Rose, Jonathan. 1992. “Rereading the English Common Reader: A Preface to a History of Audiences.” Journal of the History of Ideas 53: 47 – 70.

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Scolnik, Julie. 2010. “The Detective Novel in Ladino: Clues to a Little Known Genre.” European Judaism 43 (2): 126 – 33. Scott, Rosemary. 1992. “The Sunday Periodical: Sunday at Home.” Victorian Periodicals Review 25 (4): 158 – 62. Somel, Selçuk Akşin. 1997. “Ottoman Islamic Education in the Balkans in the Nineteenth Century.” Islamic Studies 36: 439 – 64. Stein, Sarah Abrevaya. 2007. “Divining the Secular in the Yiddish Popular Press.” In Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia, edited by Mark D. Steinberg and Heather J. Coleman, 253 – 75. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Steinhoff, Anthony J. 2008. The Gods of the City: Protestantism and Religious Culture in Strasbourg, 1870 – 1914. Leiden: Brill. Veidlinger, Jeffrey. 2009. Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wittmann, Reinhard. 1999. “Was There a Reading Revolution at the End of the Eighteenth Century?” In A History of Reading in the West, edited by Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, 284 – 312. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Zalar, Jeffrey T. 2019. Reading and Rebellion in Catholic Germany, 1770 – 1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Part III: Religion and the Arts

Samuel J. Kessler and Anthony J. Steinhoff

11 Architecture

Je veux, pour composer chastement mes églogues, Coucher auprès du ciel, comme les astrologues, Et, voisin des clochers écouter en rêvant Leurs hymnes solennels emportés par le vent. Les deux mains au menton, du haut de ma mansarde, Je verrai l’atelier qui chante et qui bavarde; Les tuyaux, les clochers, ces mats de la cité, Et les grands ciels qui font rêver d’éternité. —Charles Baudelaire, “Paysage” (1857)*

In the opening stanza of “Paysage” from Les fleurs du mal, Charles Baudelaire points twice to church steeples—les clochers. The first reference evokes a sense of the sacred; they are structures whose “solemn hymns are carried by the wind.” The second mention compares steeples to chimneys (tuyaux), which Baudelaire describes as “masts of the city reaching into the sky.” At first glance, this progression seems to point to a certain secularization, with the steeples losing their sacred character and, especially if tuyaux were translated not by “chimneys” but by “smokestacks,” even being crowded out from the skyscape. But since Baudelaire never describes these steeples as old, worn, or neglected, one could argue that he associates them with the present, not the past, and even sees them as one of many recent additions to the built environment. In fact, the nineteenth century witnessed the most prolific period of religious construction that Europe had ever experienced. New structures were erected, while existing ones were restored, replaced, expanded, or otherwise modified. Moreover, existing churches that had lacked bell towers for one reason or another now acquired them, most famously the Cologne Cathedral (Germany), which gained a pair of new spires as part of a massive effort between 1842 and 1880 to complete the monumental Gothic structure (Figure 11.1). The need and desire for new sacred architecture between 1800 and 1914 provoked questions whose discussion and resolution had considerable implications for the concerned religious communities and for society at large, precisely because even the more modest of these new structures affected the built environment, whether rural or urban. One set of concerns was eminently practical: what kind of religious space did the community need? How should the building be structured? No less critically, how would the project be financed? Aesthetic considerations were no less important. Decision makers—faith communities, architects, public and ecclesiastical officials—had to

* “I would, to compose my eclogues chastely, / Lie down close to the sky like an astrologer, / And, near the church towers, listen while I dream / To their solemn anthems borne to me by the wind. / My chin cupped in both hands, high up in my garret / I shall see the workshops where they chatter and sing, / The chimneys, the steeples, those masts of the city, / And the skies that make one dream of eternity.” https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110609059-013

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Figure 11.1: The Cologne Cathedral, engraving, 1840.

determine in which style (or styles) the building should be constructed, which in turn raised the question of whether a particular architectural language (if any) was especially appropriate for sacred architecture. Increasingly, they reflected too on how to leverage aesthetic choice in order to convey messages about the faith community and its relationship to the broader urban, social, cultural, and even political environment. For years, explorations of religion and architecture in this period have been the domain of architectural and art historians, which explains the literature’s tendency to examine aspects of form and aesthetics in the context of larger aesthetic movements: from classicism, Gothic revival, and historicism to art nouveau and early modernism (e. g. Lewis 2002; Wortman 2003; Foucart and Hamon 2006). Recent scholarship has encouraged a broadening of the research agenda by paying greater attention to questions of space and building use (e. g. Steinhoff 2001; Yates 2008; Whyte 2017). Researchers have thus studied how religious buildings were implicated in contests over the public use of space, from the building of majestic Russian Orthodox churches in such “Catholic” cities as Warsaw to the decisions to locate churches at major intersections in the contemporary redesigns of Paris and Vienna. Other specialists have contended that the construction and use of religious buildings provide insight into the conditions of religious toleration and the changing dynamics of religious coexistence whether in the Balkans or the British Isles (Kalmar 2001; Makaš and Conley 2010). For their part, theologians and religious historians have stressed that the nineteenth century building boom provoked numerous discussions within religious com-

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munities over the nature of sacred space (Seng 1995). What kind of building did a community need? Did it have to be a church, a synagogue, or a mosque? These scholars have also highlighted how the imagination and planning of a building’s interiors offer insight into communities’ ritual practices, even how they imagined themselves. Finally, newer research has demonstrated that church, synagogue, and mosque building was, in fact, a multifaceted phenomenon. These buildings were erected as monuments to past glories, increased civic acceptance, and newfound wealth. They were expressions of communal solidarity but also of aristocratic largesse and state interest. Furthermore, as statements of what was beautiful, virtuous, or modern, they attracted the attention of a public who might appreciate them more for their aesthetic qualities than their sacred purposes. This chapter seeks to weave together these many strands to produce an overarching view of religious architecture and notions of religious space in nineteenth-century Europe. It begins by examining the century’s religious building boom and the complex social and political factors that helped drive it. It then explores notions of aesthetics and style in the century’s ongoing discussions of sacred architecture. The chapter’s final section shifts the focus to buildings and notions of sacred space, reflecting not only on what happens within the building but also on the structure’s relationship to the wider built environment of neighborhood and city.

A Golden Age of Religious Construction Arguably, the most salient fact bearing on the relationship between religion and architecture during Europe’s long nineteenth century was the sheer volume of building. Between 1800 and 1914, Europeans—individuals and faith communities, municipalities and states—participated in the most extensive program of sacred construction that the Continent had ever known. If the pace of construction was irregular, reflecting fluctuations in both financial and legal conditions, the cumulative result remains impressive. By the eve of the First World War, tens of thousands of new structures for worship and religious activity now dotted the European landscape, from Belfast to Vienna and Constantinople, and from Andalucía to Alsace and Galicia. This urge to build was also a patently cross-denominational phenomenon. In one way or another, all the Continent’s faith communities engaged in important construction projects, both in the cities and the countryside. New edifices, however, represented only a portion of this construction. Hundreds of existing structures were also renovated and expanded, and many projects begun before 1800, including the Cologne Cathedral, were now completed. Although the physical evidence for this religious building boom is abundant, the phenomenon itself has attracted scant scholarly attention. This owes largely to the fragmented nature of the relevant data. For many localities, the extant data remains to be compiled. And the data that has been collected generally concerns only a specific geographic space: a country (e. g., England or Ireland), a diocese (Rennes or Cologne), or a

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city (Berlin or Paris). Nevertheless, the available data do enable us to sense the broader picture. Developments in the British Isles are the best documented. In England, some 6,000 Anglican churches and chapels were erected between 1835 and 1900 (1,010 alone in the 1860s!), to which we can add nearly 5,000 Dissenting churches and chapels (from 1851 to 1912) and some 1,000 Roman Catholic churches. In Wales, more than 700 Nonconformist chapels were built between 1801 and 1851; between 1851 and 1905, the Church of England (in Wales) erected another 227 structures for worship. Scotland witnessed the construction of roughly 1,000 new Presbyterian churches between 1830 and 1850, and at least another 600 between 1850 and 1909. In addition, between 1845 and 1910, nearly 400 new Catholic churches had emerged on Scottish soil (Brooks 1995). In Ireland too, 1,805 new Catholic churches and 217 convents went up between 1800 and 1865, with another major burst of ecclesiastical construction occurring between 1850 and 1880 that embraced not just churches and convents but also chapels, seminaries, parish houses, and monasteries (Larkin 1967, 864). Data from France and Germany add usefully to the picture. Between 1800 and 1905, at least 7,000 new Catholic parish churches were built in France, and hundreds more renovated or expanded (Chaline 1993). In the same period, France’s Jewish communities benefitted from the erection of more than 100 new, purpose-built synagogues. A wave of new synagogue construction also touched the German lands, with some 1,700 new synagogues and prayer halls alone being built in the territories that united in 1871 to form the German Empire (Hammer-Schenk 1981, 14). The motivations behind the building craze also warrant attention. In the century’s early decades, new construction served primarily to replace structures that were no longer fit for worship. In rural Ireland, numerous churches had been poorly built and by the late 1700s were succumbing to the island’s harsh weather conditions. By 1800, these structures were targeted for repair or replacement. Authorities in the French diocese of Soissons likewise determined in 1810 that roughly 45 percent of its eight hundred churches needed serious repair or replacement, which fueled the repeated demands for new constructions after 1815. Churches that suffered during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, too, had to be rebuilt or restored once peace returned in 1815, such as in the Prussian Rhineland (diZerega 2021). The British bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807 also destroyed the Vor Frue Kerke (Our Lady Church), which was rebuilt in a neoclassical style (1817– 29) according to plans by Christian Frederik Hansen. In France, the White Terror that accompanied the return of the Bourbon regime in 1814 reignited tensions between Catholics and Protestants over worship space, which was partially defused by erecting new churches for the Calvinist congregations. Above all, demographic change made the construction of worship space essential. Quite simply, Europe needed new sacred architecture to accommodate a population that continued to expand. In many parts of rural Europe, extant buildings were expanded and, from Ireland to Greece, rural communities that had long lacked churches finally received them. The rapid growth in the number and size of cities placed partic-

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ular pressure on urban ecclesiastical infrastructures. Indeed, religious leaders from London to Hamburg and from Paris to Saint Petersburg frequently complained about the dearth of clergy and worship spaces, which they bemoaned as a moral menace and a source of public disorder. But scholars have frequently overlooked that from 1850 on, a steady stream of churches and related buildings were erected to meet the pressing demand. Berlin, for example, witnessed the construction of 38 new Protestant and 40 new Catholic churches between 1870 and 1914. In Paris, 43 new Catholic churches arose between 1814 and 1914, in addition to some 6 Jewish synagogues. The need for new Catholic churches in Berlin and Jewish synagogues in Paris points to a further aspect of the building boom’s demographic angle: nineteenthcentury migrations resulted in a geographic redistribution of Europe’s faith communities. Catholic churches arose in Protestant areas like Berlin, Saxony, and the industrializing Ruhr valley in response to the stream of Catholic workers arriving from Prussia’s Polish territories. Similarly, in both Paris and Strasbourg, the consistorial synagogue was twice replaced (and relocated) because the community, continually expanding as rural Jews moved to the cities, had outgrown its existing structure. After 1880, the westward migration of Jews from eastern Europe stimulated the building not just of larger but additional synagogues in such cities as Paris, Antwerp, Berlin, Budapest, Copenhagen, Prague, and Vienna. Moreover, to meet the needs of Indian Muslims arriving in Britain from the colonial periphery, Europe’s first purpose-built mosque, the Shah Jahan Mosque, was erected in Woking (Surrey) from 1888 to 1889 (Figure 11.2). Political and legal change, too, prompted communities to build. The spread of religious toleration and the legal emancipation of many of the Continent’s religious communities eliminated many of the barriers to creating their own worship spaces. In France, the concordatory legislation of 1801 – 2 lifted restrictions on Calvinist church construction, while obliging the French state to finance construction projects for all the state-recognized religious communities: Catholic, Reformed, Lutheran and, after 1808, Jewish. The British Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829 also finally permitted Catholics to commission new church buildings. Similarly, the Ottoman Hatt-i Hümayun decree of 1856 ended the constraints on the construction of new places of worship for non-Muslim communities, giving rise to new Christian churches (Orthodox, Catholic, Uniate) as well as new Jewish synagogues in Constantinople. After 1859, the legal emancipation of non-Catholics in the newly founded Kingdom of Italy made possible the building of new Protestant churches, such as Saint Paul’s within the Walls (Episcopal) in Rome (1876), and monumental Jewish synagogues in Florence, Rome, and Turin. Moreover, the progressive emancipation of central European Jewry after 1850 was reflected in a wave of new, often grand synagogue construction. As the Balkan states—Greece, Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria—gained autonomy and eventually independence from the Ottoman Empire, they too sought to construct new Orthodox churches to underscore the intimate ties between the new nation-states and Orthodox Christianity. In Belgrade, which became the capital of an autonomous Serbia in 1841, the Cathedral Church of Saint Michael the Archangel (1837– 40) was con-

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Figure 11.2: W. I. Chambers, “The Mosque – Woking,” The Building News and Engineering Journal 57 (August 2, 1889).

structed in the heart of the city, its neo-Baroque bell tower designed to stand tall amidst the city’s still minaret-laden skyline. As the century advanced, however, the transformation of former Ottoman administrative centers into national capitals prompted extensive destruction of the Ottoman built environment (“de-Ottomanization”), including numerous mosques (Hartmuth 2006). When Serbia gained full independence in 1867, for instance, much of old-town Belgrade along with its mosques was demolished, which was deemed a “sacrifice necessary to make the city a European-looking metropolis” (Makaš and Conley 2010, 48). In Bulgaria, which had been under Ottoman rule for nearly five centuries, only a single working mosque—the Banya Bashi Mosque—remained in its capital, Sofia, on the eve of the First World War. The assertion of Habsburg control over Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1878 saved many of the region’s mosques—imperial funds were even used to rebuild completely Travnik’s “Varoska” Mosque (1903 – 6)—but a mosque complex was torn down to make room for a park

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in Sarajevo, while in Zvornik the Fethija Mosque was converted into a museum (AmziErdoğ dular 2024, 115). Finally, the flurry of religious building took place because, from the late eighteenth century onwards, increased economic prosperity enabled Europeans to pay for it. To be certain, governments at every level financed the construction of new worship space in important ways. Municipalities donated tracts for building sites. Legislatures endowed funds to finance new churches, most spectacularly the grants voted by the British House of Commons in 1818 (£1,000,000) and 1824 (£500,000) for Anglican church building. In France, the post-revolutionary religious settlement obligated the state to underwrite all necessary church construction. By contrast, in the German lands, the system of state churches generally made new building the responsibility of the local parish and prince (at least in Protestant communities), such that formal state support for worship space was limited. But after 1870, private initiatives such as Berlin’s Evangelischer Kirchenbauverein (Protestant Church Building Society), founded in 1883 with the support of Empress Augusta Victoria, began playing a major role in financing new church construction. In addition, the introduction of a special church tax, starting in the 1880s in Prussia, and in most German states before 1914, created a valuable source of revenue to finance (among other needs) new construction (Ribbe 1990). Growing personal wealth up and down the social pyramid also helped finance this spate of new religious building. Europe’s new commercial and industrial elite now joined the ranks of the possessors of landed wealth as major church benefactors. For example, the Jewish railroad magnate Samuel Poliatkov used his influence and money (some 100,000 rubles) to arrange for the construction of Moscow’s first official synagogue (1868 – 70), and the Sultan of Bhopal underwrote most of the cost for the Woking mosque. More typically, building projects were funded through collections and subscription campaigns. Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, and other Nonconformists all established voluntary societies to raise funds for new church and chapel construction. In Catholic Ireland, even in richer parishes, contributions from the poor to building campaigns were significant, at times amounting to over a third of the total cost (Grimes 2009). The subscription lists for (Anglican) All Saint’s Church in Rome mention a handful of large donors (£500–£4,500), but the bulk of the monies came from some 2,000 individual subscribers who contributed between £1 and £100 (Bremner 2019). The approach used to finance the Orthodox Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Warsaw (1894 – 1912) was more unusual but notable. Erected to commemorate the centenary of the final Polish partition of 1793, Tsar Alexander III decreed that in addition to personal donations, which ultimately flowed in from every corner of the Empire, the project was to be funded from mandatory contributions from “Congress Poland” and from tax increases on Warsaw’s residents, an arrangement that the Polish Catholic population greatly resented.

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Aesthetic Considerations The thousands of new worship spaces that arose in Europe between 1800 and 1914 attest to the employment of a dizzying array of styles: from neoclassical, neo-Gothic, and neo-renaissance to neo-Byzantine, art nouveau, and modernist, as well as eclectic mixes of multiple aesthetics. In terms of building materials, the new sacred spaces acknowledged tradition—employing stone, brick, even wood—and modernity, as seen in their growing reliance on steel, industrially-produced glass, and cement. It might seem that this diversity simply reflected European architecture’s aesthetic evolution. As the century began, neoclassical styles prevailed for buildings both sacred and secular; by the 1840s, construction increasingly took place in a historicist mode (neo-Gothic, neoByzantine, etc.), while the fin-de-siècle witnessed the rise of modernism. Yet, recent research has shown that such a reading is insufficient, precisely because after 1800 the choice of style was increasingly invested with meaning. Faith communities and architects debated which styles were particularly appropriate for sacred architecture, and contemporaries more and more instrumentalized aesthetic choice for symbolic gain. In particular, communities chose to exploit the choice of building style to distinguish themselves from their peers, claim a degree of civic equality, or even signal their openness to modern understandings of religious community and society. Although Europe’s Catholic and Protestant communities underwent a broad period of religious renewal in the wake of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, the new religious sensibilities had only a modest influence on sacred architecture before the 1830s. Thus, during the century’s opening decades, most religious structures embraced the prevailing neoclassical aesthetic. Impressive neoclassical churches arose in Saint Petersburg (Kazan Cathedral, 1801 – 11) and Helsinki (Lutheran Cathedral, 1830 – 52) (Figure 11.3), London (Anglican Saint Marks, Kennington, 1822 – 24) and Milan (San Carlo al Corso, 1839 – 47), but also more modest structures such as the box-like Catholic pro-Cathedral of Saint Mary’s in Dublin, Ireland. Paris’s Church of the Madeleine (1811 – 42) was initially conceived as a Greek-style temple to the glory of Napoleon’s army but ultimately completed as a parish church. In Berlin, King Frederick William III had Karl Friedrich Schinkel remodel the Baroque Cathedral in the neoclassicist style (1820 – 22) to celebrate the Union of the Prussian Lutheran and Reformed Churches. Similarly, in Hungary, the massive Esztergom Basilica was restored along neoclassical lines (1822 – 56) to mark the Catholic diocese of Estzergom-Budapest’s restoration in 1820. In places like Brumath, France, Jewish communities deliberately adopted neoclassical plans for their synagogues because that was the style being used for other public buildings. Even at mid-century, architects like Garabet Balyan were designing neoclassical façades for such structures as the Dolmabahçe Mosque (1853 – 55) in Ottoman Constantinople. Carol Herselle Krinsky suggests that the first signs of an effort to define a religious building through its aesthetic program emerged in the context of new synagogue construction (which, well into the nineteenth century, was normally carried out by Chris-

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Figure 11.3: F. Tengström, Nya Lutherska Kyrkan och Bibliotheket (The Lutheran Church by the Library in Helsinki), 1838. Lithograph.

tian architects). For example, when the Margrave of Baden authorized in 1789 the erection of a synagogue on a prominent Karlsruhe street corner, the court architect, Friedrich Weinbrenner, employed an exotic Egyptian style for its street-side façade to suggest that the synagogue was still out of place in the Christian city (Figure 11.4). In Munich too, the state architect, Jean-Baptiste Métivier, sought to connote the Jewish community’s “foreignness” by adding Egyptian elements—notably large white marble palm capitals—to the neoclassical basilican synagogue erected in 1825 (Krinsky 1985, 72 – 73). The neo-Gothic revival, which began in earnest in the 1830s, stimulated a vigorous discourse about stylistic choices for sacred construction that shaped building decisions from the British Isles into central Europe for decades to come. In his classic and influential study, The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (1841), the English architect Augustus Pugin (1812 – 52) justified his historicist position. Rejecting (neo‐)classicism in all its forms as pagan and thus totally unsuited for Christian buildings, he contended that the revival of sacred architecture depended on a return to the rules and principles of the Middle Ages, an era when true church art allegedly flourished (Bałus 2020). While Pugin and such contemporaries as Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Lassus (1807– 57) and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (1814 – 79), both French, and the Dutchman Petrus Josephus Cuijpers (1827– 1921) recognized that the Gothic was not exclusively a sacred

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Figure 11.4: Peter Wagner, The (Karlsruhe) Synagogue, c. 1810. Engraving. Courtesy of Stadtarchiv Karlsruhe, Germany.

style, they contended that thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Gothic churches represented the summum of sacred architecture. Accordingly, to ensure that a church was “read” as a church, an architect (or commissioning faith community) need only select a historic, Christian style, either Gothic or its “less perfect predecessor,” Romanesque. In part, the neo-Gothic gospel was spread via the printed word: in treatises like Pugin’s polemical Contrasts of 1837; Charles de Montalembert’s essay, “De l’état actuel de l’art religieux” (The Current State of Religious Art); August Reichensperger’s treatise, Die christlich-germanische Baukunst und ihr Verhältnis zur Gegenwart (ChristianGerman Architecture and Its Relationship to the Present, 1845) but also in articles appearing in periodicals like Annales archaeologiques and the new journals devoted to ecclesiastical art, such as The Ecclesiologist (Cambridge, 1841 – 68) and Das Christliche Kunstblatt für Kirche, Schule und Haus (Stuttgart, 1858 – 1919). But it was also nourished through personal contact and through the public attention garnered by notable building projects, including the Cologne Cathedral’s completion and the radical rebuilding of Notre-Dame in Paris. Kraus contends, too, that the construction of Vienna’s Votivkirche (1856 – 79) (Figure 11.5) opened the way for a more general employment of the neoGothic style for churches in the Habsburg Empire, as evidenced by the Basilica of Saint Ludmila in Prague’s Vinohrady district (1888 – 92). By the 1850s, neo-Gothic was roundly accepted throughout northern Europe as the ideal style for Christian buildings. In Britain, most new churches, whether Anglican, Roman Catholic, or Presbyterian, took as their model the medieval parish church with its deep chancel. In Germany, too, the neo-Gothic had ecumenical appeal, promoted by architects, bishops, and parish leaders for new Catholic and Protestant structures alike. In 1861, the Eisenach Church Conference, a body that represented the governments of the German state Protestant churches, even formally endorsed the neo-Gothic in its Eisenach Guidelines (Eisenacher Regulativ) as the preferred style for Protestant

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Figure 11.5: The Votivkirche in Vienna. Illustration from Wilhelm Lübke and Carl von Lützow (eds.), Denkmäler der Kunst zur Übersicht ihres Entwicklungsganges von den ersten Versuchen bis zu den Standpunkten der Gegenwart (Stuttgart, 1879), 2: 137.

churches. Yet, as Eva-Maria Seng observes, German Protestants’ endorsement of the neo-Gothic was motivated less by ecumenicism and more by a desire to appropriate the Gothic as the foundation for a genuinely Protestant architectural aesthetic (1995). By contrast, in France, and to a large degree in Belgium and in the Netherlands, the neo-Gothic style was employed almost exclusively for Catholic projects, from monumental structures such as the Saint Nicolas Basilica in Nantes (Lassus, 1844 – 69) and Our Lady of Laeken Church, Brussels (1854 – 1911) to more modest parish churches such as Cuijpers’s Saint Catherine’s Church in Eindhoven, The Netherlands (1861 – 67) (De Maeyer and Verpoest 2000). Both in discourse and in practice, the idea that neo-Gothic was an inherently Christian style was broadly transnational. Nonetheless, the increased intertwining of notions of religion and national identity after 1815 encouraged a certain nationalization of neo-Gothic, especially in the context of sacred construction. In the later Victorian

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era, architects like George Frederic Bodley (1827– 1907) rejected the French high Gothic style in favor of fourteenth-century English Gothic models for their churches, as seen in Holy Trinity Church (Anglican), South Kensington (1901) (Figure 11.6). Drawing on

Figure 11.6: Street façade of Holy Trinity Church (Anglican) in South Kensington, England, 2014. Reproduced by permission of Diego Delso, delso.photo, Creative Commons License CC-BY-SA.

historic models from Liège and Flanders, Belgian architects like Jean Baptiste de Bethune developed a specifically Belgian (and Catholic) approach to the Gothic (Dagnino 2012). Advocating for completing the Cologne Cathedral, August Reichensperger portrayed the Gothic church as a resolutely German, national monument, while the Eisenach Church Conference’s endorsement of neo-Gothic in 1861 aspired to claim the style not just for Protestantism but for a Protestant vision of the German nation. If the Gothic revival’s promoters regarded neo-Romanesque forms as acceptable but less “perfect” models for Christian architecture, the latter was nonetheless es-

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teemed and widely used as a religious building style. The neo-Romanesque style owed much of its popularity to the fact that it offered an alternative to “official” styles for sacred architecture. Inspired by models from late antiquity as well as eleventh- and twelfth-century Lombardy and Norman England, the Romanesque revival afforded considerable aesthetic variety. In the 1840s, Rudolf Wiegmann, professor of architecture at Düsseldorf, asserted that the Romanesque was “prematurely interrupted by the Gothic, thus making its continuation and perfection in the nineteenth century more promising and more suitable.” Above all, Curran maintains (1988), it offered a chance at reconciliation between the antique Greek conception of God (represented in classicism) and the Christian Middle Ages’ extravagant spiritualism (Gothic). An early variant of neo-Romanesque, known as “round-arch” style (Rundbogenstil), was particularly popular in the German lands, as seen in such structures as Munich’s All Saints Court Church (1826 – 37), the first new church built in Bavaria since 1803 (Figure 11.7), and Berlin’s Saint Michael Catholic Church (1851 – 56). The Germanic taste for the neo-Romanesque also found expression in such monuments as Đakovo’s Catholic Cathedral in Croatia (1866 – 82), constructed by the Viennese architects Carl Roesner and Friedrich von Schmidt. The neo-Romanesque aesthetic frequently served to promote religious differentiation. Because “high church” Protestants and Roman Catholics championed the neoGothic in Britain, “broad church” Anglicans and Nonconformists often preferred to build their worship houses in a neo-Romanesque style, as seen with William Mortimer and Michael Drury’s Mint Lane Baptist Chapel, Lincoln (1870 – 71). In Strasbourg, the

Figure 11.7: The All-Saints Court Church (Hofkirche) in Munich. Illustration from Johann Michael Söltl, München mit seinen Umgebungen, historisch, topographisch, statistisch dargestellt (Munich, 1838), 163.

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Lutheran New Church parish opted against replacing the building destroyed during the Franco-Prussian War (1870 – 71) with another Gothic structure. In part, the parish wanted a building (which would be the city’s first purpose-built Protestant church) that would better meet the needs of Protestant worship. But it also wanted to distinguish the home of the city’s most important Lutheran parish more sharply from Strasbourg’s iconic, Catholic cathedral. In 1872, the parish adopted Emile Salomon’s neo-Romanesque basilican design, which it deemed “contemporaneous to Christianity’s origins and easily adaptable to the simple forms of Protestant worship” (Steinhoff 2001). In Paris, Catholic monarchists roundly criticized Paul Abadie for not employing a neoGothic style for the Basilica of Sacré-Coeur (1875 – 1914), which they viewed as the only choice for the national votive church. However, Abadie’s neo-Romanesque design, with its cruciform plan and domes (Figure 11.8), consciously sought to differentiate Sacré-Coeur from Notre-Dame Cathedral, while also taking into account the constraints posed by the site, the butte of Montmartre (Jonas 1997). In Britain, the Russian Orthodox community endorsed a neo-Romanesque design for the cathedral erected at Kensington (1848 – 49); Paris’s Greek Orthodox community made a similar choice for its new church on rue Bizet (Émile Vaudremer, 1897). When fire destroyed the sixteenth-century basilican Metropolitan Church of (still Ottoman) Salonika in 1890, it was replaced with a neo-Romanesque structure. In Russia and

Figure 11.8: Paul Abadie’s plan for the south façade of the Basilica of Sacré-Coeur (Montmartre, Paris), 1876. Source: Médiathèque du patrimoine et de la photographie, France.

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Figure 11.9: The Consistorial Synagogue of Strasbourg, 1903. Source: Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire de Strasbourg.

southeast Europe, however, the neo-Romanesque aesthetic was typically employed to mark a church as non-Orthodox, as with Saint Petersburg’s Church of Saint Katarina (1885), constructed for the city’s Swedish (Lutheran) expatriates. Finally, whereas the neo-Gothic was viewed as appropriate only for Christian structures, the neo-Romanesque style was also employed for synagogues, such as those erected in German Kassel (1839) and Freiburg im Breisgau (1869 – 70), as well as Strasbourg’s consistorial synagogue (1895 – 98) (Figure 11.9). In the case of Kassel and Strasbourg, Jewish architects (respectively A. Rosengarten and Ludwig Levy) were responsible for the plans and stylistic choice. Within eastern and southeastern Europe, the historicist penchant promoted a neoByzantine style—modeled after sacred (and secular) buildings from the fifth through the eleventh centuries—as the preferred choice for Orthodox church architecture. Throughout the region, the search for a new purity in sacred architecture also took on strongly nationalist overtones. In Russia, the quest for a national style in church architecture dates from the reign of Tsar Nicholas I (1825 – 55). In part, it reflects the doctrine of official nationalism, which viewed Orthodox Christianity as a fundamental component of the Russian national idea. But it also follows from Nicholas’s conviction that Russia should embrace its Slavic roots and distance itself from the soulless, revolutionary West. The “Russian style” that began to emerge in the 1830s was heavily inspired by the vernacular wooden churches of the late fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, seen as symbols of a purer, rural spirituality and of an authentic Russian folk spirit. In

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Figure 11.10: Saint Basil’s Cathedral on Moscow’s Red Square, c. 1890 – 1900. Photograph. Source: Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

their simplest versions, these churches featured a linear floor plan, a defined apse containing the altar on the east, and a bell tower (with onion dome), which helped establish the structure’s strong vertical line. Exemplary too was Saint Basil’s Cathedral on Moscow’s Red Square (1555 – 61) (Figure 11.10), which blended Byzantine/Muscovite architectural traditions with a geometrical plan typical of Italian Renaissance buildings (Brumfield 1993). Nicholas himself did not admire the Byzantine style. Nevertheless, he approved such Russo-Byzantine projects as Konstantin Ton’s grand Church of Christ the Savior in Moscow (1838 – 83), featuring a cruciform plan, medieval façade, and a dome whose gilding was achieved using the new technique of gold electroplating (Figure 11.11). In 1841, Nicolas also sanctioned Ton’s Model Album for Church Designs (1836) as the definitive guide for new Orthodox church construction throughout the empire (Brumfield 1993, 398 – 99). Although Ton provided the designs for and supervised the construction of dozens of Russo-Byzantine churches in provincial towns, including Sveaborg and Rostov-on-Don, in the countryside older traditions continued in church architecture, largely unaffected by urban historicist trends (Shvidkovsky 2007, 324). In 1852, Nicholas approved the design for a new church in Kyiv that marked the transition to a more rigorous interpretation of neo-Byzantine style in sacred architecture, the striking Cathedral of Saint Volodymyr (1862 – 82). Under Nicholas’s successor,

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Figure 11.11: William H. Rau, The Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, Russia, 1903. Photograph. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Alexander II (1855 – 81), this version of the neo-Byzantine style became the preferred style for Orthodox church construction, championed by such notables as Prince Grigory Gagarin (himself an amateur architect), the Empress Maria Alexandrovna, and Alexander II’s sister, the president of the Imperial Academy of Arts, Maria Nikolayevna. The first church to be built (and not just designed) in this neo-Byzantine mode was Roman Kuzmin’s Church of Dmitry Solunsky in Saint Petersburg (1861 – 66). Inspired by Constantinople’s Hagia Sophia, it featured a main dome over a cruciform plan that innovated by employing four apses instead of the usual two. David Grimm’s 1865 modifications to the original design gave the final structure a more pronounced vertical dimension (Figure 11.12). Whereas neo-Byzantine churches were initially con-

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centrated around Saint Petersburg and in Crimea, by the 1880s, the neo-Byzantine style as interpreted by Kuzmin and Grimm was increasingly adopted for impressive churches on the imperial periphery as part of the Russification politics of Alexander II’s son, Tsar Alexander III (1881 – 94). Prominent examples include Warsaw’s Alexander Nevsky Cathedral (1894 – 1912), the garrison Cathedral Church of Saints Peter and Paul in Kaunas (1891 – 95), and the Church of Theotokos Orans in Vilnius (1899 – 1903). The latter church is especially notable for its two-tone, striped masonry and the way its arcades blend into the hemispherical domes (Wortman 2003).

Figure 11.12: The Church of Dmitry Solunsky in Saint Petersburg, Russia, 1913. Photograph. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The progressive emancipation of southeastern Europe from the Ottoman Empire promoted a similar Byzantine revival in regional Orthodox church architecture. Across the Balkans, the local Orthodox Church—whether Bulgarian, Greek, Romanian, or Serb— was regarded as a key pillar of the respective nationalist movements. Faced with the need—and the ability—to construct new worship spaces after centuries of Ottoman restrictions, the debates over an appropriately national style for the new sacred architecture resulted in a strong endorsement of Byzantine models, precisely because of their symbolic capacity to reject the Ottoman past and renew the region’s historic ties to Byzantium. In Greece, Vassilis Colonas notes, the early discussions of reviving a Byzantine aesthetic did not clearly distinguish between properly “Roman” and “Byzantine” elements (2006). Frequently, the latter term was used merely to indicate the use of brick ornamentation, for example around the bays. In Serbia, too, the beginnings a

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modern Byzantine style wedded Western-style axial plans and Byzantine features, as exemplified by the Cathedral of Saint George, Smederevo (Andrey Damyanov, 1850 – 54). Here, a three-nave basilica and tall, Baroque belltower were combined with a cross-in-square plan (with five domes), typical of middle- and late-period Byzantine churches. Colonas suggests that the birth of a more historically informed and structurally consequential neo-Byzantine sacred style in Greece arrived with the plans to build a new Orthodox cathedral in Athens (2006). In 1846, a public competition was organized to rework an initial Romanesque project (developed by the Danish architect Theophil Hansen), in which the design specifications now stipulated the use of a “Greco-Byzantine” style, the first use of the term. Demetrios Zezos’s winning design featured a crossin-square plan outlined by six interior pillars and a broad façade framed by two imposing belltowers. On Zezos’s premature death in 1857, the project was brought to completion by the team of Panagis Kalkos and François Boulanger, who increased the building’s final height and designed the exterior’s red-rose polychromatic decoration (Figure 11.13). With its consecration in 1862, the Athens cathedral became the point of reference for religious architecture in Greece, symbolizing a cultural and religious continuity with the Greek past that was not limited to classical antiquity. During the reign of King George I (1863 – 1913), numerous neo-Byzantine churches were erected in Athens and the country’s major cities, even in centers of the Greek diaspora (e. g., the Agios Minas Cathedral built between 1862 and 1895 in Heraklion, Crete) (Colonas 2006). As the Balkans’ national Orthodox churches invested in new sacred architecture after 1850, a tendency to build not just neo-Byzantine but also monumental neo-Byzantine churches becomes evident. In Serbia, the Viennese-trained Svetozar Ivačković (1844 – 1922) promoted the Byzantine revival with such structures as the grandiose Church of the Holy Transfiguration in Pančevo (1873 – 77) and the Church of Saint Sava in Kosovan Mitrovica. In 1882, construction began on the massive neo-Byzantine Alexander Nevsky Cathedral for the Exarchate of Bulgaria in Sofia, which in 1912 became the largest Orthodox church in the Balkans. In Romania, King Carol I marked the kingdom’s achievement of full independence in 1881 by promoting new church construction in a neo-Byzantine mode, notably the spacious Domnița Bălașa Church in Bucharest (1881 – 85) (Figure 11.14), and the even more grandiose Cathedral of Iași (1880 – 87). The neoclassical Church of Amzei in Bucharest was also demolished in 1898 and rebuilt, between 1898 and 1901, in a loosely neo-Byzantine style inspired by the medieval Saint Nicholas Church in Curtea de Argeș. Here again, Popescu maintains (2006), the architectural team of Alexandru Sâvulescu and Zigfried Kofczinski’s aesthetic choice served to assert neo-Byzantine as a national style for Orthodox church architecture. Strictly speaking, historicism played a lesser role in the designs for new synagogues. With their processional aisles and side chapels, neo-Gothic structures were illsuited to Jewish needs. However, a simple Gothic chapel might serve as a synagogue model, as seen in synagogues built for Lüneburg (1892 – 94) (Figure 11.15) and Berlin (Bismarckstrasse, 1897). More commonly, Krinsky notes, Gothic details were added to

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Figure 11.13: The Metropolitan Cathedral (Orthodox) of Athens, Greece, c. 1895 – 1915. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

synagogues; for example, tracery on the entrance portal at Sheffield’s North Church Street synagogue and Gothic-inspired interior decorations at Fürth and Regensburg. Architects defended these practices by noting that since Jewish communities had used such designs and ornamentation in the Gothic era, they could do so again in the modern, neo-Gothic era (Krinsky 1985, 85 – 87). As noted above, architects also employed neoclassicism or a variant of neo-Romanesque, as seen in such edifices as Moscow’s Choral Synagogue (1887– 1906), Warsaw’s Great Synagogue (1875 – 78), and Glasgow’s Garnethill Synagogue (1879 – 81). But whereas the historicist turn in Christian church construction looked to historic buildings as inspiration for renewal in sacred architecture, Jewish discourses more frequently used historicism to advance cultural-political claims about Jews’ place in modern European society. The nineteenth-century recourse to neoclassicism, for example, rejected rabbinic traditions, which viewed ancient Greece and Rome as sources of a violent and immoral Hellenistic paganism, and instead highlighted ancient notions of a multinational imperial citizenship as a model for Jewish toleration in modern times. Similarly, the German state’s endorsement of neo-Romanesque as a national style following unification encouraged Jewish communities to use that aesthetic for their synagogues after 1871 and, thereby, assert their membership in the new German nation.

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While not specifically historicist in nature, a new style did emerge that was considered particularly appropriate for Jewish synagogues, the so-called neo-Islamic or neo-Moorish. Presenting a pastiche of Islamic, Mediterranean, and Ottoman influences, it featured such elements as horseshoe arches; polychromed wall patterns; the use of slender cast-iron piers as supports; horizontal rooflines; twin, minaret-like towers; and bulbous domes over the ark (Efron 2015; Olson 2019). This was a style invented by Christian architects in central Europe, including such luminaries as Gottfried Semper (1803 – 79), Ludwig Förster (1797– 1863), and Otto Wagner (1841 – 1918). It was promoted in their buildings—Semper’s interiors for the Dresden synagogue (1838 – 40); Förster’s monumental Leopoldstadt Temple in Vienna (1854 – 59), the capital’s first freestanding, street-facing synagogue; and Wagner’s Rumbach Street synagogue in Budapest (1868 – 72)—and in print, most prominently via Förster’s influential architectural review, Die Allgemeine Bauzeitung (1831 – 1918). In part, the neo-Moorish style reflected a desire to evoke Judaism’s origins in the Near East; some architects even identified a connection between “Islamic” and Gothic architecture, which made the former a worthy alternative to the latter. Nonetheless, as Alofsin stresses, “In the minds of many contemporary theorists, the main reason for the use of the Moorish style for syn-

Figure 11.14: The Domnița Bălașa (Orthodox) Church in Bucharest, Romania, 2023. Source: Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

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agogue architecture was the ‘Arabian heritage’ of Judaism.” It was an “Orientalizing” gesture that marked the Jews as other and, frequently, inferior (2006, 44). Nevertheless, numerous Jewish communities embraced the Islamic/Moorish aesthetic, seeing in it a chance to make positive “Orientalist idealizations of themselves prevail over the Orientalist vituperations” (Kalmar 2001, 72). In 1855, the Jewish architect Otto Simonson adopted the neo-Moorish style for Leipzig’s new synagogue. Almost simultaneously, Jewish leaders approved designs for imposing, neo-Moorish synagogues in (Buda)Pest and Berlin: respectively, Ludwig Förster’s Dohány Street Synagogue (1854 – 59), complete with twin minarets, fanciful tilework, and spacious interior (Figure 11.16); and Eduard Knoblauch’s New or Oranienburger Strasse Synagogue (1859 – 66). Indeed, the generally improved conditions for European Jewry, at least into the 1870s, gave Jewish congregations confidence to build large, demonstrative synagogues in a distinctive architectural style. Orthodox Jewish communities, such as Frankfurt am Main’s Israelitische Religionsgemeinschaft, in fact, often preferred the neo-Moorish aesthetic for their building projects because its unique architectural language clearly differentiated synagogue from church and, thereby, offered symbolic resistance to pressures to assimilate to Christianity. Moreover, because of its references

Figure 11.15: Eduard Lühr, The Lüneburg Synagogue (Germany), 1895. Photograph Courtesy of Stadtarchiv Lüneburg.

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Figure 11.16: Klösz Gy. Fényk, The Dohány Street Synagogue, Budapest, Hungary, 1890. Photograph. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

to secular Islamic buildings, assimilated Jews in central and eastern Europe appreciated how the style was both respectable and promoted a distancing of the modern, urban synagogue from the humbler prayer houses and synagogues of eastern Europe’s shtetls. By the turn of the century, the historicist imperative in sacred architecture was waning. In part, this reflected new discussions about the very nature of such buildings. By the 1880s, for example, German Protestants were increasingly dissatisfied with the Eisenach Guidelines. Local authorities started again approving churches in a Renaissance-Romanesque revival style, such as the Friedenskirche in Stuttgart (1890 – 92). More importantly, pastors, theologians, and architects engaged in critical discussions of the modern Protestant church’s real architectural needs. Pastors such as the Lutheran Emil Sulze, the leader of the so-called congregation movement (Gemeinde-Bewegung), contended that churches needed now to be seen more as community centers than “houses of God” (Gotteshäuser). Accordingly, plans for new buildings should provide not just worship space but also areas for the faith community’s other activities.

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Starting in 1894, the regular Congresses of Protestant Church Architecture became important forums for these discussions, complementing the exchanges that occurred in such journals as the Allgemeine Bauzeitung, the Christliche Kunstblatt and, after 1896, the Monatschrift für Gottesdienst und kirchliche Kunst (Monthly Review on Worship and Ecclesiastical Art). The so-called 1891 Wiesbaden Program presented a first organized challenge to the Eisenach Guidelines, but only in 1908 did the Eisenach Church Conference formally revise and liberalize them. The new standards no longer prioritized a specific style or plan but rather accorded architects considerable leeway in how local parishes’ specific needs could be met (Seng 1995). The move away from a rigorous historicism prompted greater stylistic eclecticism and experimentation with fully new aesthetics. An early harbinger of this trend is Victor Baltard’s Saint-Augustin Church in Paris (1860 – 71), built to anchor one end of the new Boulevard Malesherbes, which integrated Tuscan Gothic, Romanesque, and Byzantine elements. Similarly, a few decades later, Ferdinand Boberg’s Lutheran Church of the Epiphany (1910 – 13) in Saltsjöbaden, Sweden (Figure 11.17) was inspired by the British Arts and Crafts movement and the rounded arches and Venetian-style mosaics of Byzantine architecture. Eclecticism was not limited to new Christian churches. To celebrate the Roman community’s emancipation in 1870, the team of Vincenzo Costa and Osvaldo Armanni designed a grand synagogue on a Greek cross plan that blended Roman, Greek, Assyrian, and Egyptian features (built 1901 – 4). And for Plzen’s synagogue (1890 – 93), Emmanuel Klotz resorted to neo-Moorish and neo-Renaissance styles,

Figure 11.17: Ferdinand Boberg, Studies of the face for the Church of the Epiphany (Lutheran) in Saltsjöbaden, Sweden, 1910.

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as well as such ornaments as the “Russian” onion domes atop the façade’s twin towers (Figure 11.18).

Figure 11.18: The main façade of the Great Synagogue, Plzeň/Pilsen, 2015. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Finally, fin-de-siècle religious architecture participated in the modernist wave often resumed under the labels of “art nouveau” (Jugendstil) and, in the Habsburg lands, Viennese Secessionism. This aesthetic drew inspiration from nature but also explored the expressive possibilities of new materials, from cast iron and reinforced concrete to glass and ceramics. In Paris, Anatole de Baudot’s Saint-Jean de Montmartre (1894 – 1904) helped set the tone (Figure 11.19), with its art nouveau façade of brick and tile and pathbreaking use of reinforced concrete (at least for religious architecture). Otto Wagner’s church for Vienna’s Steinhof district (Church of Saint Leopold, 1902 – 7) epitomizes the sacred architecture of the Viennese Secession, featuring straight lines and a geometric form, spare decoration on the façade, and a richly ornamented dome (Figure

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Figure 11.19: Dietmar Rabich, Saint-Jean de Montmartre, Paris, 2014. Photo reproduced with permission, Wikimedia Commons, 1227, CC BY-SA 4.0.

11.20, below). Art nouveau was fused with elements of Russian revival to produce such Orthodox structures as Moscow’s Marfo-Mariinsky (Mary-Martha) Convent (1908 – 12) and the Church of the Holy Spirit (1903 – 5) in Talashkino, near Smolensk (Brumfield 1991). Eliel Saarinen’s Saint Paul’s Church in Tartu, Estonia (1915 – 17) reflects a Lutheran appropriation of art nouveau, while Edmund Körner’s New Synagogue for Essen (1908 – 13) demonstrates its employment for Jewish structures.

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Figure 11.20: Otto Wagner’s (Catholic) Church for Vienna’s Steinhof District, 2015. Photograph by C. Stadler/Bwag, reproduced with permission CC BY-SA-4.0.

Sacred Space/Sacralized Space In Le génie du Christianisme (The Genius of Christianity, 1802), François-René de Chateaubriand avows: “One cannot enter a Gothic church without experiencing a certain thrill and a vague sense of the divine.” Indeed, for all the attention that contemporaries —and scholars subsequently—have paid to ecclesiastical architectures’ outward appearance, these buildings’ capacity to evoke a sense of sacredness depended even more on how they organized and decorated their interior space. Wojciech Bałus suggests that it was especially the experience inside medieval Gothic churches that inspired the neo-Gothic revival. With their spacious, lofty interiors, vertical orientation of the piers and pointed-arch vaulting, and use of slim supports to reduce the walls’ materiality, these structures “expressed a desire, typical of Christianity, to leave the earth and reach the heavens.” In addition, the building was viewed in its entirety and not just as a collection of parts: nave, aisles, transept, chancel, galleries, etc. (Bałus 2020, 222). Nonetheless, the building’s interior required a coherent program: for the various elements to work together, each needed to be carefully delineated. Hence, in contemporary treatises on architectural symbolism, such as George Ayliffe Poole’s The Appropriate Character of Church Architecture (1842), authors sought to as-

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sign a specific meaning to each element of a new religious structure, meanings that were determined, to a large degree, by studying models of the past. From the beginning, proponents of the Gothic revival strove to achieve a high level of harmony between external aesthetic and interior plan and decoration. Typical here is Saint Mary’s (Anglican) of Bathwick (1814 – 18), one of England’s first neo-Gothic churches, which featured a long, high nave, tall thin piers, a flat timber lintel, perpendicular tracery in the tall aisle windows, and an extended chancel. However, circumstances could also dictate considerable divergence between exterior and interior styles. Michael Meyer has observed, for example, that in the 1830s and 1840s a German synagogue’s exterior often merely made clear that it was a “house of God”; only the building’s interior revealed it to be a synagogue (1996, 57). In Dresden, Gottfried Semper thus designed a synagogue whose outer form alluded to Byzantine and Romanesque forms with its round-arches, flat roof, and cupola but refrained from lavish exterior ornamentation that might attract unwanted public attention. In fact, local officials had already rejected his more ambitious original design. The exterior suggested a central plan for the interior, but Semper also incorporated Byzantine features such as the domed square and the galleried nave, all richly decorated using models drawn from Moorish sources, especially the Alhambra at Granada (Krinsky 1985, 276 – 77) (Figure 11.21). Similarly, Constantinople’s Sadâbad Mosque (1862, Figures 11.22 and 11.23), realized by the prominent (Christian) team of Sarkis and Agop Balyan, presents a sharp contrast between the florid, Baroque-inspired exterior and the prayer hall’s simple, sparsely decorated interior, save for the sumptuous floral ornamentation under the dome (Kuban 2010, 639). Other architects sought to exploit the possibilities of designing exteriors and interiors in differing aesthetics. Léon Vaudoyer’s plan for Marseille’s new Catholic Cathedral (1852 – 93) was notably eclectic: it mixed Byzantine and Provençal Romanesque elements for the exterior, and then an amalgam of Byzantine, Italian Romanesque, and Gothic features for the interior. For his Allée (Fasor) Reformed Church in Budapest, Aladár Árkay crafted an art nouveau structure that references local, traditional Calvinist churches while also alluding to Hungarian folk motifs (Figures 11.24 and 11.25, below). Indeed, Alofsin notes, the building’s picturesque façade coexists fully with the “technological sophistication [modernity] and prowess of the thin-shelled dome,” supported by a reinforced-concrete arch spanning 13.3 meters (2006, 208 – 10). Recently, Ruth Slatter (2019) has encouraged scholars to attend to interior space, and especially its materiality, to better understand the use and experience of such spaces. Of course, throughout the period, architects and faith communities were keenly attuned to a building’s intended purpose as worship space. Nonetheless, as waves of religious revival and ritual reform buffeted these communities, particular aspects of the interior space’s organization and equipment might provoke debate and controversy. For instance, in the design competition for its new building, Strasbourg’s Lutheran New Church stipulated that the altar should not be placed “in a chancel, which is unnecessary for Protestant worship.” Furthermore, the community wanted a design that ensured that congregants could clearly hear and see the pastor whether he was at the

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pulpit or the altar, a consideration that was not just acoustic in nature but also reflected a Protestant concern to link “seeing with believing” (Steinhoff 2008, 243). By contrast, starting in the 1830s, the Anglican ritualist revivals associated with the Oxford Movement and Cambridge’s Camden Society strove to exploit the neo-Gothic style for their own liturgical ends. The elongated chancels of neo-Gothic churches, notably, could be fitted out with stalls for choristers, thereby enhancing the latter’s role in Anglican worship. In addition, locating the altar in a chancel clearly demarcated from the nave (even by using steps) served to distinguish more clearly between pulpit and altar and assert new importance for such altar-based rituals as Holy Eucharist (Yates 2008). Whereas plans for new Christian churches regularly made provision for organ lofts, organs were initially absent from Methodist chapels, because John Wesley and his followers feared that the instrumental music would undermine the message of the hymns’ lyrics. But in 1820, the Methodist Conference reluctantly authorized their intro-

Figure 11.21: Interior of the Dresden Synagogue, photograph, c. 1898. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

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duction, which Slatter interprets both as a chance to give new, material expression of the Methodist faith and a sign of Methodism’s transformation from spiritual movement into official church (2019). As David Meola notes (in his chapter for this volume), the rise of Reformed Judaism occasioned spirited debates over ritual practices that then carried into synagogue design. One point of discussion was the placement of the bimah, the place from which the officiant reads the Torah scrolls and leads the congregation in prayer. Whereas a centrally located bimah and “eastern” ark (where the Torah scrolls were stored) were traditionally aligned in an axis pointing towards Jerusalem, Reformed synagogues increasingly moved the bimah to a more lateral location, that is, nearer to the ark; in some cases, it was even placed under an elevated ark. In her study of Vienna’s City Temple (1823 – 26), Ann Katrin Bäumler (2016) points out that, from an acoustical per-

Figure 11.22: Exterior view of the Sadâbad Mosque, Constantinople/Istanbul, 2021. Photograph reproduced with permission of Ayhan Altun/Alamy Stock Photo.

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Figure 11.23: Interior view of the Sadâbad Mosque, Constantinople/Istanbul, 2008. Photograph reproduced with permission of Sinan Dogan/Alamy Stock Photo.

spective, the decentralized bimah was actually advantageous. Nonetheless, in Vienna and elsewhere, Conservative and Orthodox Jews criticized the shift as just another example of Reform Judaism’s “Christianizing” tendencies. Reformed synagogues also rethought plans for seating. While the tendency to replace movable with fixed seats rarely provoked debate (even though, by limiting movement, this shift also promoted more orderly services), the push to provide better accommodations for women was more contentious. Traditionally, women were assigned to separate and often dark and poorly ventilated spaces or galleries. Wishing to make it possible for women to see and better hear the services, Reformed congregations began removing or modifying the grills and walls that separated the men’s and women’s sections, without however abandoning the gendered segregation. Mixed seating was only sanctioned after 1900, and then only in Liberal congregations. By far the most explosive point was Reformed Judaism’s embrace of the organ, which Tina Frühauf argues was a significant dimension of the Jewish religious response to modernity (2009). From the first approval of organ music in the synagogue, namely by Hamburg’s Temple Association in 1817, the subject provoked controversy. Not only did the organ lack a basis in Jewish Scripture, but operating the organ during services (at least by Jews) would violate the restrictions on work during Sabbath. In 1845, the Second Rabbinical Conference, held at Frankfurt am Main, formally permitted organ playing in Jewish worship services. Thereafter, organs were introduced in synagogues in the German lands, but also in France, England (notably, at the West London Synagogue), the Netherlands and, in time, Poland. But this did not end the disputes, as the lengthy, heated arguments over plans to include an organ in Berlin’s Oranienburger Strasse synagogue attest. In many communities, the organ was the reform that

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Figure 11.24: Front façade of Aladár Árkay’s Fasor Reformed Church, Budapest, Hungary, 2011. Photograph reproduced under the terms of CC BY-SA 2.5 Hungary.

went too far, prompting Orthodox and Conservative Jews to leave the official community and establish separatist congregations, such as the Israelitische Religionsgesellschaften founded in Frankfurt am Main (1851) and Strasbourg (1892). Scholarly attention to the notion of interior, sacred space has also encouraged reflection on how new religious architecture influenced notions of urban space. If previous work on Europe’s cities has tended to view nineteenth-century urbanization as a resolutely secular and secularizing process, newer research, especially studies that examine the built environment, have revealed that faith communities proved quite adept at contesting urban space, claiming it, and marking it as sacred. Furthermore, state ac-

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Figure 11.25: Altar space of Aladár Árkay’s Fasor Reformed Church, Budapest, Hungary, 2017. Photograph reproduced under the terms of CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED.

tors regularly supported this sacralization of urban space; indeed, they were often its primary instigators. Above all, this was a highly dynamic process that reflected the ebb and flow of what space was marked as sacred, how it occurred, and by whom. The construction of new religious structures was, in fact, widely understood to be a conscious act of claiming urban space for sacred purposes. During the Bourbon Restoration (1815 – 30), state authorities eagerly approved the construction of several new, albeit relatively modest Catholic neighborhood churches in Paris to stimulate the capital’s re-sacralization following the secular excesses of the Revolutionary era (Marrinan 2009). Whether Christian or Jewish, faith communities increasingly built on a monumental scale to accommodate better the growing numbers of congregants and assert their presence in the city. Indeed, from Halle to Limoges and Florence, from Manchester to Saint Petersburg, grand new churches and synagogues occupied new, often prominent parcels of municipal territory, their domes and soaring steeples challenging the towers of factories and city halls for attention in the urban skyline. Evangelicals rented quarters and later erected their own buildings in London, Hamburg, and Berlin as sites for their urban missions, which quickly became vibrant points of metropolitan religious activity. In London, the city’s West End Jewish “establishment,” the Union Synagogue, even strove to encourage the assimilation and Anglicization of immigrant Ashkenazi Jews by erecting the East London Synagogue (1876 – 77) in Stepney Green, just outside the Whitechapel “ghetto” (Kadish 2002, 398 – 99).

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In the Netherlands, Joks Janssen has observed, the emergence of a segregated Catholic community or “pillar” towards the end of the century was not just a matter of forming a political party and numerous cultural and social associations. It also occurred via a major building spree, especially in the cities: churches, of course, but also rectories, parish schools, convents, and chapels. Catholic corporations even planned and constructed “Catholic” housing estates in newly urbanized districts (Janssen 2016, 136 – 37). In Saint Petersburg, too, religious associations like the Society for Religious and Moral Enlightenment strove to extend the reach of religion (Russian Orthodoxy) into the big city by erecting humble structures for worship in such working-class districts as the neighborhood adjoining the Warsaw train station. Here, a modest, prefabricated edifice was built in 1894. Popularly referred to as the Varshavka “church,” it quickly “became an active center of Orthodox worship, education, and community” (Herrlinger 2011, 843). Urban planning also led to a notable sacralization of the built environment. As part of his modernization of Paris between 1852 and 1869, Georges-Eugène Haussmann called for the construction of new churches, both as architectural jewels for new plazas and important intersections (e. g. Saint-Augustin at one end of the new Boulevard Malesherbes) and as essential contributions to life in the city’s arrondissements. In all, eight new Catholic churches and four new Reformed temples were built, and the construction of six other Catholic parish churches completed. The plans formulated to guide the development of Vienna (1860) and Berlin (1864) likewise reserved space for new works of sacred architecture and provided guidelines for erecting other religious buildings on new city squares and plazas. In Strasbourg, the displacement and rebuilding of the city’s fortifications after 1875 almost tripled the size of the city within the walls. The official development plan for the new districts (Neustadt) set aside areas for the construction of two monumental garrison churches. It also foresaw the building of at least one new parish church (never realized). Furthermore, municipal authorities donated tracts in the Neustadt so that the Jewish community could erect a new synagogue and the Catholic Young Saint Peter parish a new church, thereby ending the latter community’s centuries-old sharing of the medieval Young Saint Peter Church with the Lutherans (Steinhoff 2008). In Clermont-Ferrand, the plans for developing the area around the new train station included the construction of a new Catholic church. Ultimately, however, the quarter was named not for the Saint-Joseph church (1882 – 1901) but for the train station (Massard-Guilbaud 1999). Constantinople’s genteel Teşvikiye neighborhood did, however, take its name from the local mosque, rebuilt in 1854. Constantinople also presents a telling example of how faith communities could turn the menace posed by urban renewal into an advantage. The city’s planned enlargement of the Grand Rue de Pera in 1890 required either reducing or relocating the Catholic Church of Saint Antoine, which was under French protection, although its congregation had a substantial Italian expatriate contingent. Faced with French inaction, the congregation appealed to Rome, which seized on the chance to promote its image as a protector of Catholics in the Near East by financing a new church. Designed in an Italian Gothic style by Giulio Mongeri,

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himself a member of Constantinople’s Italian community, the church was erected between 1906 and 1912 (Tökmeci 2015). Niahm Nicghabhann has recently called attention to another way in which faith communities marked urban space as sacred (2019). Namely, when laying foundation stones for new Catholic churches, Irish parishes made a grand, public show of the occasion to proclaim and celebrate the Church’s existence in the urban environment. They minted ceremonial coins and hung banners and flags throughout the town. Above all, they organized loud, long street processions and musical events. In short, Nicghabhann contends, Catholic communities seized the opportunity provided by the construction of new churches to occupy, however briefly, an urban public sphere that was increasingly dominated by commercial interests and secular culture. Finally, even if implied above, it should be emphasized that the sacralization of urban space through architecture produced a highly differentiated, evolving sense of the sacred in the city. Through their style and their features, new buildings called attention to a city’s religious diversity. Christian churches in Ottoman Europe, for example, tended not to be sited on public squares and lacked a mosque’s minarets. Faith communities regularly competed with one another to mark a city’s built environment: Anglicans in Rome, Calvinists in Budapest, Lutherans in Saint Petersburg, Baptists in Hamburg, Jews in Warsaw and Berlin, to name just a few. New construction could even alter how a building and a space was read “confessionally”; with the opening of Catholic Young Saint Peter Church in Strasbourg in 1892, the medieval Gothic church became fully Lutheran. Alternatively, as we see in late nineteenth-century London, chapels originally constructed for Nonconformist congregations could be “recycled” as synagogues for the burgeoning Ashkenazi community (Kadish 2002). Critically, this extension of urban sacred space was not just realized via new church, synagogue, and mosque construction. It was also furthered by the erection of schools, parsonages, parish halls, and mikvehs and through the acquisition of space (including by building) for parish libraries, charitable organizations, and even religiously-oriented political organizations.

Conclusion Throughout the nineteenth century, sacred architecture contributed powerfully to a sense of religious culture in Europe. As in centuries past, these buildings figured centrally in the creation and maintenance of religious communities. They were places for worship, most certainly, but also for communal gathering. They were sites for prayer, education, and celebration but also affirmations of faith in stone, glass, wood, and concrete. Some scholars have argued for a certain secularization of religious architecture during this period, evidenced by a tendency to build apartments for the sultan as integral parts of new mosque complexes (at least in Constantinople, see Kuban 2010) and even more so in the move after 1800 to regard churches as heritage sites, that is, museum pieces to be preserved and valued more for their aesthetic and national impor-

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tance than for their function as sacred spaces. This latter dynamic is clearly at work in the reconstruction of Paris’s Notre-Dame Cathedral and, after 1852, the clearing away of the “medieval rubble” around it, thereby isolating the church and marking it as urban monument (Murphy 2011). Moreover, it is evident in the tourist guidebooks that begin to be produced after 1800 and the publications of such architectural societies as the German Architekten- und Ingenieurverein, which after each annual meeting prepared a substantial volume on the host city’s architecture (e. g., Vienna, Hamburg, Cologne, Berlin) in which chapters were devoted both to older and newer sacred structures. To recognize the various ways in which religious buildings could be and were read and experienced, however, does not lessen their sacred character. Indeed, architecture provides perhaps the most formidable rejoinder to the arguments for European secularization between 1800 and 1914. The religious building boom was possible above all because of the massive investments of money, time, and creativity by members of the various faith communities, and not simply by states or social elites. In other words, they expressed their religious sentiments through the pocketbook, and not the pew. We might well question to what degree these women and men experienced these buildings as their architects intended, through their choice of plan, aesthetic language, and ornamentation. But even if community members did not visit these structures as frequently as their ministers and rabbis might have wished, they remained key anchor points in the faithful’s sense of religious community.

References and Bibliography Alofsin, Anthony. 2006. When Buildings Speak: Architecture as Language in the Habsburg Empire and Its Aftermath, 1867 – 1933. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Amzi-Erdoğ dular, Leyla. 2024. The Afterlife of Ottoman Empire: Muslims in Habsburg Bosnia Herzegovina. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bäumler, Ann Katrin. 2016. “The City Temple in Vienna (1823 – 26): Architectural Innovations and Moderate Liturgical Reforms in the Course of its Foundation.” In Reform Judaism and Architecture, edited by Andreas Brämer, Mirko Przystawik, and Harmen H. Thies, 35 – 67. Petersburg, Germany: Michel Imhof. Bałus, Wojciech. 2020. “Space and Beholder in Nineteenth-Century Sacred Architecture.” Porta Aurea 19: 221 – 29. Boudon, Jacques-Olivier. 2001. Paris: Capitale religieuse sous le Second Empire. Paris: Cerf. Brooks, Chris. 1995. “Introduction.” In The Victorian Church: Architecture and Society, edited by Chris Brooks and Andrew Saint, 1 – 29. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bremner, Alex. 2019. “A Tale of Two Churches: Protestant Architecture and the Politics of Religion in Late Nineteenth-Century Rome.” Papers of the British School at Rome 88: 259 – 56. Brumfield, William Craft. 1991. “The ‘New Style’ and the Revival of Orthodox Church Architecture, 1901 – 1914.” In Christianity and the Arts in Russia, edited by William C. Brumfeld and Milos M. Velimirovic, 105 – 23. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brumfield, William Craft. 1993. A History of Russian Architecture. New York: Cambridge University Press. Chaline, Nadine-Josette, ed. 1993. Ces églises du dix-neuvième siècle. Amiens: Encrage.

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Colonas, Vassilis. 2006. “La Cathédrale d’Athènes et la naissance du style ‘greco-byzantin’.” In Foucart and Hamon 2006, 69 – 81. Curran, Kathleen. 1988. “The German Rundbogenstil and Reflections on the American Round-Arched Style. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 47: 351 – 73. Dagnino, Roberto. 2012. “One Region, Many Regionalisms: The Multiple Identities of a Neo-Gothic Circle in the Low Countries (1863 – 1900).” History of European Ideas 38: 440 – 51. De Maeyer, Jan, and Luc Verpoest, eds. 2000. Gothic Revival: Religion, Architecture and Style in Western Europe, 1815 – 1914. Leuven: Universitaire Pers Leuven. DiZerega, Laura. 2021. “Beyond Berlin: Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Bureaucracy, and Rhenish Ecclesiastical Architecture, 1815 – 1840.” PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara. Efron, John. 2015. German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Foucart, Bruno, and Françoise Hamon, eds. 2006. L’architecture religieuse au XIXe siècle: Entre éclectisme et rationalisme. Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne. Frühauf, Tina. 2009. The Organ and Its Music in German-Jewish Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grimes, Brendan. 2009. “Funding a Roman Catholic Church in Nineteenth-Century Ireland.” Architectural History 52: 147 – 68. Hammer-Schenk, Harold. 1981. Synagogen in Deutschland: Geschichte einer Baugattung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (1780 – 1933). 2 vols. Hamburg: Hans Christians Verlag. Hartmuth, Maximilian. 2006. “Negotiating Tradition and Ambition: Comparative Perspective on the ‘De-Ottomanization’ of the Balkan Cityscapes.” Ethnologia Balkanica 10: 15 – 33. Herrlinger, K. Page. 2011. “The Religious Landscape of Revolutionary St. Petersburg, 1905 – 1918.” Journal of Urban History 37: 842 – 57. Janssen, Joks. 2016. “Religiously Inspired Urbanism: Catholicism and the Planning of the Southern Dutch Provincial Cities Eindhoven and Roermond, c. 1900 to 1960.” Urban History 43: 135 – 57. Jonas, Raymond. 1997. “Sacred Mysteries and Holy Memories: Counter-Revolutionary France and the Sacré-Coeur.” Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques 20: 95 – 123. Kadish, Sharman. 2002. “Constructing Identity: Anglo-Jewry and Synagogue Architecture.” Architectural History 45: 386 – 408. Kalmar, Ivan Davidson. 2001. “Moorish Style: Orientalism, the Jews, and Synagogue Architecture.” Jewish Social Studies 7 (3): 68 – 100. Khodakovsky, Evgeny. 2016. Wooden Church Architecture of the Russian North: Regional Schools and Traditions (14th –19th centuries). New York: Routledge. Krause, Walter. 2003. “The Role of Neo-Gothic in the Ecclesiastical Art of Austrian Historicism.” Centropa 3 (3): 184 – 93. Krinsky, Carol Herselle. 1985. Synagogues of Europe: Architecture, History, Meaning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kuban, Doğ an. 2010. Ottoman Architecture. Translated by Adair Mill. Woodbridge, UK: Antique Collectors Club. Lane, Barbara Miller. 2000. National Romanticism and Modern Architecture in Germany and the Scandinavian Countries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Larkin, Emmit. 1967. “Economic Growth, Capital Investment, and the Roman Catholic Church in Nineteenth-Century Ireland.” American Historical Review 72: 852 – 84. Lewis, Michael J. 2002. The Gothic Revival. London: Thames and Hudson. Makaš, Emily Gunzburger, and Tanja Damljanovic´ Conley, eds. 2010. Capital Cities in the Aftermath of Empires: Planning in Central and Southeastern Europe. New York: Routledge. Marrinan, Michael. 2009. Romantic Paris: Histories of a Cultural Landscape, 1800 – 1850. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Massard-Guilabud, Genevie`ve. 1999. “The Genesis of an Urban Identity: The Quartier de la Gare in Clermont-Ferrand, 1850 – 1914.” Journal of Urban History 25: 779 – 808.

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Meyer, Michael A. 1996. “‘How Awesome is this Place!’ The Reconceptualization of the Synagogue in Nineteenth-Century Germany.” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 4: 51 – 63. Murphy, Kevin D. 2011. “The Historic Building in the Modernized City: The Cathedrals of Paris and Rouen in the Nineteenth Century.” Journal of Urban History 37: 278 – 96. Nicghabhann, Niahm. 2019. “‘A Development of Practical Catholic Emancipation’: Laying the Foundations for the Roman Catholic Urban Landscape, 1850 – 1900.” Urban History 46: 44 – 61. Olson, Jess. 2019. “Reimagining the Synagogue in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” In Jewish Religious Architecture: From Biblical Israel to Modern Judaism, edited by Steven Fine, 287 – 306. Leiden: Brill. Popescu, Carmen. 2006. “‘Le Temple splendide de l’orthodoxie roumaine’.” In Foucart and Hamon 2006, 83 – 100. Ribbe, Wolfgang. 1990. “Zur Entwicklung und Funktion der Pfarrgemeinden in der evangelischen Kirche Berlins bis zum Ende der Monarchie.” In Seelsorge und Diakonie in Berlin, edited by Kaspar Elm and Hans-Dietrich Loock, 233 – 63. Berlin: De Gruyter. Seng, Eva-Maria. 1995. Der evangelische Kirchenbau im 19. Jahrhundert: Die Eisenacher Bewegung und der Architekt Christian Friedrich von Leins. Tübingen: E. Wasmuth. Shvidkovsky, Dmitry. 2007. Russian Architecture and the West. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Slatter, Ruth. 2019. “Becoming Chapels and Everyday Congregations: How the Repair and Maintenance of London’s Wesleyan Chapels Illustrates Their Communities’ Everyday Practices and Experiences (1851 – 1932).” Journal of Design History 33: 34 – 49. Steinhoff, Anthony. 2001. “Building Religious Community: Worship Space and Community in Strasbourg after the Franco-Prussian War.” In Protestants, Catholics and Jews in Germany, 1800 – 1914, edited by Helmut Walser Smith, 267 – 96. Oxford: Berg. Steinhoff, Anthony. 2008. The Gods of the City: Protestantism and Religious Culture in Strasbourg, 1870 – 1914. Leiden: Brill. Tökmeci, Ebru Özeke. 2015. “A Catholic Church in an Islamic Capital: Historicism and Modernity in the St Antoine Church.” In Sacred Precincts: The Religious Architecture of Non-Muslim Communities Across the Islamic World, edited by Mohammad Gharipour, 219 – 39. Leiden: Brill. Whyte, William. 2017. Unlocking the Church: The Lost Secrets of Victorian Sacred Space. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wortman, Richard. 2003. “The ‘Russian Style’ in Church Architecture as Imperial Symbol after 1881.” In Architectures of Russian Identity: 1500 to the Present, edited by James Cracraft and Daniel Rowland, 101 – 16. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Yates, Nigel. 2008. Liturgical Space: Christian Worship and Church Buildings in Western Europe 1500 – 2000. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.

Daniel Weidner

12 Religion and Literature The long nineteenth century in Europe was a century of literature. At its beginning (for literature, we must actually start in the middle of the eighteenth century), a modern understanding of literature as fiction emerged and the classical genres of lyrical poetry, drama, and most of all, the novel became central forms of cultural representation. At its end, in the early decades of the twentieth century, these forms were being replaced or at least challenged by new types of mass media including film and radio. Throughout the era, literature was both an archive for religious experience and a field in which the meaning of this experience was negotiated. Moreover, a major shift of symbolic power from religion to literature took place: if, until the mid-eighteenth century, literature was still conceived of as a vehicle for religious and moral messages, it now became art in the sense of an autonomous sphere of culture. While church-oriented religion lost much of its hegemonic power, art itself became central to the self-understanding of modern cultures and societies. For a long time, this development was considered a more or less linear process of secularization. This notion suggests, on the one hand, that literature had emancipated itself from religious pressure and, on the other, that central elements of religious heritage had been translated into secular thinking and literature. Upon closer inspection, however, and from the perspective of postsecular theory, which questions this narrative, the relationship between religion and literature was much more complex and far from univocal, since different literatures, genres, and literary forms constantly interacted with different modes of religious experience. At the same time, religion, even after the decline of its hegemony, continued to affect society and culture by transforming and adapting to its ever-changing circumstances. It was largely due to this transformation that a modern notion of religion emerged, a notion that was then projected into the past. Secularity invented religion as its opposite to imagine what it meant to be secular. Religion and literature thus co-evolved during the long nineteenth century. While literature both distinguished itself from religion and assumed functions that religion had hitherto fulfilled, religion, meanwhile, reinvented itself through the means of literature. They found themselves, therefore, in a constant give-and-take relationship, which contributed essentially to the intricacies of both realms but also to the ambivalence of their relations. A modern history of literature or a literary history of the modern epoch can thus no longer depict a singular, univocal development. Rather, it will have to consider complexity, ambiguity, and overdetermination, features that are typical, in any case, of literary texts. The remarks that follow sketch the lines of this interpretation by considering literature in constellations of relationships central to the long nineteenth century. These considerations include the heritage of the Enlightenment, a new understanding of literature in the Romantic era, the formation of biographical and historical religion in the genre of the novel, the relation between nationalism https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110609059-014

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and religion as it has to do with literature, the Kulturkämpfe or “culture wars” between secular and religious ideologies in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the renaissance of religion in fin de siècle literature. The more general trends in scholarship bearing on these constellations will be summarized in the essay’s conclusion.

The Heritage of the Enlightenment In nineteenth-century Europe, culture and religion were shaped significantly by the heritage of the Enlightenment. Already in the eighteenth century, at least in some western countries, the authority of churches had declined as religious issues came under enlightened criticism. However, the Enlightenment was never a coherent antireligious movement; its intentions toward religion were diverse and multivalent. With few exceptions, enlightened philosophes aimed at transforming religion rather than abandoning or replacing it with secular reason. They usually directed their critique at what they defined as superstition, not at religion as such (Sorkin 2008). This distinction between a natural religion focused on moral and interior belief, on the one hand, and superstition focused on primitive and ritualistic external action, on the other, a distinction that incidentally bears resemblance to Protestant polemics during the confessional age, proved to be an important feature of the modern understanding of religion from that point forward. But the boundary between religion and superstition proved difficult to draw, resulting in a broad spectrum of positions on religion, theology, and the church. Debates about and within literature served as an arena for defining these positions. Dealing more often than not with religious, literary, and political affairs concurrently, these debates took place in the public sphere, whose emergence contributed more to the success of the Enlightenment than did the rationalism, empiricism, and materialism for which the Enlightenment is typically known. In these debates, literature and literary criticism became important media of public understanding, all the more so since literary debates often stood in for political ones, especially under conditions of political censorship that lasted in most European countries well into the nineteenth century. In the early modern period, discussions about literature had taken place among a few savants of the humanist “Republic of Letters.” Now, however, widening audiences of literate individuals participated in them in expanding public spheres of mediated communication. One important feature of this development was that controversies about the historical and critical treatment of the Bible, which had occurred since the Reformation, now became matters of public consideration. Broader discussions about the Bible produced various specialists devoted to a particular discourse, specialists who were trained in what would later become the university discipline of biblical criticism (Sheehan 2005; Weidner 2011). These discussions also laid the foundations, already in the eighteenth century, for rhetorical techniques that utilized literary devices deliberately intended to reach audiences beyond the specialists. These devices included polemical and satirical writing, fictions, and dialogues, in which it was not always easy

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to distinguish between serious and ironic voices and thus between a text’s apologetic and critical aims. For example, Voltaire’s polemics and parodies, such as the Sermon de[s] cinquante (The Sermon of the Fifty, 1749) and the satirical entries on “David” or “Hesekiel” in his Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764), employ many forms of mockery and ridicule. At the same time, his Traité sur la Tolerance (Treatise on Tolerance, 1763) ends with a prayer to almighty God. The physico-theological movement embraced empirical observation, but this embrace was intended to highlight the perfect design of creation. Thus, Bartold Heinrich Brockes, in Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott (Mundane Pleasures in God, 1721 – 47), a multivolume collection of his poetry, describes minutely, for example, the design of lice as an aspect of God’s perfectly ordered universe. The Enlightenment novel, for its part, touched broadly on religious questions. Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) discusses the connection between virtue and divine reward. The narrator of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) pretends that even he cannot interfere with divine providence to save the hero, however much he might like to. Lawrence Sterne’s Tristam Shandy (1749 – 67) includes parodistic sermons. A considerable amount of poetry written in this period also addresses religious topics, sometimes in a very modern way. Different poetic translations of the biblical psalms and of the Book of Prophets introduced new poetic devices, such as parallelism. In Der Messias (The Messiah, 1747– 73), Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock continued the tradition of the biblical epic. By focusing mostly on the inner feelings of his characters, he contributed prominently to a sentimentalist style that expanded his readership in Pietist circles and among a younger generation of poets. Finally, historical criticism of the Bible focused attention on the Bible’s myths and poetry, which themselves inspired much of contemporary literature. For instance, the poems in James Macpherson’s Ossian (1760) bore the marks both of Homer and the biblical prophets (Prickett 1986). In the second half of the eighteenth century, Enlightenment optimism came to a grinding halt. Events such as the Lisbon earthquake (1755), the Seven Years’ War (1756 – 63), and the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror (1793 – 94) prompted a new, more tragic or more dialectical understanding of reason and history. Accordingly, late-Enlightenment figures focused increasingly on the darker sides of nature and became more interested in supernatural phenomena and esoteric traditions, such as kabbala, occultism, freemasonry, magnetism, and clairvoyance. These developments portended a religious landscape in the century yet to come in which lower-class individuals tended to adhere to credal Christianity while educated elites and wellinformed circles tended to follow a more “rational” religion of humanity. Ironically enough, this religion allowed for eruptive emotions and the irrational. The Swedish scientist and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg became famous for allegedly communicating with the dead, while Johann Georg Lavater, in Physiognomische Fragmente (Essays on Physiognomy, 1775 – 78), asserted that he could read the character and the fate of individuals from their faces. In literature, this turn to the irrational resulted in a new valuation of the mysterious and the miraculous culminating in the emergence of Gothic fiction, a new genre abounding with dark secrets, mysterious memories, unconscious motivations, and quite often also with all kinds of sexual aberrations and

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violent fantasies. We can see these features in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann (The Sandman, 1816), which scholars often view as a psychoanalytical narrative avant la lettre, and Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), which revived the medieval figure of the Wandering Jew. The Gothic genre, when it incorporated further phantasmagoric illusions, became the forerunner of fantasy literature, which has had such a major influence on the tastes of readers up to today. In Gothic fiction but also more generally in the realist literature of the nineteenth century, Enlightenment echoes reverberate in the topical character of the critic whose belief in progress is undermined by his naïve and narrow-minded nature. Karl Gutzkow’s Wally, die Zweiflerin (Wally the Skeptic, 1835), for example, presents a young woman who loses her faith in God after reading biblical criticism, undergoes a spiritual crisis, and leans toward a particular breed of libertarianism that includes sexual license. Edward Casaubon, Dorothea’s coldhearted husband in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871 – 72), is depicted as a ridiculous antiquarian erudite who is entirely oblivious to the methodological criticism of German Wissenschaft. Obviously, Eliot is thinking here of the criticism of David Friedrich Strauss, whose Das Leben Jesu (The Life of Jesus, 1835 – 36), a critical treatment of the Gospels, Eliot had translated into English. In Russian literature, the nihilistic intellectual appears frequently, such as in Turgenev’s Otzy i deti (Fathers and Sons, 1862). Here Bazarov’s rebellion against tradition and paternal authority has a clear resemblance to the fight of “enlightened” intellectuals against superstition, though in Turgenev this fight is motivated not so much by a rational search for truth as by generational conflict.

Romanticism and the Emergence of “Autonomous” Literature The weakening influence of institutional religion was not the only change affecting literature around 1800. In fact, the idea of literature itself was changing. During the second half of the eighteenth century, the classical conception of poetry as an imitation of the ancients (imitatio veterum) that aimed to instruct and entertain (prodesse et delectare) gradually lost authority. Romanticism arose to fill this void as a movement that dominated European literature from the 1790s to the 1820s, although its form, influence, and contingencies of development differed markedly from country to country. Literature, and poetry in particular, was now linked not to the classics but to nature, and its prestige depended upon the poet’s originality as a creator of unique literary works of art. This new perspective implied that literary art should no longer serve moral or religious purposes but should be an end in itself, an idea that was indeed highly ambivalent. Nature, for example, could mean both the physical and the moral universe. Creation had heavy religious overtones. And the idea of a work of art was complex, overdetermined, and usually associated with organic unity, which is to say

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it figured as a microcosm of the universe itself. Literary art in the Romantic era was thus associated with metaphysical claims found in theological traditions, suggesting the conceptual instability of the genre: treating literature-as-art as absolute and autonomous was thought to distinguish it explicitly from religion, but its use of metaphors and symbols from theological traditions implicitly anchored it to a religious heritage. At the same time, the Romantics were heavily invested in transforming and translating religious imagery and forms into literature (Abrams 1971; Prickett 1986). They adopted ideas about history, nature, salvation, and other topics to drive home their views, interpreting nature, for example, as a spiritual landscape or as the history of mankind. In place of the Enlightenment idea of reason’s progress, other models of history came to the fore. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing envisioned an Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (Education of the Human Race, 1780), in which the stages of Old Testament religion, the religion of the New Testament, and a religion of the spirit follow one another. For Johann Gottfried Herder, history consisted in the interaction of different cultures, each of which evolved organically but collided in the course of human development. Friedrich von Hardenberg, or Novalis, envisioned medieval Catholicism as a period of European harmony that was disrupted by the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment but that would soon return. The literature of the period also brought Christianity into confrontation with paganism. Schiller’s poem “Die Götter Griechenlands” (The Gods of Greece, 1788) laments the loss of ancient beauty due to the influence first of Christianity, which dispelled diverse and enchanting representations of divinity, and then of the scientific Enlightenment, which reduced the sensuous harmony of the cosmos to mere clockwork. This nostalgic or, in Schiller’s phrasing, sentimental view of modernity as a loss of mythological fullness also tasked poetry with memorializing this fullness in song: “Was unsterblich im Gesang will Leben / Muss im Leben untergehn” (Whatever should live immortally in song / Has to perish in life). In the Romantic era, writers openly discussed the possibility of a new mythology that combined ancient, Christian, and modern elements. The Romantics also imbued nature with religious meanings. The experience of nature, they said, implied the experience of the universe, an encounter that also influenced the inner drive of poetic subjectivity. Accordingly, the poetry of William Wordsworth, among others, proposes the countryside as the proper place of the poet’s musing, for it is only here that the poet can connect the world with his inner life. Meanwhile, a kind of “natural supernaturalism” (Abrams 1971) combined neoplatonic and Spinozist ideas in a view of nature as a creative agent. The image was popular among middle-class individuals, who found refuge in nature as a site of relaxation and beauty but who also considered it a source of sublimity, such as one might feel when gazing from the shoreline upon an infinite sea or when standing before the towering peak of a mountain. The “poet as creator,” an idea that had emerged already in the Renaissance, not only suggests artistic subjectivity’s heightened role in Romanticism but also speaks to poetry’s inherently problematic nature and inner fragility. Thus, the mythical figure

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of Prometheus appears in the works of such luminaries as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Prometheus, 1774) and Percy Bysshe Shelley (Prometheus Unbound, 1818). In both cases, the writers represent art as an act of rebellion against omnipotent authorities with political, paternal, and religious implications. Similarly, and most famously, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus (1818) imagines creation as a transgressive act with bearings upon both medicine and gender relations since she presents male creativity as haunted by the female ability to give life. Creation also appears in relation to the Bible, such as in William Blake’s re-mythologization of biblical stories, in which he focuses on the gnostic and rebellious nature of primordial man, or in Lord Byron’s play Cain (1821), which depicts the biblical arch-sinner as the prototype of the artist in crisis. The modern poet continued to find himself in similar roles, as when Friedrich Hölderlin equated the poet with Empedocles (The Death of Empedocles, 1797– 1800), who sacrifices himself to nature, an idea that also bore clear Christomorphic elements, or more ironically in the work of the mature Heinrich Heine, in whose Lazarus poems (1853 – 54) the poet-protagonist fashions himself as a Lazarus figure or the beaten prophet who suffers from his unfulfilled predictions of revolution. While the Romantics tended to sacralize art in these and other ways, they also aestheticized religion. For example, Friedrich Schleiermacher, a Protestant theologian who participated in the literary circles of the Berlin Romantics, famously described religion in aesthetic terms as a “taste for the absolute” (Reden über Religion, 1799). It is important to observe that in this and other contemporary definitions, what mattered was no longer the truth of dogmatic claims embedded in systematic and authoritative religious establishments or the moral value of religion as customary observance. Rather, these writers imagined religion as a site where the individual and the universal meet, where people come to understand that they depend on universal principles. To a certain extent, this development resulted from Enlightenment elites’ skeptical assaults on religion that not only challenged the authority of the church but, in the second half of the eighteenth century, also questioned the truths of so-called natural theology, including its affirmations of the soul’s immortality and God’s existence. Both David Hume and Immanuel Kant, for instance, argued that these truths were beyond the reach of reason and therefore could be the objects of faith at most. Schleiermacher, among others, concurred, claiming that human beings could not grasp the truths of religion by reason; they could only feel them in an amorphous but more intimate manner that was not dissimilar to the way one experiences works of art. Other Romantics, such as Novalis and François-René de Chateaubriand (Le génie du Christianisme, 1802), desired to establish a religion of art or a poetics of Christianity, in which the truths of religion and their emotional apprehension coincided. Later, in the mid-nineteenth century, when Romanticism gave way to other aesthetic movements, the debate about the nature and aim of art was still carried out in religious terms. Heine, who favored a more political understanding of art without giving up its essentially autonomous nature, thus articulated his position in a complex balancing act between the morality of Hebraism, on the one hand, and the aesthetics of Hellenism, on the other. This distinction influenced, through Matthew Arnold’s Culture

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and Anarchy (1869), Victorian views on literature and education, among other topics of public interest. These several approaches combined religious and aesthetic elements, either by aestheticizing religion or by sacralizing art (Auerochs 2006). Collectively, they changed the field of literary production by promoting a distinction between poetry, with its complicated language and imagery that was mainly attractive to educated elites, and the rapidly growing literature of mass readership. This distinction between “high” and “low” art still influences our understanding today. It is also essential for comprehending modernity as such, for the secular modernity that has come down to us is regularly contrasted with the lost world of supernatural fullness, understood either as the classical awareness of sensual beauty or as the medieval belief in a divinely-ordered cosmos. This understanding, which is implied in Schiller’s image of the dispelled gods, reechoes, for example, in Max Weber’s influential theory of the “disenchantment” of the world. Similarly, in 1916, at the end of our period of examination, Georg Lukacs wrote his Theory of the Novel, one of the most important reflections on literary modernism. It describes modernity as a state of “transcendental homelessness,” an idiom that can be traced back to the poetic debates around 1800 mentioned above.

Religion and the Rise of the Novel In the modern period, literature changed not only in its cultural aesthetics but also in its material foundations. During the eighteenth century already, a number of European countries underwent a “reading revolution,” bringing about a rise in literacy and therefore a much broader circulation of books and other kinds of print media. These developments paved the way for the fantastic success of the novel, the paradigmatic form of modern literature. As a “realistic” genre, the novel claims to represent the wide scope of social reality as well as the depth of private experiences. Accordingly, in the Restoration years after the Napoleonic Wars, the novel tended to turn away from Romantic idealism and toward an attitude that was more realistic in political terms, symbolized above all by an acceptance of the bourgeois social order. The novel, often associated with the prosaic form of modern life, stood in contrast to the more poetic accounts of a heroic past, and thus represented the complexities of industrializing societies and the psychological dynamics of adjusting to them. As a heterogeneous genre, the nineteenth-century novel always adopted themes and forms from religious literature when exploring providence or what constitutes a meaningful life or coming-of-age experiences conceived as ritual thresholds. This was especially the case in the so-called Bildungsroman, “the novel of formation,” which focused on a young (usually male) hero who confronts the world to find his or her place in it. It is a genre that combines feudal and bourgeois ideals of self-development and incorporates different literary traditions, from the picaro-novel to the spiritual autobiography. A famous example of this form of novel is Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehr-

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jahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1795 – 96), which includes traditional religious elements, such as the fictionalized diary of a pietistic God-seeker, but also features a secret society that directs the hero’s actions and keeps a sort of “book of life” in its archive. Gottfried Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich (Green Henry, 1855) narrates the loss of childhood illusions. Young Heinrich believes he finds God in the weathercock on the church’s roof and later aligns his loss of faith with his disappointment in love. After failing as an artist, Heinrich wants to follow the philosophy of Peter Gilgus, a philosophy, obviously modeled after that of the secular critic of religion Ludwig Feuerbach, which replaces the love of God with erotic love. But he does not dare declare his love and thus ends his life in resignation. Here, the novel of formation morphs into the novel of disillusionment, a form that represents the conflict between youthful ambitions and the restrictions of bourgeois life. For instance, in Flaubert’s Éducation sentimentale (Sentimental Education, 1869), poetic moments can exist only in the memory of a lost past. Belonging to this category of fiction as well are the numerous novels about preachers and pastors, in which the spiritual unrest of one’s youth is finally resolved, usually in the context of a stay abroad or in a big city. The protagonist might settle into sentimental memories of his longings amid a quieter existence in a country parish, as in Wilhelm Raabe’s Der Hungerpastor (The Hunger Pastor, 1863). Or he might undergo a personal transformation that redirects his commitments from traditional Christianity to moral and social action, as in Elisabeth Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888). Not all these novels end in harmony, however. Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh (1903) criticizes the Victorian hypocrisy that fuels generational conflicts, a hypocrisy to which his novel finds no solution. By representing youth as a transitional phase of life and life-as-such as something to which the individual gives shape, the Bildungsroman offers a “symbolic form” of modern existence (Moretti 1987), whose patterns of self-understanding encode a religious biography that can include estrangement and crisis but also reaffirmations of faith. A biographical approach to religion also increasingly informed its theoretical interpretation, such as one finds in William James’s important The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Besides biography, the novel is also a paradigmatic form for imagining the past. The enormously successful subgenre of the historical novel emerged at the beginning of the century and quickly spread throughout Europe. Even to this day, it makes up a significant part of the literary market. Historical novels allow us to imagine the past in new, more immersive ways by mixing modern narrative techniques and plot forms with characters and settings from the past. In particular, nineteenth-century novelists were wont to populate their works with religious figures: priests, monks, heroic crusaders, and Jewish moneylenders were all standard characters. In Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), Victor Hugo even made a cathedral into the symbol of the medieval spirit. Novels of this type allowed writers to raise historical consciousness in broad readerships and were useful, therefore, to proponents of incipient nationalisms not only in Europe but also elsewhere. The Lebanese author Jurij Zaydan, for instance, a vigilant

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follower of the Nahda, the Arab renaissance, composed a series of historical novels about the Islamic world, including al-Mamluk al-Sariid (The Fleeing Mamluk, 1891). Historical novels also memorialize events rooted in religious traditions. In particular, we find countless examples of works relating the life of Jesus of Nazareth that often combine a specific theological agenda with the formal means of literary realism. The biblical epic, once a major genre of literature, produced such examples as Hermann Melville’s Clarel (1876), which paints a broad portrait of the spiritual dilemmas faced by a modern subject on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. By contrast, Ernest Renan’s La vie de Jésus (The Life of Jesus, 1863), probably the most read of the “life of Jesus” books, combined modern critical exegesis, a vivid Orientalist imagination, and a realistic though slightly melodramatic plot. The Palestinian landscape in particular functions as a major symbol to illustrate the contrast between the barren, dry Jewish legalism in Judea and the natural and simple piety of Jesus in Galilee. Countless other attempts at refurbishing biblical stories followed. Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur (1880) powerfully depicts the conflict of Imperial Rome and Christianity and became the secondmost printed book in the nineteenth century after the Bible itself, while Henry Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis (1885) highlights the suffering of a religious people in exile, an issue with which the exiled Polish author could empathize. These novels translated legends and traditions into realist narrative forms with high emotional impact, thus preparing the way for film adaptations of biblical traditions in the twentieth century.

The Literature of Nations Religion became not only more “rational” and “aesthetic” in the nineteenth century, it also became more “national.” Reacting to the French Revolution and its aftermath, including the Napoleonic conquests, nationalists throughout Europe transformed the cultural landscapes of their homelands in an attempt to create unified nation-states out of the patchwork territories that preceded them. Since most European national groups lacked political sovereignty, their “imagined communities” rested upon cultural foundations and relied heavily upon literary means of communication (Anderson 1983). Authors of fiction played decisive roles in propelling these developments forward by producing literature that was usually loaded with religious meanings. More often than not, spiritual appeals for a national awakening figured as powerful patriotic literature. For example, the German poetry produced during the wars against Napoleon praises the conflict as a sacred cause while encouraging the sacrifice of one’s life for the nation. Such strong rhetoric intended to awaken the German nation to confront its foreign foe. It is prominent in Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Reden an die Deutsche Nation (Addresses to the German Nation, 1808) as well as in the lyrical war songs of Theodor Körner. His Leier und Schwert (Lyre and Sword, 1814) figured prominently in the repertoires of male choral societies, an enormously popular institution of bourgeois sociability and national exuberance that developed by mid-century.

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In a similar way, historical novels and dramas raised popular awareness of national histories, at least as they were conceived of and approved by elites. Dramas in particular, by virtue of their performative character, were closely related to liturgical movements and they turned out to be powerful media of national-religious representations. In England, for example, the performance of Handel’s oratorios with their massive choirs of lay singers and very large orchestras became decisive moments of national Protestantism. From the 1860s forward, such performances in the Crystal Palace included up to five hundred musicians and some four thousand singers. In Germany, the wars fought by the ancient Germanic tribes against Roman invaders were immensely popular literary topics. Heinrich von Kleist’s Die Hermannsschlacht (Hermann’s Battle, 1808) praises the primitive heroism of ancestors and stages the founding of Germany as an experience of common sacrifice. Another popular topic in Germany was the tricentennial of the Reformation in 1817, which brought forward a series of historical dramas about Luther. Later in the century, Richard Wagner developed the new genre of the musical drama. It combined Romantic music with reinvented Germanic and, later, Christian mythologies in elaborate theatrical stagings that were performed in a Festspielhaus constructed exclusively for Wagner’s music. Traditional Catholic passion plays were performed, too, becoming increasingly popular as they developed as theatrical events. By the end of the century, medieval plays were staged throughout Europe in authentic settings in cities, which both represented the past and developed models of theater that differed from the bourgeois alternative. Under all these influences and more, writers reconceptualized literature in national terms. After the decline of rhetorical poetics, they proposed literature not only as art created by individual genius but as the product of the nation and its peculiar “spirit,” a notion of tremendous consequence that was developed in the late Enlightenment, notably by Johann Gottfried Herder. This notion became operative especially in the aftermath of the French Revolution. At the same time, while literary authors understood themselves more and more as spokespersons of their nations, philologists began unearthing the remains of nations’ poetic traditions in medieval literature and folk poetry, which they edited and anthologized in collections of fairy tales and legends. In this way, national philology, a learned discipline to a large extent modeled after classical philology, came to replace rhetoric as the context for discussing literature at universities. The proponents of this new discipline claimed further that reading national literature should be an essential part of public education, since it fostered national spirit as well as morality by bringing readers into contact with texts that had strong religious undertones. In some places, such as Britain, attempts were made to include the reading of literary passages from the Bible in this curriculum (Norton 1993). More commonly, curricula featured Bible reading, mostly in elementary education, alongside classical texts, as in the humanist Gymnasium of German lands, or national literature, as occurred in the laicized French system towards the century’s end. The new philology identified national classics that competed for authority with the classics of antiquity. Certain texts established the (imagined) origins of national literatures, such as the Beowulf legend in England or the Nibelungenlied in Germany. Schol-

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ars presented them in critical editions accompanied by the apparatus of historical linguistics, scholarly commentary, and all kinds of thematic introductions. Other texts were the works of more modern authors that were meant to be read at school. These included Shakespeare in Britain, the texts of the Âge Classique of seventeenthcentury France, and the Klassiker of Goethe and Schiller, which Germans celebrated immediately after their deaths and well into the twentieth century. The longing to identify texts in the first group—literary monuments of autochthonous origin—was so strong that some authors, mostly philologists, undertook to write national poems of their own. In this category were the Romanian Ţiganiada (by Ion Budai-Deleanu, c. 1800), the Finnish Kalevala (Elias Lönrot, 1835 – 49), and the Polish Pan Tadeusz (Master Thaddeus, Adam Mickiewicz, 1834). Since these poems usually derived inspiration from other national literatures, they were not as autochthonous as their authors claimed. But their very emergence showed how national literatures influenced one another to such a degree that such figures as Goethe and then Marx and Engels declared the arrival of a “world literature.” The texts of this literature, they claimed, competed in a single literary market that facilitated translation and transfer on a scale that outstripped production in home countries. Not only were emerging nations less autochthonous in their literary origins than their exemplars believed, but as a rule they were less homogenous in their populations as well. Many European territories were multilingual, for instance in eastern and southeastern Europe, where vastly diverse peoples lived under Russian, Austro-Hungarian, or Ottoman imperial rule. There were other markers of difference as well. The classic nation-states of central and western Europe were comprised of different confessional and religious minorities. There were, for example, significant Catholic minorities in England and Prussia, a Protestant minority in France, and Jewish minorities nearly everywhere in Europe. These groups usually had complex forms of belonging. In the Jewish case, both German and eastern European Jews highly valued German culture and literature, which they identified with modernity and thus with emancipation, despite the growing resentment of Jews in Germany and indeed across the European continent (Hess 2002). The ambivalences of such relations found expression in literature. Heinrich Heine’s poem Der Rabbi von Bacherach (1822) depicts Jewish religion both as a nostalgic memory and an object of satire and ridicule. The stories and novels of Karl Emil Franzos, such as Der Pojaz (1893), consider the Jewish attempt to assimilate to German Kultur with skepticism and view the bourgeois promises of humanism, tolerance, and Bildung or “personal cultivation” from the perspective of an outsider. At the same time, writers like Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh deliberately employed the minority language of Yiddish to emphasize the contradictions of modern Jewish existence. In Fishke der krumer (Fishke the Lame, 1869) a traveling bookseller and a Jewish beggar entertain themselves with tales about the absurdity of ghetto life in the Galician Settlement. Later, Abramovitsh rewrote his book as Sefer Ha-Kabaznim (The Beggar’s Book, 1888), which contributed significantly to the renaissance of modern Hebrew. In this case, Hebrew, which had been hitherto reserved as a sacred language for religious use, was transformed into a modern literary and then vernacular language, a

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process that was full of tensions. These tensions appear in Chaim Nachman Bialik’s “Be-ir ha-haregah” (The City of Slaughter, 1903), a poem that employs biblical imagery of destruction, mostly from the prophetic books and the Book of Lamentations, to protest against the pogroms in Galicia.

Cultural Conflicts The century’s second half featured myriad conflicts between church and state that contemporaries dubbed Kulturkämpfe or “culture wars.” In France, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, and other places, the political authorities of emerging nation-states demanded decisive influence in domains of public action previously controlled by the churches, for instance education and family law. Middle-class liberal elites in particular led this effort at the state level. From their perches at the top of the economic and educational orders, they also declared cultural hegemony over their unlearned fellow citizens. They polemicized against tradition and backwardness, targeting especially the Catholic Church, the institution that to them represented an outdated and unwanted heritage. The church, in turn, developed an increasingly anti-modern attitude, criticizing or anathematizing such central features of modernity as democracy, liberalism, and capitalism. There were sharp conflicts along these lines: in France between exponents of republican Laicism and members of the Catholic France profonde and in Imperial Germany, unified in 1871, between bourgeois members of the Protestant majority and members of the Catholic minority. These conflicts provided essential contexts for the development of secularism as a distinct ideology. Their belligerent and divisive rhetoric also foreshadowed the radical ideological conflicts of the twentieth century. Kulturkämpfe were conflicts over identity, belonging, and legitimacy and, consequently, unfolded to a large extent in the realm of culture. They were contests over preferable cultural attributes in the transition to modernity and thereby impinged upon the legitimacy of institutions that no longer referred to religious authorities. Those responsible for these institutions either claimed quasi-sacral authority for themselves or consigned religious belief to the private realm. At the same time, they conceived of national unity and national progress as the highest values to be guaranteed by the secular, or secularizing, state. Such views could only be resisted by members of religious communities, Catholic and otherwise, which interpreted the sacred differently and demanded communal loyalty when under attack. Accordingly, these conflicts could become rather Manichean in nature, prompting the closing of ranks and bans on deviation on both sides. Such an environment promoted the exclusion of other groups, such as socialists and Jews, who as “inner enemies” of a nation deserved to be marginalized, persecuted, or exiled. Here, too, we see a more or less overt continuity with the exclusivist ideologies of the twentieth century, above all antisemitism. Of key concern here is that these conflicts also took place in print. Countless brochures, popular leaflets, historical novels and collections, and caricatures appeared, sending the venom of stereotypes coursing through the veins of national communities.

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Anticlerical images of lustful monks and cunning Jesuits, for example, figure prominently in Wilhelm Busch’s Pater Filucius (1872), a famous illustrated satire published at the commencement of the German Kulturkampf. Catholic authors, for their part, condemned with constant scorn liberal and libertine materialists, who were described at times with distinctively Jewish characteristics. Newspapers and journals, whose markets had expanded fantastically since the mid-century, were rife with all kinds of sensational stories for and against Catholicism. But more “standard” fiction often also drew on anticlerical tropes. In Portugal, Eca de Queiroz’s O Crime do Padre Amaro (The Crime of Father Amaro, 1875) mocks the erotic involvements of its priest-protagonist. In Italy, the story of the “Monaca di Monza”—an episode from Alessandro Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed, 1827) about a young woman who after being forced into a convent by her parents, dies over an unfortunate love affair—became so popular that deputies referred to it regularly during parliamentary debates. Historical novels and novellas, such as Conrad Ferdinand Meyer’s Jürg Jenatsch (1876) and Gustalf Adolfs Page (1882), glorify the Protestant heroes of the Reformation and the confessional wars, while also experimenting with the transformation of religious legends into realist narratives. These narratives did not simply unfold ideological stereotypes. They usually also displayed a certain fascination with the other. For example, in another work by Meyer, Der Heilige (The Saint, 1880), the narrator and thus also the reader are drawn more and more into the story of Thomas Beckett, so that by the end it remains unclear to what extent the story is truly miraculous. In a more realist manner, Leopoldo Alas’s La regenta (1884 – 85) blames both arrogant clerics and the liberal elite of a Spanish provincial town for the bigotry that undermines the society in which the protagonist finally perishes. The conflict between church and state was especially fierce in France. Here the fall of the Second Empire (in 1870) led to a particularly vigorous separation of church and state and an aggressive laïcité that remains a point of ideological contention today. The conflict drew the attention of numerous writers. Late in life, Émile Zola (1840 – 1902), whose naturalist fiction explores scientific subjects, namely genetics and social psychology, wrote a trilogy about Pierre, a young priest, and his ideological career. The trilogy begins with Pierre embarking on a pilgrimage to Lourdes in the Pyrenees Mountains (Lourdes, 1894), the site of the famous apparitions of the Virgin Mary in 1858. Once there Pierre is appalled by the mixture of superstition and commercialism that conditions the spiritual environment, but he also reacts with pity to the bodily sufferings of pilgrims seeking a cure. This the novel describes in great detail, suggesting that these sufferings may have psychic causes. In the subsequent volumes (Rome, 1896 and Paris, 1898), Pierre first seeks solace in the church and then in politics before realizing that he has to found a new religion of mankind. When he completed the trilogy, Zola also penned his famous open letter “J’accuse” in the context of the Dreyfus Affair, which alleged an antisemitic plot in the French military that profoundly enflamed the public conflict between conservative and republican France. Zola’s letter with its prophetic pose can be seen as a harbinger of yet another literary figure that became important to twentieth-century culture: the intellectual, a pol-

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itician of the word, so to speak, who uses the moral authority that he (or she) gains through artistic production to intervene in public affairs. The republican enthusiasm of someone like Zola found its counterpart in the French renouveau catholique, which criticized the capitalist bourgeoisie in a style bordering on mysticism and thereby left realist literature behind. Important contributions in this line of interpretation were made by Leon Bloy who, in Le sang des pauvres (1909), describes money as “the blood of the poor,” a metaphor that bears both Christological and revolutionary overtones, and by Charles Peguy, whose religious retelling of Joan of Arc’s story proclaims her a French national saint.

Religion and Literature at the Fin de Siècle If the church-state struggles of the European Kulturkämpfe undercut any simplistic narrative of European literature’s gradual and inevitable secularization, the lively religious scene at the end of the century demanded its final rejection. For during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth, in a period of rapid technological, scientific, and economic change, a demand for new worldviews spread all over Europe. Marxist Socialism, Darwinism, Scientific Monism, Life-Reform: all these ideologies and many more as well as the movements they spawned emerged as functional equivalents of religion in that they gave answers to life’s ultimate questions and directed the decisions of the individuals who adhered to them. These worldviews depended on literary means to spread their respective messages. Some of them also proved essential for the renewal of literary forms that came along with the avantgarde, such as Dadaism and Surrealism, which explicitly intended to break with nineteenth-century aesthetics. The general feeling of religious longing suggested by these developments encouraged investigations of religious traditions found outside of Europe. Thus Buddhism, which had been known in Europe since the eighteenth century, became more familiar by the second half of the nineteenth, largely through the works of philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer or through European philologists working in colonial zones. For example, Friedrich Max Müller, who edited The Sacred Books of the East (1879 – 1910), a major collection of ancient Indian religious texts, rendered Indian literary traditions akin to holy scriptures (Masuzawa 2005). Meanwhile, writers such as Helena Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley, who made extensive use of a range of European and non-European religious traditions to create new systems of belief, founded Theosophy, other branches of Western esotericism, and Spiritism. These alternative religions made a very strong impact both on the general public and on the literary imagination of many modernist writers, who became increasingly interested in irrational and paranormal experiences. Russian spirituality also had an important influence on literature. Leo Tolstoy began as an author of realist novels (War and Peace, 1862 – 69, Anna Karenina, 1876 – 78) that employ all the techniques of introspection to portray the problematic

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state of society. He then turned to existential and moral questions in becoming a reformer who preached a simple life according to the Gospel’s message. His charismatic teaching, spread by all forms of modern communication, including photography, features largely in his later work, which combines social realism with explicitly religious elements, as evidenced in his last novel Woskressenije (Resurrection, 1899). Similarly, Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote complex and polyphonous novels about modern man’s alienation (notably Crime and Punishment, 1866). These novels contain radical criticisms of Western decadence, often from a Christian perspective. One sees this in the famous dialogue between Christ and the Grand Inquisitor in Bratja Karamasowy (The Brothers Karamazov, 1878 – 80), which became a classical prooftext for the existentialist interpretation of Christianity in the twentieth century. Furthermore, the work of Friedrich Nietzsche exemplifies another type of “religious” literature. In developing a highly influential critique of modern culture and morality, this kind of literature aimed at a transvaluation of values, that is, reform that would finally overcome the religious past. In Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883), Nietzsche presents himself as the prophet of this teaching and, relying on biblical pretexts, develops an original tone of proclamation that became powerfully influential among poets like Stefan George, W. B. Yeats, and Wallace Stevens. Finally, by his personal life and the cult that his early disciples developed around him, Nietzsche became an iconic figure much imitated in the twentieth century: the intellectual as a cultural critic who castigates modernity for its degeneracy and hollowness (Aschheim 1992). This hollowness was the constant topic of aesthetic debates that considered the fin de siècle in general a period of crisis in which the realist representation of the world had exhausted itself. One of these debates concerned the reception of Impressionist painting, which no longer offered mimetic representations of reality. The crisis led to different forms of symbolism that referred to mythical or religious pretexts, such as Rainer Maria Rilke’s Stundenbuch (The Book of Hours, 1899 – 1903), which imitates medieval meditations and whose fictive authors include an Orthodox monk and a painter of icons. This sense of crisis is even more explicit in the literature of linguistic philosophy that harkens back to Nietzsche’s skeptical conception of language. It informs Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s lament in the Letter of Lord Chandos (1902) that words lose their meaning and culminates in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus (1921), which ends with different references to the mystical and the famous command of silence: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” This mystical conception of meaning was then elaborated upon to include the idea of poetic epiphany, an abrupt and partly non-rational revelation of meaning that one finds to varying degrees in the works of Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce. The long nineteenth century came to a close with the First World War (1914 – 18), a catastrophic event that marked a literary caesura as well. Among contemporaries, the outbreak of this terrible war was a moment of national awakening that had clear religious overtones. The German philosopher Max Scheler, for instance, claimed that war

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revealed virtue, true morals, and the divine (The Genius of War, 1915). The war was also a literary event. In the fall of 1914 alone, the German people submitted an estimated 50,000 poems per day to different newspapers and magazines! Yet, this enthusiasm did not last for long. The gruesome experience of industrial–technological warfare and the radicalization of state propaganda techniques resulted in a deep disillusionment that demanded a rethinking of moral, religious, and aesthetic standards of judgment. A monument to this concern was Karl Kraus’s Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Mankind, 1918), a massive five-hundred-page documentary drama that renders reports from the daily press in scenes that are as satiric as they are shocking. Kraus’s drama ends, consequently, with the apocalypse of mankind as seen from Mars, a scene that draws from the medieval morality play but also points toward Brechtian theater. Ultimately, nineteenth-century literature remains the standard for realist fiction, which makes up the vast majority of literature read worldwide today. Figures of the avant-garde who wanted to break away from the aesthetics of realism and pronounce a “crisis of the novel” proved to be ephemeral, while such innovations of modernism as the inner monologue, unreliable narration, and metanarrative play have long since become parts of a broader realist style that one finds in many world literatures. There is practically no religious culture globally that has not embraced realist fiction and its technological variations, from film and television to Bollywood, Asian Arthouse, Christian paperback, and subtle post-secular serial narrative. The style developed in the long nineteenth century, which has been examined here, thus remains fundamental to the representation of religion even in present times.

Trends in Scholarship Scholarship on the relationship between literature and religion in the period is manifold. As noted earlier, the history of literature is itself a product of the nineteenth century. Indeed, as part of nation-building strategies, these histories were cast as different national philologies that determined the study of literature far into the twentieth century. Rarely, however, do the religious underpinnings of much modern literature come into focus. A notable exception is the work of Erich Auerbach, a German philologist and literary scholar exiled by the Nazi regime, who argued in Mimesis (1946), now a classic in comparative literature, that European realism cannot be understood apart from its biblical roots. But as a rule, the vast majority of research follows national traditions that differ significantly. In the Anglophone world, the field of “Religion and Literature” emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. It conceived of literature as a realm for discussing existential questions which had once been topics of theological analysis and speculation. Naturally, this scholarship tended to focus on literature that deals with the problems of contemporary man, with Kafka arguably located at the center of its canon (Jasper 1992). By contrast, German philology was oriented more historically and usually followed the model of progressive secularization, first developed by Max

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Weber, which described how religion was both displaced by and then transformed into art. In this tradition of scholarship, religion is generally considered a phenomenon of the past, a precursor of true literature. The paradigm of this research is the period of sentimentalism when the sons of Lutheran pastors became writers of fiction (Schöne 1968). French scholarship is multivalent but stands out by a series of theoretical attempts to combine (post)structural approaches, psychoanalysis, and the history of spirituality (Certeau 1987). However, here the focus usually falls on the early modern period. These several schools of interpretation proved very fruitful in producing a rich variety of studies on all the major authors of the long nineteenth century. That said, outside of the Anglophone realm, these studies tended to remain isolated from one another and were largely marginalized in their broader fields as they developed in the 1970s and 1980s. Since the 1990s, with the return of religion in Europe, such topics as political theology have been gaining renewed interest, thus focusing attention once again on the nineteenth century. In addition, highly integrated approaches to the literary past have come forward thanks to a historiography of modern Europe that stresses not the unity of European culture but its diversity, inherent tensions, and conflicts (Kippenberg et al. 2009). At the same time, a wave of post-secular theorizing in the social sciences and anthropology has questioned the self-image of Western cultures as intrinsically secular (Asad 2003). Finally, as the field of comparative literature increasingly merges with world literature studies, themes of transfer and transformation play ever more pivotal roles, raising the question of how religious traditions move beyond their original cultural contexts. It remains to be seen if and how such developments as these will influence the study of religion and literature, literary studies in a more general sense, and the history of nineteenth-century culture.

References and Bibliography Abrams, Meyer Howard. 1971. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: Norton. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Aschheim, Steven. 1992. The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany: 1890 – 1990. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Auerbach, Erich. [1946] 1953. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Occidental Literature. Translated by Willard Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Auerochs, Bernd. 2006. Die Entstehung der Kunstreligion. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Certeau, Michel de. [1987] 1992. The Mystic Fable. Translated by Michael B. Smith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hess, Jonathan M. 2002. Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Jasper, David. 1992. The Study of Literature and Religion: An Introduction. 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Kippenberg, Hans G., Jörg Rüpke, and Kocku von Stuckrad, eds. 2009. Europäische Religionsgeschichte: Ein mehrfacher Pluralismus. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Masuzawa, Tomoko. 2005. The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Moretti, Franco. 1987. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. Translated by Albert Sbragia. London: Verso. Norton, David. 1993. A History of the Bible as Literature. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Prickett, Stephen. 1986. Words and the Word: Language, Poetics and Biblical Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schöne, Albrecht. 1968. Säkularisation als sprachbildende Kraft: Studien zur Dichtung deutscher Pfarrerssöhne. 2nd ed. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Sheehan, Jonathan. 2005. The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sorkin, David. 2008. The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Weidner, Daniel. 2011. Bibel und Literatur um 1800. Munich: Wilhelm Fink.

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13 Music Introduction “All experience takes place in time and space.” Stephen Kern makes a bold, if unarguable, assertion as he positions himself conceptually in the book whose premise informs the structure of this chapter. The Culture of Time and Space: 1880 – 1918 tells the story of change in the way the experience of time and space are culturally constructed from the late nineteenth century to the dawning of modernity—from the 1880s to the outbreak of the First World War—a period defined by “a series of sweeping changes in technology and culture” (1983, 1 – 2). Kern touches upon music only very briefly in his book and never on the topic of religious music or musical culture. The other types of artworks he examines (poetry, fiction, philosophy, etc.) are generally secular, or at the very least, non-religious, in nature. In that sense this chapter fills an important gap in musical content. There are differences and limitations, however. Kern spends most of his book tracking and explaining evolutionary changes but this chapter zooms in and out of particular case studies, without making larger evolutionary points. Kern’s argument revolves around the belief that technological innovation symbiotically “shaped consciousness” (1983, 1 – 2). Regrettably, technological innovation in music plays only a relatively minor role in this chapter; instead, I focus on what might broadly be described as “religious consciousness.” And lastly, although Kern himself eschews any single thesis, his project does give the impression of ascribing increasing plurality to time and space as the centuries progress: from earlier, collectively homogenous understandings of time and space to more personalized and therefore multiplicitous conceptions of “times” and “spaces.” This chapter is less certain of that evolutionary trajectory and makes no attempt to define change developmentally. With David Topper, I also doubt whether there can ever be “sufficient evidence available to conclude that the world was and is perceived in different collective ways” (1987, 287), particularly in the present study, which tactically limits itself to Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic religious cultures. Kern delineates time categories through past, present, and future. For space, he draws upon phenomenological descriptors of form, distance, and direction; this chapter weaves them together sequentially into a single thesis not dissimilar to Kern’s. I argue that music symbiotically shaped religious consciousness and religion, musical consciousness, and in the broadest sense I seek to contextualize European religious identities through music. In “time past” I look at evolutionary—and ultimately sacralized—interpretations of musical origins in different types of feeling; in “time present” I play with the idea of authenticity, using two case studies (two Catholic chant revivals and Jewish liturgical modernization) to explore how different approaches to musical origins legitimate authority; and in “time future” a hymn and a Mahler symphony rehttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110609059-015

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veal the circular fulfillment of our musical origins in the eschatology of “becoming.” Leading on from Mahler, the next section opens with a discussion of how forms of performance sacralize often secular space, from orchestral performance to choral and congregational singing; how distance can be construed both positively and negatively —positively through congregational liberalization of Tonic Sol-Fa, and prejudicially through antisemitism and empire; and how new directions (assimilation) in thought catalyzed and embodied changing attitudes towards musical composition—how, spiritually, the (real or imagined) East rather than the West itself came to sacralize the secular spaces of Europe. A conclusion explores the liminality of birdsong to illustrate how music unites time and space in the construction of nineteenth-century religious culture.

Time Past Nineteenth-century thinking was acutely interested by anything concerning origins: origins of the universe; of the natural world; of the human species, and positively everything associated with it, especially religion. In this respect, the quest for musical origins represented a particular fascination, not least for its ability to direct thinkers ineluctably towards explorations of the deepest human, and possibly animal, pasts. Theories of musical origins abound in nineteenth-century writing, often from entirely contradictory scientific (and religious) standpoints. Charles Darwin, for instance, believed that music preceded language, but his contemporary, Herbert Spencer, believed that music evolved from “impassioned” speech. In the Descent of Man (1874), Darwin observes: “He [Spencer] concludes that cadences used in emotional speech afford the foundation from which music has been developed; whilst I conclude that musical notes and rhythm were first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex.” The significance of these theories concerns not only the scientific disciplines but also the realm of religious culture. While Darwin and Spencer believed they held unimpugnable scientific beliefs about the chicken and the egg (language and music) of musical origins, their views on music’s evolutionary function were difficult to prove. Darwin clearly thought music was more primitive than language because it was observably allied to reproduction, the most rudimentary evolutionary action. Spencer, on the other hand, believed that the universality of music promoted the virtue of human sympathy, and along with it the development of a liberal, cooperative, civilized society. In his essay “The Origin and Function of Music” (1857), Spencer maintains that feelings associated with music “are the chief media of sympathy.” The significance of these views for religious culture may not be obvious, but they reflect an important, living contradiction in the way nineteenth-century thinkers regularly negotiated the seemingly divergent and intractable intellectual territories

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of their day. When pushed about his beliefs on music and sexual selection Darwin dodges the question in The Descent of Man by substituting a higher, almost transcendental, feeling for the lower, more basic human sexual instinct: “Love,” he opines, “is still the commonest theme of our songs.” Spencer does much the same with sympathy. For him, as he notes in First Principles (1862), sympathy is not merely the result of evolution, but an expression and manifestation of the world’s great unknowable, “a united belief in an Absolute that transcends not only human knowledge but human conception.” The demi-spiritual nature of Darwin’s and Spencer’s musical underbellies is important for two reasons: more broadly it supported the idea that religion and science were not as mutually opposed as many at the time claimed, and more specifically it challenged science’s ability, or even professional competency, to ascribe entirely material origins to music. This musical conundrum played into the hands of nineteenthcentury religion, concerned to evidence the mystical, spiritual origins of music. European religions were united on the spiritual origin of music, even if they held different doctrinal positions about it. Protestant thought on the matter was heavily influenced by theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher. Like Herbert Spencer, the theologian believed that music originated in impassioned speech—what he calls more generally Gefühl, or feeling. In his Lectures on Aesthetics (1831 – 33), he thus proposes: “The greatest triumph, it is true, is when he [the composer] bids adieu to language altogether and embodies, in this endlessly changing wealth of tonal sequences and harmonies, all the tremors of life that can pass through the soul.” According to Robert O’Meara (1998), Schleiermacher is also largely consonant with Catholic theology because his presuppositions about the Gefühl—especially those espoused in the 1830 Augsburg Confession Sermons—reflect the universalizing spirit of both Catholic and Protestant thought of the time. Other theologians disagree and musical culture tends to prove it. Francis Fiorenza (1996, 176) claims that Catholics, particularly those represented at Vatican I, were antagonistic to what they deemed to be a historically and philosophically ungrounded assertion about the origin of faith in human emotion. Catholic writers reflect this same objection through music, claiming that in its highest forms music originates in the emphatically spiritual, not human, world. Official nineteenth-century Catholic writings on music may, as a result, give the appearance of dwelling upon legislation rather than theological aesthetics, but through legislation against musical profanation they offer an alternative theory of origins based not on human emotion, but directly on God and the Bible. In the document “Bonum est confiteri” of August 14, 1830 that approved the statutes of the Italian Society of Saint Cecilia (Saint Cecilia is the patron saint of music), Pope Pius VIII maintains that music “was given to us in the Old Testament and was accepted in the Catholic Church … to excite souls to piety in the praises we owe to God.” Pope Pius IX’s brief, Multum ad Commovendos Animos (December 16, 1870) promulgates the statutes of the German Society of Saint Cecilia in not dissimilar language: “When united with the solemn supplication of the Church, sacred hymns contribute much to move the soul and promote piety, as far as the genius which has

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originated them, and the industry which has elaborated them, have been in harmony with the sanctity of the house of God and the majesty of the divine rites.”

Present Saint Cecilia Societies did not merely protect music from profanation, they used the musical past to forge a new Catholic identity in the present, an identity increasingly bound up with contemporary notions of authenticity. Belief in authenticity led Catholics directly into a reform of musical worship and, in particular, revivified appreciation of their earliest, most sacred music: Gregorian chant. By the nineteenth century, editions of chant were widely believed to have been extensively corrupted over time, so reform was absolutely critical. The earlier Ratisbon (German) and then later Solesmes (French) chant revivals placed authenticity at the very heart of a program to unify the Church’s worship. Frederick Pustet, publisher of the Ratisbon editions, received formal approval for them in the brief of Pius IX’s successor, Leo XIII, Sacrorum concentuum (1878): “It has always been a concern of the Supreme Pontiffs to consider the dignity of sacred music and even more to provide for uniformity in Gregorian Chant. … So we approve and declare authentic the edition brought before the Commission of musically competent men” (Hayburn 1979, 157). Although their revival was differently imagined methodologically, and more progressive in that respect, Solesmes reformers maintained not dissimilar attitudes towards the musically spiritual, Gregorian past. But where Ratisbon scholars appealed to an early sixteenth-century, Tridentine past, Solesmes revivalists went back to the Middle Ages for their sources. Katherine Bergeron cleverly describes the Solesmes chant revival as a study in “decadent enchantments,” a phrase meant to convey the paradoxical nature of restoring a seemingly ruined musical past—what she calls “the past perfected” (1998, 144), “the beautiful, ineffable history of the ancient repertory” (1998, xiii). Jann Pasler (1999, 371 – 73) may, perhaps rightly, accuse Bergeron of historically othering, orientalizing or exoticizing Gregorian chant, but the fact remains that, irrespective of their methodology or politics, both revivals were motivated by a present vision of an imagined community’s past. While that combination, a present–past, if you will, was widely shared by conservative religious cultures across Europe, reformers also sought to create a more present–present combination by modernizing tradition with new music and musical instruments (the organ, and female voices). Jewish reforming zeal owed much to processes of assimilation (see also David Meola’s chapter in this volume) and, in its effort to assimilate Reform Judaism, often expressed itself in locally borrowed musical traditions, incorporating the present–past of other religions. In 1810 the German banker Israel Jacobson advocated sweeping reform in Seesen and Kassel in Westphalia, involving the use of Protestant melodies sung to Hebrew texts, the installment of an organ and choral, and congregational singing based on Protestant models (Frühauf 2015, 188). The present–past of Jewish modernization involved more than the adoption of Christian tunes, instruments, and liturgical traditions. Like its

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Christian counterparts, Jewish reform also involved the publication of books accompanying traditional prayer melodies with newly harmonized arrangements. Unlike the Ratisbon or Solesmes editions of chant, books of this kind assimilated the past into the present without a re-creative intention; rather, modernization (in the form of modern harmonization) adorned antiquity through formal compatibility and self-augmentation. For reformers and modernizers eager to bring worship into the present, this was a win-win situation: the combination of ancient melodies of the past accompanied by the most up-to-date harmonic musical practices of the day. Notable among these Jewish musical reformers was Salomon Sulzer, Obercantor of Vienna’s newly consecrated Stadttempel. The Stadttempel was consecrated in 1826 and home to the reformed Vienna rite, renowned for its complementary treatment of tradition and modernization. Sulzer’s contribution to reform coalesced in the 1840 publication of the collection Schir Zion 1, a sizeable undertaking including 36 traditional and 86 newly composed melodies amongst 159 cantorial solos and five- to eight-part choral pieces for Sabbath, the Three Pilgrimage Festivals, the High Holidays, Purim, and Tisha B’Av, as well as various other occasions like bar mitzvahs and weddings (Frühauf 2015, 190). Despite its profoundly modernizing approach, Schir Zion 1 remains a work anchored in the past because, crucially, its musical texts are set entirely to Hebrew. Yet the use of Hebrew and vernacular languages was not always antithetically positioned by reformers. Charles Garland Verrinder’s anthem Hear My Cry O God provides an excellent example. Organist of the first reformed (and putatively Anglicanized) synagogue in Britain, the West London Synagogue of British Jews (founded 1842), Verrinder was active there for much of the second half of the nineteenth century and composed extensively for the community. Like its counterparts in Germany and elsewhere across Europe, the reforming community of the West London Synagogue sought to assimilate, as Jews began “judging themselves by non-Jewish standards” (Clark 2009, 4). Published in 1887, and composed for solo tenor or, progressively, soprano, Hear My Cry O God is indicative because it is bilingual, reinforcing “the point that the Jewish and British cultural worlds were not separate entities” (Padley 2019). Bilingual and potentially multi-gender, Hear My Cry O God is also bi-temporal, incorporating an ancient linguistic past within a very modern musical present. David Woolf Marks, minister of the West London Synagogue, summarizes these ideas in the sermon he gave on September 26, 1859, “The Synagogue and the Organ,” for the service in which the organ was inaugurated: Whilst the principles of Judaism have remained fixed and immutable since the days of Moses, the ceremonial or external worship has been subjected to constant modifications, according to the changes in the political and social relations in which the Jewish people have been placed. … We may fearlessly advance the proposition, that in as much as time has wrought its influence on the forms of worship, the exigencies of time may again be consulted for the purpose of bringing our ritual practices into harmony with our mental, social and political progress (cited in Padley, 2019, 8).

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Future Stephen Kern debates the extent to which the past began increasingly to oppress the present as the nineteenth century careered towards its close, pointing, for example, to the advent of dystopian time traveling literature like H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine. Time, in Kern’s estimation, was becoming increasingly compressed, a “temporally thickened present” (1983, 86). The future looked more promising, however, more open somehow—a reflection of what philosopher Henri Bergson (1859 – 1941) referred to, arguably, as “a becoming” in his 1907 treatise, Creative Evolution: “The material world [will] melt back into a single flux, a continuity of flowing, a becoming.” The idea of “becoming” is enshrined in contemporary and later evolutionary, and even transcendental utopian, philosophy. Determined to make sense of “the vast, slow unfolding of time,” Arthur O. Lovejoy, like Bergson, commits to the idea of “becoming” in The Great Chain of Being: “Now God himself is placed in, or identified, with this Becoming” (1936, 326). Religious culture reflects this becoming, not as a philosophical proposition but as a theological reality, and nowhere is this more abundantly apparent than in the eschatological content of its music, especially its hymns. The text to J. M. Neale’s “Around the Throne of God a Band” offers some insight. Beginning in heaven, it soon depicts an entirely different temporal sphere, life on earth. “His servants here below” keep vigil day and night in the hope of returning to heaven: “And we shall dwell, when life is past. / With Angels round the throne at last.” Michael Wheeler describes the temporal progression of Neale’s hymn as three forms of eschatological “presents”: an “eternal,” transcendental present; a “locutionary,” temporal present; and an “existential” present projected into post-mortem existence (1994, 136 – 37). In some respects this kind of thought inverts the theological imperative of nineteenthcentury movements that seek authenticity (and consequently authority) through the resumption and revival of historical pasts within a contemporary present. Eschatological hymns do the opposite. Within the—within a—contemporary present they seek authenticity and ontological fulfillment through future becomings. Eschatological music surfaces outside denominational contexts too, in ostensibly secular compositions with profoundly spiritual motivations, for example in the compositions of Gustav Mahler. Mahler, himself a Jewish convert to Christianity, is generally associated with the breakdown of conventional musical syntax and the seemingly geometric expansion of the symphonic dimension. A collateral effect of these developments is Mahler’s treatment of endings, or what in music is called the cadence. In earlier classical and romantic repertoire, the cadence is usually very strong because the music leads teleologically towards the goal of its conclusion. Often a classical or romantic symphony will thus conclude with a resounding thump or set of thumps on the work’s principal major or minor chord. But Mahler’s symphonies played with time and the very idea of a goal, what Alastair Borthwick, Trevor Hart, and Anthony Monti refer to as a “noncadential gesture of closure” (2011, 280). Mahler’s ninth and last completed symphony, itself often associated programmatically with his own impending death, ends in fragmentation gradually overwhelmed by silence in a section expressively headed Adagis-

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simo (effectively, as slowly as possible). The twentieth-century composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein describes it this way: “The strands of sound disintegrate. We hold onto them, hovering between hope and submission. And one by one these spidery strands connecting us to life melt away. … For a petrifying moment there is only silence. Then again, a strand, a broken strand, two strands … one … none. … And in ceasing we lost it all. But in letting go, we have gained everything” (1976, 321). One could even say that we “become” and that musical silence is the ultimate form of eschatological becoming, “a temporality with an open future” (Thomas 2002, 264). As this suggests, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries silence was itself deeply sacralized, not just silence in and of itself, but a silence before “the past” and after “the future,” before and after our existence. Catherine Pickstock draws on Augustine for an explanation: “The alternation of sound and silence in music is seen by Augustine as a manifestation of the alternation of coming into being and non-being which must characterise a universe created out of nothing” (1999, 247). In fact Mahler is, arguably, a deeply Augustinian composer, provided that we also accept Jeremy Begbie’s interpretation of Augustine himself: Augustine, like Mahler, “appears to see a link between the artistic possibility of creating something authentically new, the perpetual ‘coming to be’ of things, and the emergence of finite reality as a whole from nothing” (2000, 96). Perhaps this is what Mahler meant when he reputedly told the composer Sibelius that “the symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything” (cited in Horton 2013, 190)—including, paradoxically, what the nineteenth-century world and its otherwise secular, material temporality was not.

Space Form Like music more generally, descriptions of silence often take the shape of form rather than time, precisely because of silence’s intractable metaphysical nature. Music and silence are intimately entwined, however, especially in the nineteenth century. In the previous section, the hymn “Around the Throne of God a Band” was described as eschatological by virtue of what its text represented (i. e., eschatological theology), but in his Ninth Symphony Mahler aimed to embody (to embrace)—or even capture or somehow participate in—eschatology. In a characteristically romantic way, Mahler wanted his music not simply to represent “becoming” but to be or to become “becoming” itself through itself. To become “becoming” music requires more than time, however. It requires spaces as well, and musical spaces require form. Musical forms vary in the way that different times vary, from intrinsic shapes, like the sorts of symphonic structures Mahler used, to extrinsic structures in which performances take place. Between these intrinsic and extrinsic forms are forms through which the medium of music, one might say, is itself performed: the musical instruments. These include the

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voice or several voices (e. g., a soprano, choir, or congregation), an instrument or set of instruments (e. g. an organ or orchestra), or a combination of all of these. There is a correlation between these three categories of form, especially in the context of religious musical culture. Mahler’s Ninth Symphony is customarily performed by an orchestra in a concert hall; the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Bruno Walter, for example, gave its premiere in the Vienna Festival Hall in 1912, a year after his death. There is an additional, less tangible form, however: the blended, sacred/secular form of the symphony’s contemporary cultural context. Mahler’s Ninth is an emphatically secular composition containing an emphatically spiritual message, yet it performs a type of theologically intermediary role, a role Tom Beaudoin describes as connecting “to God or to things that are related to God, like ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ ideas, texts, or practices” (2013, x). By contrast, in the early nineteenth century, secular forms sacralized religious music as well, not just the secular forms represented in a symphony like Mahler’s Ninth. Choral performance and congregational singing were a mainstay of nineteenth-century European religious worship, whether Jewish, Protestant, or Catholic. Indeed, as discussed previously, they often represented ideologically contested territories, especially in the context of differing attitudes towards reform and revitalization. Nineteenth-century Protestant musical worship was deferentially congregational in form, but in some traditions—High Anglicanism, Catholicism—the choir was more preeminent. As a part of its socially equalizing agenda, an eighteenth-century Methodist congregation could not only expect to sing hymns extensively in its services, but to sing music drawn largely from secular musical sources. In the nineteenth century, however, repertoire began to change, as even more “sacralizing” theological tendencies came into play. In the introduction to the hymnal Sacred Harmony (1822), Charles Wesley junior (1757– 1834) takes a swipe at secular music when he maintains that “the rage for new tunes … deluged the Connection with base, dissonant, unscientific, and tasteless compositions, utterly destructive of that rich and solemn melody, which best becomes religious services.” That same complaint resonated throughout Judeo-Christian worship of the time, but not necessarily through congregational singing. Chant is a largely non-congregational genre of music sung by a choir trained to perform it, but revivalists were as concerned to recover its solemnity as its religious authenticity. For them choral—and, to a much lesser extent, congregational—chanting reunited God with His church, and His church with its people from the beginning of time. Dom Prosper Guéranger, the founding father of the Solesmes Revival, asks in the Mémorial catholique of February 28, 1830: Who has not tasted the charm of so many [Gregorian] pieces sublime or original, stamped by the geniuses of the centuries past. … What Christian has ever been able to hear the Paschal chant of the Haec Dies without being tried with that vague sentiment of the infinite, as if Jehovah Himself was having His majestic voice heard? And who has not heard … an entire congregation making the sacred vaults of the roof resound with the inspired accents of the Gaudeamus, without his being

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brought back through the ages, to the epoch when the echoes of subterranean Rome resounded with this triumphant chant? (cited in Hayburn 1979).

Whether choral, congregational, or both, singing took place within its own form, the liturgy, and that form was invariably placed within spaces sacralized for the purposes of worship, such as cathedrals, churches and synagogues, prayer houses, domestic settings, or even open-air locations in fields. Drawing upon his experience of early nineteenth-century American evangelical meetings, Hugh Bourne, for example, advocates their use in the preface to A Collection of Camp Meetings, Revivals &c (1824), tracing, and hence theologically justifying, the history of open-air worship to the Old and New Testaments (Clarke 2018, 66). Indoor services were inevitably more conventional, but no less sculpted by their environment—described by Ingrid Sykes as “the sonorous construction of institutional spaces” (2004, 44). For French convent nuns, the sound of the church organ became “an ideal symbol for their conscious rejection of the human world and the acceptance of a heavenly sphere” (Sykes 2004, 50). Indeed, Guéranger and those nuns believed that the ecclesiastical space not only enhanced spirituality, it served a positively theological purpose to unite them with God. This vastly popular belief and deeply humanizing theology—a doctrine of divine simplicity—reinterpreted the hypostatic union of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as a metaphor for God’s inextricable union with his creation. The Italian composer Gaspare Spontini (1784 – 1851) summarizes this notion in an essay posthumously published in English translation, “The Music in the Churches of Rome” (1885), when he suggests that “the music of the Church should carry the mind to heaven; that it should praise the Lord in melody that would be sweet, joyful, fervent, animated and pleasing, as we fancy the angels and seraphims sing in heaven.” In this respect Spontini anticipated Jeremy Begbie, who argues today that a “musical understanding of space is considerable and far-ranging. The co-presence of the Son of God and humanity in Christ obviously comes to mind, as does the way we conceive the Trinity” (2000, 26).

Distance The way the nineteenth century conceived the Trinity was partly spatial: the relationship of created and Creator mirrored the relationship of God and his creation, and God and Himself. Music’s ability to reduce the distance between created and Creator, and therefore between created and created, is a belief generally shared across denominations of the time, but occasionally the distance within and between denominations is antithetical. This is particularly true of the relationship between certain nominal Christians and their Jewish contemporaries.¹ Reared in sometimes palpably antisemitic

1 Although these individuals were baptized and identified as Christian (at least in official documents), in most cases they had already distanced themselves from the churches and from regular practice.

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ideologies, some nineteenth-century “Christian” writers sought to denigrate Jewish composers and their music. These commentators considered synagogal music to be noise, or even more derogatorily, Lärm, a term Ruth HaCohen describes as signifying a very loud noise, not necessarily of human origin; shouts, exclamations and loud sounds; and an aural state located somewhere between alarm and bustle (2011, 127). In the context of antisemitism, additionally fueled by hierarchical presumptions about race, nationhood, and cultural identity, Jewish “noise” became a cypher for difference and distance from its Christian detractors. It was not just noise but transgression. The transgressive nature of Jewish music was sometimes mitigated by Jewish reform of the kind mentioned previously in relation to Sulzer, but Christian appreciation was almost invariably qualified. Jewish music was still noise, even if its noise was rationalized by seemingly enlightened ethnographic explanation. In the treatise The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands, and United Provinces (1773), the music historian Charles Burney sets the (self-conflicted) tone with the apparently unintended deprecation: “At the end of each strain, the whole congregation set up such a kind of cry, as a pack of hounds when a fox breaks cover. It was a confused clamour, and riotous noise, more than song or prayer. However, this is a description, not a censure of Hebrew music.” Like other ethnic musics—and like the Jews themselves—Jewish music remained almost uniformly exotic over the nineteenth century, no matter how reformed or modernized. The most prejudiced and renowned antisemitic musical tract of the period was Richard Wagner’s Das Judenthum in der Musik (Judaism in Music, 1850). Here, Wagner reflects three principal strands in contemporary antisemitism: (1) individuals express an “essential substance” that invariably recapitulates their ethnic or national origin; (2) their essential substance is imprinted in symbolic systems like language, music, and poetry; and (3) the expression of their essential substance communicates either substance or nonsubstance. Jewish music thus falls into the category of nonsubstance. Substantial music produces the emotion of sympathy; insubstantial (Jewish) music, abhorrence, and sympathy can only be communicated to others who carry the same essential substance as the composer of substantial music (HaCohen 2011, 247– 48). While Wagner’s ideas register amongst the most insidious and noxious kinds of spatial “distance,” there are others, and sometimes they are not entirely obvious. Nonsubstance, in this definition, also infects attitudes in nineteenth-century music historiography. A seemingly benign component in European Christian music history is liturgical chant, but like all music, chant represented a contested ideological space across Christian and Jewish historiographies. Conventional Christian musical history of the nineteenth century usually traced the origin of Gregorian chant to Hebrew music and the Temple, but occasionally chant historians omitted Jewish ancestry altogether. Some historians embraced Jewish ancestry to prove the developmental superiority of its Christian successor. For example, in From Lyre to Music: A History of the Aboriginal Union of Music and Poetry (1890) J. Donovan contends:

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Where the Gregorian chant originated, whether among the Egyptians, Hebrews, or Greeks, there is … everything to support the belief that it originated in the natural way. But what is pointed here is, that when it reached the Northern [Christian] people it was raised far above the spontaneous stage of evolution. It was drawn into relationship with very high and dignified language.

Like Burney, these historians routinely treated Jewish music and the people who sang it as “simple”: people who, as William Stafford claims in his History of Music (1830), “had not the least idea of music, and who professed, also, in every thing, to observe the greatest simplicity” (see also Zon 2010, 99 – 119). A corollary can be found in Joseph Goddard’s comment in his The Rise of Music (1908) that Hebrew music is “an embryological music in which melody and regular accentuation are nascent.” Others, for complementary reasons, actively rejected Jewish musical genealogy on presumptive ideological grounds. Raphael Kiesewetter, in History of Modern Western Europe, from the First Century of the Christian Era to the Present Day (1834), even claims that the early church would have relinquished Jewish music along with Judaism itself. At the same time, European Christians—between and within Catholic and Protestant denominations—argued incessantly about chant, and this despite ubiquitous revival movements like Ratisbon and Solesmes. As the Catholic magazine The Tablet observed in 1847, “One person would abolish all music but the Plain Chant of the Church; another dreads the very idea of barbarism.” Other types of religious music united disparate apologetical viewpoints under the banner of imperial objectives, effectively reducing ideological distance while extending it geographically and culturally. A good example is the broadly evangelical movement called Tonic Sol-Fa. Tonic Sol-Fa was a singing movement founded in England by Sarah Glover in the 1830s and then internationalized by her successor, John Curwen. It taught without musical notation, using instead a semiotic system of solfeggio syllables (doh, ray, me, fah, soh, lah, te). Both Glover and Curwen came from strongly congregational Christian religions—as the title of Glover’s central contribution, the Scheme to Render Psalmody Congregational (1841), attests—and Curwen was himself a Congregational minister. Unlike previous systems, Tonic Sol-Fa taught the truly Congregational—even liberal—message that each note in a scale (i. e., each person in a congregation) was conditioned not by a predetermined, fixed position, but by its function and therefore purpose (Zon 2019, 180 – 200).² Tonic Sol-Fa rose above internal squabbles of the kind exemplified by more conservative Protestant and Catholic revivals and, in the context of imperial expansion, taught the same singing system to nations all over the world as a part of the church’s global initiatives in evangelization. Not unlike what today is called ethnodoxology (Nee-

2 Previous systems utilized “fixed” Doh, meaning that syllables are always fixed to a particular note: C was Doh; D, Re; E, Mi; F, Fah; G, Soh; A, Lah; B, Te. Glover and Curwen introduced “moveable Doh” in which each syllable is determined not by a fixed position, but by its relative position within any scale. Thus, in the key of C, C is Doh and G is Soh; in the key of F, F (the first note of the scale) becomes Doh and C (the fifth note of the scale) becomes Soh.

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ley 2018),³ missionary work and Tonic Sol-Fa became partners, introducing British evangelical, and ostensibly benign philanthropic, attitudes through music. John Curwen was widely known as “the musical missionary” for a reason. Contemplating the various challenges posed by the initiative in “Missions and the Tonic Sol-fa Method” (1859), he opines: “The spreading of the Tonic Sol-fa method throughout the world, as an aid to mission labour, is a great problem” (cited in McGuire 2009, 132). Musical mission could be far from benign, however, as in-progress research on singing in Boer War concentration camps intimates (see Johnson-Williams 2023) and as the missionary history of Tonic Sol-Fa abundantly illustrates. According to Kofi Agawu, “In domesticating hymns whose texts were originally in German or English for local consumption, melodies often disregarded the natural declamation of indigenous singing, imposed a regime of regular and symmetrical periodicity, and rode roughshod over the intonational contours prescribed by speech tones” (2016, 336).

Direction The imperial project used musical space strategically, not simply reducing ideological distances by expanding internationally but also by creating genuinely new musical opportunities (and therefore directions) for Judeo-Christian religious cultures. One new direction, facilitated by recent scientific technologies used in ethnographic research (particularly photography, sound and video recording), helped to reverse conventional imperial trajectories from East to West and dismantle Western ignorance of indigenous religion. A founding, if largely forgotten, father of British ethnomusicology, Charles Samuel Myers was part of the large interdisciplinary team gathered for the 1898 Cambridge Torres Straits expedition. Amongst other disciplines, the team included experts in psychology, medicine, linguistics, anthropology, ethnography, photography, music and sound recording. Although expedition findings in music were largely empirical in nature—Myers recorded, transcribed, and analyzed twenty Torres Straits songs (always sung by men)—the five published volumes (1901 – 35) of the expedition contextualized musical practices across a range of religious ceremonial practices. Myers’s important contribution—his new direction—was to reinterpret the nature of musical evolution. No longer were indigenous musical cultures considered to be intrinsically “primitive”; they evinced the same developmental characteristics of all music. In the article “A Study of Rhythm in Primitive Music (1905), he explained: “Just as the complexities of European harmony have advanced from a basis of simple relation between the vibration-frequencies of simultaneously occurring tones, so those of primitive rhythm have developed from a basis of simple relations between the duration of suc-

3 Paul Neeley (2018) writes that “Ethnodoxology is the theological and anthropological study, and practical application, of how every cultural group might use its unique and diverse artistic expressions appropriately to worship the God of the Bible.”

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cessively occurring periods. The development of harmony and of rhythm alike invoke the psychological acts of analysis, synthesis and fusion.” Myers was indicative of a change in the direction of European values, a change that itself initiated change in the course of Western art music. In the same article, he wonders, almost presciently, given that the premieres of Stravinsky’s Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913) were only a few years away, whether modern composers “will ever adopt such complex rhythms as are in use among certain primitive peoples,” suggesting that it “must depend on the gradual education of their audience and on the limiting value of the strain of attention which is compatible with aesthetic pleasure.” Myers proved to be an excellent soothsayer because, like Stravinsky, European composers increasingly integrated Eastern spiritual and so-called primitive musical ideas into complex secular art music. While Stravinsky’s early ballets may be amongst the most well-known compositions of the period, there are others. Gustav Holst’s famous orchestral suite The Planets (1914 – 16) is largely understood to be a paragon of Britishness, but it harbors a transnational secret. Lying beneath the surface is a host of Vedic (ancient Indian religious) influences. Holst is known to have become absorbed in Indian culture from an early period in his career, and although publicly he dismissed the attribution of Indian influences on The Planets, the work’s stylistic properties were drawn incontestably from earlier and other works with direct Indian influences, including Hymns to the Rig Veda (voice and piano settings, 1907– 08; choral settings, 1908 – 12) and Sāvitri (premiered, 1916). Amongst the most popular Planets is Mars, itself based on “Battle Hymn” no. 1 of Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda. Mars may include an insistent orchestral ostinato (a short, continuously repeating melody), an unusual (Indian) 5/4 rhythm with an unusual (Indian) accented fourth beat, and unusual semitone (Indian) construction (Ghuman 2014, 141), yet it produces an altogether British-sounding effect. At a time when secular Western composers manifestly exoticized Indian and other non-Western spiritual contexts, frequently in opera (e. g., Massenet’s Le roi de Lahore, premiered 1877; and Bizet’s Les pêcheurs de perles, premiered 1863), Holst’s approach may well have helped de-colonialize Western musical culture. Rather than treating foreign music like most musical exoticists of the time and later—as superficial decoration; as relatively cheap, flat-pack socio-cultural signifiers—Holst integrates Indian music into the very fabric of his compositional structures, in a way signalled by Charles Samuel Myers. In this respect Ralph Locke suggests that Holst was protomodern, identifying him as a composer who thought of “all the music in full context” (2010, 42). Holst was certainly not alone among composers, but some also used religious culture to express the origin of their own musical identity, invoking deep-seated feelings in the process—feelings not unlike Schleiermacher’s Gefühl or the impassioned speech of Herbert Spencer. Swiss-Jewish composer Ernst Bloch is one such example. Bloch sought to engage composition at a deeply linguistic level, liberating music from the constraints of speech and converting Jewish personal and collective historical experience into an embodied, yearning form of emotional musical expression. His masterpiece, Schelomo: Rhapsodie Hébraïque for Violoncello and Orchestra (premiered in 1917), is in-

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dicative, portraying King Solomon through the cello, his world and thoughts through the orchestra. Bloch’s music raises important questions about identity and the nature of Jewish assimilation. The cultural theorist Klára Móricz, for example, argues that Jewish essentialism (Jewishness based on universal characteristics) is entirely illusory and should instead be replaced with the multiplicities of Jewish experience. She thus defines Bloch’s music as “racially conscious but not necessarily nationalistic” (2008, 7). David Michael Schiller, on the other hand, speaks about how Bloch “assimilates Jewish music” and how “assimilating Jewish music becomes audible” (2003, 1). In that respect assimilation speaks directly of direction and the distance and form that its space connects: the way audiences, composers, critics, or musicologists assimilate what music they hear or study, or the way music itself assimilates and absorbs music of the past. These definitions have even larger implications for defining identity, however, because assimilation of this kind is not necessarily uniquely Jewish but occurs throughout the history of European religious music: Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic. Take, for example, the “discrete influence of Gregorian chant” and “the Gregorian archetypes” in the vocal writing of Fauré’s Requiem (1900) (Nectoux 1991, 121). Is Fauré assimilating Catholic music? Or is he, like Bloch, “racially conscious but not necessarily nationalistic” (Móricz 2008, 7)?

Conclusion There is, of course, no answer to these questions, because they are fundamentally historiographical. All music assimilates in the evolutionary concourse of music history. Music, like people, is by its very nature hybrid. Nineteenth-century music history is no exception. What is exceptional is the way nineteenth-century European religious cultures constructed their narratives of assimilation and how those narratives exploited contemporary notions of time and space. Darwin wondered whether language assimilates music; Spencer, whether music assimilates language. Nonetheless, both scientists ascribed transcendental properties to the origination of music (Darwin, love; Spencer, sympathy). Schleiermacher considered whether feeling (Gefühl) assimilates mind or mind assimilates feeling, and whether religious feeling helps liberate music from the more primitive strictures of speech (Crossley 1991, 151 – 72). Chant revivalists had their own narrative of assimilation: a present–past, a present perpetually comprising the assimilation of only pasts, and (arguably) the illusion of an unassimilated present. At the same time, nineteenth-century hymnodists imbued their hymns with eschatological futures, with futures assimilating the totality of time past, present, and future into a “becoming.” Mahler did much the same in some of his symphonies. Space invariably assimilates time as well. One of the main points of my latest book Evolution and Victorian Musical Culture (2017) was to ask why the Victorian designers of the London Zoo placed aviaries at the entrance. Typically for Victorians the personal experience of public exhibition spaces (e. g., museums, zoos, Crystal Palace) were organized to reflect the evolutionary principles of the Great Chain of Being (Poliquin

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2012, 125; also Qureshi 2011). Visitors could expect the experience to embody developmental principles and to follow a trail along the Great Chain from the lowest possible creature up through to the highest primates and possibly man himself (Zon 2017, 50). The 1851 Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace began slightly higher up the Great Chain, but its questionable anthropological certitudes were no less apparent, leading “along a line of progress from the Tasmanian savage through the ‘barbaric’ civilizations of the East, northwest across the European continent toward an apex in Great Britain” (Stocking 1987, 5). Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century guidebooks, however, teach us that the London Zoo only partially conformed to this kind of model. Divided into two unequal northern and southern halves, its southern half began at the aviaries and rose to monkeys, its northern half, at insects rising to large mammals. The question remains, therefore: Why did visitors enter at the aviaries instead of directly lower down the Great Chain of Being? The answer is admittedly speculative but indicative: nineteenth-century European religious culture considered birds and their songs to be spiritually liminal—a living threshold, an entrance or open doorway to heaven and earth, the sacred and secular, spiritual and material, the transcendent and immanent—even between time and space themselves. The aviaries replicated the position of that threshold; they were what they represented. And this very keenly summarizes the nineteenth century. When the nineteenth-century listener heard the song of the nightingale, she or he did not simply hear birdsong but everything birdsong represented. As H. G. Adams opines in Favourite Song Birds (1887): [When] the mind is most free from worldly cares, and the heart is most alive to impressions of a gentle, and a soothing, and a holy character; into these impressions there enters, too, a feeling of solemn awe, at a time when we seem to stand face to face with the great Creator of the universe, and to hold high commune with the mightiest spirits of the past … we walk amid a host of attendant spirits … to music of an unearthly and seraphic character.

Birdsong was often theologically foregrounded, especially as a pedagogical tool for redemption. The anonymous author of English Singing Birds asks “If God can call forth such notes of song from so small a creature on earth, what must be the music of heaven? What the song of redeemed creation—of those saints, who have not only been saved, but changed into the image of Christ?” It is curious, then, that ornithology published by religious organizations (The Religious Tract Society, for example) occasionally omits so much as a word about God, His design, or creation. The evidence was simply left to speak for itself; and perhaps so too with the London Zoo and its liminallypositioned aviaries. The evidence is often contradictory, as this chapter illustrates. What is more certain is that nineteenth-century evidence illustrates a range of times and spaces across the period and that those times and spaces embodied what they represented for the people who experienced them. Music symbiotically shaped their religious consciousness, and religion, their musical consciousness. This was no ordinary relationship, but a relationship forged in the assimilation of time and space, a unique relationship forged in the dynamic musical cultural environment of nineteenthcentury Europe.

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References and Bibliography Agawu, Kofi. 2016. “Tonality as a Colonizing Force in Africa.” In Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique, edited by Ronald Radano and Tejumola Olaniyan, 334 – 55. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Beaudoin, Tom. 2013. Secular Music and Sacred Theology. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press. Begbie, Jeremy. 2000. Theology, Music and Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bergeron, Katherine. 1998. Decadent Enchantments: The Revival of Gregorian Chant at Solesmes. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Bernstein, Leonard. 1976. The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Borthwick, Alastair, Trevor Hart, and Anthony Monti. 2011. “Musical Time and Eschatology.” In Resonant Witness: Conversations between Music and Theology, edited by Jeremy S. Begbie and Seven R. Guthrie, 271 – 94. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Clark, Michael. 2009. Albion and Jerusalem: The Anglo–Jewish Community in the Post-Emancipation Era, 1858 – 1887. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clarke, Martin V. 2018. British Methodist Hymnody: Theology, Heritage, and Experience. London: Routledge. Crossley, John P., Jr. 1991. “Religion, Science, and Ethics: Schleiermacher’s Study of the Structure of Mind.” The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics 11: 151 – 72. Fiorenza, Francis Schüssler. 1996. “Schleiermacher and the Construction of a Contemporary Roman Catholic Foundational Theology.” The Harvard Theological Review 89: 175 – 94. Frühauf, Tina. 2015. “The Reform of Synagogue Music in the Nineteenth Century.” In The Cambridge Companion to Jewish Music, edited by Joshua S. Welden, 187 – 200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ghuman, Nalini. 2014. Resonances of the Raj: India in the English Musical Imagination, 1897 – 1947. Oxford: Oxford University Press. HaCohen, Ruth. 2011. The Music Libel Against the Jews. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hayburn, Robert F. 1979. Papal Legislation on Sacred Music, 95 A.D. to 1977 A.D. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press. Horton, Julian. 2013. “Cyclical Thematic Processes in the Nineteenth-Century Symphony.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Symphony, edited by Julian Horton, 190 – 231. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson-Williams, Erin. 2023. “‘The Concertina’s Deadly Work in the Trenches’: Soundscapes of Suffering in the South African War.” Nineteenth-Century Music Review 20: 119 – 51. Kern, Stephen. 1983. The Culture of Time and Space, 1880 – 1918. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Locke, Ralph. 2010. Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lovejoy, Arthur O. 1936. The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of An Idea. New York: Harper Torchbooks. McGuire, Charles Edward. 2009. Music and Victorian Philanthropy: The Tonic Sol-fa Movement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Móricz, Klára. 2008. Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Music. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Nectoux, Jean-Michael. 1991. Gabriel Fauré: A Musical Life. Translated by Roger Nichols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Neeley, Paul. 2018. Response to “What is Ethnodoxology?” International Council of Ethnodoxologists. https://www.worldofworship.org/what-is-ethnodoxology/. O’Meara, Robert Thomas. 1998. “The Catholic Spirit in Schleiermacher’s Ecclesiology: The 1830 Augsburg Confession Sermons.” Master’s thesis, University of Toronto.

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Padley, Danielle. 2019. “Tracing Jewish Music beyond the Synagogue: Charles Garland Verrinder’s Hear my cry O God.” Nineteenth-Century Music Review 14. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479409819000193. Pasler, Jann. 1999. Review of Decadent Enchantments, by Katherine Bergeron. Journal of the American Musicology Society 52: 370 – 83. Pickstock, Catherine. 1999. “Soul, City and Cosmos after Augustine.” In Radical Orthodoxy, edited by John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward, 243 – 77. London: Routledge. Poliquin, Rachel. 2012. The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Qureshi, Sadiah. 2011. Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Schiller, David Michael. 2003. Bloch, Schoenberg, Bernstein: Assimilating Jewish Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stocking, George W., Jr. 1987. Victorian Anthropology. New York: Free Press. Sykes, Ingrid J. 2004. “Sonorous Mechanics: The Culture of Sonority in Nineteenth-Century France.” Nineteenth-Century Music Review 1 (1): 43 – 66. Thomas, Günther. 2002. “Resurrection to New Life: Pneumatological Implications of the Eschatological Transition.” In Resurrection: Theological and Scientific Assessments, edited by Ted Peters, John Russell, and Michael Welker, 255 – 76. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Topper, David. 1987. Review of The Culture of Time and Space: 1880 – 1918, by Stephen Kern. Leonardo 20: 287 – 88. Wheeler, Michael. 1994. Heaven, Hell, and the Victorians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zon, Bennett. 2010. “Victorian Anti-Semitism and the Origin of Gregorian Chant.” In Renewal and Resistance: Catholic Church Music from the 1850s to Vatican II, edited by Paul Collins, 99 – 119. Oxford: Peter Lang. Zon, Bennett. 2017. Evolution and Victorian Musical Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zon, Bennett. 2019. “Liberalism and Victorian Musical Sympathy.” In Liberalism and Victorian Musical Culture, edited by Sarah Collins, 180 – 200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sarah Schaefer

14 Visual Arts When the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen was adopted by the French National Constituent Assembly on August 26, 1789, the document’s content was immediately subject to visualization and circulation in a variety of media forms. Most frequently, the text appeared within the space of two arched tablets, the traditional iconographic signifier of the Mosaic laws (Figure 14.1). In the Declaration, the tablets are represented in a strictly frontal manner, rendering the text legible to the viewer, with each article indicated by a Roman numeral. The authorial figure of Moses is supplanted by the all-seeing eye of God enclosed in an equilateral triangle, a motif with Masonic and deist associations that implies divine favor on this revolutionary endeavor. The significance of the Declaration was further materialized two years later, when the text was cast on a bronze tablet and placed in the foundation of a monument that was to be erected where the Bastille once stood. The tablet would be exhumed, mutilated, and deposited in the national archives when a new Declaration was ratified in 1793, an iconoclastic act that demonstrates both the material and discursive value of these relics of the recent past (Ribner 1993, 8 – 16). I begin with this example for several reasons. First, the French Revolution is frequently cited as the inaugural moment of the “long” nineteenth century, due in large part to its overturning of institutions of authority like the Catholic Church. Many of the characteristics associated with modernity that would continue to develop in the nineteenth century can be linked to the ideologies that were at the Revolution’s core. And although in recent years important advances have been made in considering the foundations of nineteenth-century culture beyond the ferment of the French Revolution, it nonetheless provides a useful bookend for the period discussed here, a period in which revolution—whether political, economic, social, or cultural—plays a central role. Second, as the image of the Declaration makes clear, the secularist aims of many revolutionary factions were not as cut-and-dried as one may initially think. In terms of its relationship with the visual culture of the past (and with religious imagery in particular), the revolutionary period can be characterized by appropriation, adaptation, and revision rather than wholesale rejection. For instance, after the relics of Sainte Geneviève were tried, burned, and cast into the Seine, the eponymous church that housed them was not destroyed but transformed into the Panthéon, a temple dedicated to the “Great Men” of the nation. The artist Jacques-Louis David represented the death of his friend Jean-Paul Marat by employing the visual language of Baroque religious painting, solidifying the political firebrand’s role as a martyr to the Revolution. Appropriation, adaptation, and revision are evident throughout the religious visual culture of the long nineteenth century in Europe, which witnessed an unprecedented expansion of religious imagery. Subjects from the Bible and church history remained part of the primary pedagogical corpus within the major, national art academies. Explorations beyond the European continent led artists to represent faiths outside of https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110609059-016

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Figure 14.1: Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, 1789, engraving. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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Judeo-Christian traditions. Artistic practice was itself reframed as an act of religious transcendence. Religion pervaded the realms of popular visual culture and became the subject of avant-garde critique. Far from being a relic of the premodern world, religion as a form of experience, source of subject matter, and a complex set of institutions was fundamental to the shaping of modern art and visual culture.

Historiography Despite the significant role that religious visual culture has played in modernity, it has traditionally stood on the margins of art historical scholarship. The centrality of France to the narratives of art history is a major factor in the limited amount of literature on this material. The major art historians of the 1970s and 1980s focused primarily on the rise of modernism and the avant-garde via French Realism, Impressionism, and PostImpressionism, styles that were often tied to radical politics and the rejection of tradition. The religious imagery that appears in these art historical narratives tends to be either avant-garde works that are interpreted as critiques of religious institutions and practices or objects that were the “kitsch” to which “high art” was opposed. Beginning in the late 1980s, a number of groundbreaking studies began to challenge the predominant narratives of nineteenth-century art. These studies questioned the secularist model of modernity and explored the continued significance of religious imagery. In his expansive overview of religious art in nineteenth-century France, Michael Paul Driskel developed a framework that consisted of two categories: “ultramontanism” and “naturalism.” The ultramontanist style was aligned with the religio-political ideology of the same name that favored the centralization of Catholic power in the papacy. The artists whom Driskel characterizes as ultramontanist aimed at reviving what they perceived as the nobility of religious art of the Byzantine, late medieval, and early Renaissance periods. The naturalist school sought a more “authentic” style of religious art through, for instance, a more historically-grounded representation of the Bible. Although not all religious imagery in nineteenth-century France fits neatly into Driskel’s ultramontanist and naturalist characterizations, they nonetheless provide a useful counterbalance to the prevailing categories of “avant-garde” and “retrograde.” The complex narratives of religious imagery have been further elucidated by scholarship dealing with contexts outside of France, which has steadily increased. For instance, tendencies in British and German art have been the focus of significant scholarly investigation. Michaela Giebelhausen (2006) has explored religious imagery in mid-Victorian Britain through well-studied artists like the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood as well as figures like Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786 – 1846) and Charles Lock Eastlake (1793 – 1865), who would be less familiar to non-specialists. Cordula Grewe has devoted two books and numerous articles to the Nazarenes, a movement associated with German Romanticism that was devoted to reviving religious imagery (see 2009). As JudeoChristianity remained the dominant religious tradition throughout Europe in this peri-

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od, scholarship has focused primarily on material that fits broadly within that framework. Analysis within this broad category occurs generally through the lens of Christianity, including when the subject derives from the Old Testament. However, the relationship between Jewish and Muslim faiths and nineteenth-century visual culture has been subject to greater investigation, as will be discussed below. Most notably, the depiction of Muslim communities and practices among Orientalist artists has been a source of considerable debate. A fruitful realm of emerging scholarship deals with Orthodox Christian imagery in eastern Europe, particularly at the end of the nineteenth century, when nationalism was on the rise and modernist trends expanded. A key way in which attention has been brought to modern religious art is through museum exhibitions, which often include significant scholarship in the form of exhibition catalogues. There has been a marked increase in the number of these shows in major museums. Recent important examples include James Tissot: “The Life of Christ” (Brooklyn Museum of Art, 2009 – 10), Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit (Cincinnati Art Museum and Houston Museum of Fine Arts, 2012 – 13), Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design, 1848 – 1900 (National Gallery of Art, 2013), Mystical Symbolism: The Salon de la Rose + Croix in Paris, 1892 – 1897 (Guggenheim, 2017), and Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future (Guggenheim, 2018 – 19). The Jewish Museum in New York City has created exhibitions that highlight and explore representations of Jewish identity in modernity, including The Emergence of Jewish Artists in Nineteenth-Century Europe (2001 – 2) and The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and Their Salons (2005). It also has mounted shows devoted to Jewish artists like Camille Pissarro (2007– 8) and Max Lieberman (2006) that do not focus specifically on their religious backgrounds. The Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, the first museum in North America devoted entirely to the arts of the Islamic world, opened in 2014. Its collections cover the entire expanse of Islam’s fourteen centuries. The modern museum is, in fact, a product of nineteenth-century positivist demands to document and codify the world and its history. Museums grew out of the tradition of “curiosity cabinets,” which were personal collections of art, artefacts, and natural specimens gathered by elite figures and generally accessible only to selected audiences. Some of these private collections became the bases of public museums, such as Sir Hans Sloane’s bequest to the British Museum in the mid-eighteenth century. The development of museums as we know them today was awash with imperial and racist ideologies with important implications for the history of religious art. National, encyclopedic collections like those of the Louvre, the British Museum, the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York contain objects of major religious import that were obtained by dubious means, including outright looting and smuggling. Archaeological campaigns in the Middle East and North Africa were often conducted against the wishes of local communities, and discoveries were consumed by European audiences as curiosities produced by “inferior” cultures and “primitive” sets of beliefs. Efforts have been made globally to restore objects of religious significance to their places of origin, although some institutions have pushed back, citing a number of factors, including the precedent it would set, the depletion

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of major collections, and threats posed to objects’ integrity in the process of repatriation. Opponents often observe that such concerns are simply continuations of the prejudice and racist ideologies that created the situation in the first place: that indigenous communities are not “advanced” enough to respect and properly care for works of cultural value. The means of making objects of religious import accessible to broad audiences while respecting their origins, functions, and value remains an ongoing debate. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, in the past several decades there has been a reckoning with the concept of “art” as a category writ large. Scholars have increasingly valued the ways in which images function beyond the lens of “high art,” i. e. the paintings and sculpture one might see in a museum. The question of whether something should be considered “art” or not is, for many, a moot point. The study of religious visual culture has been an important part of this development, as scholars both within and beyond the field of art history have explored images that do not fit the molds of modernism or the avant-garde as well as popular and ephemeral media forms like inexpensive prints and spectacular entertainments. Although outside the geographical framework of this book, it is necessary to mention the significant work that has been produced relating to religious visual and material culture in nineteenth-century America and the concomitant development of the field of material religion. Art historians like Sally Promey (2003) and David Morgan (2015) have propelled the study of material religion through their analyses of nineteenth-century American visual culture, and they provide valuable models through which this work can advance outside of the American context.

Religion and the Making of Artists The fundamental place of religious imagery in nineteenth-century Europe derived in part from the central role it played in the training of artists in the official academies. These academies were generally state-sponsored institutions that controlled not only the education but the exhibition and circulation of aspiring artists’ work. Painters generally specialized in a single genre, the most esteemed of which was “history painting.” This category included subjects from the Bible and the history of Christianity as well as from ancient Greek and Roman history and mythology. In France, students competed for the prestigious Prix de Rome (Rome Prize), the winner of which was given the opportunity to study from the masterpieces of antique and Renaissance art in Rome. Applicants were required to submit an entry based on a predetermined subject. Of the fifty-seven competitions held between 1797 and 1863, almost a third featured subjects from the Bible or church history. Commissions for history paintings were generally limited to spaces, such as palaces, churches, and civic buildings, that were operated by wealthy and powerful institutions. Mid-nineteenth-century France witnessed a flourishing of commissions as part of a widespread campaign to renovate many churches that had been decimated during the Revolution. The artists who obtained these commissions were very often students

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of the academic painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780 – 1867), whose work embodied the “ultramontanist” aesthetic described by Driskel. Followers of Ingres like Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin (1809 – 64) employed a hieratic style (Figure 14.2) derived from Byzantine frescos and the early paintings of Raphael (1483 – 1520). Figures are rendered in starkly frontal and profile positions with bold gestures that make the narrative and moral messages immediately legible. Symbolic elements like halos are emphasized, while background details are limited. Part of the aim with this kind of representation was to restore the perceived nobility of late medieval and early Renaissance religious painting after which, according to some, it fell into decline with the theatricality of the Baroque.

Figure 14.2: Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin, The Baptism of Christ, 1858. Preparatory cartoon for the paintings of Saint-Germain-des-Près. Musée Carnavalet, Paris. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Religious subjects were central to academic training in England as well, particularly under the leadership of the Royal Academy’s first two presidents, Joshua Reynolds (1723 – 92) and Benjamin West (1738 – 1820). The latter devoted significant attention to religious subjects in the last two decades of his career, including several paintings drawn from the Book of Revelation. Apocalyptic subject matter appears frequently in British art and popular culture of this period as the French Revolution devolved into the Reign of Terror and Napoleon rose to power. Moreover, West’s dramatic style in these works demonstrates the increasing influence of Romanticism, a set of movements in which spiritual transcendence played a pivotal role.

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Romanticism: Art as Religious Experience Wilhelm Wackenroder’s Outpourings from the Heart of an Art-Loving Monk, written in 1797, a year before the writer’s death at age twenty-five, presents in powerful language the convergence of artistic and religious experience: “In each work of art from every region of the earth He perceives the traces of the divine spark, which, having issued from Him to penetrate the breasts of humankind, passes into their small creations” (Taylor 1987, 134). For Wackenroder, as channeled through the narration of a fictional monk, it was not simply the making but the contemplation of art that aligned with religious life. For him, museums and galleries “should be temples where in calm and silent humility and in exalting solitude one may admire great artists as the most noble of mortals…. I compare the enjoyment of the noblest works of art with prayer” (Taylor 1987, 137). Wackenroder’s writings proved immensely influential among the burgeoning Romantic movements in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. As the foundations of Christian faith were continually under threat from Enlightenment philosophy and revolutionary uprisings, Romantic artists and writers explored spirituality through new lenses, frequently pinpointing artistic creation as a form of spiritual transcendence. In Germany, this ideology manifested itself in the works of the Brotherhood of Saint Luke, also known as the Nazarenes. These artists rejected the cold neoclassicism associated with academic art and developed styles informed by medieval and early Renaissance imagery. In England, Romantic aesthetics coalesced most powerfully in the art and poetry of William Blake (1757– 1827). Throughout his fraught career, Blake sought an authentic spiritual life informed by his own visionary experiences and his enthusiasm for revolutionary politics. Blake developed a complex cosmology that is detailed in his numerous illuminated books. In crafting these works, Blake created a print technique called “relief etching,” which allowed him to print text and image together and thus approximate the appearance of a medieval manuscript. Blake’s diagnoses of the dramatically changing world around him are powerfully manifest in his prophetic books, the culmination of which was Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Great Albion (1804–c. 1820). This rich and enigmatic work encompasses metaphysics, biblical history, and contemporary politics in a non-linear, symbolic, and visionary manner. Another crucial aspect of Romanticism was the elevation of the natural world as a manifestation of divinity. For many artists, nature offered the possibility of personal transcendence outside the channels provided by the church. German painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774 – 1840) frequently represented the convergence of religious experience and the natural environment with lone travelers gazing at vast oceans, finding crosses in the mountains, and having miraculous visions in barren wildernesses (Figure 14.3). Friedrich was influenced by the philosophical concept of the Sublime, which became pervasive in Europe through the writings of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. For these writers, the Sublime represented boundless immensity as evident in

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Figure 14.3: Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea, 1808 – 10. Oil on canvas. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

nature in, for instance, treacherous mountains and stormy seas. The Sublime embodied the power of the divine and had the capacity to provoke a sense of awe and even terror in the viewer. In England, the artist whose work most thoroughly visualized the Sublime was Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775 – 1851), who transformed the nature of landscape painting over the course of his career. Many of Turner’s works fit in the category of “historical landscape,” which figured historical subject matter in landscape scenarios. Initially following the examples of historical landscape painters like Nicolas Poussin (1594 – 1665) and Claude Lorrain (1604 – 82), Turner’s style became increasingly unorthodox with loose brushstrokes underscoring the dynamism of his scenes. Late in his career, he devoted several canvases to apocalyptic subjects, including the Deluge described in the book of Genesis. In The Evening of the Deluge (Figure 14.4), Turner evokes the impending torrent through the ominous, swirling atmosphere. While Noah and his family sleep, crowds of animals and flocks of birds begin proceeding toward the distant Ark. Turner painted another version of the scene, Shade and Darkness—The Evening of the Deluge, along with a pendant, Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory), The Morning after the Deluge—Moses writing the Book of Genesis. As the titles indicate, these works merge Turner’s keen interest in aesthetic philosophy and color theory with his propensity for representing the Sublime through biblical subject matter.

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Figure 14.4: Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Evening of the Deluge, c. 1843. Oil on canvas. Timken Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Print Culture, Anticlericalism, and Popular Religion European Romanticism encompassed a diverse set of ideologies and practices, but one of the characteristics that unified many Romantic factions was a renewed interest in Christianity that was divorced from what they perceived as its entrenched, corrupt institutions. Spanish artist Francisco Goya (1746 – 1828) took aim at the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church, especially in print series like Los Caprichos and Disasters of War. These works were subject to Inquisitorial investigation and a number were censored. Those who fell under the church’s influence did not escape Goya’s critique; his prints and paintings often depict folkloric superstitions and rituals that were still commonplace among peasant communities, which are represented as grotesque mobs.

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Goya was working in the midst of a revolutionary period in the history of print culture. Industrialization made print production cheaper and more efficient, and the number and types of images circulating throughout Europe increased exponentially in the first half of the nineteenth century. The genesis of modern visual satire is usually located in England in the eighteenth century, beginning with William Hogarth (1697– 1764) and reaching a fever pitch in the work of James Gillray (1757– 1815), Thomas Rowlandson (c. 1756 – 1827), and George Cruikshank (1792 – 1878). With political liberalism on the rise, these artists enjoyed new freedom in choosing the subjects of their critique. Anglican ministers received a fair share of attention, though often in a relatively benign, playful manner. Antagonism toward Catholicism or “Romanism,” as it was often called, resulted in much more derisive imagery that was frequently directed specifically at the papacy. Nineteenth-century France likewise saw a major increase in print culture and the illustrated press. The anticlerical attitudes that had flourished during the Revolutionary era later appeared in caricature at regular intervals. For example, the Falloux Laws of the early 1850s, which gave new support to Catholic schooling (public and private), led to a rash of anticlerical imagery. Another peak period occurred at the constitutional crisis of May 16, 1877, which was provoked in part by Catholic royalists (Figure 14.5). Although the illustrated press experienced periods of harsh oversight throughout the nineteenth century, caricatures themselves were generally subject to

Figure 14.5: André Gill, “Enfants, n’y touchez pas!” (Children, do not touch!). Caricature from La Lune rousse 2, no. 65 (March 3, 1878). Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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censorship only when they criticized governmental figures. The Catholic Church, on the other hand, seems to have always been fair game. The figure of Jesus, moreover, was incorporated into leftist politics and workers’ movements. The images that aligned with emerging “Christian socialism” blended traditional religious iconography and revolutionary emblems, much like we saw with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen at the outset of this chapter. For instance, a print produced by the Pellerin firm in Épinal (Figure 14.6) represents a seated Christ

Figure 14.6: The Reign of God, published by Pellerin, 1838. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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making a gesture of blessing with one hand while holding a sphere with the words “Fraternité” and “Unité” in the other. He is flanked by angels whose halos display the words “Liberté” and “Égalité.” Christ’s starkly frontal position and the majestic space he inhabits cohere with the ultramontanist style, but the message is much more aligned with leftist politics than one finds in the work of Ingres and his students. The Pellerin print is indicative of the kinds of religious images that were broadly accessible throughout Europe at a popular level. Industrialization brought print culture to the masses, and while there was an important body of images that criticized religious institutions, an even larger proportion were clearly aimed at communities of faith. Major Bible illustration projects were undertaken. Notable examples include Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld’s Bibel in Bildern (1860) and Gustave Doré’s illustrations for a Bible published by Alfred Mame et fils in 1865 – 66, both of which were (and continue to be) widely reproduced. New methods of reproduction made images available on an unprecedented scale. The paintings of artists like Heinrich Hofmann (1824 – 1911), Bernard Plockhorst (1824 – 1907), and William Holman Hunt (1827– 1910) have been continually reproduced. The twentieth century saw these works transformed into lenticular images and paint-by-number templates. New technological developments were mobilized within the realms of religious education and entertainment. The magic lantern, a means of projecting illuminated images on glass, became a common tool in this pursuit. Popular subjects included Bible stories and travel images of the Holy Land. These industrial and technological innovations also coincided with the growth of missionary societies that frequently sought to evangelize on a global scale. In his work and travels as part of the London Missionary Society, David Livingstone used the magic lantern to elucidate religious subjects. In one famous instance, an audience in India was so overwhelmed by images of Abraham preparing to sacrifice Isaac that they ran out of the tent. Livingstone’s accounts of his travels and missionary work became so well known that they themselves were represented in lantern slides (Figure 14.7). When photographic technologies emerged in the 1830s and 1840s, they were immediately adapted to the growing industries of popular religious visual culture. Stereographic photography, for instance, generated images that appear more three-dimensional when viewed through a stereoscope. The most significant category of stereographic imagery relates to travel and tourism, as the stereoscopic apparatus could transport the viewer to the remains of an ancient Egyptian palace, a medieval monastery, or the Vatican with a quick card change. Another means of virtual tourism was the panorama, a popular spectacle that encompassed the viewer’s entire visual field. Invented by Robert Barker in the late eighteenth century, the panorama generally consisted of a 360-degree painted image placed within a rotunda building. Panoramas frequently featured famous battles, but landscapes and cityscapes, including scenes from the Holy Land, were common as well. These representations relied on prints, photographs, and paintings produced on-thespot or based on firsthand experiences to underscore the sense of realism and authenticity that the panoramas were meant to evoke. The space between the viewing plat-

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Figure 14.7: Lantern slide of David Livingstone preaching from his wagon, c. 1900. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

form and the panorama painting often contained rocks, foliage, and other objects to aid in the transition from real space to the illusionist image. Few panoramas remain extant, but a significant exception is the “Jerusalem Panorama” in the Bavarian town of Altötting, which opened to the public in 1903. The product of a collaboration between artists Gebhard Fugel, Josef Krieger, and others, the panorama depicts Jerusalem from a point near Golgotha as Christ is dying on the cross. The painters had access to photographs and reconstructions of Jerusalem as well as sketches that Krieger made while traveling there in 1902. Today, the panorama is a significant source of tourism for the city of Altötting, becoming a kind of pilgrimage site for those unable to travel to Jerusalem and for enthusiasts of a once-popular form of spectacular media.

The Search for Historical Authenticity The Jerusalem Panorama is a prime example of an attempt at visualizing biblical history in an “authentic” manner, one of the most significant developments in the discourses around nineteenth-century religion and art. This impulse is linked to Enlightenment positivism and the development of modern archaeological practices that began

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with the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt (1798 – 1801). Accompanying Napoleon’s troops were a group of scholars known as the savants, who documented Egypt’s architecture, flora and fauna, and contemporary life. Their work culminated in the publication of the immense Description de l’Égypte (1809 – 23), which included more than seven hundred images. Subsequent archaeological and documentary campaigns explored sites associated with the foundations of Judeo-Christianity, and by the mid-nineteenth century English, French, and German archaeologists had established excavation sites throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Discoveries were disseminated in both scholarly and popular publications and numerous artefacts were shipped back to Europe to become part of major institutions like the Louvre and the British Museum. These findings were frequently incorporated into the work of artists like John Martin (1789 – 1854), who crafted elaborate representations of biblical settings. Martin drew heavily from contemporaneous research and excavation in Egypt as well as from the growing field of ancient Near Eastern archaeology when creating his large-scale paintings. He cultivated a broad audience by reproducing his works as prints and mounting high-profile exhibitions that became popular sensations. A wide market of illustrated travelogues offered images based on drawings (and later photographs) made “on-the-spot” for audiences unable to travel to these sites. David Roberts’s The Holy Land … From Drawings Made on the Spot (1842 – 49) established an influential model of picturesque representation: relatively distant, generalized

Figure 14.8: Louis Haghe after David Roberts, “The Mosque of Omar, or the ancient site of the Temple,” lithograph. Illustration from The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt and Nubia: From Drawings Made on the Spot (London, 1842 – 49). New York Public Library.

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Figure 14.9: Auguste Salzmann, Jérusalem, Birket-Hammam-Setty-Mariam, 1854. Salted paper print from paper negative. Gilman Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.

views of deteriorating façades with a few figures to indicate scale (Figure 14.8). When photographic technology emerged at mid-century, it was soon adopted by exploratory and archaeological missions (Figure 14.9). Although photography was recognized and valued for its perceived objectivity, many photographers still adhered to the pictorial standards employed by artists like Roberts. Félix Bonfils (1831 – 85) established a commercial photography studio in Beirut and traveled throughout the Middle East, producing thousands of “souvenir” images that were intended primarily for European audiences. These included staged photographs of members of local communities who function as signifiers of particular contexts rather than individuals with names and identities. An image of a veiled Muslim woman, likely photographed by Bonfils’s wife Marie-Lydie Cabanis (1837– 1918), was one of a number of “costume studies” the studio produced (Figure 14.10). That the woman’s body is completely hidden reinforces the role the image plays as a document of an ethnic “type.” The area around present-day Israel and Palestine, in fact, became a hotbed of investigation and (often unauthorized) excavation. The city of Jerusalem was a rich and complex source of interest due in large part to its being a contested site among Jews, Christians, and Muslims for centuries. The Reverend George Croly, who wrote the text that accompanied Roberts’s illustrations, noted in the entry accompanying the plate “Gate of Damascus”: “The walls of Jerusalem are chiefly modern and Saracenic, but

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Figure 14.10: Turkish woman in city dress, produced by the Maison Bonfils, 1870s. Albumen silver print from glass negative. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.

are built evidently on the site of more ancient walls, raised in the time of the Crusaders, and those, not improbably, formed of material of others still more ancient.” A significant number of painters, including William Holman Hunt, Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824 – 1904), and James Tissot (1836 – 1902), traveled to the Holy Land to document its communities and material cultures and translate them into paintings of scriptural subjects. Although these works signaled an aim toward historical “objectivity,” they are often anachronistic and highly problematic. In The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple, for instance (Figure 14.11), Holman Hunt rendered with careful precision the ornate architecture of the temple as well as the physiognomy and clothing of the rabbis. The young Christ, however, was modeled on a Protestant English boy, creating a clear visual distinction between the savior and his Jewish forebears. In a starkly contrasting instance, German painter Max Liebermann (1847– 1935) caused a scandal with his painting of the same subject when it was exhibited in Munich in 1879. A rash of antisemitic criticism was prompted by the more clearly Jewish figure of Jesus and un-

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Figure 14.11: William Holman Hunt, The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple, 1860. Oil on canvas. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

doubtedly by Liebermann’s own Jewish heritage. Liebermann subsequently repainted Jesus to cohere with Christian iconography. One does begin to see representations of Jesus and his followers in this period that aimed toward consistency with the historical record. Influential publications like David Friedrich Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu (1836) and Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus (1863) examined the life of Jesus by considering the social, political, and religious contexts of firstcentury Galilee. An edition of Renan’s work from 1870 includes sixty images by Godefroy Durand, a prolific illustrator of books and periodicals. The images are of a more frank, journalistic variety than one finds in traditional Christian iconography. In certain instances, it is not immediately apparent which figure is Christ; he wears the same garb as those around him and is given no halo to indicate his divinity. Indeed, Renan’s work rejected the divinity of Jesus and the miracles recorded in the Gospels, not out of a lack of faith but rather with the aim of rejuvenating Christian principles.

Visualizing Jewish Identities Durand’s illustrations for the Vie de Jésus are one of a number of projects that purported to represent the life and times of Jesus in more authentic ways. However, it was not uncommon for these images to visualize Jesus as physiognomically distinct from his Jewish community, as was the case in Holman Hunt’s painting (Figure 14.11, above) and Liebermann’s revised version. Alexandre Bida’s (1823 – 95) Gospel illustrations, for instance, incorporate the kind of details the artist would have encountered during

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his travels in the Holy Land, but the pale-skinned, haloed figure of Jesus adheres to European traditions that extend back at least to the Renaissance. The same period witnessed the emergence of new approaches to representing Judaism and Jewish identities. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, a number of European governments had lifted restrictions barring Jews from pursuing certain professions, resulting in growing populations of Jewish artists within established institutions. The works produced by these artists represent a wide and diverse set of subjects and styles that is impossible to characterize concisely. In a catalogue essay for an exhibition of nineteenth-century Jewish art at The Jewish Museum in New York in 2001, Susan Tumarkin Goodman raises the questions that confronted many newly emancipated Jewish artists when it came to tradition and acculturation: “How much would their entry into the larger society require them to mute, or even deny, their Jewishness? And how could they function as loyal, engaged citizens of the countries where they had just achieved a measure of freedom and equality while remaining faithful to their own traditions?” (2001, 16 – 17). Goodman highlights the painting Sabbath Rest by Moritz Oppenheim (1800 – 82), one of the most influential artists in this period, to represent Jewish experience (Figure 14.12). At the center of the image, several figures listen contemplatively as an elderly woman reads from a prayer book after the Sabbath lunch. They are seated outside the family storefront, the name of which is faintly visible on the awning and functions as a subtle nod to the Jewish patriarchs: “Abraham Isaak Jacobsohn.” The date “1789” is engraved on the lintel above the open door in commemoration of the French Revolution and the liberties that were subsequently granted to numerous Jewish communities. The triangle formed by the three bars holding the window shut could carry a number of symbolic resonances, from the patriarchal triad to the all-seeing eye found in revolutionary iconography. Oppenheim created this painting to be reproduced as an illustration for his Scenes from Traditional Jewish Life, which became a renowned and internationally circulating book. The artist also played a significant role in shaping the identity of modern Judaism through his numerous portraits of acculturated bourgeois figures, including the writer Heinrich Heine and members of the Rothschild family. In 1856, Oppenheim painted a meeting between Moses Mendelssohn, a seminal figure in the “Jewish enlightenment,” Johann Kaspar Lavater, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (Figure 14.13). Although Mendelssohn maintained relationships with both individuals, the meeting is an imagined one. His friendship with Lessing represented for many the possibilities of enlightened Judaism, and Lavater famously attempted and failed to convert Mendelssohn to Christianity. Lavater is, notably, represented in strict profile, a reference to the images in his influential writings on physiognomy. Ironically, Lavater’s work and legacy would deeply inform the rise of racist movements that would continually target Jews as inferior and subject to persecution. The increased visibility of Jewish life, culture, and history coincided with rising antisemitic discourses, which were furthered through visual culture in this period. One of the most pervasive examples is the “Wandering Jew,” a legendary immortal figure who

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Figure 14.12: Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, Sabbath Rest, 1866. Oil on canvas. The Jewish Museum, New York. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

taunted Christ on the cross and was cursed to wander the earth until the Second Coming. The Wandering Jew was subject to numerous, divergent appropriations in the nineteenth century, variously interpreted as a tragic embodiment of the persecution of Jews and as a cautionary tale demonstrating the necessity of Jewish conversion to Christianity. Among the earliest high-profile visualizations of the Wandering Jew were Gustave Doré’s illustrations of a poem written by Pierre Dumont, which represent the story in the dramatic and fantastical style for which Doré would become famous (Figure 14.14). Whether one can interpret Doré’s images as antisemitic is still a matter of debate; it is certainly the case, however, that his images would have been familiar to artists who used the Wandering Jew for overtly antisemitic purposes. Doré is often cited as the creator of an infamous caricature of the Wandering Jew that appeared on the cover of the Journal pour rire in 1852, though that attribution has been challenged. The image relies on techniques of exaggeration to reinforce stereotypical perceptions of Jewish bodies. This exaggeration carried significant weight at a time when the pseudo-scientific realms of physiognomy and phrenology were frequently employed to justify colonialism, slavery, and eugenics. Francis Galton’s (1822 – 1911) composite photographs representing Jewish “types,” for instance, provided material

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Figure 14.13: Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, Lavater and Lessing Visit Moses Mendelssohn, 1856. Oil on canvas. The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, Berkeley, CA. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

evidence to those who argued that visible attributes were inherently linked to personality traits. The “Jewish type” was generally associated with greed and deviousness. The Dreyfus Affair, in which the Jewish military officer Alfred Dreyfus was wrongly accused of treason against France, represents a culminating moment of visual violence against Jewish identities with the appearance of openly antisemitic periodicals like La Libre Parole. Several months after Dreyfus had been condemned to Devil’s Island in April 1895, the journal published an image with the title “France for the French” in its illustrated supplement (Figure 14.15). In it, two muscular, shirtless men representing the journal are depicted clearing the land of Jewish “weeds”; Dreyfus, at the lower right, is being used as a reference for the figure representing La Libre parole illustrée.

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Figure 14.14: Poster advertising Gustave Doré’s illustrations to La Légende du juif errant (The Legend of the Wandering Jew), 1856. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Orientalism and the “Other” The representation of Jews through caricatural, racist exaggeration was part and parcel of the kind of “othering” that pervaded nineteenth-century European visual culture. A related set of images falls under the concept of “Orientalism” as developed by Edward Said in the 1970s (e. g., Said 1978). According to Said, Orientalist art and literature reinforce stereotypes about perceived “others,” subtly or overtly underscoring the perceived superiority of “Western” civilization over the “primitive” cultures of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Holman Hunt’s painting (Figure 14.11, above), which merges details drawn from direct observation with an anachronistic representation of Jesus, is an example of Orientalism. A number of artists, moreover, stated or implied with

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Figure 14.15: “La France aux Français” (France for the French). Illustration from La Libre parole illustrée 3, no. 129 (December 28, 1895).

their works that there was an uninterrupted continuum between the communities of the biblical past and those of the present. This continuum likewise reinforced the perception that these were static cultures, subject to the same criticisms that could be leveled against the Sanhedrin that condemned Christ to death. Orientalist attitudes deeply informed Western representations of non-Christian religions, and of Islam in particular. The types of photographs Bonfils produced were used as references by painters who had little or no direct interaction with these communities and who were responding to the demands of the art market. The production of Orientalizing images could indeed be a highly profitable endeavor. Jean-Léon Gérôme, for example, was acclaimed on an international scale for his Orientalist works. For many decades, Orientalist art was marginalized within art historical scholarship; this was less the result of what we now perceive as problematic and racist representations and more due to their being considered aesthetically conservative when

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compared to the avant-garde movements that developed at the same time. Said’s work prompted a renewed interest in these kinds of representations and what they tell us about colonialism and imperialism. More recently, scholars have focused attention on Middle Eastern artists who represented their own communities. The example of Osman Hamdi Bey (1842 – 1910) is a fascinating and complex one. An Ottoman bureaucrat as well as a painter, Osman Hamdi studied under Gérôme and Gustave Boulanger (1824 – 88) in Paris, incorporating their academic style and approach to Orientalist subjects in his own works. The reading and recitation of the Quran is a common subject in Osman Hamdi’s oeuvre, and these activities are frequently represented in richly detailed settings (Figure 14.16). Whether one can read Osman Hamdi’s work as espousing Orientalist attitudes or as subverting them is still a subject of much debate. Edhem Eldem has argued that “while it is more than likely that [Osman Hamdi] understood that Western views of the Orient could often be extremely demeaning due to the combined effect of ignorance and clichés, this did not preclude him from sharing some of those views, albeit with a much more conscious and mindful attitude towards the culture he depicted in his paintings” (2012, 374). The growing interest in Osman Hamdi’s work became acutely apparent in 2019 when one of his paintings sold at auction for nearly seven million British pounds, a sum that exceeded the auction house’s estimate by a factor of ten.

Provincial Realism As noted above, Orientalist painting was largely marginalized throughout the twentieth century, though more for aesthetic reasons than socio-political ones. Artists like Gérôme stood in stark contrast with the modernist trends that would manifest in radical artistic movements like Impressionism. The dominant art historical narratives generally identify Realism, which emerged in France in the 1840s, as the first truly avant-garde movement. Artists like Gustave Courbet challenged academic standards by employing unorthodox techniques and representing provocative subject matter. Courbet’s Burial at Ornans (1849 – 50), for instance, was criticized for its frank and displeasing representation of death and the clergy. Although Courbet has long been hailed for the social and political critiques that are at play in his works, it is crucial to note that other Realist artists depicted popular religion in a much more sympathetic way. Jean-François Millet’s (1814 – 75) The Angelus, for instance, represents two peasants praying at the end of a day’s work in a potato field (Figure 14.17). The loose, muddy style and peasant subject matter is characteristic of Realist painting, but the humble religiosity of the two figures is presented in a heroicizing way. The Angelus became one of the most well-known paintings of the nineteenth century particularly in the United States, where it was widely reproduced in a variety of media. French Realism’s impact was international. A particularly important body of Realist art emerged in Germany through artists like Wilhelm Leibl (1844 – 1900). After meet-

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Figure 14.16: Osman Hamdi Bey, Kur’an Tilaveti (Reciting the Quran), 1910. Oil on canvas. Sakıp Sabancı Museum, Istanbul. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

ing Courbet in Munich, Leibl went to Paris but was soon forced to leave due to the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War (1870 – 71). He settled for a period in the Bavarian countryside, where he devoted meticulous attention to the lives of the local peasants. The complex and ambitious Three Women in a Church embodies Leibl’s approach to style and subject matter (Figure 14.18). Painstaking in his execution of visual detail, Leibl does not shy away from representing the smallest wrinkle or blotch. The painting represents multi-generational piety, placing particular emphasis on the physical aspects of devotion: two women hold prayer books while the third grasps a rosary, her hands slightly exaggerated. The perspective of the pew is skewed and the bodies are compressed in the space; the result is a greater sense of intimacy, despite the fact that each woman is engaged in a personal act of devotion. The aesthetic concerns and anti-establishment tendencies of Realism likewise shaped artistic culture in eastern Europe, particularly following the abolition of serf-

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Figure 14.17: Jean-François Millet, The Angelus, 1857 – 59. Oil on canvas. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

dom in Russia in 1861. Radicalized young artists increasingly rejected the traditions observed in the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg. In 1863 a group of students left the Academy in protest and became known as the Peredvizhniki (“Wanderers” or “Itinerants”), ultimately coalescing in 1870 as the Society for Travelling Art Exhibitions. These artists were committed to depicting contemporary life in Russia especially outside of its urban centers through an unidealized, realist approach. Paintings frequently demonstrate the persistence of Orthodox practices in locales that were beginning to experience the effects of modernization. Konstantin Savitsky’s (1844 – 1905) Paying their Respects to the Icon (Figure 14.19) depicts villagers flocking to a traveling icon of the Virgin and Child. Savitsky devoted great attention to the details of peasant life and material culture, from villagers’ patterned skirts and head scarves to the thatched roofs and wild forests in the background. The icon’s significance as “divine words in painting” is evident in the reverence of the figures kneeling and praying before it. The devotional practices of peasant communities that formed a central component of Realist movements were continually recuperated by artists seeking increasingly radical stylistic means. In France, Realism was followed by the emergence and flourishing of Impressionism, much of which was concerned with the effects of industrial modern-

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Figure 14.18: Wilhelm Leibl, Die drei Frauen in der Kirche (Three Women in a Church), 1878 – 82. Oil on mahogany wood. Kunsthalle Hamburg. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

ity on Paris and its environs. Artists like Paul Cézanne (1839 – 1906) and Paul Gauguin (1848 – 1903) initially exhibited with the Impressionists, but by the 1880s they were beginning to explore more isolated locations and communities. Gauguin spent significant time in the area around Pont-Aven in Brittany, where inhabitants still adhered to traditional standards of dress and strict observance of Catholic practices (Figure 14.20). In his Breton paintings, Gauguin employed bold contouring and broad swaths of flat color; this style was derived in part from Japanese print culture but also from the cloisonné technique found in Byzantine religious imagery, in which gold wires were used to create compartments filled with enamel. In works like The Yellow Christ, the bold forms and non-mimetic color lend ambiguity to the scene: are the women kneeling before a sculpted crucifix or is this a visionary experience?

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Figure 14.19: Konstantin Savitsky, Paying their Respects to the Icon, 1878. Oil on canvas. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

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Figure 14.20: Paul Gauguin, Le Christ Jaune (The Yellow Christ), 1889. Oil on canvas. Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, New York.

Symbolism, Mysticism, Nationalism A number of artists in France were influenced by Gauguin’s work in Brittany, traveling there and representing scenes of provincial religious life. In the late 1880s, a group coalesced in Paris that included Paul Sérusier, Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, and Édouard Vuillard, who dubbed themselves les Nabis after the Arabic and Hebrew words for “prophet.” The group engaged in spiritual as well as artistic practices in the studio of Paul Ranson, which was referred to as “The Temple.” The quasi-mystical, religious aspect of the group is captured in Sérusier’s portrait of Paul Ranson in Nabi costume (Figure 14.21). Ranson is depicted with the kind of staff that the presiding Nabi would hold at the beginning of meetings while reciting the invocation “Sounds, colors, and words have a miraculously expressive power beyond all representation and even beyond the literal meaning of the words.”

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Figure 14.21: Paul Sérusier, Portrait of Paul Ranson in Nabi Costume, 1890. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The Nabis represent one artistic manifestation of the Symbolist movements emerging across Europe in the 1880s and 1890s. Symbolist artists revived many of the characteristics that were central to Romanticism a century earlier—creative experience as spiritual transcendence, the unknown, madness—now explored through increasingly radical stylistic means. The painter Gustave Moreau played a major role in the solidification of Symbolist art, though he would more aptly be characterized as a “proto-Symbolist,” for much of his work predates the advent of Symbolism as a defined set of movements. A motif that Moreau represented numerous times in various media was the story of Salome, whose seductive dance before Herod resulted in the beheading of John the Baptist. In 1876, Moreau exhibited L’Apparition, which depicts the disembodied head of John gushing blood, framed by a luminous aureole, and gazing mournfully at a scantily clad, exoticizing Salome (Figure 14.22). The painting became a sensation, and was followed by a number of repetitions characterized by Moreau’s

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Figure 14.22: Gustave Moreau, The Apparition, 1876 – 77. Oil on canvas. Harvard Art Museums/ Fogg Museum, Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop.

unorthodox style: encrusted, glittering painted surfaces with richly detailed, compressed backgrounds that add to the ominous, otherworldly feel. The character of Salome became a mainstay of Symbolist art and literature as an archetypal femme fatale, perhaps most notably in Oscar Wilde’s 1891 play Salomé. Wilde was influenced in part by Moreau’s painting and his version of the story was subsequently visualized in Aubrey Beardsley’s (1872 – 98) famous illustrations. Symbolism’s emergence coincided with a fraught period of geopolitical conflicts, which included the Franco-Prussian War, the unifications of Italy (1870) and Germany (1871), and the continued march of European colonialism and imperialism. Much of the artistic production in this period can be tied to rising nationalistic discourses. In northern and eastern Europe, national identities frequently coalesced around what were perceived as indigenous folkloric traditions. For instance, the publication of the Finnish epic poem the Kalevala in 1835 is often tied directly to the growth of Finnish in-

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dependence movements. The Kalevala was a major source of inspiration for the artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865 – 1931), who produced some of the most lauded representations of the poem, including for the Finnish National Pavilion at the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris. Gallen-Kallela’s By the River of Tuonela represents the final step in the journey to the realm of the dead (Figure 14.23), a component of Finnish tradition described in the Kalevala that shares similarities with Greek and Roman mythology and Dante’s Inferno. Gallen-Kallela employed Symbolist style with his unusual compositional ordering: the picture plane is elongated, most of the figures are compressed at right, the nude at left is starkly cropped, and the center-left is dominated by the mostly empty black river.

Figure 14.23: Akseli Gallen-Kallela, By the River of Tuonela, 1903. Tempera on canvas. Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Gallen-Kallela is just one example of a visual response to rising nationalist ideology characterized by embracing the representation of folkloric religion through Symbolist aesthetics. At the other end of the spectrum, James Ensor diagnosed the hypocrisies of modern life in his native Belgium through the lens of Christianity with paintings like Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 (see this volume’s cover image). In this massive canvas, Ensor depicted a mob of Mardi Gras revelers with grotesque, mask-like faces, evoking the chaos of the frequent workers’ strikes in late nineteenth-century Brussels. Banners triumphantly tout Jesus as a representative of socialist values, but the savior remains relatively hidden despite being at the physical center of the composition. The crowds rather mindlessly march behind the writer and reformer Émile Littré, shown in caricatured bishop’s garb in the foreground. Littré was an influential reformer who sought to reconcile positivist research into biblical history with the fundamental cornerstones of the Christian faith. Although Ensor may have been sympathetic to the aims of Christian socialism and identified himself with Christ as a subject of scorn

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and persecution, Christ’s Entry into Brussels underscores the artist’s wariness of dogmatic allegiances and the mob mentalities they can engender. It also reminds the viewer that many of the same people who exalted Christ upon his entry to Jerusalem would soon demand his crucifixion.

Continuing Revolution As we have seen, the nineteenth century witnessed revolutionary change at every level of visual production, from politically charged subjects to industrialization and technological innovations to the emergence of the avant-garde, and religious subjects and practices were thoroughly intertwined in these developments. We began with the French Revolution, not only because it is often identified as the beginning of the “long” nineteenth century but also because revolutionary visual culture frequently relied on religious iconography at the same time that the power of traditional religious institutions was being questioned or rejected. By the end of the century, numerous avant-garde artists continued to draw from religious tradition filtered through radical stylistic approaches. At the dawn of a new century, there was widespread awareness of the monumental shifts in everyday life and the inevitable acceleration of change. An event that is a useful demonstration of the optimism with which many greeted the future was the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris. Historians of art and culture have demonstrated the extent to which industry, modernity, fashion, and glamour were the core themes of the Exposition. This event has provided a useful bookend to the standard narratives of modern art as proceeding further and further from outmoded traditions and embracing the new. However, as scholars have employed more embracing geographical and temporal frameworks, the “long” nineteenth century has frequently been extended to the 1910s, to include the beginnings of the First World War and the upsurge of revolutionary politics in eastern Europe. For our purposes, the emergence of the Russian avantgarde is a productive moment with which to conclude as it embodies many of the overarching trends of nineteenth-century religious visual culture and introduces many of the characteristics that will continue to inform art and religion beyond the temporal confines of this volume. As we saw in western and northern Europe, the merging of national tradition and modern aesthetics was at the core of much early Russian avant-garde art. This is perhaps most evident in the work of Natalia Goncharova (1881 – 1962), a member of several key avant-garde groups in Moscow. Christian subjects represent a substantial proportion of Goncharova’s early paintings and print series. In these works, she employed a stark stylization of forms that coheres with the aesthetics of modernism but that is also drawn from popular religious prints known as lubok. Goncharova’s print series represent contemporary socio-political conflicts through the lens of religious tradition. In Christian Host, one of fourteen lithographs in Mystical Images of War, Russian soldiers

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march beneath a host of angels, implying that earthly combat is a virtuous campaign (Figure 14.24). Goncharova’s work was highly influential for a generation of Russian avant-garde artists, most notably Kazimir Malevich (1878 – 1935), the leader of a movement he dubbed “Suprematism.” Malevich pushed radical abstraction to extremes by rejecting representation entirely. Many of his works are examples of “non-objective” art or “pure abstraction” (as opposed to the work of someone like Pablo Picasso, who employed abstraction but always represented something in the real world). Malevich saw in pure abstraction a correlate to the revolutionary politics swirling around him: by rejecting the traditions of representation with their links to bourgeois identities, abstract artists could provide visual language for a new world order. However, with Malevich’s work we see, once again, more of an adaptation of tradition than its wholesale rejection. In 1915, his works were shown in “0.10, the Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings” in Petrograd. Intended to signal a new starting point (a “zero” point), the exhibition included Malevich’s Black Square notably mounted in the upper corner of the gallery rather than flat against the wall like the other works

Figure 14.24: Natalia Goncharova, Christian Host. Lithograph from Mystical Images of War (Moscow, 1914). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

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Figure 14.25: View of “0.10 – The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting,” Petrograd, 1915 – 16. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

(Figure 14.25). As viewers would have immediately recognized, this position was normally occupied by a religious icon in a Russian home. Malevich was thus making a provocative statement about the possibility of abstract art supplanting outmoded religious traditions. And indeed, Malevich’s Black Square became an icon in its own right: an icon of revolutionary art and politics among young Russian artists and an icon of the radical abstraction that would continue to define much of twentieth-century art. At the same time, the aim of Suprematism was, as Malevich wrote, to promote “the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art.” We can thus see in this movement a connection to Romanticism, in which creative expression was likened to spiritual transcendence. Once again, then, avant-garde visual production must be considered in close relationship with rather than wholly distinct from the traditions it ostensibly rejects.

Conclusion There is still much to be written on religious art and visual culture in nineteenthcentury Europe, and it will likely be some time before these subjects wend their way more thoroughly into the foundational narratives of the period. Paging through recent editions of survey textbooks like Gardner’s Art through the Ages or Marilyn Stokstad’s Art History, both commonly assigned in introductory art history courses, very few of the images discussed here appear in the chapters devoted to the nineteenth cen-

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tury. Focused surveys like Petra ten-Doesschate Chu’s Nineteenth-Century European Art and Michelle Facos’s An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Art delve more deeply into the complex discourses of art and religion. However, in an era of declining college enrollments, it is likely (and understandably) the case that instructors will focus on canonical artists and/or examine the material through the lenses of, for instance, feminism and postcolonialism. There are myriad contributing factors to the relative dearth of material on nineteenth-century religious imagery, but one that cannot be overstated is the contraction of the academic publishing industry and its particular impact on the field of art history. That art historical texts almost invariably include numerous images makes them complicated and expensive to produce. It is an unfortunate reality that invaluable scholarly work on the material discussed in this chapter may never appear in published form due to these financial and production constraints. That said, significant shifts in recent years signal the possibility for positive strides. Of particular note is the fact that many major cultural institutions have made highquality images of public domain works in their collections available for download and reproduction without restrictions. Beyond making these collections accessible to wider audiences, the loosening of reproduction policies means that writers and publishers will have to spend far less time and money obtaining permissions, ideally resulting in quality illustrated books at reasonable prices. Many of the images in this chapter were chosen because they are within collections that maintain open licensing policies. My aim was to maintain a balance between relatively canonical material (e. g. Romanticism, Realism, Symbolism) and that which has received less sustained attention (e. g. Jewish visual culture, the eastern European avant-garde).

References and Bibliography Apostolos-Cappadona, Diane. 2017. Religion and the Arts: History and Method. Leiden: Brill. Buggeln, Gretchen, Crispin Paine, and S. Brent Plate, eds. 2017. Religion in Museums: Global and Multidisciplinary Perspectives. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Driskel, Michael Paul. 1992. Representing Belief: Religion, Art, and Society in Nineteenth-Century France. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Eldem, Edhem. 2012. “Making Sense of Osman Hamdi Bey and His Paintings.” Muqarnas 29: 339 – 83. Foucart, Bruno. 1987. Le renouveau de la peinture religieuse en France, 1800 – 1860. Paris: Arthena. Giebelhausen, Michaela. 2006. Painting the Bible: Representation and Belief in Mid-Victorian Britain. Aldershot, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Goodman, Susan Tumarkin, ed. 2001. The Emergence of Jewish Artists in Nineteenth-Century Europe. London: Merrell. Grewe, Cordula. 2009. Painting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism. Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Hardiman, Louise, and Nicola Kozicharow, eds. 2017. Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art: New Perspectives. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers.

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Morgan, David. 2015. The Forge of Vision: A Visual History of Modern Christianity. Oakland: University of California Press. Netton, Ian Richard, ed. 2013. Orientalism Revisited: Art, Land and Voyage. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Nir, Yeshayahu. 1985. The Bible and the Image: The History of Photography in the Holy Land, 1839 – 1899. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Promey, Sally M. 2003. “The ‘Return’ of Religion in the Scholarship of American Art.” The Art Bulletin 85: 581 – 603. Ribner, Jonathan P. 1993. Broken Tablets: The Cult of the Law in French Art from David to Delacroix. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. Taylor, Joshua. 1987. Nineteenth-Century Theories of Art. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Part IV: Religion and Civil Society

Yvonne Maria Werner

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Until the 1990s, historical research on the modern era was largely “religion-blind”: religious issues were generally ignored. An important reason for this neglect was that many historians were inspired directly or indirectly by the secularization paradigm that gained prominence in Western society in the nineteenth century and came to permeate university scholarship. Under the sway of this paradigm, historians tended to treat religion in the period after 1800 as either a remnant of a bygone past or an epiphenomenon of material relations in society. This view long dominated the field of women’s history as well. Where religion was mentioned at all, it appeared as a reactionary and oppressive force inhibitory to women’s emancipation. Consequently, the profound impact of denominational doctrines and beliefs on the gender order and on the ideas of both femininity and manliness was long overlooked in historical research. A new departure in historical research regarding religion began in the 1980s. The predominant focus on political, economic, and social conditions gave way to cultural perspectives, and with this shift religion came to the fore. Social and church historians took the lead in this development, pointing to the importance of religious values for ordinary people in their everyday lives (Schneider 1996, 45 – 79). Several researchers stressed the link between denominational cultures and the construction of nineteenth-century national identities (Brubaker 2012). In drawing an analogy with Reformation-era confessionalization, the German historian Olaf Blaschke describes the period between 1830 and 1960 as “a second confessional age” characterized by church consolidation and conflicts among the denominations. Bourgeois liberalism may have been of crucial importance for the political developments of the period, but it attracted only a minority of the population. Despite dwindling attendance at religious services, Christianity in its different denominations in many ways remained a normative basis of European societies (Blaschke 2002). A turning point in gender historiography was a conference volume based on the 1983 History Workshop on Religion and Society: Disciplines of Faith: Studies in Religion, Politics and Patriarchy (Obelkevich and Roper 1987). Its thirty-five contributions ranged in subject from popular piety and religion in family life to revivalism and the impact of religion on politics and political movements. These contributions elaborated upon religion’s manifold importance as a source of multiple meanings for different individuals across the social spectrum. The volume encouraged women’s historians to consider the significance of religion for the positions of women in modern societies. Among those enthused by the new approach was Joan Scott, who in her famous article on gender as a useful category of historical analysis pointed to Christian religion as a key factor in the construction of the gender order, above all in its promotion of “separate spheres” ideology in Western society (Scott 1986, 1057– 59). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110609059-017

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These developments accounted for “the religious turn” in gender historiography, which sparked a new interest in gender and feminism in religious history (de Groot and Morgan 2013). Since the 1990s an enormous literature on women and Christian religion has been published. These studies have illuminated female religious activities in philanthropy, civic associations, and social reform initiatives, and they have reflected on the fact that Christian inheritance could as often promote female empowerment as hinder the emancipation movement. Religious engagement offered women alternatives to the confining domestic sphere, an engagement authorized by doctrines creatively reinterpreted to support their participation in public life (Hölscher 1996; Hogan and Bradstock 1998). Other works pointed to the extent of female involvement in Protestant missionary movements and sisterhoods and the growing importance of female religious orders and congregations in Catholic Europe as well as in the Russian Orthodox Church (Mumm 1999; Meiwes 2000; Okkenhaug 2003; Miller 2009). The German historian Ursula Baumann gives a good illustration of this historiographical turning point in an article on Catholic and Protestant women’s leagues in Germany in the early twentieth century. She observes that historical studies of women in Germany had largely overlooked these two expanding denominational women’s associations, concentrating instead on the less successful liberal women’s associations (Baumann 1995). Another example of the broadening vistas of the research field is a volume edited by Sue Morgan and Jacqueline de Vries, Women, Gender and Religious Cultures in Britain, 1800 – 1940 (2010). Its wide-ranging essays explore the diversity and complexities of women’s identities as preachers, revivalists, missionaries, theologians, political activists, and representatives of alternative spiritualities. The volume reflects on the interactions among institutional religion, male clerical cultures, and female agency as well as the material expressions of family religiosity, the connection between individual faith and social activism, and the influence of religion on the development of women’s public roles. These publications along with numerous other works on gender and religion in modern society focus on women and their socioreligious activities. Prior to 2000, scholarship seldom discussed masculine religious cultures and the articulation of Christian masculinity; similarly, religious issues were long overlooked in the rapidly expanding field of men’s history, particularly in research on masculinity in the modern period. As religion was seen as a private matter connected to the female domestic sphere, men were often left out of the analysis. By the same token, men’s own religious convictions did not seem to fit in a public sphere that was thought to be dominated by secularity. If men did appear in pertinent historical studies, they did so as reactionary figures intent on controlling women and their activities. Exceptions, however, can be found in Anglo-American research, where already by 1990 historians such as Catherine Hall and Leonore Davidoff published works that addressed the question of manhood and Christian religion in modern society (see Davidoff and Hall 1992). In the last twenty years, numerous studies on Christian manliness have appeared. An example is Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture (Bradstock et al. 2022), which comprises fourteen essays that explore the complex interrelationships between

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religion and masculinity across the different Christian denominations in Victorian society. Several other studies focus on “Muscular Christianity,” a movement popular in the Anglo-American world, whose advocates tried to find a spiritual dimension to typically male activities such as sports, politics, and business, and to express a new synthesis of masculinity and Christian practice. Missionary initiatives bearing the influence of Muscular Christianity inspired both the Christian Socialist movement in Great Britain and the Social Gospel movement in the United States (Hall 1994). Similar ideas about religion’s “muscular” dimensions appeared also among Jewish minorities in Europe. Zionism itself portrayed and attracted a new and uniquely modern Jewish male type, thereby confronting antisemitic stereotypes of Jewish men as passive, weak, and effeminate (Presner 2007). Since the turn of the millennium, several studies addressing Christianity and masculinity have been published. The Swedish historian Yvonne Maria Werner spearheaded an interdisciplinary research project on Christian manliness in northern Europe, which apart from Swedish scholars enlisted researchers and research groups working on similar topics in Belgium, Germany, Great Britain, Denmark, Norway, and the Netherlands. The initiative yielded several publications, among them two collections of essays, Christian Masculinity (Werner 2011) and Gender and Christianity in Modern Europe (Pasture et al. 2012). These publications illustrate the close connection between confessional cultures, on the one hand, and strategies to uphold, defend, and renew Christian ideals of manliness, on the other. Protestants, not least churchmen, sought to highlight the masculine character of their denomination by linking it to the nationalist discourses of the dominant bourgeois culture. Catholic priests, for their part, notably the Jesuits, strove to re-code religious actions and attitudes regarded as feminine such as, for example, churchgoing and prayer, to make Catholic belief and practice appear legitimately “masculine.” They also instrumentalized traditionally male characteristics and actions for religious purposes. Men’s roles as voters and civic leaders made their religious commitment a prerequisite for maintaining a Christian society amid powerful secularizing forces.

The Concepts of Feminization and Re-Masculinization A theoretical starting point for these research projects was the hypothesis of a feminization of Christianity in the nineteenth century. The feminization theory implies that women predominated in church life as men distanced themselves from the churches. In contrast, other scholars argue that religious revivalism and re-confessionalization engaged men in religious life and church matters. Characteristic of these developments was the expression of new ideals of religious manliness defended and stabilized by rhetorical strategies drawn from denominational traditions and cultures (Pasture 2012).

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The feminization theory, introduced by historian Barbara Welter in the 1970s, developed from studies of liberal middle-class milieus, where beliefs in science and progress gradually replaced Christianity as normative guidelines for social life. The British historian Hugh McLeod argues that according to these guidelines, which took hold throughout western Europe, piety was accepted as a normal and desirable part of womanhood, whereas religious indifference was thought to be an equally normal dimension of manhood. This helps to explain the rising importance of women in church life and men’s heavy overrepresentation in secularist movements (McLeod 2000, 124 – 46). In accordance with such findings and drawing on examples from Great Britain, Callum Brown stresses that the feminization of Christianity during the nineteenth century counteracted the secularization of society in general. In his famous work The Death of Christian Britain, he shows that Christian discourse and moral codes of behavior only remained in place until the mid-twentieth century due to women’s religious engagement. This was especially evident within evangelical Christianity, where women as the “pious sex” stood at the center of “salvation economy” (2001). Men may have run the churches and enjoyed preferment in an exclusively male clerical establishment, but to a high degree women took on critical responsibilities in parishes, within the Christian philanthropic associations and, to an extent, in missionary endeavors. Missionary life, for example, offered women from different strata of society avenues for self-assertion and personal empowerment as well as opportunities for professional roles that were otherwise restricted to men. Some studies on gender and mission therefore speak of a “feminization of mission” (Huber and Lutkehaus 1999). Studies of gender and religion in Catholicism have had a different focus. Several scholars, among them the German historian Norbert Busch, point to a feminization of religious symbols and practices in new forms of Marian devotion and the cult of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Other studies highlight the growing importance of female religious congregations, which also affected missionary activity. From the mid-nineteenth century, members of female religious institutes made up the largest part of mission staff (Busch 1997; O’Brien 2016). The fact that contemporary anticlericals accused the Catholic Church of being “effeminate” and “unmanly” is sometimes also used as argument for the thesis of a feminization of Catholicism (Gross 2000; Borutta 2011). As mentioned above, Jewish men, too, were subjected to accusations of unmanliness. Antisemitic propaganda frequently depicted them as effeminate and antithetical to the masculine ideals of the nation. However, some scholars question whether the feminization theory can be applied to Jews, for women were excluded from the rabbinate until the 1970s and Jewish religious practice thus remained overwhelmingly male (Summers 2012, 402 – 10). Other researchers have come to a different conclusion, arguing that the decline of traditional rabbinic Judaism in the nineteenth century led to a feminization of Jewish religious practice. Maria Benjamin Baader, for example, illustrates how Jewish women achieved new forms of religious agency by adapting to bourgeois ideals of domesticity, thus integrating them into religious practices formerly performed by men. Baader also notes that Jewish men at times expressed unease about

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the feminine character of these new forms of Jewish religious practice and the growing moral authority it conferred on women (2016). A similar development occurred in the Russian Orthodox Church. The increasing role women played in church life produced new expressions of female spirituality that challenged the traditional order (Worobec 2016). While the feminization theory implies that religious life became more and more feminine and that men distanced themselves from the churches, the concept of a reconfessionalization of society offers a counter-perspective. Starting points were the revivalist movements and church renewals characteristic of the nineteenth century in western Europe, which helped stabilize and restore religiously-determined social orders within and among the denominations. In Protestant countries, revivals originated in Pietistic, Evangelical, and Low Church communities, while the so-called “ultramontane” (beyond the mountains) Catholic revival drew its inspiration from CounterReformation ideology. With its emphasis on papal authority, ultramontanism served as a basis for the Roman Curia’s successful efforts to promote ecclesiastical discipline and centralization. Denominational identity thus continued to be an important factor in the formation of nineteenth-century national identities, with nationalism and religion frequently intermingling to produce, as McLeod puts it, nationalist religions and religiously-shaped nationalisms (McLeod 2000, 216 – 47; Blaschke 2002). All these studies suggest the need to consider not only the institutional but also the theological and broadly cultural aspects of religion in the modern world. Ideas about women’s natural subordination to men, for example, often drew from a historic theology of gender relations grounded in traditional readings of biblical texts and the hierarchical anthropology of the classical Christian theology of creation. According to this theology, man represents the human being as such, while women figure as men’s subordinate companions. The fact that Jesus only appointed men to apostolic work also offered scriptural justification for the established gender order. Before God men and women are seen as equal, but in the order of creation men enjoyed ontological primacy (Børresen 2001). Such ideas about gender, deeply rooted in the Christian imagination, indirectly formed the basis of the nineteenth-century gender order, not least the bourgeois ideology of separate spheres. The destabilization of this gender order lies at the center of much ongoing research.

Protestant Gender Perspectives The consolidation of the Protestant Reformation in northern Europe brought about not only a new theological system but also a new social and gender order with the household as its core. Protestant reformers rejected the Catholic ecclesiastical system, where celibate monastic life was regarded as superior to ordinary life in “the world.” Religious vocation was thus reinterpreted to imply callings in all forms of worldly occupations in response to God’s providential plan for individuals. This new doctrine of vocation, which emphasized the value and normative position of married life, constituted a

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central element in Martin Luther’s Small and Large Catechism and in the “Tables of Duties” (Haustafeln) that summarized Lutheran social principles. Vocational doctrine offers an instructive point of departure for comprehending the construction of gender in Protestantism. At the center of this doctrine stands the “household,” with its married couple and their children along with, in many cases, relatives and servants. The Lutheran household ideal featured a patriarchal scheme of gender, where the Hausvater as head discharged moral and legal responsibilities for the family’s relations with the outside world and where his wife superintended the household’s internal order. As several scholars have pointed out, the tasks of the housewife, ranging from food supply to procurement of clothing, were responsibilities at least as demanding as those of the father. Nevertheless, Lutheran teaching emphasized male authority, placing the housewife in a subordinate position and women’s contributions to a lesser status. Reformed denominations developed similar ideas and stressed male prerogatives and the subordination of women with thematic emphases and distributions of tasks akin to the Lutheran tradition (Gause 2019). The Lutheran doctrine of the household and its counterpart in other Protestant denominations were well adapted to the needs of an early modern agrarian society. But the profound changes introduced by industrialization, urbanization, and democratization posed fundamental challenges to it. Liberal reforms, for their part, undermined the established social order with its hierarchical structure and stiff economic regulations. Industrialized male laborers saw their bonds to households weakened or severed, while the bourgeois nuclear family gradually replaced the old household community as an ideal family form. Meanwhile, Protestant parts of Europe preserved the state church system, but the links between state power and the established churches attenuated as secular ideologies began to overtake the normative position of Christian faith in politics and justice. Both developments had long-term implications for family habitus. Yet, as many studies have shown, the Lutheran doctrine of vocation held its function as a generally recognized social ideology. Women were still linked to husband and household, while maternity and domestic duties were thought to be their first, if not their only, tasks. Public affairs remained the domain of men (Davidoff and Hall 1992). Under the influence of middle-class liberal ideas, a new ideal of womanhood developed. The benchmark was no longer the energetic housewife, who independently led a large household, but a figure of more refined femininity. In the liberal discourse, religion was a private matter, anchored to domestic life and therefore to the female sphere of activity. Christian virtues such as piety and self-sacrifice, which were previously regarded as gender-transgressing, now became associated with the female sphere, while masculinity was linked to traits like self-control, rationality, and scientific acumen. The feminization theory addresses these developments and the transformed relationships of power they betokened. As the church’s position in society weakened, the Protestant clergy lost much of its authority in social life and priestly influences became predominantly confined to the denominational milieu of the faithful. Men may have continued to run the churches, but at the parochial level, especially in

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urban areas, women gained an increasingly dominant position in parish life. Yet, in many agrarian areas older collective religious ideals remained, and both men and women engaged in Protestant revivalist movements (Hogan and Bradstock 1998; Jüttemann 2008; Morgan and de Vries 2010). Much research has been devoted to Protestant women’s increasing commitment to philanthropy and charitable work and how these activities affected the gender order. Male activities in the social sector have also been studied, but mostly not from a gender perspective. A general conclusion is that religious engagement in Protestant areas both consolidated the prevailing order of gender and subverted it by opening possibilities for women in society. This conclusion may be illustrated in multiple ways. Let us start with matters of ideology. Many of the pioneers of the early women’s movement in Protestant Germany and Scandinavia, for example, were influenced by the Lutheran doctrine of vocation, which they adapted to new conditions. Inspired by liberal theology, they reinterpreted biblical texts invoked historically to justify their subordination and enlarged the concept of the household to include their social activities in public life. The new perspective came through clearly in women’s philanthropic activities. Giving poor children homes, saving fallen women, and training them to be good housewives as well as championing the moral reform of society aligned successfully with traditional responsibilities tied to the home (Baumann 1992; Hammar 2000). The same pattern can be observed in Great Britain, where Christian women, Anglicans as well as Nonconformists, changed the traditional patriarchal language of religion and piety to redefine domestic duties to include social action in the public sphere (de Vries 2010). This development was reflected in female missionary writing, which ranged from newsletters to fiction to biographies of female missionaries (Eyre 2022). Important developments along these lines were connected to the Bible and its interpretation. In the early nineteenth century, Protestant Bible societies, including women’s Bible societies, sprang into being. Committed to the Home Mission (or Innere Mission) through the spread of Bibles and catechetical instruction, they paved the way for the emergence of philanthropic associations that spoke to the distress and social problems of the time. Women were comprehensively engaged in these associations and their activities, which the notion of an extended household made possible. Since these activities stood under the authority of local clergy, they were not seen as threats to the prevailing gender order. Moreover, charitable work aimed not only at providing aid to the poor and other vulnerable groups in society, but also at stabilizing the ecclesiastical system threatened by unprecedented social upheavals. Female philanthropists, then, could be seen as the clergy’s natural allies in the struggle against dechristianization and social dissolution (Röper and Jüllig 1998). Also affected by these developments were female deaconries. They evolved from the activities of the Innere Mission, a revivalist movement started in Germany in the mid-nineteenth century aiming to counteract the secularization of society through evangelization and social work. The first deaconess institute was founded in 1847 in Kaiserswerth in Germany. It served as a model for diaconal programs elsewhere in

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Protestant Europe and in the United States. Although in certain respects inspired by Catholic charitable congregations, the deaconess institutes fundamentally adhered to Lutheran household ideology, with the patriarchal family as their model. The deaconesses dedicated themselves to poor relief, teaching at elementary and Sunday schools, and health care, and they assisted the clergy in their parish ministries. Throughout Protestant Europe, deaconess institutes trained the first professional nurses, promoting the idea of health care as a female calling to God’s glory well into the twentieth century. Like members of Catholic female charitable congregations, Lutheran deaconesses wore a habit, belonged to a motherhouse, and avoided marriage. Yet, unlike Catholic nuns, they did not take a solemn vow of lifelong celibacy, making it possible for them to leave the motherhouse, marry, and start families, should they decide to do so (Markkola 2000b; Kaiser and Scheepers 2010; Green 2011). Jewish communities offered similar possibilities to women, who in the same way as Protestant women invoked the ideals of domesticity to legitimate their work in public life in such areas as philanthropy, education, social relief, and charitable outreach. They also established new roles for themselves in religious life that subverted rabbinic Judaism, whose traditions had excluded them from direct participation in synagogue prayer services. Starting in liberal Judaism, a kind of confirmation rite for both boys and girls was introduced, and by the eve of the First World War the first steps toward abolishing gender separation in the synagogue were taken. Women thus attained a new role in Jewish religious affairs, while observance of Judaism was increasingly focused on the household. As in Protestantism, these developments gave women greater responsibility for the inculcation of religious faith and culture at home, while men attended synagogue services less frequently (Baader 2016). Similarly, in the Russian Orthodox Church, women were at the forefront of the nineteenth century’s religious awakening and clergymen’s wives and daughters assumed new roles as schoolteachers and “civilizing agents” in the countryside (Manchester 2011). Protestant revivalism itself was a powerful force in social transformation and it had a great impact on gender relations. In Great Britain, these revivals often arose outside the framework of the established churches. Elsewhere, such as in Germany and Scandinavia, they took form within state churches. Either way, their purpose was not so much to create new religious communities as to initiate reforms within the established churches. Exceptions to this general approach could be seen among Baptists and other religious movements shaped by Reformed Christianity. These revivals offered greater freedom of action for laypeople, not least for women, than the established churches did. Most of the research on evangelical revivalism and gender has focused on women, and a general conclusion is that these movements stressed spiritual equality despite an awareness of sexual differences that provoked an ongoing reformulation of feminine and masculine identities. Moreover, even if this was not intended, evangelical revivalism frequently resulted in women transgressing the boundaries of the gender order (Albrecht-Birkner 2017; Williams 2017). Such transgression could be seen, for example, in the Salvation Army, which espoused the principle of sexual equality from its beginning. Founded in 1865 by William

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and Catherine Booth and quickly spreading throughout the Protestant world, the Salvation Army, with its energetic revival meetings and compelling personal testimonies, drew in thousands of working-class men and women, offering them a new life of faith. Studies of Salvationists’ conversion stories reveal that men saw themselves as “warriors” fighting sin and the Devil, whereas women stressed love in Christ. In any case, the Salvation Army’s gender-neutral organizational structure offered leadership roles to women with paid salaries and the authority to preach. This was, however, not meant to overthrow traditional gender hierarchies. The Salvation Army represented conservative values on gender and family. It assumed a wife’s submission to her husband and rejected the new, more liberal sexual morality propagated by secular liberals and socialists (Walker 2001; Eason 2003; Lundin 2013). Protestant overseas missions also offered women new opportunities. In many cases, women took over functions and tasks abroad that in their home countries were reserved for men only. Their main responsibility as missionaries was to bring the Gospel to women and children. Most missionary women were, however, missionary wives first, and household ideology played a central role in the missionary ethos. The missionary household was organized in accordance with “separate spheres” ideology, but the professionalization of missionary work at the end of the nineteenth century created partnerships between men and women. Women were also important as fundraisers and as members of missionary societies. By 1900, in fact, membership in these societies became highly feminized (Robert 2008; Gunner and Sarja 2010; Manktelow 2016). Protestant women were strongly committed not only to overseas missions and social work but to questions of moral reform, even if they largely refrained from taking a position on voting rights. Only after the introduction of women’s suffrage following the First World War did Protestant women begin to engage more directly in politics, usually to the benefit of right-wing parties (Baumann 1992; Konrad 2001; Guido 2010). Likewise, the Protestant household doctrine was crucial to the formation of Protestant manliness. According to this doctrine, a real man was a married man capable of providing for his family, and as the head of the most important household locally, the priest or pastor was expected to be a role model for his parishioners and capable of maintaining moral order in his parsonage. This construction of manhood, in other words, was firmly rooted in the realities of ordinary life. Low Church revivalist movements promoted this vision of manliness just as did the conservative Lutheran churches, stressing the connections between Christian manhood and the functions of the housefather with the moral, political, and religious responsibilities of household members. Interestingly, however, by repudiating liberal views of society, they also distanced themselves from rigidly gendered private and public spheres in favor of more cooperative, even if still hierarchical, household relations. The same patterns can be observed in British evangelicalism with its close coordination of family life and the local chapel community (Tosh 1999; Maurits 2014; Williams 2014). The ideals of Protestant missionary masculinity derived from the household doctrine, too. The missionaries were expected to be married men and to build Christian homes in colonial zones as a strategy for Christianizing the “heathen.” Indeed, the

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evangelical missionary movements projected an activist masculine ideal, which combined older Protestant notions of manliness with liberal concepts, such as the “selfmade man.” This combination was attractive not least to missionaries deriving from the lower strata of society. Their missionary engagement can be seen partly as a striving for social advance and middle-class respectability (Sidenvall 2009; Semple 2008). In these several developments, we see how the image of a feminization of Christianity provoked reactions among Protestant men. In the English-speaking world, these reactions led to the emergence of movements like the above-mentioned Muscular Christianity that aimed to achieve a new synthesis of traditional Christian ideals and practices with contemporary notions of manliness. Similar movements arose in Lutheran areas in Europe. Representatives of the established churches opposed the assertion that Christian faith was incompatible with modern manhood by redefining both the concept of modernity and their understanding of how Christian faith was supposed to flourish within it. By referring to nationalist ideology and the Christian rhetoric of struggle, for example, they sought to create an up-to-date male ideal that was both modern and authentically Lutheran. This ideal was proposed as the opposite of the allegedly effeminate types of manliness found in “foreign,” non-established churches and above all in Roman Catholicism. “Male” Lutheran Christianity was set against “female” Catholicism, which was portrayed as an outdated form of religion and a threat to the “masculine” character of the nation (Blaschke 2011; Tjeder 2011; Borutta 2011, 267– 389).

Catholic Gender Perspectives While Protestant reformers made fertile marriage and the well-ordered household the norm of Christian life, the Catholic Church held on to the ideal of celibate, consecrated religious life. When it came to marriage, the Council of Trent (1545 – 63) declared its indissolubility and its status as a sacrament. The Catholic Church adhered to the principle of family as a hierarchical fellowship with the man as head of the household. The subordinated role of women that distinguished the Lutheran doctrine of vocation was stressed also within the Catholic tradition. But here consecrated religious life offered an alternative to marriage that was not only accepted but also regarded as having superior worth. This is a basic point of departure for research on gender and gender relations within Catholicism. According to classical Catholic doctrine, vocation referred only to clerical office and regulated religious life. Prior to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, it was common to speak of consecrated life as a “state of perfection.” Monastic life was regarded as the most accomplished expression of Catholic piety and served as a model for both clergy and laity. Devotional literature for daily use was replete with rules, prayers, and penitential acts, while the faithful were enjoined to participate diligently in worship and devotions and preferably also join one of the many sodalities and other associations for lay people. The ideal of celibacy was evident

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also in the liturgy, with its disciplinary regulations of fixated purity in the sense of sexual abstinence (Dortel-Claudot 1994). When addressing Catholic gender ideals and relations, it is crucial to consider the Catholic Church’s position in modern European society. Catholic confessionalism served as the basis for a religiously-motivated Catholic ideology that opposed and also appeared as an alternative to the liberal political order that broke through in the Western world in the nineteenth century. The church’s opposition to liberal social and political changes strained its relations with increasingly secular governments. In several countries this estrangement led to open conflicts, sometimes escalating to “culture wars” (Kulturkämpfe) between church and state. To defend the church from state interference and protect the faithful from secular influences, the Catholic hierarchy, together with assertive lay movements, established an alternative infrastructure of schools, hospitals, and other social organizations of all kinds, from religious sodalities to popular mass organizations and political parties. Catholicism thus offered a counterculture with clearly anti-modern traits characterized by hierarchical order, broad popular participation, and triumphalist manifestations of faith (Lönne 2000; Clark and Kaiser 2003). To be sure, the official Catholic liturgy, which until the reforms of the 1970s preserved an overtly ceremonial and solemn character, was an all-male affair, and only boys were allowed to serve at the altar. But both men and women engaged in a richly flourishing devotional life, even if women tended to predominate. Some devotions, in fact, came to be associated solely with women and thereby regarded as “feminine,” a fact upon which scholars have capitalized as evidence in support of the feminization theory (Busch 1997). The many Marian apparitions from the 1830s onwards led to an upswing in pilgrimages. While older research on this phenomenon focused on the interplay between social changes and popular piety (Blackbourn 1993), recent studies have increasingly concentrated on gender perspectives. A particularly intriguing aspect of these apparitions is that most recipients were young women, which reflects the growing importance of women in the religious sphere. Several of the sites of these private revelations, such as Lourdes in France (1858) and Fatima in Portugal (1917), gained the status of officially-sanctioned shrines that attracted millions of visitors, men as well as women (Götz von Olenhusen 1995; van Osselaer 2019). At the end of the nineteenth century, Catholic devotional life became more family oriented, as one sees, for example, in the consecration of families to the Sacred Heart of Jesus (van Osselaer 2014). Gender studies of women’s engagement in Catholic orders and congregations abound (de Maeyer, Leplace, and Schmiedl 2004). Many of these studies address the new types of female congregations that developed in the early modern period. These congregations dedicated themselves to health care, schooling, and other outreach activities. By the nineteenth century, they had become the dominant form of female consecrated life in Catholic Europe. In the context of industrialization with its manifold social crises, hundreds of new female congregations grounded in the early modern apostolic model appeared to answer the distresses of the time. Woman religious contributed powerfully to the development of a modern but thoroughly Catholic education-

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al system, and they were in many ways pioneers in the fields of nursing and other forms of health care. Together with the male orders, the sisters also played important roles in the Catholic revival and restoration linked to the ultramontane movement and in the expansion of missionary work around the globe (Langlois 1984; McNamara 1996, 603 – 30). These women religious lived by so-called simple vows with limited enclosure, which enabled them to engage in public life outside the convent. With the 1854 Roman decree Methodus, charitable female congregations were recognized as proper religious orders. Women religious received hereby a “quasi-clerical” status and bishops and parish priests began to acknowledge them as co-workers and missionaries in their own right. The female congregations did not, however, enjoy the same extent of independence from the church hierarchy as their male counterparts did. Interestingly, the argument for this restriction was not that female superiors of congregations lacked required skills, but that like overprotective mothers they might develop an overly authoritarian leadership style. Nevertheless, the new regulations allowed women to lead and administer world-wide religious congregations without direct male assistance (McNamara 1996, 603 – 30; Sastre Santos 1997, 805 – 6, 848 – 52, 860 – 75). As several studies have shown, the social–charitable female orders and congregations represented a particular female religious culture, which appeared as an alternative to both the secular female emancipation movements and the Lutheran doctrine of vocation with its emphasis on marriage, biological motherhood, and domestic work. In Protestant regions, such as Great Britain and Scandinavia, Catholic sisters took part in missionary endeavors through their schools and hospitals, which served as instruments to disseminate Catholic faith and prepare the ground for conversions. These women religious owned and ran their institutions themselves; for instance, their hospitals were managed by trained nurses, not by doctors, which was the norm in state hospitals and in private hospitals connected to the Protestant deaconess institutes. But even if consecrated religious life transcended socially constructed gender differences and women religious had a great influence on parish work as well as on missions, men still held the power and norm-setting positions in the church. Throughout this hierarchy, the nuns exercised influence not by virtue of their own authority but through ordained men, to whom they had to turn to enforce their visions against the resistance of stubborn parish priests or bishops (Turin 1989; Meiwes 2000; Mangion 2008; Brejon de Lavergnée 2016; Suenens 2020). In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Catholic laywomen’s associations appeared across Catholic Europe. Unlike the parish-related mothers’ unions and other traditional female sodalities, which were dedicated to personal edification and often connected to female consecrated life as so-called “third orders,” the Catholic women’s associations devoted themselves to political and social issues with a particular emphasis on family policy. The issue of morality, i. e. questions of marital relations, contraception, and prostitution, played a central role, and both the Protestant and the Catholic women’s associations rejected the new, more liberal sexual morality that was taking form in secular circles. In Germany, the Catholic women’s unions became involved

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in politics through their connections to the Catholic Center Party (Zentrumspartei). The political activities of Catholic female associations were less pronounced in countries like Belgium, France, Italy, and Spain, where they were linked to the Catholic Action movement initiated by the church leadership in Rome (Cova 2000; Dumons 2006). In 1910, an International Federation of Catholic Women’s Leagues was founded with a Roman cardinal as protector, whose aim was to coordinate the activities of the regional and national federations. A corresponding international union for Catholic men’s associations was not established for another forty years, and it did not reach the female union’s membership numbers (Della Sudda 2013). When it came to political participation and suffrage, the Catholic Church did not raise the same fundamental obstacles to expanding women’s political rights as did the Protestant churches, which through their more democratic organizational structures would be more directly affected by such reforms. Due to its strictly hierarchical structure, the Catholic Church was guarded against such effects since the laity had no direct influence in ecclesiastical affairs. Catholic political parties, however, were relatively reluctant to integrate women in political work. It was not until 1911, for instance, that the Center Party in Germany accepted female members (however, only with the new 1908 associational law could women be members of any German political organization). When after the First World War female suffrage was introduced in many European countries, women in general proved to be loyal exponents of their churches. This was especially true of Catholic women and their unions, which followed the directives of the church hierarchy and in many ways helped to sustain a religiously grounded, patriarchal gender order (Baumann 1995). For example, women supported the church’s vision of family as a hierarchically structured community with the man as head, and as late as the 1960s they tended to reject married women’s salaried employment (Beinert 1987, 77– 110). Clerical masculinity within Catholicism bore the same hallmarks that characterized Catholic female religious life: monastic spiritual ideals; detailed regulation of consecrated life with its offices, prayers, and spiritual exercises; and an ethos of humble obedience to church hierarchy. According to the Tridentine vision, which nineteenthcentury ultramontanism revitalized, a priest was not only a dispenser of the sacraments, a teacher, and a leader of the faithful. He was also expected to be a model of Christian virtue, piety, and ascetic lifestyle. Historians have shown how these ideals shaped a specific habitus clericalis, which demanded self-sanctification and self-denial and stressed the high dignity and exclusively male character of priesthood. It also implied the idea of male superiority in accordance with the classical Catholic theology of creation, which constituted a fundament for the Catholic concept of priesthood (Forstner 2014, 158 – 63, 245 – 300). Such ideals of clerical manhood were particularly evident in the male orders and congregations, not least among Jesuits, the most fervent defenders of ultramontane confessionalism and papal authority (Werner 2016, 60 – 65). The male laity, for their part, cooperated closely with their priests, not only in associational life but also and perhaps most importantly in politics, where the laity was heavily involved. Unlike Protestants, Catholics in several countries founded their own

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political parties, which engaged not only laymen but also many priests as candidates in parliamentary elections. The church hierarchy made strong efforts to mobilize laymen to fight for church interests and to prevent them from joining anticlerical political movements, especially on the socialist and communist Left. This was an urgent task, as the allegiance of these men was crucial to the maintenance of a Catholic society. An example is the above-mentioned German Center Party, which was established in 1870 as a response to “culture war” policies and, together with the People’s Association for Catholic Germany (Volksverein für das katholische Deutschland), played a decisive role in mobilizing Catholic men. Saint Joseph, the foster father of Jesus, was chosen as patron saint of this as well as of numerous other male associations and organizations. Declared a patron of the universal church in 1870, Saint Joseph provided a model of manhood that emphasized the integration of faith and daily life (Schneider 2012, 207– 18; Loth 2018). While Protestants expressed the masculine character of their faith by aligning it with nationalism and state patriotism, Catholic elites rejected accusations that Catholic piety was feminine and recoded it as masculine in order to engage men in church life. This was particularly evident in male associations led by the Jesuits, such as the Marian congregations and the male branches of the Sacred Heart of Jesus movement. One example of this was the re-conception of the Sacred Heart of Jesus cult to express a more combative form of Catholic identity. Members of these associations formed the core of Catholic Action, a militant mass movement started in the late nineteenth century to mobilize Catholic laity for the sake of the church and to promote Catholic influence on society (Blaschke 2011; van Osselaer 2013). Movements like Catholic Action provided structure and training for men to participate actively in the church’s mission and to defend the church and its doctrines in public life. Yet, compared with Protestant all-male movements, such as Muscular Christianity, which cherished the ideal of strong and independent men, Catholic male lay movements often had a more pronounced religious character that anchored them to the church and its traditional expectations of obedience to clerical authority. Several researchers have noted that the “ultramontanization” of Catholic culture imparted to the Catholic concept of manhood a weak and gentle touch. The image of the humble, pious, submissive, and self-sacrificing Catholic man, which found expression in lay magazines, catechisms, and missionary reports, stood in sharp contrast to the dominant middle-class understanding of masculinity. Catholic magazines addressed to men also championed bravery, drive, and loyalty, values that figured in secular concepts of masculinity. Yet they set these values in religious contexts, emphasizing the primacy of religious virtues (Werner 2016; van Osselaer 2017).

Summary and Outlook Over the past three decades extensive research has been conducted on the relationship between gender and Christian religion in modern European history. These studies have

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compellingly demonstrated not only the pivotal role of religion in shaping gender ideals and constructions but also the need to consider the denominational, theological, and institutional aspects of religious culture and identity. We see this clearly in Protestant countries, where the Lutheran doctrine of vocation and the closely related ideology of the household, with its emphasis on women’s reproductive and domestic tasks, influenced so many pioneers of the early women’s movement. The very legitimization of their engagement in public life rested upon this doctrine, as they expanded the notion of domestic vocation to include social and political activities outside the home. Jewish and Russian Orthodox women made similar moves in realizing new forms of agency that gave them greater responsibility for the dissemination of religious faith and practice, both at home and outside it. Catholic women, especially consecrated women in the many newly established charitable congregations, operated from different principles. Building upon models established already in the early modern period, these congregations made a significant mark on nineteenth-century society. With their many schools, hospitals, and institutions for the weak and marginalized, they contributed to the mid-century Catholic revival linked to the ultramontane movement and to the formation of Catholic milieus. Their work in mission fields abroad vastly expanded the Catholic Church’s geographic reach. Although the female religious congregations still fell under the authority of the church’s all-male clergy, they were nonetheless led from the highest level downwards by their own superiors. The powerful and independent work of these female superiors subverted in a way socially constructed gender differences. Meanwhile, research on Christian masculinity has revealed male reactions to the feminization of religion, which could be felt in both Catholic and Protestant confessions, above all in everyday piety and parish life, where women’s predominance was most apparent. To return men to church and to counteract the secular bourgeois image of Christianity as feminized and “unmanly,” both Protestant and Catholic clerics developed strategies to re-masculinize the religious sphere and engage men to fight for church interests. Masculine ideals among Protestants were more closely linked to nationalist ideologies than were those in the Catholic discourse of manhood, where regulated religious life with its disciplines and pious exercises were normative. Here “classical” Catholic ideals, such as humility, obedience, and self-sacrifice, played a more central role than they did in Protestantism’s family-oriented gender ideology, which was to this extent more amenable to liberal bourgeois values. A similar difference also appeared in the mission fields. For Protestant missionaries, the household ideology with the missionary couple as role model was a benchmark of social organization, whereas Catholic missionary work unfolded according to ascetic principles characteristic of consecrated life and championed by the several religious orders engaging in missionary endeavor abroad. Despite these significant strides to establish the field of gender and Christian religion in modern European historiography, much work remains. Current scholarship predominantly deals with women’s religious engagements and religion’s role for their position in society. More research is needed on religion’s impact on men and

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the development of concepts of masculinity in Christianity, not least in regions dominated by Eastern Orthodoxy. Jewish masculinities also deserve more critical attention. Yet another desideratum is to broaden gender and religion studies to embrace comparative and transnational perspectives. Such approaches are essential for understanding the dynamics of gender constructions in contexts where members of Christian and non-Christian religions interacted. Expanding the research framework in this manner will not only enrich our comprehension of gender and religion but also highlight the complex interplay between different cultural and religious traditions in shaping gender identities.

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Huber, Mary Taylor, and Nancy C. Lutkehaus, eds. 1999. Gendered Missions: Women and Men in Missionary Discourse and Practice. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Jüttemann, Veronika. 2008. Im Glauben Vereint: Männer und Frauen im protestantischen Milieu Ostwestfalens 1845−1918. Köln: Böhlau. Kaiser, Jochen-Christoph, and Rajah Scheepers, eds. 2010. Dienerinnen des Herrn: Beiträge zur weiblichen Diakonie im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt. Konrad, Dagmar. 2001. Missionsbräute: Pietistinnen des 19. Jahrhunderts in der Basler Mission. Münster: Waxmann Verlag. Langlois, Claude. 1984. Le Catholicisme au féminin: Les congrégations françaises à supérieure générale au XIXe siècle. Paris: Cerf. Lönne, Karl-Egon. 2000. “Katholizismus-Forschung.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 26: 128 – 70. Loth, Wilfried. 2018. Freiheit und Würde des Volkes: Katholizismus und Demokratie in Deutschland. Frankfurt: Campus. Lundin, Johan. 2013. “The Salvation Army in Sweden and the Making of Gender: Conversion Narratives 1887 – 1918.” Journal of Religious History 37: 245 – 60. Manchester, Laure. 2011. “Gender and Social Estate as National Identity: The Wives and Daughters of Orthodox Clergymen as Civilizing Agents in Imperial Russia.” Journal of Modern History 83: 48 – 77. Mangion, Carmen M. 2008. Contested Identities: Catholic Women Religious in Nineteenth-Century England and Wales. New York: Manchester University Press. Manktelow, Emily J. 2016. Missionary Families: Race, Gender and Generation on the Spiritual Frontier. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Markkola, Pirjo, ed. 2000a. Gender and Vocation: Women, Religion and Social Change in the Nordic Countries, 1830 – 1940. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society Markkola, Pirjo. 2000b. “Promoting Health and Welfare: The Deaconess Movement in Finland and Sweden, 1850 – 1930.” Scandinavian Journal of History 25 (1 – 2): 101 – 8. Maurits, Alexander. 2014. “The Household of the Pastor: An Exponent of Christian Manliness.” In van Osselaer and Pasture 2014, 53 – 65. McLeod, Hugh. 2000. Secularisation in Western Europe, 1848 – 1914. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. McNamara, Jo Ann Kay. 1996. Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Meiwes, Relinde. 2000. Arbeiterinnen des Herrn: Katholische Frauenkongregationen des 19. Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt: Campus. Miller, Marlyn L. 2009. “Under the Protection of the Virgin: The Feminization of Monasticism in Imperial Russia, 1700 – 1923.” PhD diss., Brandeis University. Morgan, Sue, and Jacqueline de Vries, eds. 2010. Women, Gender and Religious Cultures in Britain: 1800 – 1940. London: Routledge. Mumm, Susan. 1999. Stolen Daughters, Virgin Mothers: Anglican Sisterhoods in Victorian Britain. London: Leicester University Press. Obelkevich, Jim, and Lyndal Roper, eds. 1987. Disciplines of Faith: Studies in Religion, Politics and Patriarchy. London: Routledge. O’Brien, Anne, 2016. “Catholic Nuns in Transnational Mission, 1528 – 2015.” Journal of Global History 11: 387 – 408. Okkenhaug, Inger Marie, ed. 2003. Gender, Race and Religion: Nordic Missions 1860 – 1940. Uppsala: Swedish Institute of Mission Research. Pasture, Patrick. 2012. “Beyond the Feminization Thesis: Gendering the History of Christianity in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” In Pasture et al. 2012, 7 – 26. Pasture, Patrick, et al., eds. 2012. Gender and Christianity in Modern Europe: Beyond the Feminization Thesis. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Presner, Todd Samuel. 2007. Muscular Judaism. London: Routledge.

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Robert, Dana L. 2008. “The ‘Christian Home’ as a Cornerstone of Anglo-American Missionary Thought and Practice.” In Converting Colonialism: Visions and Realities in Mission History, 1706 – 1914, edited by Dana Lee Robert, 134 – 65. Grand Rapids, MI: B. Eerdmans Publishing. Röper, Ursula, and Carola Jüllig, eds. 1998. Die Macht der Nächstenliebe: Einhundertfünfzig Jahre Innere Mission und Diakonie 1848 – 1998. Berlin: Kohlhammer. Sastre Santos, Eutimio. 1997. La vita religiosa nella storia della Chiesa e della società. Milan: Ancora. Schneider, Bernhard. 1996. “Vergessene Welt? Religion, Kirche, Frömmigkeit als Thema der deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft: Historiographische und methodologische Sondierungen.” In Wozu Historie Heute? Beiträge zu einer Standortbestimmung im fachübergreifenden Gespräch, edited by Amalie Fössel and Christoph Kampmann, 45 – 79. Köln: Böhlau. Schneider, Bernhard. 2012. “Reform of Piety in German Catholicism, 1780 – 1920.” In The Dynamics of Religious Reform in Northern Europe, 1780 – 1920: Piety and Modernity, edited by Anders Jarlert, 193 – 224. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Scott, Joan Wallach. 1986. “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” The American Historical Review 91: 1053 – 75. Semple, Rhonda A. 2003. Missionary Women: Gender, Professionalism and the Victorian Idea of Christian Mission. London: Boydell & Brewer. Semple, Rhonda A. 2008. “Missionary Manhood: Professionalism, Belief and Masculinity in the Nineteenth-Century British Imperial Field.” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 36: 397 – 415. Sidenvall, Erik. 2009. The Making of Manhood among Swedish Missionaries in China and Mongolia, c. 1890– c. 1914. Leiden: Brill. Sohn-Kronthaler, Michaela, ed. 2016. Feminisierung oder (Re)Maskulinisierung der Religion im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert? Forschungsbeiträge aus Christentum, Judentum und Islam. Vienna: Böhlau. Suenens, Kristien. 2020. Humble Women, Powerful Nuns: A Female Struggle for Autonomy in a Men’s Church. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Summers, Anne. 2012. “Gender, Religion and an Immigrant Minority: Jewish Women and the Suffrage Movement in Britain c. 1900 – 1920.” Women’s History Review 21: 399 – 418. Tjeder, David. 2011. “Crises of Faith and the Making of Christian Masculinities at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” In Werner 2011, 127 – 46. Tosh, John. 1999. A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle Class Home in Victorian England. London: Yale University Press. Turin, Yvonne. 1989. Femmes et religieuses au XIX siècle: Le féminisme en religion. Paris: Nouvelle Cité. Van Osselaer, Tine. 2013. The Pious Sex: Catholic Constructions of Masculinity and Femininity in Belgium c. 1800 – 1940. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Van Osselaer, Tine. 2014. “Religion, Family and Domesticity in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” In van Osselaer and Pasture 2014, 7 – 22. Van Osselaer, Tine. 2017. “‘Such a Renewal’: Catholic All-Male Movements in Modern Europe.” In Secularization and Religious Innovation in the North Atlantic World, edited by David Hempton and Hugh McLeod, 158 – 72. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Van Osselaer, Tine. 2019. “Marian Piety and Gender: Marian Devotion and the ‘Feminization’ of Religion.” In The Oxford Handbook of Mary, edited by Chris Maunder, 579 – 91. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Van Osselaer, Tine, and Patrick Pasture, eds. 2014. Christian Homes: Religion, Family and Domesticity in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Walker, Pamela J. 2001. Pulling the Devil’s Kingdom Down: The Salvation Army in Victorian Britain. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Werner, Yvonne Maria, ed. 2011. Christian Masculinity: Men and Religion in Northern Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Werner, Yvonne Maria. 2016. “Katholische Männlichkeit in Skandinavien.” In Sohn-Kronthaler 2016, 52 – 77.

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16 Missions and Empire The idea that dominion advances the cause of religion, as Augustine of Hippo wrote in the fifth century, is as old as civilization. Since the Emperor Constantine prevailed in battle under the sign of the cross, it has been associated with Christianity. From a practical point of view, empires facilitated commerce, travel, and communications. Medieval Prince Vladimir of Kiev promoted uniformity of religious belief through mass baptisms. Early modern Portuguese and Spanish monarchies treated the expansion of Christianity as coterminous with imperial expansion as evidenced by the priests and monks aboard their voyages of discovery and conquest. By 1800 European practices varied enormously. The declining Dutch seaborne empire observed religious toleration, fearing to antagonize members of other faiths, especially Muslims. The British East India Company barred Christian missionaries from its domains until compelled by Parliament to admit them. As Russia pushed into central and northeast Asia it took care not to upset Islamic populations even while stepping up persecution of Jews and other religious minorities in its historic heartland. Similar forces were at work in the Ottoman Empire, the so-called “Sick Man of Europe.” Whereas sixteenth-century sultans had welcomed Jews and Muslims fleeing persecution in Spain, by 1900 forces of intolerance were on the march that threatened Armenian and Greek communities. Relations between missions and empires in the nineteenth century provide a fertile field for historical studies but have yet to receive the comprehensive, comparative analysis they deserve. For example, there is no book-length treatment of the subject corresponding to the overview presented in this chapter. Mission history remained the preserve of church-affiliated scholars until twentieth-century reappraisals of imperial expansion and decolonization attracted secular historians, many seeking to prove or disprove the charge that Christian missions were the handmaidens of empire. Towards the end of the century the so-called “literary turn” in historical scholarship and the emergence of postcolonial literary theory directed attention to the mountains of mission-generated texts. Regrettably, most research focuses on the British Empire and English-speaking Protestant mission societies. This imbalance not only obscures the other empires and branches of Christianity, but also the work of non-English and American missions within the British Empire. Those who aspire to study missions in imperial contexts need first to grasp their diversity, magnitude, and impact not just in distant climes but in the countries from which missionaries came. It must be said at the outset that some themes of great significance to studies of the expansion of Christianity have slight connections to empire or imperialism and therefore lie outside the parameters of this chapter. For example, in the 1970s anthropologist Robin Horton opened a conversation about the nature of religious conversion that continues to inspire scholars in many fields (1971). He hypothesized that economic, social, and political disruption motivated ordinary people’s interest in a High God whose https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110609059-018

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power extended beyond local shrines and ancestral graves. Empire was one such disruptive force, but only one of many. Two decades later Lamin Sanneh challenged the widely held belief that Christianity was inescapably European or Western (1990). Had that been so, Sanneh reasoned, a Middle Eastern faith could never have taken root in Europe; universality of access was what made Christianity and other world religions what they were. This observation helped exonerate missions from the charge of cultural imperialism, but it made little impact upon the business of empires. Another topic of considerable interest is the incorporation of Christian evangelical thinking into the self-image of emerging nationalisms. The concept of the Great Commission—Jesus’s commandment to preach the Gospel to all the world (Matthew 28:16 – 20)—resonated with other movements. By extension, certain nations could claim to be the special instruments of Divine Providence. Many spoke of “the mission of America” to spread ideas of democracy, liberty, and Christianity throughout the world. European nationalists in several countries saw homegrown mission societies as signs of a special destiny. It cannot be too strongly emphasized that organized missions and empires played a minor role in the nineteenth-century expansion of Christianity. Conversion came about mainly through local people interacting with family, friends, and neighbors. By the end of the nineteenth century, it is estimated that that worldwide corps of foreign missionaries numbered no more than 62,000. Even if we add to that number missionary wives, teachers, and indigenous assistants, the total is tiny compared to the whole body of what used to be called “converts from the heathen.” Some writers have treated white foreign missionaries as patriarchal rulers of mission stations that constituted an imperium in imperio. The number of people subjected to such government was too small to make much difference to the overall experience of missions and empire. Among the most urgent tasks for future research is to recover the untold stories of nameless informal evangelists who made Christianity a truly global religion. This chapter will confine itself more narrowly to an analysis of formally constituted mission societies in an era of unparalleled expansion of formally constituted empires.

Eighteenth-Century Background Beginning in central Europe in the early eighteenth century, the pietist religious movement sponsored by Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf of Herrnhut, Saxony, took literally the New Testament injunction to preach the Gospel to all peoples. In 1732 the Moravian missionary society launched its first missions to Greenland and the West Indies. Missions followed at the Cape of Good Hope, Georgia, and other European colonies. Among those influenced by Moravian ideas and practices was John Wesley (1703 – 91). Although a lifelong member of the Church of England, he promulgated novel views on personal holiness and evangelism. His methods—lay preaching, mass meetings, membership tickets, all-night vigils—gave a name to his Methodist movement. Without the need for ordained preachers and state support, the Wesleyans

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grew rapidly, eventually splitting from the Anglican communion. Although the Methodists did not launch a formal mission society until 1818, it was from inception an inherently evangelical enterprise. Stimulated by similar impulses, the nondenominational London Missionary Society (LMS) sprang up in 1795 as an umbrella organization for Nonconformists (those who did not subscribe to the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles). A Baptist Missionary society (BMS) appeared in 1792. The society that became the Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS) began in 1799. Although British in origin, their agents were multi-national, seeing themselves as part of an international brotherhood (Walls 1996, 79 – 84). Linkages to states and empires were initially tenuous. The Church of England’s Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), founded in 1701, devoted itself mainly to supplying clergy to Anglican settlers and parishes unable to provide their own priests. It evinced little enthusiasm for missions to the so-called “heathen” until well into the nineteenth century, and even then it insisted that missionaries subject themselves to bishops appointed by the British Crown. Unlike the state-supported missions in the old Spanish, French, and Portuguese empires, the new Protestant Societies operated independently. They often had to fight for the right to evangelize. On paper the vast territories of the British East India Company offered unparalleled opportunities, but the Company placed every possible barrier in their way, fearing any intrusion that might imperil their hold on Muslim and Hindu subjects. Despite heated debate in the British Parliament over the renewal of the Company’s Charter in 1813, missions failed to win the right to freely evangelize. However, “pious clauses” in the new charter granted the right to establish schools, giving missionaries access to Indian pupils provided they did not openly proselytize them. Though little known to scholars of Christian missions, an awakening of religious fervor chronologically parallel but institutionally unconnected to the western European evangelical movement also arose in Tsarist Russia. Eastern Orthodox missions traced their origins to the early Middle Ages. By the seventeenth century they extended to East Asia. A Russian Orthodox Mission Society formed in the nineteenth century reached a peak membership of more than 16,000 and supported hundreds of evangelists (Veronis 2003, 872 – 74).

Missions and Anti-Slavery Slavery both impeded and inspired missionary work. Most early modern European states established footholds in tropical Africa to ensure supplies of slave labor to plantations in their colonies in the Caribbean and the Americas. Slave holders resisted the Christianization of their labor force. The biblical promise that “you shall know the Truth and the Truth will make you free” (John 8:32) was plainly subversive. Some eighteenth-century Christian organizations actually owned slaves. The anti-slavery movements that emerged later were spearheaded by the same evangelical Christians who backed overseas missions.

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Slave traders and owners feared missionaries because of these affiliations. William Wilberforce’s (1759 – 1833) unsuccessful 1789 parliamentary bill to abolish the British slave trade aroused fierce opposition, not only from West Indian planters but also from the British navy, which viewed the seaborne trade as a “nursery of seamen.” The French Revolution in its early days promised abolition, inspiring further doubts among conservatives fearful of revolutionary fervor. Nonetheless, the anti-slavers persisted until, in 1807, they succeeded in banning the trade to British ships and subjects. Ironically, the evangelical champions of missions who threatened empires built on the backs of African slaves laid the foundations of a new kind of colonialism. Ardent evangelicals in the Church of England, the so-called Clapham Sect, proposed to attack slavery at its roots. Their first experiment was the Sierra Leone colony, founded in 1787 as a home for free people of African descent. Despite a troubled start, it developed into a broader evangelical enterprise. When, following the abolition of the trade, the British Navy began intercepting slave ships, Sierra Leone became the favored port of disembarkation for their human cargoes. Missionaries reasoned that freed slaves converted to Christianity might become their best evangelists, preaching the evil of slavery at its source. Not only did they speak a variety of African languages, but they also appeared immune to the region’s deadly fevers. Accordingly, a training college at Fourah Bay began turning out ordained missionaries. West African slavers viewed these developments as a threatening form of European imperialism. An Old Calabar trader in 1805 asked a British explorer if Wilberforce had sent him, adding, “If you come from Mr. Wilberforce I will kill you” (Richardson 2004, 64). Sierra Leone inspired the foundation of other colonies. In 1822, the American Colonization Society (ACS) established Liberia for the settlement of black freemen from the United States. Although opposed by many African American leaders as a removal scheme, the ACS explicitly aimed at the Christianization of Africa by black missionaries. In 1849 the French followed suit at Libreville in Gabon. Despite the nods to liberty in their names, these colonies were imperial enterprises. Their core populations thought and acted like settler elites. Indigenous inhabitants resented their land seizures, religion, and assumptions of superiority. Britain made numerous other incursions on the African coast in the name of anti-slavery that, for much of the nineteenth century, was a key element in its self-defined national character (Hussey 2012, 141 – 46). British Nigeria and French Equatorial Africa grew from the footholds established at Sierra Leone and Gabon. After the 1833 abolition of slavery throughout the empire, leadership of the British anti-slavery movement passed to Thomas Fowell Buxton, who expanded the effort to kill the Atlantic trade at its African source through a twopronged effort of Christianity and what he termed “legitimate commerce” (1840). Inspired by Buxton, a British expedition to the Niger River in 1841 carried missionary Samuel Crowther as well as the usual complement of surveyors and military personnel. A freed slave with local connections but educated in Sierra Leone, Crowther rose to be the first Anglican bishop of the Niger Territory. West Indian plantation colonies took fright when the French Revolution abolished slavery in 1794. Napoleon Bonaparte’s attempt to reestablish the institution in Haiti

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provoked ex-slaves to take matters into their own hands and proclaim independence. The rebellion inspired terror among all slave holders of the Americas and thoughts of freedom among all slaves. Jamaican slaves rose in 1831 under the leadership of Samuel Sharpe, a Baptist deacon, in what became known as the Baptist War (Bleby 2010). Although it was suppressed, the Jamaican elite nourished a steadfast suspicion of all Protestant missionaries, especially Baptists, whether black or white.

Missions and Colonies of White Settlement Nineteenth-century missionaries proved as unpopular in colonies of white settlement as in the Caribbean. At its Cape of Good Hope colony, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) spawned a complex and violent political economy. The narrow agricultural zone depended on slave labor, some acquired by trade, some from possessions in southeast Asia, and others seized as children in frontier raids. When French revolutionary armies invaded the Netherlands, their British enemies occupied the Cape lest it threaten a vital naval route. By the terms of the Treaty of Versailles in 1815, the British kept the Cape. They proved to be as ineffectual as the VOC in restraining white settler raiding and farming beyond the colony’s formal bounds. The more or less unending wars on the eastern borders, begun under the Dutch, continued for most of the nineteenth century. Into this cauldron of conflict came the missionaries. Moravians developed an evangelical strategy centered on self-sufficient, enclosed villages (Krüger 1966). The LMS began work at the Cape in 1799 under the direction of Johannes van der Kemp, a former Dutch soldier. Neither operation won friends among the settlers, who viewed the Moravian villages as refuges for runaway workers and LMS preaching as a frontal assault on the racial order (Elphick 2012, 26 – 28, 42 – 43). Hostility increased after John Philip, LMS superintendent of the South African missions, published his Researches in South Africa (1828). Its exposé of labor abuses appeared especially dangerous because it threatened to mobilize public opinion back in England. A large emigration movement of Dutch-speaking farmers out of the Cape Colony (later dubbed The Great Trek) in the 1830s advertised itself as a protest against misguided humanitarians. Trekker republics established in the interior of South Africa explicitly banned missionaries. These events, along with controversies over white colonization in Australasia, made missionary societies as wary of settlers as settlers were wary of them. A Select Committee of the British House of Commons took evidence on these and related issues in 1836 – 37. The published Report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes, (British settlements) remains a key document for historians of missions and empire. John Philip testified along with indigenous Christians, whose points of view can otherwise be difficult to find in the historical record. One of them, Andries Stoffels, a Khoisan adherent of the LMS, when asked whether he gave the whole credit for relaxation of persecution to missionaries, replied, “Yes; the missionaries being white peo-

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ple stated our grievances to the British Government, and since that time our grievances have been somewhat redressed.” Stoffels later told a large public gathering in London’s Exeter Hall that “Your missionaries, when they came to us, suffered with us, and they wept with us, and they struggled for us, till they obtained for us the charter of our liberties” (Ross 2018, 66, 70). A Christian Xhosa chief, Jan Tzatzoe, addressed the same meeting: “Christian friends: I thank God that you sent out these devoted men, who came to South Africa, when we were shot with bullets, and when there was nothing but bloodshed in that ill-fated country” (Levine 2011, 33). The cheers, prayers, and tears that flowed on this and similar occasions made Exeter Hall a by-word for organized Christian philanthropy. In South Africa and other colonies of white settlement, the press and politicians spat the name out with venom as a shorthand for pious busybodies who sought to impose their misguided policies on distant lands that they did not understand. Settler demands for “responsible government” were often portrayed as the best means of preventing metropolitan authorities from meddling with their land, labor, and immigration policies. Missionaries were never popular in settler colonies because of the suspicion that they were a fifth column of spies committed to maligning the white inhabitants. The internal imperial conflict between mission-linked humanitarianism and territorial acquisitions is a constant in British Empire history. As heir to the anti-slavery movement, the Aborigines Protection Society kept up the pressure right through the century, its power as lobby group fluctuating with the tides of public opinion. The Select Committee’s investigation also significantly shaped the development of Australia and New Zealand. It came at a time when the “systematic colonization” movement initiated by Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1796 – 1862) was at the height of its influence. The Wakefield-inspired South Australian Company was in the process of establishing a colonial capital at Adelaide even as the committee took evidence. Although the South Australian experiment involved the tried-and-true model of taking land from indigenous owners without payment and selling it in parcels to immigrant settlers, the spotlight shone by the Select Committee forced the incorporation of various strictures on the original inhabitants’ treatment. Anglican Archdeacon Matthew Hale, having observed the deleterious effects of white settlement on Aboriginal People in the Adelaide region, founded a mission at remote Poonindie in the hope it would grow into a self-supporting Christian agricultural community. And so it did, until political action by white farmers broke it up for sale on the ground it was “too good for Aborigines” (Brock and Kartinyeri 1989). Wakefield’s similar plans for New Zealand were vigorously opposed by the Church Missionary Society whose lay secretary, Dandeson Coates, testified at length before the Select Committee. Paradoxically, both the missions and the settlers endorsed British annexation of New Zealand: the CMS to protect the Maori people from exploitation by rapacious newcomers and the New Zealand Company to secure protection of their proposed acquisitions. The annexation of 1840 was based on the Treaty of Waitangi negotiated by Maori chiefs with strong connections to the CMS. The treaty also laid down the conditions under which the New Zealand Company could acquire

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land. Unlike South Australia, this land had to be paid for. The terms on which land purchases were conducted were highly controversial. White settlers accused the so-called Missionary Party of secretly sponsoring an “anti-land selling league” (Richmond 1861, 63; Storey 2014). The land question was the root cause of all the New Zealand Wars fought in the 1840s and 1860s. Through the colonial press, the settlers insisted that missionaries in cahoots with Exeter Hall had misrepresented them in Britain.

Catholic Missions and the Resurgent French Empire Even before the French Revolution attacked the Catholic Church through the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1790, French missions were in decline. The Seven Years’ War resulted in the transfer of Canada to the British Empire in 1763. The advancing frontier of the English-speaking Atlantic colonists, the American Revolution, and the subsequent Louisiana Purchase destroyed the independent Indian nations who had hosted French missions. The most active missionary order, the Jesuits, was suppressed by papal order from 1759 to 1814. Napoleon’s efforts to reestablish the overseas empire foundered when the British navy achieved comprehensive maritime supremacy. The rise of Protestant evangelical ideas had no impact in France until Napoleon decreed general religious tolerance in 1802. But only in 1822 did a French Protestant mission emerge, the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society (PEMS), and it found its first fields of work in and around British colonies, often in close association with the like-minded LMS. The French Catholic missionary revival gathered strength after the restoration of the French monarchy in 1815. Its guiding spirit was counter-revolutionary and its progenitors were ultramontane clergy acknowledging primary allegiance to the pope rather than to civil authorities. Eugène de Mazenod (1782 – 1861) personified the new face of Catholic missions. Like German and British evangelicals, he used highly emotional sermons to stimulate the spirituality of his countrymen. For example, he loved to preach beside open graves with a skull in his hand as a pointer to God’s judgment to come. His first missions were to his home territory of Provence. When the missionary order he founded, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, sought foreign fields, they found them in the first instance in British colonies (Leflon 1957– 65, esp. vol. 3). This was by no means unusual in the first half of the nineteenth century. Missionaries from European countries who lacked colonial territories of their own often chose to operate within the British Empire, which did not discriminate against them by doctrine or national origin. In this way, empire facilitated missions even when it offered them nothing more than an opening in reasonably safe surroundings. Gradually, as France rebuilt its lost empire, new fields opened, beginning with the seizure of Algeria in 1830. This endeavor was followed by expansion into nearby African territories. Unfortunately, their populations were overwhelmingly Muslim. For fear of antagonizing the local people, French authorities gave no encouragement to the Catholic emissaries. It was some time before an archbishop of Algiers, Charles Lavige-

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rie, ventured in 1868 to launch a missionary society—the White Fathers—that focused on Africa.

Beyond the Pale of Imperial Authority As the examples of the British East India Company, the Dutch in South Africa, and the French in Algeria confirm, European empires could operate without missions. It was equally true that missions could exist beyond the reach of European sovereignty, as witnessed by seventeenth-century Catholic missions to China, Ethiopia, and Japan. Nineteenth-century Protestant missions relearned what it was to “live on terms set by other people” (Walls 2001, 35 – 38). In 1796 the LMS launched its first mission to Tahiti in the South Pacific. Imperial rivalries as well as scientific curiosity had motivated very expensive British and French naval exploration in the region. To that extent, maritime empire opened the way for missions by showing churches where to go and how to get there. But once they landed, European evangelists were on their own. They had to learn local languages, reduce them to writing, and make Bibles for them. They also had to win the trust of rulers and obey their dictates. These tasks brought them into intimate daily contact with alien cultures for lengthy periods. If they were to succeed, these first missionaries had to be linguists, ethnographers, and philosophers. Accordingly, for many Europeans, including the first armchair anthropologists, missionaries were a prime source of scientific knowledge about newly discovered societies (Samson 2001; Walls 2001). Before the emergence of anthropological fieldwork in the twentieth century, missionaries were practically the only literate reporters of daily life among the societies Europeans called savage and barbarous. Very rarely did any missionaries exercise political authority beyond the pale of European imperial control. However, their linguistic, geographical, and cultural efforts paved the way for secular empire builders. Such authority as missionaries did wield in independent kingdoms and chieftaincies stemmed from their command of Western knowledge, technology, and geopolitics. This command secured the wholesale conversion of Pacific Island societies. One after another, Tahitians, Hawaiians, Maori, Fijians, Tongans, and others proclaimed their Christianity (Barker 2005, 88 – 92). These early nineteenth-century successes created unrealistic expectations, however. In other parts of the world, independent states proved more resistant. In 1835 the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions dispatched a contingent to South Africa with instructions to seek out and convert the Zulu nation. After an initial welcome by audiences numbering in the thousands, the Americans found themselves rebuffed on every front. It did not help that their arrival coincided with that of fierce Boer trekkers, who came for Zulu land with guns blazing. Knowing how such contests ended on the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony, the Zulu king needed convincing that the mission was not allied to the advancing tide of European empire. As ordinary people learned more of Christian teachings, suspicion hardened

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into fear, fear that the new religion would weaken the ties that bound families to each other and people to their chiefs. When mission stations offered sanctuary to people running away from unwanted marriages and other obligations, Zulu King Mpande banned all missionaries from his domain. (Etherington 1978, 24 – 28, 34 – 35, 45 – 46, 92 – 96). Interactions with African states took a similar course in most of sub-Saharan Africa. Missionaries were generally tolerated but nowhere did they find rulers who would compel their people to believe, attend sermons, go to school, or reside at mission stations. The slow progress of Christianity in Africa mystified the American Board, the LMS, the CMS, and others who had built their hopes on the early, almost effortless triumphs in the South Pacific. Society secretaries berated their agents for alleged failures of energy and methodology, when the real obstacles to repeating the Pacific story were cultural and political. The scriptural imperative to preach the Gospel to all peoples spurred on missionary explorers. Some information about “unreached” societies came from members of their congregations. Other insights came from agents who collected geographical information first hand. LMS missionary Robert Moffat of Kuruman, South Africa traveled long distances in search of new fields. This search took him to the realm of Mzilikazi who, after defeat at the hands of Boer invaders, moved to the Zimbabwe plateau with his Ndebele people, the very people the American Board had first sought out. David Livingstone (1813 – 73), Moffat’s son-in-law, went much further. Although accused by some of abandoning evangelism for exploration, his motives were complicated. His early travels exposed the complicity of the Dutch-speaking republics in human trafficking. Investigations further north alerted him to the wider slave trade flowing from the interior to east African ports. Having grown up under the influence of the British antislavery movement, Livingstone believed Thomas Buxton’s prescriptions for ending west African slaving could work in east Africa. “Christianity, commerce, and civilization” was his catchcry. His crossing of Africa from Angola to Mozambique made him a household name and gave him a platform. Moreover, his electrifying addresses to British audiences almost singlehandedly revived the evangelical movement as a political force affecting both missions and empire. A new society, the Universities Mission to Central Africa (UMCA), sprang up to put his ideas into action. Its inaugural enterprise was led for the first time ever by an Anglican bishop stationed outside British territory. Livingstone himself conducted a government-sponsored expedition up the Zambezi to assess the prospects for missions and commerce. With further government support, the search for the sources of the Nile River opened European eyes to central Africa’s economic potential, including the vast Congo Basin. Goaded by Livingstone’s reports, Britain imposed a treaty on the Sultan of Zanzibar in 1873 that abolished slavery and the slave trade in his dominions, which included the coastal territories of what became Kenya and Tanzania. In 1876 King Leopold II of Belgium launched the Association Internationale Africaine, which ostensibly aimed at combatting the slave trade through “civilization.” He employed as his agent Henry Morton Stanley, “the man who found Livingstone” when the world thought him lost in 1871. Leopold claimed disingenuously to facilitate an interna-

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tional effort on behalf of commerce, civilization, and anti-slavery, but in reality he aimed to found a colony for the exploitation of the Congo Basin. The mapping of Lake Victoria showed it to be one of the main sources of the Nile. European contact with the interlacustrine kingdoms of Bunyoro, Buganda, Toro, Rwanda, and Burundi opened undreamt of possibilities for evangelism. Cardinal Lavigerie’s White Fathers seized this hoped-for opportunity to found missions beyond the realm of Muslim domination. Competition with Protestant missions in the area planted the seeds of future European political intervention. It is no wonder that central and east Africa have been happy hunting grounds for historians interested in the “missionary factor” in imperial history (Oliver 1952; Chadwick 1959; Robinson and Gallagher 1961). Missionaries also operated beyond the reach of European authority in the Ottoman, Chinese, and Japanese empires, where well-established religions enjoyed both popular support and state patronage. The Ottomans were themselves a European power, ruling much of the modern-day Balkans. Although formally Islamic, they tolerated a range of other faiths, including Christianity. Numbers of Greek Orthodox and Armenian Christians served in the higher ranks of the bureaucracy. Muslims in the domains of the Ottoman sultans were an unlikely target for conversion as the state nominally upheld the prohibition against leaving the Islamic faith. That said, the fact that the Ottomans ruled the Holy Lands where Jesus once walked made them a subject of intense interest for missionaries, especially those with eschatological expectations that the Second Coming of Christ would occur in Palestine (Sharkey 2010, 5 – 6). Great Power rivalries for domination of the eastern Mediterranean played out in disputes over access to and protection of the “Holy Places,” which culminated in the Crimean War of 1853 – 56. In practice Protestant missionary efforts focused on Eastern Rite Christians—Armenians, Assyrians, Copts, and various sub-branches of Greek Orthodoxy—to whom they had ready access. Although the initial focus was on converting them to a “purer” Christianity, in the long run the most significant achievements of these missions were educational. They founded schools and universities that were notable for their enrollment of both women and men (Heyrman 2015; Murre-van den Berg 2006, 263 – 80). Asia Minor was also important for various missions aiming at converting Jews. Roman Catholic orders had been active in the Ottoman Empire for centuries, having as a primary objective the achievement of a reunion of the Eastern and Western Churches under the authority of the pope at Rome. These efforts quickened in the nineteenth century, reflecting the renewal of Catholic evangelical fervor more generally (Latourette 1944, 36 – 55; Marten and Tamcke 2006). Japan and China attracted the attention of nineteenth-century Europeans despite the unfortunate history of earlier Catholic missions, which had ended in failure and official persecution. The drawcard was East Asia’s huge population. The forced “opening” of Japan by American naval forces in the 1850s precipitated political revolution. During the subsequent Meiji era, Catholic, Protestant, and Russian Orthodox churches acquired a precarious foothold. Catholics were amazed to find that isolated communities had secretly maintained Christian practices over more than two centuries of offi-

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cial suppression. Protestants were delighted that modernizing elites welcomed their educational program. With the support of the Romanov Empire, Russian missionaries established a presence that would survive even the Russo-Japanese War of 1894 – 95 (Latourette 1944, 370 – 410). Despite the resources expended, new converts to Christianity remained few in number, revealing the difficulty of making headway in strong states with entrenched religious traditions. The so-called opening of Japan was Western imperialism in its most boldfaced manifestation, but it had nothing to do with missions and produced no real religious change. Nineteenth-century interactions with the Chinese Qing Empire were more dramatic. Britain fought the first Opium War (1839 – 42) ostensibly on behalf of free trade but really to protect the East India Company’s trade in that destructive commodity. The Treaty of Nanking transferred Hong Kong to the British victors and opened five other so-called treaty ports to merchants of all nations. With it came foreign nationals’ right to build churches at those ports. Although a ban on Christianity remained in force elsewhere in China, missionaries of many denominations dispatched agents to the designated ports. Not long afterwards, Hong Xiuquan (1814 – 64), who had been influenced by Protestant missionaries in Canton, revealed himself to be the brother of Jesus Christ, sent by God to purge China of corruption and Confucianism. From the multitudes who rallied to his cause he raised a revolutionary army in 1851. Over the next decade, his Taiping rebels came tantalizingly close to dethroning the Qing dynasty (Chesneaux 1973, 23 – 31). While the conflict raged, a second Opium War was fought in 1856 – 57. This time France joined Britain, citing the execution of a French Catholic missionary as its casus belli. The United States and Russia used the conflict as a pretext for advancing their own regional interests. The terms of peace established foreigners’ right to travel freely throughout China, which missionary societies interpreted as the right to itinerant preaching. By the end of the century, the corps of European and American missions operating in China was perhaps the largest in the world, even if Chinese Christians made up an insignificant percentage of the population. Missionaries had not sought direct assistance from the Chinese or any other empire. At least in the short term, however, they were the beneficiaries of larger geopolitical forces undermining the old order. In Chinese hands the faith they preached inspired peasants to revolt, modernizers to import Western techniques, and the ruling elite to fear the power of ideas as much as armies. Because the arrival of missionaries coincided with unequal treaties imposed by force, missions came to be identified in Chinese imaginations with alien domination in general. This conviction provoked the rise of a nativist movement known to its supporters as the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists. To Europeans, they were the Boxers. Their uprising in 1899, encouraged by the Empress Dowager, seized on mission Christianity as a symbol of European imperialism. Boxer attacks resulted in the deaths of 239 European missionaries and an estimated 30,000 Chinese Christians. The eightnation alliance whose armies relieved the besieged Christians in Beijing imposed a humiliating indemnity, which did nothing to dispel the notion of missionaries as ideolog-

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ical foot soldiers of European imperialism (Silbey 2012; Cohen 1997, 238 – 60; Greenlee and Johnson 1999, 108 – 11).

Missions within Empires Nineteenth-century Christian missions aimed at much more than the conversion of “heathens” abroad. Great resources were directed to what were known as Home Missions to urban poor and expanding frontiers of white settlers. Churches struggled to serve the populations of rapidly expanding cities in Europe and new settlements in the American west and the Siberian east. William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, promoted his movement with the polemical text, In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890). Deliberately drawing a parallel with “Darkest Africa,” Booth argued that the poor, suffering, often godless denizens of Europe’s cities were in equal need of salvation. Accordingly, many mission societies made efforts to convert adherents of other faiths within Europe. This ambition included not just efforts like the various Prussian missions to the Jews, but also missions to Eastern Orthodox, Armenian, and other Christians (Clark 1995; McLeod 2015). In his pioneering History of the Expansion of Christianity, Kenneth Scott Latourette scratched his head in bewilderment at this activity. These missions, “some Roman Catholic, some Eastern, including Russian Orthodoxy, and some Protestant … present a picture of intense and largely futile effort by each of the major divisions of organized Christianity to win adherents from the others” (1941, 143).

Missions and the “New Imperialism” The Boxer Rebellion occurred at the height of European overseas empire-building. Much had changed over the previous twenty-five years. For the first three-quarters of the century, the missionary movement had been an international affair. People of many nations had worked for organizations such as the LMS, the CMS, and the SPG, which were headquartered in Britain. Societies from Continental countries and the United States ran missions in British and French colonies. Following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, which led to the proclamation of the German Empire, new forces stalked the world stage. Leading states—Germany, France, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Japan, the United States—entered into an arms race that challenged Britain’s global military and naval supremacy. These same states raised tariff walls against imported goods to speed industrialization and economic growth. The nationalist fervor with which these goals were pursued also began to infect Christian missions. At the same time missions came under attack from the apostles of pseudo-scientific racism, who claimed that efforts at conversion were wasted on “inferior races.” The most visible fruits of these European rivalries were overseas territorial acquisitions in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. Scholars continue to debate the extent to which

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missions connived in, acquiesced in, or otherwise affected the course of this “new imperialism.” The first and clearest case of missions provoking European intervention was Vietnam in 1858. French Catholic missions had been active in the country since the seventeenth century, enjoying good relations with the powerful Nguyen dynasty. When the ruler turned against them, expelling missionaries and persecuting Christians, Emperor Napoleon III sent a punitive expedition. With help from the Spanish Philippines, the Vietnamese were forced to change their policy, pay a heavy indemnity, and cede several southern provinces to the French. By the end of the century, imperial control extended to North Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos that together formed French Indochina (Tarling 1999, 40 – 41, 47). Although Catholic missionaries had set the wheels of intervention spinning, subsequent French policy was guided by reasons of state rather than religion. Under the policy of laïcité pursued by the Third Republic beginning in the 1880s, all faiths were tolerated without direct state support to any. European annexations elsewhere came so thick and fast in the century’s final years that newspapers spoke of a “Scramble for Africa.” Mission societies were as puzzled by it as everyone else. Their main concern was to avoid getting on the wrong side of the emerging colonial regimes. A few examples will illustrate the diversity of experience in that turbulent period. After more than a century in sub-Saharan Africa, Protestant missions had little to show for their efforts. Avowed Christians numbered in the thousands despite the multitude of missions in the western and southern regions. Many began to hope that an expansion of European rule would break down the resistance of independent kingdoms. Nowhere was this more evident than in Natal and Zululand in the mid-1870s. American Board missions barred by King Mpande from Zululand regrouped in the adjacent British Colony of Natal. By the 1870s they had been joined by a score of other missions from Britain, Scandinavia, Germany, and France. Despite the large corps of missionaries, the progress of conversion was agonizingly slow, even after the Zulu Kingdom permitted their return. Sir Bartle Frere, newly appointed British High Commissioner, looked for excuses to bring Zululand into a united South Africa. When agents of the Hermannsburg Lutheran mission withdrew from the kingdom claiming persecution, Frere cited it as one reason for delivering an impossible ultimatum to the Zulu king. Missionaries from several other societies joined in the clamor for war. Anglican Bishop Henry Callaway hailed British soldiers as “the Godsent power, which is effecting change” (Etherington 1978, 44 and 1981, 13 – 52). Missions were neither a first nor even a sufficient cause of the war and subsequent annexation of Zululand. However, their involvement threw a veil of sanctity over what was, from every other point of view, a highly dubious operation. Their ultimate irrelevance was dramatically—and ironically—illustrated by the post-war settlement, which in the first instance barred all missionaries from the conquered territory. The emergence of a German African empire took the world by surprise. After years of arguing that overseas empire was a pointless enterprise, in the years 1884 – 85 Germany’s Chancellor Otto von Bismarck proclaimed the annexation of colonies in west, east, and southern Africa (along with New Guinea in the Pacific). The German Rhenish Missionary Society had been operating for decades before the annexation of German

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South West Africa. Although the home society paid lip service to the cause of colonization, its veteran missionaries were highly critical of the new regime, especially the high-handed and immoral conduct of German officers. Missionaries sent after 1884 were more enthusiastic but all looked on in horror as ill-conceived policies led to the genocidal Herero and Nama wars of 1904 – 6 (Oermann 1999). The speed with which states laid claim to African territories during the Scramble can give a misleading impression of European powers engaging in a quasi-military struggle that prefigured the Great War of 1914 – 18. In reality, the major powers took pains to avoid open conflicts, as shown by British-German relations in Cameroon. Largely at the behest of German merchants looking to expand commerce in the Congo region, annexation of the territory they called Kamerun became part of Bismarck’s unexpected grab for colonies. British Baptist missions, active in the territory since the 1850s, responded by ceding their churches to the German-speaking Basel Evangelical Mission, ignoring the vehement protests of their African congregations and evangelists who did not want to become Lutherans (Brock et al. 2015, 76 – 89). Similar arrangements were made in German East Africa, where LMS missions were transferred to German Moravians, while most of the other British Protestant missions transferred operations to the adjacent territory of the British Imperial East Africa Company (later Kenya). The void created by the departure of British missions in German East Africa was filled by the arrival of several old and new German societies, both Protestant and Catholic (Latourette 1966, 404 – 5). Following the French colonization of Madagascar, the old LMS missions were transferred to the PEMS. And so it went in other parts of Africa. In some places the flag followed the Bible; in other places, the Bible followed the flag. The politics of religion were most fraught where clear lines of authority had yet to be drawn, as in Nyasaland (later Malawi), where Scottish Presbyterians mobilized parliamentary friends in Britain to thwart plans that would put them under the control of Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company (Oliver 1959, 173 – 90; Robinson and Gallagher 1961, 222 – 27). In the Kingdom of Buganda, where the French White Fathers, the British CMS, and Islam competed for influence in the king’s court, armed conflict broke out in 1892. Protestant forces aided by Captain Frederick Lugard of the British East Africa Company defeated the Catholics partisans in a pitched battle. Thanks to CMS lobbying, Britain absorbed the kingdom into the Uganda Protectorate. And through the intervention of the papacy, control of the Catholic missions in Uganda passed to the British Mill Hill Fathers (Oliver 1952, 75 – 78, 103 – 8, 140 – 49; Perham 1956; Low 1971, 23 – 38). Europeans’ determination to avoid quarrels over missions and religion had been demonstrated at the Berlin Conference of 1884 – 85. Bismarck convened the Conference for the purpose of resolving international tensions in Africa. Among other resolutions it agreed that both trade and religion should be open to all nations in every African colony regardless of sovereignty. Though subtly undermined in many places, this agreement ensured that no territorial acquisitions were claimed in the name of Christianity

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and that there would be no forced conversions. Meanwhile indigenous evangelists, not foreign-born missionaries, continued to drive the advance of Christianity. Missions played a larger role in the European colonization of the southwest Pacific. This was a largely peaceful affair negotiated with traditional authorities, except where European traders and settlers were the disturbing elements. New Zealand was the paradigmatic case. From the time of James Cook’s landing in 1769 to the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, the Maori struggled to cope with a disruptive, disorganized coterie of European traders, whalers, and arms dealers. The missionaries helped negotiate a bloodless (and eternally controversial) British annexation only to confront a greater menace in white settlers’ unscrupulous land dealings, which led to long and bitter wars. In other parts of the Pacific the missions entrenched their power decades ahead of the arrival of white settlers. Protestant missions initially concentrated their attention on Tahiti, Tonga, and Hawai’i. With their connivance ambitious chiefs expanded their domains, aspiring to the status of kingdoms. In Hawai’i and Tonga, the missions also helped kings write constitutions and land policies. In these instances, it is misleading to cast foreign missionaries as the engineers of political, social, and economic change. Indigenous chiefs did the messy work of centralizing political authority. Indigenous producers responded to market forces by growing the agricultural commodities traders wanted for shipment to distant lands. The key agents in the expansion of Christianity in the Pacific were indigenous evangelists like those who carried Protestantism from Tonga to Fiji. Lessons learned from their interactions with foreigners enabled many island groups to negotiate the European scramble for Pacific colonies on their own terms (Barker 2005, 88 – 91, 93 – 96; Denoon et al. 2000, 102 – 6, 129). Tonga survived as an independent kingdom until fears of German interference caused it to seek security as a British protectorate in 1900. So did Hawai’i up to the 1890s, when a white settler coup resulted in annexation to the expansionist United States. In Fiji Methodists turned their close relations with chiefs into formidable political power. According to one observer, the head of the Wesleyan mission occupied “very much the position of one of the political bishops of the Middle Ages” (Chapman 1964, 197). Alarmed by the disruptive effects of white planters and the illicit Pacific Island labor trade, the Methodists lobbied successfully for a friendly British annexation, which took effect in 1875 (Porter 2004, 308 – 9). The new administration, although constitutionally autocratic at the top, won the support of most chiefs and people thanks to its milder taxation regime and the involvement of indigenous authorities in local government. As in Vietnam, Catholic missions in the South Pacific served more as a pretext for than a driving force of French colonialism intent on rebuilding a global naval presence. French Catholic missions ventured to Tahiti in 1834, an island group where LMS missionaries had gathered large congregations following the conversion of King Pomare II in 1819. France dispatched a gunboat in 1838 to protest against the expulsion of the Catholics and, four years later, annexed the entire territory. Over the next two decades, the French extended their Pacific domain to the Marquesas, New Caledonia, and

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the New Hebrides (Denoon et al. 2000, 308 – 9). As in Madagascar the Protestant congregations were eventually transferred to the theologically congenial PEMS.

Tensions Exeter Hall and associated humanitarian movements did not die in the middle years of the nineteenth century, as has sometimes been argued. But they did have to deal with countertendencies in European ideas. In 1849 British essayist and critic Thomas Carlyle launched a racist salvo with his “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question” (in Fraser’s Magazine). Pronouncing slave emancipation to have been a failure, he advocated for the compulsion of black laborers to work on sugar plantations. In France Arthur de Gobineau argued in his Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853) that due to racial differences Christianity failed to spread civilization to new lands. It flourished, he wrote, only among those already civilized. On the other side of the Atlantic, physicians and anatomists with intellectual and economic links to the slaveholding South extended the argument by denying that Negroes belonged to the same species as Caucasians (Stanton 1960). Travelers also challenged the missionary doctrine of improvement through Christianity. In 1863, W. Winwood Reade, a militant secularist, declared after having spent five months in west Africa that conversion actually ruined Africans. He saw there at first hand, he claimed, “the futility of Christian missions” among people of limited understanding. The newly respectable racism represented by such views made many missionaries aware of being on trial. Every humanitarian intervention brought intense scrutiny. A prime case was the so-called Morant Bay uprising of 1865 in Jamaica. Baptist missionaries had long been vilified by the planters and officials who constituted the colonial elite. Their abiding fear was a repeat of the Haitian revolution. The old anxieties resurfaced in 1864 when Edward Underhill, English lay secretary of the BMS, asked that the British government do something for the suffering black peasantry. Governor Edward Eyre replied that the island’s only problem was getting lazy blacks to work on plantations. This response provoked an angry populace who made their feelings plain at open-air gatherings known as Underhill Meetings, many of which featured black Baptist speakers. In this heated atmosphere, in October 1865 troops fired on a crowd gathered at the Morant Bay Courthouse. Several whites died in the ensuing affray. Eyre treated the event as the opening act of full-blown revolution, declaring martial law and instigating an official reign of terror (Heuman 1994). He hung many whose only crime was speaking out and he suppressed dissenting churches. When the facts became known in Britain, a Jamaica Committee of leading intellectuals including John Stuart Mill and Charles Darwin demanded that Eyre be tried for murder. In reaction, a Governor Eyre Defence Committee sprang into being. It attracted such luminaries as Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens. Many used the Morant Bay uprising to condemn both Christian missions and slave emancipation.

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Missionaries regularly joined humanitarians in protest at abuses of imperial power. At the time of the Anglo-Zulu War (1879), Anglican bishop John W. Colenso took up the cause of the Zulu royal house, whom he felt had been unfairly treated. The British commanding general, Garnet Wolseley, took a different line. As he observed in his (unpublished) diary: “Up to now beyond shooting and wounding some 10,000 men, we have not nearly punished the people as a nation…. I should like to let loose the Swazis upon these northern tribes … but I have to think of the howling societies at home who have sympathy with all black men whilst they care nothing for the miseries and cruelties inflicted upon their own kith and kin who have the misfortune to be located near these interesting niggers” (1879). For Wolseley at least, Exeter Hall was still a force to be reckoned with. Another humanitarian cause allied to missions was the plight of Congolese rubber workers. From its origins in the ostensibly anti-slavery Association Internationale Africaine, King Leopold’s enterprise had grown into a colony economically dependent on leasing concessions to private companies. Their unregulated exploitation of natural resources, especially vine rubber, became an international scandal. A coterie of missions joined secular humanitarians in condemning maladministration and labor abuses (Grant 2005, 39 – 78; Pavlakis 2016, 136 – 34). The public outcry eventually compelled Leopold to transfer the colony’s administration to Belgium in 1908. Such cases as this suggest that there is still much historical research can tell us about the work of missions and their metropolitan backers in exposing abuses of power within empires.

Mission Christianity: An Enemy Within? Early twentieth-century historical scholarship devoted considerable attention to Christian missions’ roles in expanding European empires. Later historians have pointed to their unintentionally subversive influences. Whereas it was once commonly assumed that every missionary was a white man, it is now acknowledged that women outnumbered men in nineteenth-century missions and that indigenous evangelists were the primary drivers of Christian conversion. This observation also calls into question older views of missions as agents of alien religions in the service of Western culture and patriarchy. Mission printing presses, Bibles, and schools spread literacy to new places. These tools enhanced indigenous people’s ability to articulate their dissatisfaction with European rule, especially in relation to land, labor, and racial discrimination. Stories of Hebrew suffering under the pharaohs and Christian martyrs under the Romans gave heart to would-be liberators. Translation of Scriptures into local languages promoted nationalist feelings in an age when nationalism generally bundled language, land, and culture into a single agenda of self-determination. It is striking how many key figures in twentieth-century national liberation struggles were influenced by mission Christianity either through personal faith, schooling, or reading. They included not only virtually every leader of the sub-Saharan African independence movements but

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also such Asians as Sun Yat-sen and Gandhi. In addition, missions rendered unintended assistance to the nationalism of anti-Christian forces. Islamic and Hindu leaders opposed to Christianity on religious grounds found inspiration in the organizational, educational, and evangelical techniques employed by European missions. Although their experience belongs mainly to the twentieth century, it was very much an outgrowth of nineteenth-century developments.

References and Bibliography Barker, John. 2005. “Where the Missionary Frontier Ran Ahead of Empire.” In Missions and Empire, edited by Norman Etherington, 86 – 106. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bleby, Henry. [1853] 2010. Death Struggles of Slavery: Being A Narrative of Facts and Incidents, Which Occurred in a British Colony, During the Two Years Immediately Preceding Negro Emancipation. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Legacy Reprints. Brock, Peggy, et al. 2015. Indigenous Evangelists and Questions of Authority in the British Empire 1750 – 1940. Leiden: Brill. Brock, Peggy, and Doreen Kartinyeri. 1989. Poonindie: The Rise and Destruction of an Aboriginal Agricultural Community. Adelaide: Government Printer. Chadwick, Owen. 1959. Mackenzie’s Grave. London: Hodder and Staughton. Chapman, James Keith. 1964. The Career of Arthur Hamilton Gordon, First Lord Stanmore 1829 – 1912. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Chesneaux, Jean. 1973. Peasant Revolts in China 1840 – 1949. Translated by C. Curwen. London: Thames and Hudson. Clark, Christopher. 1995. The Politics of Conversion: Missionary Protestantism and the Jews in Prussia, 1728 – 1941. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cohen, Paul. 1997. History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience and Myth. New York: Columbia University Press. Denoon, Donald, Philippa Mein-Smith, and Marivic Wyndham. 2000. A History of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific. Oxford: Blackwell. Elphick, Richard. 2012. The Equality of All Believers: Protestant Missionaries and the Racial Politics of South Africa. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Etherington, Norman. 1978. Preachers, Peasants and Politics in Southeast Africa, 1835 – 1880. London: Royal Historical Society. Etherington, Norman. 1981. “Anglo-Zulu Relations, 1856 – 1878.” In The Anglo-Zulu War: New Perspectives, edited by Andrew Duminy and Charles Ballard, 13 – 52. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press. Etherington, Norman, ed. 2005. Missions and Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grant, Kevin. 2005. A Civilised Savagery: Britain and the New Slaveries in Africa, 1884 – 1926. London: Routledge. Greenlee, James, and Charles Johnston. 1999. Good Citizens: British Missionaries and Imperial States, 1870 – 1918. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press. Heuman, Gad. 1994. “The Killing Time”: The Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Heyrman, Christine Leigh. 2015. American Apostles: When Evangelicals Entered the World of Islam. New York: Hill and Wang. Horton, Robin. 1971. “African Conversion.” Africa 41: 85 – 108. Hussey, Richard. 2012. Africa Burning: Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Krüger, Bernheard. 1966. The Pear Tree Blossoms: A History of Moravian Mission Stations in South Africa, 1737 – 1869. Genadendal: Moravian Book Depot. Latourette, Kenneth Scott. 1941. A History of the Expansion of Christianity. Vol. 4, Europe and the United States of America, AD 1800 – 1914. New York: Harper & Brothers. Latourette, Kenneth Scott. 1944. A History of the Expansion of Christianity. Vol. 6, The Great Century in Northern Africa and Asia, AD 1800 – 1914. New York: Harper & Brothers. Latourette, Kenneth Scott. 1966. “The Spread of Christianity: British and German Missions in Africa.” In Britain and Germany in Africa, edited by Prosser Gifford and W. R. Louis, 393 – 416. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Leflon, Jean. 1957 – 65. Eugène de Mazenod: Évêque de Marseille, fondateur des missionnaires Oblats de Marie-Immaculée 1782 – 1861. 3 vols. Paris: Librairie Plon. Levine, Roger. 2011. A Living Man from Africa: Jan Tzatzoe, Xhosa Chief and Missionary, and the Making of Nineteenth-Century South Africa. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Low, Donald Anthony. 1971. Buganda in Modern History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Marten, Michael, and Martin Tamcke, eds. 2006. Christian Witness between Continuity and New Beginnings: Modern Historical Missions in the Middle East. Hamburg: LIT Verlag. McLeod, Hugh. 2015. “Christianity and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe.” International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 15: 7 – 22. Morgan, Philip. D., and Sean Hawkins, eds. 2004. Black Experience and the Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Murre-van den Berg, Heleen. 2006. New Faith in Ancient Lands: Western Missions in the Middle East in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Leiden: Brill. Oermann, Nils Ole. 1999. Mission, Church and State Relations in South-West Africa under German Rule (1884 – 1915). Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Oliver, Roland. 1952. The Missionary Factor in East Africa. London: Longmans, Green & Co. Oliver, Roland. 1959. Sir Harry Johnson and the Scramble for Africa. London: Chatto & Windus. Pavlakis, Dean. 2016. British Humanitarianism and the Congo Reform Movement, 1896 – 1913. London: Routledge. Perham, Margery. 1956. Lugard: The Years of Adventure. London: Collins. Porter, Andrew. 2004. Religion versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700 – 1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Richardson, David. 2004. “Through a Looking Glass: Olaudah Equiano and African Experiences of the British Atlantic Slave Trade.” In Black Experience and the Empire, edited by P. D. Morgan and S. Hawkins, 58 – 85. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Richmond, Christopher William. 1861. Memorandum on the Taranaki Question, Reviewing a Pamphlet by Sir William Martin, D.C.L., Late Chief Justice of New Zealand, on the same Subject. Auckland: S.N. Robinson, Ronald, and John Gallagher. 1961. Africa and the Victorians. London: Macmillan. Ross, Robert. 2018. These Oppressions Won’t Cease: An Anthology of the Political Thought of the Cape Khoisan, 1777 – 1879. Cincinnati, OH: University of Cincinnati Press. Samson, Jane. 2001. “Ethnology and Theology: Nineteenth-Century Mission Dilemmas in the South Pacific.” In Stanley 2001, 99 – 122. Sanneh, Lamin. 1990. Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture. New York: Maryknoll. Sharkey, Heather J. 2010. “American Missionaries in Ottoman Lands: Foundational Encounters.” Departmental Papers (NELC). University of Pennsylvania. http://repository.upenn.edu/nelc_papers/19. Silbey David. 2012. The Boxer Rebellion and the Great Game in China. New York: Hill and Wang. Stanley, Brian, ed. 2001. Christian Missions and the Enlightenment. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press. Stanton, William. 1960. The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes toward Race in America 1815 – 1859. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Storey, Kenneth. 2014. “Colonial Humanitarian? Thomas Gore Browne and the Taranaki War, 1860 – 61.” Journal of British Studies 53: 111 – 35.

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Tarling, Nicholas, ed. 1999. The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia. Vol. 3, From c. 1800 to the 1930s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Veronis, Luke A. 2003. “Eastern Orthodox Missions.” In The Encyclopedia of Christianity, vol. 3, edited by Erwin Fahlbusch et al., 872 – 74. Leiden: Brill. Walls, Andrew. 1996. The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith. Edinburgh: T & T Clark. Walls, Andrew. 2001. “The Eighteenth-Century Protestant Missionary Awakening in Its European Context.” In Stanley 2001, 22 – 44.

Leen Van Molle

17 The Social Question La pierre va au tas: le malheur se compose de plusieurs malheurs qui s’entrainent; … la question sociale est formée de plusieurs questions qui doivent être résolues simultanément. —Victor Considérant, Destinée sociale (1837)*

The utopian socialist Considérant worded it sharply: the social question, as first described by his master Charles Fourier, was a catch-all concept for a wide range of evils. Rapid demographic growth, uncontrolled urbanization, and the geographically uneven development of agriculture and industry created a situation where millions across nineteenth-century Europe faced miserable housing, unemployment, poverty, famine, epidemic diseases, rural exodus, migration, and the disintegration of family ties. The rather slow, inefficient, and insufficient response of governments, employers, and charities provoked outbursts of revolt and added to the widespread awareness of social crisis, a crisis that hit the mass of paupers, peasants and factory workers, small craftsmen and shopkeepers. This chapter examines how Europe’s different faith traditions helped frame and provide responses to what contemporaries routinely called the “social question.” It stresses religious communities’ ongoing engagement with and substantial contributions to the development of so-called modern social thought and policy throughout the nineteenth century. It also builds on recent research that views modernization as a dialectical process in which Europe’s churches and faith communities were active participants (in particular, Bauerkämper and Nautz 2009; Maurer and Schneider 2013; van Molle 2017). Indeed, as a result of their dynamic interplay with the radical demographic, economic, and political transformations that were underway, faith communities became coproducers of modernity and became more modern themselves. This adaptation was especially evident in the evolution of their social doctrine and social engagement between 1800 and 1914. The chapter begins by reviewing the churches’ traditional teachings regarding poverty and social unrest, in particular their interpretations of causes and culprits. These teachings informed their views on social intervention—ranging from private charity and patronage to public relief, social reform, and welfare legislation—throughout the nineteenth century. The second part sketches a portrait of the distressing social question: its size, its many shapes, and its perception. A third section deals with the evolution of the faith communities’ sense of social mission and the nineteenth-century renaissance of religious charity. The chapter’s final section then explores how social

* “The stone goes to the heap: misfortune is made up of many misfortunes that flow together; … the social question is made up of many questions that must be resolved simultaneously.” https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110609059-019

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policy became a point of both competition and cooperation among the major faith communities and other actors, most notably the modern nation-state. While the chapter explores developments across the European continent, gaps in the literature preclude examining southeastern Europe and Orthodox eastern Europe to the same degree as other parts of the Continent.

Social Teachings As the nineteenth century began, the social view and influence of Europe’s religious communities reflected above all their respective traditions’ core teachings. As the Dutch historian Stuurman notes, “People do not have an ideology, they live (in) the ideology” (1983, 37) and “canonized ideas matter a lot” (2017, 5). For centuries, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam provided a moral horizon, stressed people’s common humanity before God, and promoted mercifulness (misericordia) and charity (caritas). Nonetheless, they also constructed certain distinctions, for instance between faithful and pagan, between men and women, and between able-bodied and those incapable of sustaining themselves. Indeed, all three monotheistic faiths acknowledged social inequality and poverty as a part of God’s order, while also establishing the principle of reciprocity—“love thy neighbor as yourself”—as an ethical commandment. God thus made the rich and the poor mutually dependent. With regard to the meaning of these similar ethical positions, however, the three religions were not always on the same wavelength, developing distinctive perspectives on social matters both before and during the long nineteenth century (Kahl 2005; 2009; Saarinen 2005; Strohm 2005; van Kersbergen 2011; van Molle 2017; Petersen 2018). Judaism imposes tzedakah, the biblical command to do what is right, on its faithful. The encompassing notion of righteousness is commonly understood as a divine obligation to give what is due to the destitute, a duty that transcends occasional altruism out of brotherly love. Tzedakah is thus understood as an act of redistribution between the rich and the poor. Jewish social ethics oblige everyone to donate, even the poor in principle, and focus on the daily necessities of the individual, not on the ills of society at large since resources are not endless. Gemilut hasadim, one of the three pillars of Judaism (along with the study of the Torah and prayers in the synagogue), is in a sense more demanding: it refers to pure benevolence and implies direct assistance and personal service to others. In Judaism, being poor is neither a virtue nor a punishment; it is a personal misfortune. Alms to the poor ensure the giver of God’s blessing and advance his redemption. Interest-free moneylending or giving work to persons in need is considered even better than giving material goods, because loans and work incite the needy to rebuild a self-supporting future (Encyclopaedia Judaica 2007). According to Islam, the poor should endure their fate without begging. The annual donation to the poor and the needy, zakat (literally “purification”), is obligatory (Surah 9:60), at least for those whose resources exceed a certain minimum (nishab). One of the five pillars of Muslim faith, zakat forms the foundation of the Islamic social system that

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aims at healing social problems via solidarity and the redistribution of wealth. In contemporary Muslim states, zakat is translated into a compulsory tax on one’s income and property; elsewhere, many Muslims donate freely, often during Ramadan. In addition, there is the practice of sadaka—(discrete) voluntary gifts, services, and good deeds—which are also viewed as pleasing to Allah. In the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, a common manifestation of sadaka were the imarets, public kitchens financed by private benefactors for the distribution of food to the unfortunate and other chosen people. And even the West admired the extent of such charitable action in the Ottoman world. We should note too that within Islam zakat and sadaka have both a societal and a religious function; their neglect renders prayers meaningless. For benefactors, they are a way to worship, atone for sins, purify the soul from egoism and greed, and guarantee God’s reward hereafter. For the poor, they are an assurance that one can share in the wealth of others. Finally, for the Muslim community more generally, they are a means to spread the burden of poor relief (Encyclopédie de l’Islam 1995 – 2005). Christianity teaches that it is critical to see the face of God in all, especially the poor and vulnerable; it also considers “compassion” a moral imperative (see the parable of the Good Samaritan) that encompasses benevolence, but not necessarily redistribution. Similarly, since the late classical era, the church made it a cardinal duty of Christians to follow the New Testament commandment: “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven” (Matthew 19:21). Charity thus both benefits the poor, whose worldly needs had to be met and their souls rescued, and promotes the donor’s own salvation. In addition, Christianity values frequent fasting, self-chosen poverty, and asceticism within the religious orders. Monasticism also acknowledges the religious merits of material hardship and the Christian orders became well known for their charitable engagements. The moral duty to support the poor remained a cornerstone of Catholicism after the Reformation. According to Catholic social doctrine, it represents the added value of Christian welfare and is thus morally superior to welfare provision by public authorities. Caritas should be a voluntary “labor of love” that establishes a personal relationship between the giver and the receiver, creates a momentum to propagate the Gospel (since lack of faith is also a form of poverty), instills humble gratefulness and discipline into the receiver, and contributes to the salvation of the giver. For centuries, begging by the poor and almsgiving by the wealthy thus formed a system of mutual but unequal exchange, to the benefit of both and agreeable to God. Nineteenth-century ultramontane Catholicism fiercely opposed secular systems of social relief precisely because they would remove God’s blessing from these acts of giving and receiving. Accordingly, throughout the century Catholics continued to invest in an expanding range of social initiatives, managed by religious orders and lay associations, by charitable men and women, all with the aim to restaurare omnia in Christo (restore all in Christ). While the Reformation endorsed the Christian duty to provide the poor with relief, it rejected begging, at least by the “undeserving” able-bodied. According to Lutheran theology, God created three holy orders or ruling institutions—the church, the family, and the state—each with its own mission. Christians had the duty to live faithfully

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coram Deo (before God) and thus partake of Christ’s glorious righteousness, and to work actively coram mundo (before the world) to benefit God’s creation, thereby achieving civic righteousness. But while hard work was considered a worldly duty and a means to preserve oneself and the family from poverty, it did not contribute to one’s salvation; salvation was attained by faith alone. Importantly, poverty, vagrancy, and begging were now understood as moral failures. Hence, Lutheran Protestantism provided a doctrinal motivation to fight against idleness (the road to the devil), while also elevating providence and the willingness to work to high moral standards. All should work and will be rewarded accordingly: “I tell you, that to every one who has will more be given; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away” (Matthew 25:29). Furthermore, work is not for selfish profit, but for the sake of the family and the entire community. Accordingly, Lutherans had responsibilities to the broader community and those with the means were expected to give alms. Because Lutherans also held that society had the obligation to support the poor and sick, they counted on public authorities to organize relief for those who were unable to sustain themselves and who were considered deserving. Since Lutheranism and other forms of Protestantism rejected monasticism, they could not rely on religious orders to fulfill such functions. The Anglican and, above all, Reformed traditions stretched the fear of moral corruption, the striving to restore order, and the promotion of a work ethic to a critical maximum. For Reformed Protestants, work was a divine calling. They constantly pressed for self-discipline and diligence, for profit-seeking to the benefit of all, and for personal thrift and asceticism. This created an ethical posture that Max Weber later argued promoted “the spirit of capitalism.” Calvinist and Anglican publicists fiercely rejected begging and outdoor relief, repeatedly citing the biblical admonition “He that will not work, let him not eat” (2 Thessalonians 3:10) to justify their contention that only hunger (and low wages) would spur the lowest ranks of society to labor. At the end of the eighteenth century, the Anglican cleric and political economist Thomas Robert Malthus argued that the poor should not be publicly supported because relief creates dependency and perpetuates poverty. Reformed Protestants in the Netherlands, too, strongly opposed public intervention for the needy since “no one has the right to live off the state.” In addition, Reformed teaching on predestination associated prosperity with election by God and poverty with corruption of manners, sin, and damnation. Consequently, the idle were to be punished and corrected, most notably in the numerous public workhouses and houses of correction established on the British Isles and on the Continent during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Anglicans and Reformed Protestants, however, did value private acts of mercy, whereby the wealthy could display their election, and the distribution of charitable funds by the church, which was the best possible mediating institution between rich and poor. In sum, Europe’s major faith communities were defined by distinctive social doctrines, which influenced the collective mentality of their faithful and grounded their respective charitable universes. The Christian Orthodox churches, however, held a different position. They embraced the principle of symphonia that dates back to the By-

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zantine Empire, which postulates that state and church complement each other, as do body and soul. Since social matters were seen as a task for the state, the churches never developed a proper social doctrine of their own. Nevertheless, the social teachings of the respective faith communities were not immutable; they permitted flexible interpretations that evolved with the times. Shared social concerns across religious traditions throughout Europe also contributed to a real degree of cross-fertilization. Not only did their social practices influence each other, but faith communities also came in contact with non-religious philanthropic action and entered into dialogue with state policy makers. Take, for example, the case of eighteenth-century Amsterdam, where Catholics but also Lutherans and Reformed Protestants referred to “the purchasing of paradise” when making charitable gifts (van Leeuwen 1996). John Robert Herbert’s painting Laborare est orare provides another notable example of such blurred boundaries (Figure 17.1). The canvas depicts monks from Mount Saint Bernard Abbey in Leicestershire, England, at work in the fields. The motto of this Cistercian order is ora et labora (pray and work). But Lutherans could also relate to the painting, seeing it as an illustration of the principles coram Deo and coram Mundo. The title, which translates to “to work is to pray,” is also fully in line with the Calvinist understanding of work as a calling. What is more, the artist was an Anglican convert to Catholicism.

Figure 17.1: John Rogers Herbert (1810 – 90), Laborare est orare, 1862. Oil on canvas. Tate Gallery, Britain.

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Facing and Understanding the Social Question Throughout the nineteenth century, Europe’s faith communities were confronted with a succession of wars and revolutions; structural, political, and economic changes; plus pressing social problems. While we cannot provide here an exhaustive account of the social question, a few lines will help recall the key features and the size of the societal challenges. Firstly, the field of action. Between 1800 and 1914, Europe’s population doubled, from roughly 146 to 295 million. This unprecedented demographic growth caused a massive exodus of unemployed rural workers to urban centers and industrial areas, fueling a growth in the number and size of Europe’s cities. In 1800, London, Europe’s largest city, counted 1.2 million inhabitants, Paris 500,000 and Budapest barely 54,000. But in 1900, the figures had risen to 4.5 million for London, 2.6 million for Paris, and 733,000 for Budapest. There was also an unseen wave of intra-European and overseas migration in search of farming land, work, and a better standard of living. Between 1815 and 1930, around 60 million people left Europe in order to build a new life across the Atlantic Ocean, in Australia, Africa, or Asia. No less than 18 million left Britain and Ireland; some 10 million emigrated from Italy, 6.6 million from the Iberian Peninsula, circa 5 million from Germany, and 3 million from Russia. The first half of the nineteenth century also witnessed recurrent imbalances between demographic pressures, sources of employment, and food provision. Many parts of Europe repeatedly found themselves in the grip of the Malthusian threat, with the successive failed grain harvests and the potato famine of the 1840s as the deadly climax. From the 1870s to the 1890s, another type of calamity hit Europe: an agricultural crisis due to massive imports of cheap wheat from the New World, combined with an industrial and financial crisis because of market saturation (in the building industry but also steel, glass, textiles, and other manufactured goods). Hunger; seasonal, cyclical, and structural unemployment; subsistence wages; and appalling labor conditions were but one side of the social problem. They went hand in hand with such ills as disruption to families, child labor, woeful housing in overcrowded urban centers, abject sanitary conditions, epidemic diseases, illiteracy, alcoholism, prostitution, delinquency, violence, and social revolt. It is difficult to prove that the lower layers of society were worse off in the nineteenth century than in earlier times, but it is clear that the absolute number of poverty-stricken people was much higher than before. Their existence was also more visible than ever. All swollen cities struggled with overpopulation, working-class suburbs, rough districts, and slum dwellings—all lacking proper drinkable water and sewerage and all filthy, noisy, and smelly. Only at the end of the century did industrialization finally start to bring about improvements in the standard of living for large numbers of Europeans, including improved hygienic conditions due to water pipes and closed sewers. By the early nineteenth century, the word “pauperism” appeared in England as an abstract and pejorative term to denote chronic mass poverty. To the upper and middle classes, the swelling horde of paupers “without religion” represented a menace to pub-

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lic health, morals, law, and order; moreover, it created an unwelcome financial burden. Indeed, the growing numbers of impoverished peasants, wage laborers, peddlers, vagrants, and others at the bottom of society only added to the equally rising numbers of the “typically” destitute—orphans and abandoned children, impoverished single mothers, widows, disabled, sick, and elderly—who currently relied on public or private poor relief. Who was to blame? From where should solutions come? A first answer came from Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican pulpits, especially during the crisis of the 1840s. Namely, ministers presented the potato blight, gnawing hunger, and mass poverty either as a severe ordeal or as punishment by God for individual misconduct. The solution: rescue by moral disciplining and re-christianizing the people. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, some sought to blame “parasitic” Jewish bankers and “usurious” Jewish entrepreneurs for society’s ills. The increased antisemitism in eastern and parts of western Europe thus rested not only on political (nationalist), racist, and religious grounds but also on widespread social and economic mistrust. Far better thought-out accounts of the dramatic extent and systemic causes of social misery came from physicians, social researchers and reformers, journalists and novelists: expanding poverty fascinated, scared, puzzled, or outraged them. Charles Dickens and Bettina von Arnim voiced their social criticism via novels (for example, Dickens’s Oliver Twist, 1838 and Arnim’s Dies Buch gehört dem König, 1843, and her unfinished Armenbuch). The Belgian philanthropist Edouard Ducpétiaux wrote pioneering studies replete with statistics about mortality, destitution, delinquency, and the prison system (Le paupérisme en Belgique, 1844). In France, alarming reports about the condition of the working class came from the physician Louis-René Villermé (Tableau de l’état physique et morale des ouvriers, 1840) and the Catholic mining engineer Frédéric Le Play (Ouvriers européens, 1855). Britain, the cradle of industrialization, was awoken by Friedrich Engels (Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England, 1845, but translated into English only in 1885), the journalist Henry Mayhew (London Labour and the London Poor, 1861), the philanthropist Charles Booth (Life and Labour of the People, 1889 – 91), and the social researcher Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree (Poverty, 1901). Some clergymen also added their voices and expertise. Andrew Mearns, a British Congregationalist (Reformed Protestantism), wrote the shocking pamphlet, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883), that urged for housing reform. In Norway, the Protestant theologian Eilert Sundt (1817– 75) became a social scientist of poverty and, from the 1850s to the 1870s, published revealing reports about mortality, morals, the cottage industry, and domestic life. By the end of the century, in fact, virtually every country had its experts and their writings echoed in the newspapers, within trade unions and political parties, parliaments and ecclesiastic councils. These analyses also changed the common discourse that linked poverty to immorality. In particular, they humanized the poor and proved that misery reflected such systemic factors as low wages, excessive working hours, cyclical unemployment, the uneven distribution of land and property, and ignorance.

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Responding to the Social Question If concern for social illnesses ignored boundaries of nation, religious denomination, political conviction, and class divides, Europe’s faith communities also believed that they had a special, ethical obligation to respond to them. Down to the end of the century, they contended that religious charity was superior to profane philanthropy.¹ Faith-based forms of relief for the poor flourished during the nineteenth century, frequently initiated from below and then supported from above, despite the state’s increasing involvement in welfare provision. Firstly, notwithstanding their doctrinal differences, faith communities made use of similar practices in responding to the social question. Indeed, the time-tested models of religious and specifically Christian poor relief remained highly relevant: giving to the poor, including the organization of outdoor relief (food, fuel, clothing, etc.); providing nursing and lodging to the homeless, the impoverished sick, the old, the infirm, and the insane (in shelters, hospices, and hospitals); and, importantly, rescuing the souls of the needy and the wicked via conversion. Not only path dependency but also uninterrupted appreciation of theses models of care grounded the many examples of continuity. Secondly, European faith communities valued private acts of mercy over, or at least alongside, state intervention. Indeed, charitable engagement (and efforts to win back the masses) was a core feature of the religious revivals that marked the century. This striking renaissance in charity, to a large extent driven from below, found a range of expressions. It included the foundation of numerous new charitable religious orders; rising numbers of laity, deacons and deaconesses, pastors, priests and sisters engaging in charitable work; and the expansion of the faith-based social infrastructure: orphanages, hospitals (often with separate wards for the poor), poor schools, and homes for the impoverished elderly. During this “great philanthropic age,” to use Sarah Flew’s phrase (2015, 20), social relief, moral education, and proselytism went hand in hand. Moreover, as religious institutions developed their charitable activity, their quest for effectiveness led them to embrace more modern standards of organization (centralization, bureaucratization), differentiation (targeting the needs of specific groups), and professionalization (e. g., trained nurses). Thirdly, the renewed charitable drive was often not solely a disinterested “labor of love.” It was also loaded with competitive impulses (Maurer and Schneider 2013): intradenominational struggles between conservatives and reformists; bitter interdenominational rivalries in religiously pluralistic regions and states; and competition between religious and “secular” actors, from non-religious philanthropy and socialist activism to governments that sought to extend their influence over social relief.

1 At the time, “charity” was mainly associated with Catholicism, whereas German Protestants spoke of “Diakonie” and British Protestants and non-believers of “philanthropy.” In recent literature, “charity” is often used as an umbrella term for a wide range of religious social practices, irrespective of time period.

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This competitive spirit led to rivalries and conflicts, but also, fourthly, promoted imitation. The size and threatening nature of the social question created a widespread sense of urgency. It produced what the French historian and sociologist Christian Topalov (1999) has called une nébuleuse réformatrice (a reform-minded mist) that linked clergy, politicians, scientists, philanthropic entrepreneurs, and union leaders across Europe who were interested in each other’s theories, social analyses, methods, and experiments for remedying society’s illnesses. Faith communities across Europe made ample use of the modern freedoms of speech, press, and association, as well as new opportunities for travel and communication, to propagate their social views and actions and extend their spheres of influence. Thus, the emerging discourse on social reform soon became both transnational and interdenominational. The French politician Michel Huerne de Pommeuse, for instance, published a study of Dutch and Belgian agrarian colonies for the reeducation of young delinquents in 1832 to promote similar action in France. Similarly, the Dutch pastor Jan De Liefde wrote Six Months among the Charities of Europe (1865) to inform the British about inspiring Protestant models for poor relief in the Netherlands, Germany, and France. These included asylums for orphans, a school for the blind, a home to reeducate former female prisoners, an agricultural colony, and a hospice for “incurables and idiots.” A particularly revealing example of crossborder exchange are the Congrès internationaux de bienfaisance, which the French social-Catholic politician Viscount Armand de Melun initiated in response to prompting by such influential social reformers as Édouard Ducpétiaux (van de Perre 2008). The first conference took place in Brussels in 1856 followed by a second in Frankfurt (1857) and a third in London (1862), namely, in countries with respectively a Catholic, Protestant, and Anglican tradition. The conferences gathered approximately two to three hundred people—official delegates, politicians, scientists, physicians, administrators of charitable institutes, clergy and nobility, journalists and femmes d’oeuvres—from nearly all European countries, including Russia and the Ottoman Empire, and functioned as an important platform for knowledge transfer and discussion. Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the eighth Earl of Shaftesbury, who opened the London conference, tellingly referred to the international meeting of “benevolent men” as “a kind of Ecumenic Council … for the ends of practical philanthropy.” A striking consensus emerged at these congresses regarding the basic principles of charitable action. First, a clear line should be drawn between voluntary and involuntary misery; to alleviate the latter, poor relief was a moral duty. Second, instead of giving alms and distributing goods (with the reverse effect of paving the way for idleness, undermining frugality, and breaking down self-respect), a more structural, preventive approach to the social question was advisable. Third, all forms of charitable action should preach and teach individual responsibility: the lower classes had to learn providence and temperance to increase their ability to help themselves. With regard to the state’s relationship to charity, however, there was more difference of opinion. Some argued that the state should only exercise a facilitating role (e. g., creating the conditions for the expansion of private charities), while others favored a more interventionist

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stance (developing legislation, public services, and control). Nonetheless, all agreed that the state should preserve the social, economic, and political order and safeguard private initiative in social matters. Freedom of speech, press, and association, coupled with new transport facilities, cheap printing, and the rising numbers of religious personnel, both male and female, paved the way for an impressive expansion of missionary work in the colonial empires and a marked “social turn” at home. From the early nineteenth century onwards, clergy and devout laity within the Catholic and Protestant folds increasingly sought to connect with the daily life of the urban working classes, the peasantry, and the poor. In doing so, their initiatives became less associated with elites and authorities and more and more with the common people. To illustrate these developments, let us turn to a handful of significant examples. We turn first to the Sunday School movement. Already at the end of the eighteenth century, Anglican clergy and lay philanthropists had started to organize Sunday schools to provide moral education and basic literacy to working-class children. By mid-century, many hundreds of thousands of children from across Britain were spending their Sundays learning to read and write (with the Bible as their textbook) and learning to calculate and sing church music. The model quickly spread to other Protestant areas: the Nordic countries, the Netherlands, France, Germany, and Switzerland. Catholics too followed the Protestants’ lead, launching Sunday schools in Britain, Ireland, and on the Continent. A second initiative, which emerged out of Britain’s Evangelical Awakening and stood at the crossroads of relief and missionary work, also spread across Europe and beyond: the Salvation Army. Founded in London in 1865 by the Methodist preacher William Booth and his wife Catherine, the Salvation Army sought to convert London’s poor, prostitutes, alcoholics, and other riffraff by, among other methods, distributing food, offering shelter to the homeless, and encouraging the moral reeducation of “fallen women.” So successful was this initiative that, by the eve of the First World War, the Salvation Army had established branches on the Continent that reached from Finland to Italy. Well into the twentieth century, Dutch Calvinists nourished the ideal of a “governing church.” Accordingly, charity remained above all a religious gesture and the responsibility of ecclesiastical authorities; public support was only a last resort. Fundraising, asset administration, screening of the needy, and distribution of help was thus organized by local religious communities according to their own criteria. The result was a complex tangle and uneven access to support. Alternative initiatives and interdenominational competition added to the complexity. For example, the Dutch merchant Willem Hendrik Suringar, a partisan of small-scale moral reeducation, introduced a system of patronage around 1850. In it, a handful of willing poor were put under the care of a male or female patron for spiritual instruction, material support, and close control (church attendance and cleanliness, for instance). Ultimately, however, this project met with little success. By the end of the century, Reformed Protestant care facilities also met more and more competition from Catholic nursing schools, hos-

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pitals, and home-nursing services. Nonetheless, competition proved a fruitful incentive for new initiatives and improvements in the field, on both sides. The religious revival among German and Nordic Lutherans rested on the rather pessimistic view that people were sinners; therefore, it was necessary to preach conversion and redemption through faith and atonement. Pleas for more private charity drew on a moralizing imperative: bodies and souls had to be rescued. The influential Innere Mission (Home Mission) movement, launched in 1848 by the theologian Johann Hinrich Wichern, drove Protestant charitable work (Diakonie) in a missionary direction, first in Germany and subsequently in the Scandinavian countries. The homes for orphans and abandoned children, the schools for the poor, the hospitals and other institutes of the Innere Mission gave evidence not only of the religious Erweckung (awakening), but also of the social turn and gradual professionalization of care in Protestantism. The Kaiserswerth Institute near Düsseldorf, established in 1836 for the training of Protestant deaconesses (lay “sisters”), became widely known as the best model in the field and was imitated in England (Florence Nightingale attended the institute), France, the Netherlands, Norway, and other parts of Europe. Similarly, Protestant Raiffeisenkassen—a cooperative system launched in the Rhineland in 1864 to promote saving and provide cheap credit to peasants—were soon imitated by Belgian Catholics and spread from there across Catholic Europe and across the Atlantic. For its part, the Catholic revival prompted the “turn of the church to the people” via a whole range of moralizing and social initiatives. The Saint Vincent de Paul Society, for instance, was established in France in 1833. It initially recruited men from the upper classes and held that real compassion is laborious (“la vrai pitié est agissante”). By century’s end, the society had developed into a worldwide movement of lay men and women. Organized at a local or parochial level, members paid frequent home visits to the impoverished to evaluate their situation, provide material assistance (if judged appropriate), offer moral and religious teaching, and instill discipline. A variation on this methodology of patronage, with frequent personal visits and strict control, can be found in the German Elberfelder system, introduced in the Wuppertal region (Westphalia) in 1852 by a Protestant banker and imitated in various places in Germany and the Netherlands. The system divided towns into small districts; volunteers were to visit, assist, and instill discipline into the poor of their appointed district and evaluate whether the poor really deserved to be supported by local authorities. Associated charities and Home Missions of various faith communities had similar goals: gather information in order to distinguish between deserving and undeserving poor and restore the self-sufficiency and responsibility of individuals and families. In countries like Belgium, France, and Spain that experienced recurrent conflicts between the Catholic Church and anticlericals (republicans, liberals, and socialists), many fragmented Catholic social initiatives gained ground, developed into larger organizations, and found support from ecclesiastical authorities. An important example were the Congrès des oeuvres sociales in Belgium, which met in 1886, 1887, and 1890. Convened by the bishop of Liège, each congress gathered more than two thousand peo-

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ple from Belgium and abroad. They functioned as a major meeting place of the international socially committed Catholic elite and offered a platform to a multitude of local hommes and a few femmes d’oeuvres (Gerin 2003). German Protestants followed suit with the 1890 inauguration of the annual Evangelisch-Sozialer Kongress. In Germany, the post-Kulturkampf mobilization of the Catholic population led in 1897 to the creation of the Caritasverband für das katholische Deutschland, which strove to coordinate Catholic charitable activity across the country. Swiss Catholics imitated this initiative in 1901. In many places, the German Catholic Caritasverband and the Protestant Innere Mission worked alongside each other, but in others they were competitors. Conflicts between Catholics and Anglicans on the battlefield of social relief were everyday occurrences in Ireland. In Norway, from the 1880s onwards, Catholic sisters succeeded in acquiring a respectable position in health care to the growing dissatisfaction of the Lutheran establishment. Catholicism welcomed Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, inspired as it was by the Liège congresses, since it both responded to the threat of socialism and provided an authoritative, doctrinal confirmation of the church’s social commitments. Indeed, towards the end of the century, a marked shift had already taken place both in the minds and practices of the so-called social Catholics. Drawing on such intellectuals and reformers as the British cardinal Henry Manning, the German bishop Wilhelm von Ketteler, the French count Albert de Mun, the Austrian journalist Karl von Vogelsang, the Italian economist Giuseppe Toniolo, and the Spanish Jesuit Antonio Vicent, social Catholics eschewed caritas, a direct but purely curative approach, in favor of preventive policies: popular education, mutual health insurance and old age pensions, cooperative savings and loan banks, allotment gardens for laborers, consumers’ cooperatives and trade unions. Moreover, their Christian-Democratic representatives in parliaments pressed for more social justice via labor legislation and (compulsory) social insurance (old age pensions, coverage for sickness and workplace accidents). By these means, Catholics sought to promote the lower classes’ emancipation and, in time, establish equal (civil) rights to (public) assistance. The Jewish case is more complex. After 1800, Jewish communities sought to provide services and not just material support. In larger cities, they established institutions to tend to the Jewish population—e. g., well-equipped hospitals, homes for the blind and the deaf, sanatoria for tuberculosis patients—but the hospitals in particular generally also welcomed non-Jewish patients. (Protestant hospitals sometimes admitted Jews, and Catholic hospitals some Protestants, but religious exclusivism remained the general rule.) In addition, Jewish communities started to address the specific needs of impoverished Jews of eastern Europe (“Ostjuden”) and Jewish migrants, who were victims of the repeated pogroms in Russia. The Deutsch-Israelitischer Gemeindebund, for instance, was established in 1869 to supervise charitable institutions in Germany and support Jewish vagrants. For its part, the Alliance Israélite Universelle, established in Paris in 1860, focused on civil rights, educational outreach, humanitarian fundraising, and relief for Jews all over the world. The closed, more orthodox Jewish communities multiplied their traditional charitable initiatives over the course of the century. But

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even that world was affected by the social changes and gave evidence of modernization via imitation, for instance a certain feminization of Jewish social workers. By the late nineteenth century, large numbers of Jews successfully integrated into the economic, academic, political, and cultural life of the capitals and major cities of western and central Europe. These “secular” Jews continued to support traditional systems of charity but also contributed to a number of nonsectarian causes (Lowenstein 1997, 131 – 34; Weil 2000). Finally, in the multi-ethnic and multi-religious Habsburg monarchy, Orthodox, Muslim, and Jewish communities made great efforts to develop their own schools and maintain their charitable funds (Klieber 2013; Krogner-Kornalik 2015). The established Orthodox churches of Greece and Russia, allies as they were of the Greek king and the Russian tsar according to the principle of symphonia, cared less about the social question and failed to change their attitudes in the face of pressing social needs. Orthodox monasteries were mainly places for spirituality and asceticism, not for charity (Stockl 2009).

Paths Towards Public Social Relief The French Revolution stripped the churches of their landed estates and wealth, abolished private charities and hospices, and forbade mendicancy and vagrancy. Significantly, it also entrusted the organization of poor relief (both income and expenditure) exclusively to public institutions, so that officially assistance became a state monopoly. In France and its annexed territories, the revolutionary-era legislation generalized, uniformized, rationalized, and secularized social relief at a stroke and subsequently influenced legislative changes in many other parts of Europe. But a revolution on paper is not necessarily a revolution in practice. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, Europe’s ruling elites proved slow, if not outright unwilling, to view poor relief, broadly conceived, as a state responsibility. In part, this was a matter of limited budgets, but overall it reflected prevailing views on individual freedom and religious duty. After 1850, however, the emergence of modern states as nation-states prompted a major shift in how states defined their obligations. Namely, the more they held themselves responsible for the general welfare of their inhabitants—their citizens (and voters)—the more did governments take an active role in such matters as poor relief. But this extension of state interest also called into question traditional, religiously-defined understandings of charity and personal responsibility, creating a quandary for individuals and religious organizations alike. How should they square their religious duty to care for the poor with the new civic (and secular) sense of societal responsibility and justice that motivated the state’s desire to organize public welfare provision? In some parts of Europe, religious communities and the modern state negotiated new forms of cooperation and collaboration with respect to public welfare policy with little incident;

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elsewhere, however, denominational sensitivities ensured that public welfare became a new flashpoint in the relationship between church and state. In the predominantly monoconfessional Scandinavian countries, with their established Lutheran churches, religion was scarcely politicized, if at all. There were no serious church-state conflicts because the established church seldom felt threatened by the state, nor the state by the church. In particular, church and state agreed, in keeping with the notion of coram mundo, upon a common, public responsibility for the provision of poor relief. There was thus no outcry when, in the 1860s, key authority over it was transferred from pastors to elected municipal councils in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. By the end of the century, these three countries increased their efforts to establish a public welfare system. Sweden adopted subsidized sickness insurance for workers in 1891 and the other Scandinavian countries followed suit. A somewhat similar story can be told for Germany. The privileged position of (mainly Lutheran) Protestants in the Prussian kingdom proved a fruitful basis for concerted action to organize public poor relief. And in 1883, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck manipulated fears of socialism to gain the support not just of Protestants, but also of the Catholic Center Party for compulsory sickness insurance legislation (for employed laborers). Nonethheless, Protestants continued to support the charitable work of the Innere Mission. Similarly, fearful that state initiatives in social matters would lead to a further “Protestantization” of society, German Catholics maintained their commitment to the welter of socially-committed organizations and institutions that scholars have designated a “Catholic milieu” (Blaschke and Kuhlemann 1996). This was also the case in the Netherlands, following Pope Pius IX’s restoration of the episcopal hierarchy there in 1853. Governmental involvement in social protection was belated in countries with large Catholic populations, mainly because the Vatican also mistrusted the secular state and mobilized against liberalism and socialism. In Italy and Spain, the Catholic Church retained its near monopoly on charity and institutional social care until the end of the century. In other countries, such as Belgium, the Netherlands, and Ireland, bitter church-state battles were fought over education. Anti-Catholic agitations, such as the Kulturkampf in the 1870s in Germany, added to Catholics’ defensive attitude. In France, the French Third Republic’s ideal of laïcité was fundamentally opposed to a Catholic role in education and social care. After 1900, changes in French associational law enabled the government to disband most of the religious congregations active in both areas, prompting a noticeable emigration of men and women religious (grand exil des congrégations religieuses). Nevertheless, French Catholics tried to maintain and expand their social radius, trusting in the force of faith and voluntarism. In short, while social Catholicism’s outlook made it a potential source of valuable support for social legislation, that potential was only realized with the formation of Christian Democratic parties in the changed political climate of Europe following the First and Second World Wars. Countries with a Reformed Protestant identity were just as reticent as Catholic states to embrace some sort of compulsory social security. Because Dutch Calvinists and most British Protestants considered poverty a type of personal failure, they op-

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posed state interventionism and public support for the needy. Instead, as noted earlier, they embraced punitive policies that sent beggars, vagrants, and other riffraff to workhouses and houses of correction. In 1775, England and Wales counted over 1,800 municipal workhouses, whose residents were segregated by gender and where a harsh working regime, poor diets, and questionable hygienic conditions prevailed. The Poor Law of 1834 actually sought to dissuade English and Welsh able-bodied from seeking public assistance by imposing draconian conditions on the receipt of relief, whereas the Anglican clergy was unwilling to offer private assistance. As the Belgian Catholic professor of political economy Charles Périn observed in De la richesse dans les sociétés chrétiennes (1861), “One of the principal causes of the abandonment in which the English lower classes live … is the lack of any serious action by the Anglican clergy.” Interestingly, the Anglican Church’s insensibility to social reform contributed to the influence of Cardinal Manning and Catholicism in Britain. Yet, it was a Liberal government (with the Labour Party breathing down its neck) that ultimately put in place the first, though still limited pieces of a public welfare program: the Old Age Pensions Act (1908) and sickness insurance for workers (1911). In the Netherlands, the Constitution of 1848 and the Poor Laws of 1854 and 1870 assigned responsibility for poor relief to local church communities, so that assistance depended de facto on affiliation with a particular church. Furthermore, an alliance of conservative Calvinists and liberals blocked state involvement in poor relief until the rather meager revision of the Poor Law in 1912. Notwithstanding the particularities of different denominational contexts, we can identify similar patterns in the evolving relationships between faith communities and the state vis-à-vis assistance to the needy. First, faith communities continued to act autonomously; in their charitable work they either ignored the state’s initiatives or tried to bypass the restrictions imposed by the state. They were in fact well placed to contend with the high levels of urban but also rural distress. For centuries, local parish clergy and religious orders had been the experts in addressing poverty, more so than municipal and central civil authorities. They had developed impressive entrepreneurial skills for identifying and screening the poor, organizing the distribution of food, offering shelter and medical care and, importantly, fundraising. Because public authorities were nowhere near able to provide enough support, even at the end of the century, the involvement of churches and other religious groups in poor relief was not only possible, but essential. Since workhouses in Britain and Ireland, for instance, proved to be insufficient, inefficient, and degrading, the outdoor relief provided by congregations, religious associations, and private charitable initiatives was indispensable. In Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, new private charities arose because access to government-led poor relief and health care was too onerous. Similarly, in Germany, the Caritasverband and the Innere Mission flourished quite simply because the Bismarckian social insurance programs only addressed a fraction of the need. In southern Europe, too, Catholic parishes and congregations remained the centers of supply and demand for social aid.

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In terms of demand, the poor themselves were partly responsible for the continuation of religious charity. In many countries, those on public welfare were considered as being unworthy citizens. Denmark and Switzerland, for instance, deprived those who lived on public relief of the right to marry; it was preferable thus to receive support from private, religious sources. Recent research on poverty “from below” reveals that some poor—in particular les pauvres honteux, the embarrassed, impoverished petits bourgeois and “decent” laborers—preferred church support to the meager and humiliating public relief on offer, for the Christian churches helped them more discretely. Likewise, Jews had the tradition of supporting the needy in secret to protect the respectability of the person(s) involved. This research also suggests that the needy sought out programs tied to the faith communities because of their positive reputations. In some regions, for example, hospitals run by Catholic women religious were reputed to offer better care and be more patient-friendly and cleaner. But we should avoid overly broad generalizations here: elsewhere nursing sisters were regarded as incompetent and, with their dark and voluminous habits, a source of contamination. Second, the state’s growing role in public assistance reflected both a criticism of churches’ charitable activities and new, modern understandings of the role of the state itself. The French revolutionaries were neither the first nor the only ones to criticize the churches’ social practices. From the sixteenth century onwards, civil officials had complained that the distribution of private charity by the religious was unequal, too arbitrary, failed to contribute to the maintenance of law and order, paved the way to idleness, and offered no solution to the problem of poverty. To this, the Enlightenment added notions of the state’s responsibility for all its citizens, social justice and equal rights to relief, and the need to (re‐)educate the poor. Nevertheless, as the state’s role in social assistance expanded (Verstaatlichung), the specific policies and practices of state aid remained anchored in the traditions of religious charity. Drawing on the medieval Heimatprinzip (individuals had a right to support only in their home communities), aid was organized in terms of the local parish or commune. Religious officials figured prominently in the local aid organizations. Even specific policies reflected the persistent influence of religious teachings. Indeed, whereas earlier research on the rise of the welfare state largely ignored religious factors, more recent studies have highlighted the salience of faith communities’ contributions to ostensibly secular state initiatives (Kahl 2005, 2009; Manow and van Kersbergen 2009; van Kersbergen 2011). French ideas on social assistance, for instance, appear indebted to Catholic social thought, whereas the Nordic welfare system is understood by some as “secularized Lutheranism” (Markkola 2011; Nelson 2017; Petersen 2018). The state’s need to rely on church officials was especially evident at the beginning of the nineteenth century, even in France. In 1796, the French Directory obliged all municipalities to set up a secular charity office (bureau de bienfaisance) to provide outdoor relief and a committee for civic hospices (commission des hospices civils) to offer institutional care (indoor relief). This structure was subsequently exported to all areas under French rule. Implementing this new state responsibility to offer relief to all poverty-stricken citizens (including Jews), however, presented real obstacles. Local coun-

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cils routinely lacked the financial means, the labor force, and the expertise to manage both outdoor and indoor relief within their boundaries. Consequently, in many places, faith communities were asked to resume their charitable work, albeit under the formal supervision of civil authorities. Although partly a matter of practical necessity, this strategy also reflected the state’s desire, especially apparent in Napoleonic France, to enlist the churches to promote public morality and social order (and better control the masses). Third, nineteenth-century approaches to the social question attest to the elaboration of complex patterns of adaptation, pragmatic or opportunistic collaboration, and division of labor between civil authorities and religious actors. Newer research by historians and theologians shows that faith communities and churches progressively adapted their social teachings and changed their charitable practices (Schneider 2009; Maurer and Schneider 2013). After 1800, parochial clergy continued to serve as intermediaries between the poor and the municipality: they identified and kept track of the needy and they helped determine whether the poor really deserved support. Likewise, clergy functioned as important liaisons between public officials and the better off. They collected money for relief in their churches, received compulsory poor taxes (notably, in Scandinavia and Ireland), and entreated wealthier parishioners to donate. In France, Belgium, Ireland, and the German territories that had been under French rule, the religious also worked as (modestly) paid employees at public institutions, hospitals and workhouse infirmaries, prisons and night-shelters, orphanages, and similar welfare institutions. In Amsterdam, the city arranged for the Catholic hospital to accept poor patients, including non-Catholics, in return for a (modest) payment. In Aachen, the city council subsidized a religious home for needy girls. In addition, many female religious assisted local charity offices with the distribution of food, visits to the sick, and help to young mothers. All over Europe, the gendering of care and religious revival went hand in hand, a phenomenon that scholars have cited as part of a nineteenth-century “feminization” of religion and churches (Pasture 2012). Steadily increasing in numbers, female religious and lay women applied themselves to such public activities as nursing, health care, moral patronage, and education. By 1900, some 12,000 deaconesses were at work in Germany. France had 12,300 female religious in 1808, 66,000 by 1850, and 135,000 in 1878. In many cases, the regular collaboration between church and state in the field of public welfare provision found expression in the composition of the administrative bodies of public poor relief institutions. From Scandinavia to the British Isles, in France and in Germany, local clergy routinely sat on municipal poor committees and the boards of public hospitals. In part, this practice reflected the fact that ministers of established churches and, in some countries, Catholic parish priests were considered civil servants and paid by the state. Their presence in public bodies was advantageous to both sides. The municipality maintained its authority and could keep up the principle that poor relief was the state’s responsibility, while also availing itself of the (cheap) labor supplied by the religious officials. For its part, the clergy preserved their reputation as benefactors as well as their influence in the field of charity. But, inevitably,

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these arrangements were not themselves free of tension; the conflicts that arose over seats on the local committees were both struggles for local power and influence and contests for the souls of the poor. From the late nineteenth century onwards, anticlerical criticism of churches’ public roles by liberals and socialists gradually led to the dismantlement of this type of church-state collaboration, most notably in France. However, even where public assistance became fully laicized, its practices still relied on principles anchored in religious culture. Clergy and religious communities for their part remained active providers of care, albeit on their own. The outcome of these nineteenth-century charitable efforts was twofold. The availability of both state and independent, faith-based initiatives for welfare provision, what we could call a “dual system” or “mixed economy of welfare” (Harris and Bridgen 2007), offered the destitute the opportunity to choose (or to cleverly butter their bread on both sides), but also engendered rivalries and competition. At the same time, this duality permitted a sustained division of labor whereby public and private sectors complemented each other. In addition, the availability of private charity, above all from faith communities, allowed states to reduce their costs for providing public aid. Especially in northern and western Europe, states maintained considerable responsibility for the “unwanted”: they confined “undeserving” beggars, vagrants, and prostitutes in prisons; they created public houses of correction and agricultural colonies; they placed delinquent youth in reeducation schools. However, innovation in the realms of social care and preventive action often ensued from private initiatives. Finally, the dual system engendered creative forms of subsidiarity whereby the state chose to subsidize private institutions providing important social services, as in the sickness insurance organized by Protestant, Catholic, or social-democratic insurance funds or the system of liberté subsidiée (subsidized freedom) that emerged in the “pillarized” countries of Belgium and Germany (Righart 1986). Financed by employers, employees, and the state, the national social security system created by Bismarck was also based on private insurance organizations, many with an explicitly religious stamp. Although the state managed the overall program, organizations like the Protestant Innere Mission and the Catholic Caritasverband assured day-to-day operations and, as such, were integral parts of the German system.

Conclusion In 1904, Marie-Emilie de Spoelberch-d’Ursel (using the pseudonym Mrs. Ludovic SaintVincent) and Émilie Vloeberghs-Berranger published Belgique charitable, a remarkably detailed inventory of all the charities in Belgium, public and private. Their book seems to present a disorderly mosaic of heterogeneous initiatives, over 6,400 in total, dispersed across the country and among its target populations. Public assistance, roughly one-third of the total, was widespread and uniformly organized over the whole country, secular, and accessible to all. However, it suffered from bureaucratic rigidity and was insufficient to meet pressing needs. With respect to the private (and largely

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urban) initiatives, the authors listed the numerous institutions run by and intended for Catholics as well as the more limited number of philanthropic societies with a liberal, freemason, Protestant, or Jewish signature. Nevertheless, the list is incomplete; the ladies focused on the palliative side of social assistance to the impoverished, largely ignoring the preventive turn that had already given shape to a second level of social institutions that addressed large vulnerable groups and was gaining an ever increasing importance towards century’s end. Clearly, Belgium was amply provided with charities around 1900. Conditions there also exemplify the evolution of social care throughout Europe: in country after country, state-based assistance was becoming more central to the response to the social question. In time, a rational, uniform system of public assistance would even come to overshadow the efforts of private and faith-based organizations. But well into the twentieth century, the path towards highly developed public welfare programs met many obstacles: financial constraints, fundamental objections to welfare statism, and resistance from particular political parties, economic interest groups, and religious communities. Nonetheless, on the eve of the Great War, faith communities’ contributions to social relief remained crucial. The religious–moral imperative to alleviate the worldly needs of the destitute had lost little of its pertinence after 1800. It buttressed the old charitable recipes and gave rise to an impressive charitable revival to deal with the illnesses of the modern age. Mrs. Vloeberghs was probably right when, in the introduction to Belgique charitable, she described private charity as “less imposing probably, but more supple, and therefore more capable of adapting to every difficult or painful circumstance in the life of the poor.” Furthermore, if initially slow to respond to the new challenges, faith communities across the Continent did redefine their social missions and practices, albeit with the socialist movement on their heels, and established new organizational structures to deal with the evolving needs. In short, Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican social assistance, both outdoor and indoor, flourished throughout the century, as did Jewish and Muslim poor relief. Their basic structures for collecting funds and distributing material aid and institutional care also remained in place: alms boxes, donations, and legacies to local “good works”; the place of residence as the provider of outdoor relief; the maintenance of hospices and hospitals; and parochial clergy, religious congregations, deaconesses, and pious lay people as “natural” aid and relief workers. The doctrinal differences between the major religious traditions of Europe also endured, especially as expressed by attitudes vis-à-vis the state and the elaboration (or restriction) of public poor relief, social legislation, and social insurance systems. Under the pressure of the social question and in response to internal self-criticism, the churches also underwent change. The course and pace of those changes differed from one faith community to another and from country to country, ranging from a gradual exclusion from public assistance and compulsory social insurance (while maintaining a role in locally-based paternalist charity), to an impressive process of self-modernization and participation in the civil welfare state’s establishment. Altogether, the churches’ perseverance and adaptation strategies helped to avoid a swift

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secularization of charitable action. In Scandinavia, religion and public welfare provision gradually went their separate ways. In Great Britain, Protestant churches continued to function as providers of charity, but significant changes in welfare provision came from governmental initiatives. The Irish poor remained the plaything of the interdenominational rivalry between Catholics and Anglicans until the 1920s. Dutch Reformed theocratic thinking deliberately kept the state at a distance with regard to poor relief, making the poor largely dependent on a jumble of local private charities. In Germany, France, and Belgium, by contrast, a dual structure took shape, with private initiative in collaboration with the state, plus an energetic reorientation from paternalist charity to social reform. In southern European countries, local elites continued to patronize “good works,” especially in the villages, where well into the twentieth century landlords and clergy held the impoverished and illiterate people firmly in their grip. In the longer run, the answers to the nineteenth-century social question give evidence of forms of continuity and path dependency, but even more of a dynamic interplay between various and divergent societal forces, faith communities included, which led to a systemic change of social policies.

References and Bibliography Bauerkämper, Arnd, and Jürgen Nautz, eds. 2009. Zwischen Fürsorge und Seelsorge: Christliche Kirchen in den europäischen Zivilgesellschaften seit dem 18. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag. Blaschke, Olaf, and Frank-Michael Kuhlemann, eds. 1996. Religion im Kaiserreich: Milieus—Mentalitäten— Krisen. Gutersloh: Chr. Kaiser Gütersloher Verlagshaus. Clark, Christopher, and Wolfram Kaiser, eds. 2003. Culture Wars: Secular–Catholic Conflict in NineteenthCentury Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Encyclopaedia Judaica. 2007. S.v. “Charity” (vol. 4), “Gemilut hasadim” (vol. 7), and “Zedakah” (vol. 21). Detroit and New York: Thomson Gale. Encyclopédie de l’Islam. 1995 – 2005. S.v. “Sadaka” (vol. 8) and “Zakat” (vol. 11). Leiden and Boston: Brill. Flew, Sarah. 2015. “Unveiling the Anonymous Philanthropist: Charity in the Nineteenth Century.” Journal of Victorian Culture 20: 20 – 33. Gerin, Paul. 2003. “Les congrès sociaux de Liège (1886, 1887 et 1890), carrefours du catholicisme social international.” Bollettino dell’Archivio per la storia del movimento sociale cattolico in Italia 38 (3): 304 – 39. Harris, Bernard, and Paul Bridgen, eds. 2007. Charity and Mutual Aid in Europe and North America since 1800. New York and London: Routledge. Kahl, Sigrun. 2005. “The Religious Roots of Modern Poverty Policy: Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed Protestant Traditions Compared.” European Journal of Sociology 46: 91 – 127. Kahl, Sigrun. 2009. “Religious Social Doctrines and Poor Relief: A Different Causal Pathway.” In van Kersbergen and Manow 2009, 267 – 95. Klieber, Rupert. 2013. “Von der Mildtätigheit zum sozialpolitischen Engagement: Konfessionelle Antworten auf die Soziale Frage der Habsbuergermonarchie 1848 – 1918.” In Maurer and Schneider 2013, 209 – 33. Kraye, Jill, and Risto Saarinen, eds. 2005. Moral Philosophy on the Threshold of Modernity. Dordrecht: Springer. Krogner-Kornalik, Kathrin. 2015. Tod in der Stadt: Religion, Alltag und Festkultur in Krakau 1869 – 1914. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

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Lowenstein, Steven M. 1997. “The Community.” In German-Jewish History in Modern Times. Vol. 3, Integration in Dispute: 1871 – 1918, edited by Michael A. Meyer and Michael Brenner, 125 – 52. New York: Columbia University Press. Manow, Philip, and Kees van Kersbergen. 2009. “Religion and the Western Welfare State—The Theoretical Context.” In van Kersbergen and Manow 2009, 1 – 38. Markkola, Pirjo. 2011. “The Lutheran Nordic Welfare States.” In Beyond Welfare State Models: Transnational Historical Perspectives on Social Policy, edited by Pauli Kettunen and Klaus Petersen, 102 – 18. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Maurer, Michaela, and Bernard Schneider, eds. 2013. Konfessionen in den west- und mitteleuropäischen Sozialsystemen im langen 19. Jahrhundert: Ein “edler Wettkampf der Barmherzigkeit”? Berlin: LIT Verlag. Morgan, Peggy, and Clive Lawton, eds. 2007. Ethical Issues in Six Religious Traditions. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Nelson, Robert H. 2017. Lutheranism and the Nordic Spirit of Social Democracy: A Different Protestant Ethic. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. Pasture, Patrick. 2012. “Beyond the Feminization Thesis: Gendering the History of Christianity in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” In Beyond the Feminization Thesis: Gender and Christianity in Modern Europe, edited by Patrick Pasture and Jan Art, 7 – 33. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Petersen, Jørn Henrik. 2018. “Martin Luther and the Danish Welfare State.” Lutheran Quarterly 32: 1 – 27. Righart, Hans. 1986. De katholieke zuil in Europa: Het ontstaan van verzuiling onder katholieken in Oostenrijk, Zwitserland, België en Nederland. Amsterdam: Boom, 1986. Saarinen, Risto. 2005. “Ethics in Luther’s Theology: The Three Orders.” In Kraye and Saarinen 2005, 195 – 215. Schneider, Bernard, ed. 2009. Konfessionelle Armutsdiskurse und Armenfürsorgepraktiken im langen 19. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Stockl, Kristina. 2009. “Staatskirche und Diaspora: Die zwei Erscheinungsformen von Zivilgesellschaft in der russischen Orthodoxie.” In Bauerkämper and Nautz 2009, 237 – 57. Strohm, Christoph. 2005. “Ethics in Early Calvinism.” In Kraye and Saarinen 2005, 255 – 81. Stuurman, Siep. 1983. Verzuiling, kapitalisme en patriarchaat: Aspecten van de ontwikkeling van de moderne staat in Nederland. Nijmegen: SUN. Stuurman, Siep. 2017. The Invention of Humanity: Equality and Cultural Difference in World History. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Topalov, Christian, ed. 1999. Laboratoires du nouveau siècle: La nébuleuse réformatrice et ses réseaux en France, 1880 – 1914. Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Van de Perre, Stijn. 2008. “Public Charity and Private Assistance.” In Armenfürsorge und Wohltätigkeit: Ländliche Gesellschaften in Europa, 1850 – 1930, edited by Inga Brandes and Katrin Marx-Jaskulski, 93 – 123. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Van Kersbergen, Kees. 2011. “From Charity to Social Justice: Religion and the European Welfare State Traditions.” In Beyond Welfare State Models: Transnational Historical Perspectives on Social Policy, edited by Pauli Kettunen and Klaus Petersen, 82 – 99. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Van Kersbergen, Kees, and Philip Manow, eds. 2009. Religion, Class Coalitions, and Welfare States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Van Leeuwen, Marco H. D. 1996. “Liefdadige giften in Amsterdam tijdens de achttiende eeuw.” Tijdschrift voor Sociale Geschiedenis 22: 417 – 43. Van Molle, Leen. 2017. “Comparing Religious Perspectives on Social Reform: An Introduction.” In The Dynamics of Religious Reform in Northern Europe, 1780 – 1920. Vol. 4, Charity and Social Welfare, edited by Leen van Molle, 7 – 37. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Weil, Georges 2000. Émancipation et progrès: L’Alliance Israélite Universelle et les droits de l’homme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Anthony J. Steinhoff

18 Voluntarism

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, parish officials at Saint John’s Church in Reading, England noted that “the present age is preeminently an age of societies” (cited in Yeo 1976, 57). At first glance, this comment seems to be little more than a general observation on social trends in Britain, one that is also valid for much of Europe. Namely, by the end of the 1800s, Europe was experiencing a club mania that owed as much to the spread of urban ways beyond the city as it did to the blossoming of civil society across the Continent (Bermeo and Nord 2000; Hoffmann 2006). The number of societies formed during the long nineteenth century and the ends for which they were established were seemingly limitless. There were societies for sport and for singing, social protection and charity, reading and political engagement, to name just a few. No less impressive was the voluntary association’s suppleness as a form of social organization and action. What had started in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a largely Protestant, middle-class tactic for surmounting the barriers of aristocratic society proved capable, over the course of the nineteenth century, of successful appropriation by other religious communities and by other social groups. Most likely, officials at Saint John’s Church were not remarking on a general experience but rather on something quite specific: the marked increase in the number and presence of religious voluntary associations. R. J. Morris has called the 1890s the “high noon” of religious activity in Britain, above all because of the “bustle and activity of dozens of clubs, societies [and] associations” (1990, 420). Similarly, contemporaries spoke of “Vereinsprotestantismus” and “Verbandskatholizismus” to signal the growing significance of voluntary societies to, respectively, Protestant and Catholic religious life in the German-speaking lands (Nipperdey 1988; Kaiser 1996). In the Netherlands and Belgium, religious associations played a central role in the phenomenon that Dutch scholars have called verzuiling (pillarization), namely the creation of distinct and largely exclusive social communities for Catholics and, in the Netherlands, Protestants (van Rooden 1995). Through the agency of these religious associations, the voluntary model was even penetrating around 1900 into rural Europe. The notable expansion of religious associational life after 1780 was not just a quantitative phenomenon. It also helped transform the very foundations of European religious culture. Clubs expanded the cultural offerings available to their members (and even non-members). They organized concerts of sacred music and sporting events; they held public lectures on religious history and mission. They established and maintained libraries where members could access a wide array of publications both sacred and secular (Zalar 2019). Increasingly, these associations also promoted new notions of group identity, fostering a sense of community among members, while also sharpening the lines of difference vis-à-vis others; for instance, nonconformists vs. Anglicans, liberal vs. orthodox Lutherans, Catholics vs. Protestants, Catholics vs. socialists. Looking at developments in the century’s final decades, Thomas Nipperdey (1988) even contended https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110609059-020

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that the rise of Catholic associations contributed to a modernization of the Catholic Church, above all by creating a space for lay and even feminine engagement that the post–Vatican I institutional church largely forswore. Contemporaries sometimes complained that the proliferation of religious associations undercut notions of parish community. But they also recognized that religious voluntarism gave faith communities a flexibility that institutional churches often lacked, especially in the urban environment. Indeed, in addition to promoting a real sacralization of European society, religious associations offered new models for thinking about and realizing religious community in the modern world. This chapter proposes to explore the world created by religious voluntarism in nineteenth-century Europe, an examination organized in three parts. After an initial discussion of the concept of religious voluntarism, the first section explores the first phase of the flourishing of religious associational life, from roughly 1780 to 1850. The second section then studies the wave of associational growth that occurred in Europe from about 1850 to 1914. The chapter’s final section then considers the broader impact of voluntarism in Europe. How did these organizations help shape notions of piety and religious community? To what extent did they influence the place of religion in European social, cultural, and even political life during the long nineteenth century?

Voluntarism and the Rise of the Religious Voluntary Association As David Bebbington has noted (2006), religious voluntarism arose as a distinct socioreligious practice in late seventeenth-century Britain. Broadly speaking, it can be defined as the practice of individuals freely coming together to form more or less formal associations for religious purposes. Initially, the founders of such societies strove mainly to adapt aspects of the emergent club culture to their particular religious needs (Clark 2000), namely creating religious communities outside of, even in opposition to, the established Anglican (and in Scotland, Presbyterian) Church. This was especially evident in the meetings, societies, and eventually chapels founded by Dissenting and Nonconformist Protestants, even if their formal existence was legally assured only with the 1689 Toleration Act. Membership in these groups afforded access to ministerial care and community support. It also imposed obligations both financial (maintaining a minister, erecting and keeping up a chapel or similar worship space) and spiritual (regular attendance at meetings). Even in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, this kind of religious voluntarism was not an exclusively Protestant phenomenon. By 1766, the Catholic Church in Ireland had also become a fully voluntary institution, both in terms of membership and financial support. In the nineteenth century, too, Ireland’s Catholic bishops were largely independent of both state and papal influences (Carey 1979). The Jewish synagogues founded after 1650 in London (initially

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Sephardic and then increasingly Ashkenazi) were likewise established on a fully voluntary basis. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, Protestants were also drawing on the club model to develop new forms of philanthropic engagement and ways to promote the faith. The organizations they founded, most notably the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SPCK, in 1698) and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG, in 1701), provided the models for the “modern” religious voluntary societies of the long nineteenth century, the principal focus of the present chapter. Although the SPCK and the SPG both had strong ties to the Anglican community, both were formally independent of the institutional church. The SPCK’s willingness to overlook denominational strictures was evident too in its financial support for August Herrmann Francke’s Pietist foundations in Prussian Halle (which were similarly independent of the state church). Furthermore, in contrast to traditional Catholic parochial organizations like the confraternity and the sodality but also such informal prayer groups as the Pietists’ conventicles, the SPCK and the SPG were first and foremost vehicles for Christian social engagement, and only secondarily sites of religious sociability. Churchmen did play leading roles in these societies, but from the outset they were formed as joint lay–clerical initiatives. The SPCK’s founding committee, for instance, counted one cleric and four laymen; its subscribers (members) included Anglican bishops and non-jurors, aristocrats and gentry. Finally, the SPCK and the SPG leveraged the associational model both to raise funds for projects—publishing houses, libraries, schools, foreign missionaries—that they would themselves direct, and to back worthy initiatives (such as those launched by Francke’s community) in the broader Protestant world. Voluntarism thus stood at the heart of a range of philanthropic and charitable endeavors—schools, hospitals, orphanages; special funds to support widows, the poor, even retired clergy—undertaken by eighteenth-century faith communities. Even in Britain, religious voluntarism remained a limited phenomenon until the late 1700s, both in terms of the numbers of societies established and their members’ social profiles (overwhelmingly members of the urban elite). Starting around 1780, however, northern Europe in particular experienced a first period of spectacular growth in religious voluntary associations that continued into the 1840s (Morris 1990; Kaiser 1996). The driving force behind most of these foundations, both in Britain and on the Continent, was evangelical Protestantism. Evangelicals favored the formation of voluntary societies for both theological and practical reasons. On the one hand, the voluntary association fit well with the evangelical ideal that emphasized the active engagement of Christian men and women rather than mere parish or chapel affiliation. On the other hand, the club proved an especially useful vehicle for mobilizing wealth and talent on behalf of particular objectives, from preaching the good news and engaging in charity to campaigning to improve social and religious conditions at home and abroad. The associational wave that started in the late eighteenth century was also notable for another reason. It saw the emergence of voluntary societies that were not only

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more numerous but more formally structured. In part, this meant that, from the outset, the new societies tended to have formal statutes that defined the group’s purpose, how it would function, and who could be a member and participate in its activities. But it also meant that societies increasingly extended their geographic presence by establishing auxiliaries or local chapters, much like the SPCK did with the formation of the APCK (Association for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1792) to promote the distribution of tracts and Bibles in Ireland. Alternatively, associations were created either to group together existing societies, even across state boundaries, or to provide support to voluntary activities that were not themselves organized as formal associations, as in the case of the British Sunday School Union, founded in 1801, which promoted and supported Sunday schools in the British Isles and around the world. Missionary zeal played a notable part in launching and sustaining the advance in religious associational life. In Sweden, Carl Magnus Wrangel launched the Swedish Society for Faith and Christian Life (Pro Fide et Christianismo) in 1771. A Pietist organization inspired by the British SPCK, the society sought to spread the Christian faith in Sweden through education and mission. Nine years later, in 1780, the Pietist Johann Urlsperger founded the Society for the Promotion of the True Doctrine and True Godliness (Gesellschaft zur Förderung der reinen Lehre und wahrer Gottseligkeit) in Basel, which in 1804 was renamed the German Society for Christianity (Deutsche Christentumsgesellschaft). In contrast to both the SPCK and its Swedish counterpart, Urlsperger’s initiative in Basel stands out for its defensive orientation: one of its stated goals was to combat the growth of religious rationalism and deism. Although the society’s apologetic mission proved unsuccessful, Urlsperger’s successors as secretary established ties to evangelical circles in London. Carl Friedrich Adolf Steinkopf even left his post at Basel to become the preacher at the German Lutheran Church in London, where he was active in a number of British evangelical associations. Indeed, London emerged as the center of the new burst of evangelical voluntary activity as the eighteenth century turned into the nineteenth. In 1795, the Welsh Congregationalist minister Edward Williams spearheaded the creation of the interdenominational London Missionary Society (LMS) to support missionary work overseas: raising funds for missions at home, promoting the mission via the press (e. g., via its main journal, Evangelical Magazine), and calling missionaries and maintaining mission stations abroad. Four years later, in 1799, individuals connected to the LMS created a new initiative, the Religious Tract Society, which aimed to spread salvation to the British working classes via the distribution of religious tracts. In the 1820s, however, the society shifted to emphasize the publication of bound books and periodicals for adults and children, which soon necessitated its reorganization and the establishment of a distinct “benevolent fund” that would be partially supported by the commercial publishing activities (Fyfe 2006). In 1804, members of the Religious Tract Society founded the British and Foreign Bible Society with the initial goal of providing affordable Bibles in Welsh for Welsh-speaking Christians. Bible translations and their distribution, especially abroad, quickly became a focus of the society’s activities. It even named Carl Friedrich Adolf Steinkopf to be its first secretary for continental affairs, responsible for the dis-

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tribution of materials and for encouraging the foundation of local Bible societies that would be affiliated with the London operation. Whereas British evangelicals focused their missionary initiatives on Christians or those perceived to be heathens, one society notably targeted the minority Jewish community, the London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews (founded 1809). Later, similar organizations arose on the Continent. In Berlin, for example, a Society to Promote Christianity among the Jews (Gesellschaft zur Beförderung des Christentums unter den Juden) was established in 1822; in 1843, Rhenish Protestants organized a Rhenish-Westphalian Association for Israel (Rheinisch-Westfälischer Verein für Israel) in Cologne. Strongly influenced by developments in London, like-minded Protestants, Reformed and Lutheran, established their own missionary and Bible societies elsewhere in Europe. In Edinburgh, Robert Haldane formed the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel at Home (1797), and, in conjunction with Henry Drummond, the Continental Society in 1819 to support the evangelical faith on the European continent. During the chaos created by the Napoleonic Wars, Dutch Reformed Protestants succeeded in organizing the Netherlands Missionary Society in Rotterdam in 1797, while in Stuttgart, Lutheran Pietists established the Württemberg Bible Society (1812). In the same year, the Scottish missionary John Paterson helped create a Bible Society in Finland. Soon after peace returned to the Continent in 1815, the secretary of Basel’s Christentumsgesellschaft, Christian Friedrich Spittler, founded the Basel Mission Society (1815). Three years later, French Calvinists created a Protestant Bible Society in Paris (1818). As Morris (1990) has underscored, the spread of Protestant Bible and missionary societies had a notable effect on local communities. In places like Leeds and Sheffield, for example, local chapters of the London associations organized sermons and meetings, distributed religious literature, and even arranged local evangelizing. Above all, as one might expect, they collected money, which was largely sent on to London. Significantly, support for the missions was popular and broad-based, drawing not only on middle-class elites but even on the poorer and working classes, whose modest but regular contributions enabled them to participate in the community and not just as receivers of aid. Prochaska (1990) notes that thousands of such associations were established in working-class parishes across Britain. In the 1820s, Liverpool counted nearly twenty such associations for mechanics alone; the Bible society for Liverpool’s seamen also numbered thousands of subscribers. In this context, mention should also be made of the German Gustav Adolf Association, founded in 1843 through the merger of two societies (based in Leipzig and Darmstadt) that sought to provide aid to embattled Protestant diaspora communities in Europe. Especially significant here is that the Gustav Adolf Association was one of the first religious associations to be formed along panGerman lines. In 1848, the society even saw the creation of its first women’s sections (Frauenvereine). Alongside the various missionary and publishing initiatives, the early nineteenth century witnessed the creation of a spate of new Protestant charitable and welfare associations. In Britain, the “practical Christianity” famously promoted by the evangelical William Wilberforce led to the proliferation of new philanthropic and charitable foun-

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dations that were profoundly Christian in spirit, such that religious associations provided the lion’s share of social welfare services (Prochaska 2006; and Leen van Molle’s chapter in this volume). Visiting (also frequently called benevolent) societies sprung up in one city after another to organize regular visits of urban households to provide spiritual comfort and material assistance to the destitute, the sick, and the elderly. Increasingly, these societies expanded their field of action, setting up a presence at wharfs, train and even fire stations in order to distribute tracts, provide information about local religious services, and offer support to arriving needy. In 1835, David Naismith built on this visiting framework to develop a more expansive program of outreach to London’s poor and working-class community: the City Mission. On the Continent, the most important examples of Protestant social welfare organizations arose in northern Germany. In the wake of Hamburg’s cholera crisis, Anna Sieveking helped found a Women’s Association for the Care of the Poor and Sick in 1832 that brought together Protestant women from the middle and upper classes. Then, in 1836, the minister Theodor Fliedner and his wife, Friederike, established a Rhenish-Westphalian Society for the Training and Occupation of Protestant Deaconesses (Rheinisch-westfälischer Verein für Bildung und Beschäftigung evangelischer Diakonissen) to support the establishment in Kaiserswerth of a Diakonissenanstalt, an institution that not only trained Protestant women (“deaconesses”) to provide nursing care (and in time social services) but then also coordinated their placement in hospitals and institutions across Germany. If the recourse to voluntary associations was an especially Protestant phenomenon during the first half of the nineteenth century, it was far from an exclusively Protestant one. Nonetheless, as the examples of Jewish foundations during this period make especially clear, for other faith communities voluntary associations tended to prioritize “defensive” and “confessional” needs rather than specifically religious ones.¹ Simone Lässig (2004) has shown, for example, that the Jewish charitable and philanthropic societies that began to emerge in such German cities as Dessau, Dresden, and Berlin after 1780 reflected the transformation of traditional organs of community assistance into formal, bourgeois associations. These societies thus represented explicit efforts to adapt to and assimilate into a gentile and predominantly Protestant world. At the same time, such initiatives as Paris’s Société d’encouragement et de secours (Society for Encouragement and Aid, 1809) and Liverpool’s Hebrew Philanthropic Society (1811) quickly proved indispensable because local Jews rarely had access to ostensibly “public” sources of poor relief. Similarly, Jewish voluntary societies were founded in Copenhagen (1795), Amsterdam (1798), Vienna, and Lyssa (in Posen, 1847) to provide vocational training in crafts and agriculture to young Jews. Jews also used the voluntary association model to establish and maintain specifically Jewish (primary) schools, as in 1 While this chapter uses the term “religious voluntary association” as a general category, it also uses the phrase to denote organizations that sought especially to promote faith and piety, as opposed to “confessional associations” that made denominational affiliation a prerequisite for membership but whose activities themselves were more broadly social and cultural in nature.

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Strasbourg (1825) and London (1822) (Penslar 2001). In fact, London’s Jewish primary school resulted from the conversion of the traditional Talmud Torah establishment into the “Jews’ Free School.” Finally, Judaism provides the first clear example of a society explicitly formed to advance a faith community’s interests: the Felix Libertate association, created by progressive Ashkenazi Jews in Amsterdam in 1795, advocated for full Jewish emancipation in the newly established Batavian Republic, which was indeed realized one year later. The associational impulse was weaker among European Catholics, particularly prior to 1848. This situation owed much to the particularities of the highly clerical Catholic institutional culture. Throughout the nineteenth century, in fact, the Catholic Church remained deeply suspicious of any form of lay initiative in what it regarded as religious matters. In its view, religious life and activity should be organized by the parish and directed by the parish clergy. In the case of educational, charitable, and missionary ventures, where parish resources were limited or where cooperation among parishes was desired, the Catholic community preferred to rely on its religious orders and congregations. Hence, there was little need to form voluntary associations for philanthropic, charitable, or missionary purposes. For example, whereas the (Protestant) London Missionary Society not only raised funds but also ran its own missionary programs (and training), the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, which after its creation in Lyon (1822) spread quickly across Catholic Europe, primarily collected money to send to the missionary congregations based in Rome. Initially, Frédéric Ozanam’s Saint Vincent de Paul Society (1833) was much closer to the lay voluntary association model, but as this charitable movement gained momentum, its local “conferences” (as local chapters were called) were increasingly restructured as parochial groups under priestly supervision. Starting in the 1820s, however, lay Catholics did begin to organize societies that, as noted above with respect to the Jewish community, were mainly confessional in nature. Arguably the best-known example of these early confessional associations was the Catholic Association, essentially a political party founded by the Irishman Daniel O’Connell in 1823 to press for Catholic emancipation within Britain. During the 1840s, mounting tensions between Catholics and Protestants in the German states of Prussia and Bavaria also prompted Catholics to form their own reading circles, professional societies, and even student fraternities. That is, they promoted a sense of civil society among Catholics, rather than seeking to attend to specifically Catholic religious needs or pious interests. Similarly, the Society of Saint Charles Borromeo (Borromäusverein), founded in 1845, whose chapters established book clubs and free reading rooms, was designed to encourage the diffusion and the reading of edifying (but also instructive and entertaining) literature among German-speaking Catholics. Although the specific contours of Europe’s religious voluntary landscape owe much to the cultural particularities of the different faith traditions—Orthodox Christianity and Islam, for instance, also tended to take a dim view of independent lay action in religious affairs—the role of prevailing political and legal conditions should also not be overlooked. Namely, prior to 1848, most European states guaranteed neither religious liberty nor freedom of association. Rather, as Carol Harrison (1999) has highlight-

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ed, outside of Britain, voluntary associations of all types essentially existed at the pleasure of the state. While Continental governments proved generally tolerant of religious associations of a charitable or philanthropic nature, they were more wary of groups that might threaten public order. The French state, for instance, regularly exploited the 1810 penal code, which required any society with more than twenty members to seek police authorization, to block the creation of independent chapels or even regular prayer groups. Similarly, after 1815 German authorities impeded the development of sectarian movements, like the Baptists, which might challenge the state Protestant churches. Faced with such difficulties, as well as ongoing discrimination against Nonconformists in Britain, evangelicals from across Europe (and the United States) met in London in 1846 to form one of the first international religious voluntary associations, the Evangelical Alliance, which aimed to promote the cause of religious liberty, defend the Christian Sabbath, and resist the growing influence of Catholicism. For its part, the close links between Russian autocracy and Orthodox Christianity made the tsarist regime distrustful of the activities of minority faith communities in general, especially non-Orthodox missionary organizations. One of the rare religious societies founded in Russia before 1848 was the Russian Bible Society, created in Saint Petersburg in 1812 with the backing of Tsar Alexander I to promote the translation and diffusion of inexpensive Russian editions of the Old and New Testaments. In 1825, it counted some 57 branch chapters and 232 local auxiliaries (Batalden 2013, 13). However, by the 1820s the society was increasingly opposed by influential members of the Holy Synod. They clamored for its dissolution, but Alexander I resisted such demands. One year after his death in 1825, though, Tsar Nicholas I agreed to suppress the society. As Batalden emphasizes, ultimately the Russian Bible Society was the victim of its own success, for the mass diffusion of Russian-language Bibles challenged the “traditional arbitration of authority in Russian religious culture” as represented by the Slavonic Bible and the Holy Synod (2013, 82 – 83).

Religious Voluntary Associations after 1848 The nineteenth century’s second half may rightly be described as the religious voluntary association’s golden age. In large part, the spectacular growth in the number of societies was a function of the spread of civil society more generally, thanks to a progressive loosening of state restrictions on the formation of voluntary societies in the wake of the 1848 revolutions and evolving socioeconomic conditions that made it possible even for working-class and rural populations to join and form their own clubs. After 1848 Catholics too proved more willing to make use of the voluntary association, prompting the founding of a flurry of societies, especially in northern and central Europe. But this expansion of religious voluntarism also set off important changes to the basic model. Whereas voluntary associations during the first half of the century tended to be formed to promote religious objectives, those established during the century’s second were more likely than not to foster a sense of denominational community that was

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as much social, cultural, and political as it was religious. Indeed, as some contemporary ministers complained, in some cases the religious dimension of these groups was so weak that it was debatable whether they even warranted the label of “religious” voluntary association. Although changing legal and political conditions facilitated the growth of religious voluntary associations from circa 1848 on, both in terms of overall numbers and geographical implantation, what is especially noteworthy about the period are the new types of associations and clubs that came into existence and flourished. A major impetus behind this changing profile of associational activity was Europe’s progressive industrialization and urbanization, which prompted clergy and laity to innovate in the provision of social services and pastoral care. Central to many of their efforts was the recourse to the voluntary association. Exemplary in this respect were the initiatives of the German Pietist reformer Johann Hinrich Wichern. Drawing on the example of Glasgow and London, he organized in 1848 a City Mission for Hamburg, which aimed not just to provide a wider range of social welfare services (Diakonie) to needy Hamburg residents but also to compensate for the city’s insufficient ministerial resources. The mission conducted house visits, maintained a chapel for religious services, and founded youth groups for boys and girls. One year later, Wichern launched the Central Committee for the Home Mission (Innere Mission) of the German Protestant Church, which soon evolved into an umbrella organization for a wide range of initiatives and organizations, from shelters for the homeless and homes for “sunken” women to temperance societies and missions at train stations. Local chapters of the home mission soon emerged across the German lands, including Austria and Switzerland but also in the Scandinavian countries. By the end of the century, home mission societies in such cities as Strasbourg were even building their own “club houses” that served as meeting places for their many affiliated groups and, frequently, even as informal worship spaces. In Britain, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) was created in 1844 by George Williams to provide healthy “Christian” activities (e. g., prayer meetings and Bible reading) for young men drawn to London in search of work. Evangelical and Pietist visitors to the Great Exhibition of 1851, held in Hyde Park, London, then spread the YMCA ideal to Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland; four years later, delegates from nine countries met in Paris to form the World Alliance of YMCA societies. In the same year (1855), a parallel women’s organization was created in London, the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), for which an international federation was created in 1894. The headquarters for both the YMCA and the YWCA were established in Geneva. Whereas local boys’ and girls’ clubs were increasingly absorbed into the YMCA-YWCA network, the parochial and municipal Protestant women’s and men’s societies that also sprung up from Lausanne to Bremen and from Oslo to Riga tended to guard their autonomy. But just as with the youth groups, the women’s and men’s associations aimed to couple Christian fellowship with engagement in the local Christian community.

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Europe’s Catholics, too, were stirred to create both new sorts of religious associations and more highly structured organizations to coordinate their activities. In both cases, the pioneering work was accomplished by German Catholics. In October 1848, for instance, a first general meeting of the Catholic Associations of Germany was held in Mainz. This soon evolved into the German Katholikentag, a regular assembly where Catholic clergy, politicians, and intellectuals discussed current church, social, cultural, and political questions and where representatives of different societies met, exchanged ideas, and organized projects to be pursued collectively. The following year, in 1849, the Cologne priest Adolph Kolping formed the first of his journeymen’s associations (Gesellenvereine, later simply Kolpingvereine), an organization that endeavored to help young artisans maintain their ties to Catholicism by offering them short-term housing, vocational training, religious services, and opportunities for Christian sociability. Exploiting the possibilities offered by the Catholic press and the new Katholikentage, Kolping actively promoted his initiative; by his death in 1865, more than four hundred associations had been established, supported by a central administration in Cologne. To promote the cause of Catholic church music, the German Cecilia Society (Allgemeiner Deutscher Cäcilien-Verein) was established in 1868, a movement that Pope Pius IX formally endorsed in 1870. In Germany and in Switzerland, Catholic youth groups increasingly dotted the landscape after 1870, which were subsequently organized into regional and national organizations, like the Catholic Young Men’s Federation of Germany (Katholischer Jungmännerverband Deutschlands, 1896). In France, the pioneering extra-parochial movement for Catholic youth was the Catholic Association of French Youth (Association catholique de la jeunesse française), founded in 1886 by Albert de Mun. Finally, at the end of the century (1897), German Catholics organized the Caritas Federation both to provide a needed coordination of the welter of individual engagements in the area of charitable and social work and to professionalize them. Thus, in addition to the team of trained administrators, the Cologne headquarters was staffed with experts in such fields as social work and health care (Maurer 2000). The Kolpingvereine, like the YMCA (at least in its origins), may be understood as a Christian response to what contemporaries called the “social question,” that is, a growing concern with urban poverty as well as a sense of declining urban social and moral conditions, especially among the working classes. This rapidly evolved, however, into a burgeoning sector of associational activity by religious groups. In 1859, Jewish leaders in London founded a poor relief council, the Jewish Board of Guardians, thereby fusing the charitable work of the three city synagogues into a single communal agency with its own permanent staff of salaried officials. The number of Christian temperance societies expanded rapidly, from the British Band of Hope societies (1855) and the Church of England Temperance Society (1880) to the International Blue Cross, founded in Geneva in 1877. Temperance was also a major concern of the Salvation Army, founded in 1865 by William and Catherine Booth as the East London Christian Mission to convert urban prostitutes, gamblers, and alcoholics. Other associations campaigned for public decency, such as the Genevan Society of Vigilance towards Indecent Literature (Société genevoise de vigilance contre la littérature licensieuse, 1876) and the Parisian League

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for the Revival of Public Morality (Ligue pour le relèvement de la moralité publique, 1883), which targeted both pornography and prostitution. Similarly, the Popular Association for Catholic Germany (Volksverein für das katholische Deutschland)—founded in 1890 as a response both to the creation of the German Protestant League (Evangelischer Bund) in 1886 and the revival of German Social Democracy after 1890—proclaimed the goal of “defending Christian order in society.” Associations were also formed to study and develop policy for social questions, as with the German Evangelical Social Congress (1890), the brainchild of the former Prussian court preacher, Adolf Stoecker. Groups like the Evangelischer Bund and the Volksverein are indicative of another type of religious association that became more prevalent in Europe after 1848, the “confessional defense” society (indeed, the Bund’s full name was the “Protestant League for the Protection of German-Evangelical Interests”). Already in 1848, German Catholics had founded the Pius Association (Piusverein) in Mainz. Initially organized to campaign for religious liberty (which Catholics then understood largely as broad autonomy from the state), the Pius Association developed into a general vehicle for defending the Catholic church in the German lands and elsewhere in Europe.² Similar to the Protestant Gustav Adolf Association, the Pius Association offered support to Catholic diaspora communities. Troubled by the strength of the conservative reaction within the German state Protestant churches after 1850, liberal Protestant ministers and laity formed in 1863 the German Protestant Association (Deutscher Protestantenverein) to promote a “renewal of the Protestant Church in the spirit of evangelical freedom.” The confessional political parties established during this period also largely functioned as confessional defense groups: the Belgian Parti catholique/Katholieke Parti (1869), the German Center Party (1870), Abraham Kuyper’s neo-Calvinist Anti-Revolutionary Party (Netherlands, 1879), the Austrian Christian Social Party (1891), the Action libérale populaire Party (France, 1902), and the Swiss Catholic Conservative Party (1912). In 1860, leading members of France’s Jewish community came together in Paris to form the World Jewish Alliance (Alliance Israélite Universelle), which in addition to combatting Jewish poverty, worked to fight antisemitism and promote Jewish emancipation through the foundation of schools, in North Africa, the Middle East, and the Balkans (Greece, Bulgaria). In Imperial Germany, too, assimilated, middle-class Jews formed the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith (Central-Verein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens) in 1893 to advocate for greater social and civic equality for Jews and to assert that one could be both Jewish and (nationally) German. So far, the types of associations that have been reviewed here all had a significant religious component. They aimed to promote the faith, by word and by deed. Some groups organized religious services and activities, frequently targeting specific groups 2 Swiss Catholics also formed Piusvereine in 1848. But while the Swiss associations similarly sought to protect the faith, they were also devoted to the promotion of charity and the advancement of Catholic culture and scholarship. In 1904, the Swiss Piusverein was transformed into the Swiss Catholic Association (Schweizer Katholischer Volksverein).

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like the youth or workers, while others sought to reach out to people at risk of losing contact with the faith, Christian or Jewish. And, as we have seen, a number of societies campaigned to protect the faith community’s religious and legal interests. The period, however, also experienced the birth of a broad range of associations that required membership in a specific faith community but themselves organized few activities that were clearly (or at least regularly) “religious” in nature. Instead, their primary purpose often seems to have been the promotion of denominational (or confessional) identity. In Düsseldorf, for instance, Catholics formed their own shooting club (Schützenverein) during the 1860s, because they increasingly found it difficult to join or enjoy membership in the liberal-nationalist (and largely Protestant) shooting club. Nonetheless, following Jeffrey Cox (1982), we can also see these associations as agents of a “diffusive religiosity.” That is, even if these societies rarely organized prayer meetings or devotions, they did promote and diffuse religious values and, even if only irregularly, prompted their members to engage in religious life. Clergy, for example, might preach sermons or even hold a full mass as part of an association’s annual meeting. Alternatively, efforts were made to redefine what made a society particularly “Christian.” For example, in Britain, at the same time that the YMCA movement became more recreational than religious in nature, advocates began to make claims for the spiritual value of sports, or what contemporaries soon called “Muscular Christianity” (McLeod 2022). The sheer variety of these confessional voluntary associations is dizzying. One major type of organization focused on specific gender and age groups: Catholic and Anglican men’s clubs; Protestant mother’s meetings and women’s fellowships; Boys’ and Girls’ Brigades; and Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish student societies. Gender-specific youth groups, however, still tended to have a strong religious component; in Catholic and Lutheran settings, they were also typically parish organizations. Professional associations figure as a second important category: societies for merchants, educational professionals, lawyers, even farmers. Growing concern with the rise of socialism similarly prompted faith communities to form trade unions and workers’ societies, such as the Catholic workers associations (Arbeitervereine) in Imperial Germany, the Catholic trade unions in Belgium (e. g., the Christian Metalworkers’ Union, Christelijke Centrale der Metaalbewerkers), and Reformed Protestant associations in the Netherlands (Patrimonium, 1876; the Christian National Trade Federation, 1909). In addition, faith communities actively promoted the creation of mutual aid societies, sickness funds, penny savings banks, and credit cooperatives. Interestingly, the most noteworthy example of the latter type, the Raiffeisen credit unions (from 1862), although begun as a broadly Pietist enterprise, were soon promoted vigorously in rural Catholic communities, in Alsace-Lorraine (today: Crédit mutuel), and even across the Atlantic in Quebec (the Caisses Desjardins). Finally, there was a burst of new associations for leisure and sociability, which likewise encouraged churches and chapels to build halls for club meetings, discussions, and even sports and dance events. For instance, in Reading, one suburban Anglican parish sponsored a cricket club, a choral society, a horticultural society, and several football clubs (Morris 1990, 422 – 24), while in Swansea (and else-

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where), Methodist chapels promoted “Christian” recreation via the Wesley Guild (founded in 1896) (Yalden 2004, 314 – 15). A notable consequence of this associational activity during the nineteenth century’s second half was that more and more of Europe’s population participated in these religious voluntary societies and their programs. This said, even on the eve of World War One, the associational presence remained uneven. As the examples provided in the preceding paragraphs suggest, religious voluntarism was particularly well established in a broad band running from the British Isles and Scandinavia to France, Switzerland, and Austria-Hungary. In the predominantly Catholic countries of Italy, Portugal, and Spain, the church’s strong institutional presence continued to inhibit the widespread creation of religious voluntary societies, even organizations (as in Germany or Austria) that brought together parochial youth clubs or choirs into regional and national federations. But even in these countries, the seeds of a new associational culture had been planted. In 1867, for instance, a Society of Catholic Italian Youth (Società della gioventù cattolica) was formed in Bologna, which by 1897 had more than seven hundred local sections. Then, in 1876, Pope Pius IX sanctioned the creation of the Organization of Catholic Congresses and Committees (Opera dei congressi e dei comitati cattolici), whose primary purpose was to protect the church’s rights and to coordinate, from its headquarters in Venice, the activities of new Catholic lay charitable organizations. After Pius X dissolved the Opera in 1905, some of its previous activities were pursued by such new, lay voluntary associations as the Popular Union of Italian Catholics, the Social and Economic Union of Italian Catholics, and the Electoral Union of Catholic Italy. In Spain, apart from the Conferences of Saint Vincent de Paul, officially established there starting in 1851, Catholic voluntary associations only slowly took root. In the context of renewed church-state conflict in 1868, lay leaders organized a Catholic Association (Asociación de Católicos), but it was defunct by the 1890s. The first youth groups were formed (Asociación Católica de los jóvenes) in 1869, but they never developed a regional or national organization. After 1890, however, a number of lay or joint lay–clerical associations began to be formed: the Association of Family Men against Immorality (Asociación de Padres de Familia) in Madrid in 1893, agricultural unions and rural credit associations after 1900, and a Social Popular Action (Acción Social Popular) movement modeled on the German Volksverein (Barcelona, 1907) (Milán García 1998). As Joseph Bradley (2009) and Jeffrey Veidlinger (2009) have stressed, although voluntary associational culture did spread into Imperial Russia, especially after 1850, religious societies of any sort remained rare, with the important exception of the Lutheran associations set up in Finland and the Baltic states.³ In southeastern Europe, too, religious voluntary associations were neither numerous nor conspicuously present. However, note should be made of the Greek association Anaplasis (New Creation),

3 Initially founded in 1865 with the sponsorship of Tsarina Marie, the Orthodox Missionary Society was reorganized in 1870 as an initiative of the state church under the metropolitan of Moscow.

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founded in Athens by Konstantinos Dialismas in 1886, an organization that sought to promote and protect the Orthodox faith against materialism and the enemies of Christianity. The following year, the society founded a journal with the same name, which the Holy Synod warmly recommended to both clergy and laity. By the end of the decade, the journal had a circulation of 4,500, and chapters of the society were established all over Greece, forming a rich associational network (Nicolaidis 2011, 184 – 85; Zelepos 2011, 70 – 71). Finally, in terms of its social profile, religious voluntarism became more diverse after 1850, although this assertion also needs qualification. In terms of the social background of those who created religious associations, whether Catholic, Jewish, or Protestant, the prevalence of middle-class initiative is unmistakable, even at the end of the century. Yet, over the course of a society’s existence, its social composition could evolve. Morris, for instance, shows that temperance societies founded by middleclass British evangelicals during the 1830s were later “captured” by their respectable working-class members (1990, 417– 18). Women, too, played an increased role in religious associational life. Not only did they found an array of organizations specifically for women and girls, but they also provided much of the voluntary labor on which a large number of religious associations depended. Indeed, research on the gendering of religious life during the nineteenth century has tended to emphasize how voluntarism created important openings for women to contribute to the life of the faith community and engage in the public sphere (see the chapter by Yvonne Maria Werner in this handbook). The greater social diversity of religious voluntarism in the second half of the century becomes even more apparent if we focus on membership trends and the publics who benefitted from the societies’ services. Alongside the charitable and philanthropic organizations of a more paternalist sort, in which middle-class members offered assistance to non-members of lower social status, the societies that began springing up in earnest after 1848—e. g., youth clubs, chorales, reading circles—enrolled larger numbers of workers and lower middle-class urban residents as members. Working-class women and even children, for example, participated actively in the British “mother’s meeting” societies, which regularly drew women together to sew clothes for the needy while listening to Bible stories. Foreign missionary and Bible societies were especially successful in attracting the cooperation—and contributions—of the working class and the poor (Prochaska 1990). As Pirjo Markkola observes (2022), working-class women even dominated Finland’s Lutheran Prayer House Association, founded in 1891. The Evangelical-Lutheran Youth Association in Finland, established in 1894, also proved popular among female factory workers. Finally, whereas religious associational life had been an essentially urban phenomenon throughout the century’s early decades, by the 1850s, rural regions in northern and central Europe were increasingly participating in and benefitting from the new types of religious and confessional organizations: from agricultural societies and peasant associations to political parties and reading societies.

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Religious Voluntarism and Voluntary Associations in Perspective Against the background of the two previous sections, this concluding section explores some of the broader meanings and consequences of religious voluntarism—especially in the form of the voluntary association—in nineteenth-century Europe. As multiple scholars have suggested in recent years, religious voluntarism is intimately connected to religion’s encounter with modernity, at least as it developed in Europe after the French Revolution. Nevertheless, how specifically we should understand religious voluntarism as “modern” remains far from clear. Did it promote or at least reflect a real secularization of European society? Or should it be seen more as a force of religious renewal, even a certain sacralization of Europe? Even this way of parsing the debate makes clear that the tremendous expansion of religious associational life cannot be viewed simply as a narrow, religious (and much less, ecclesiastical) phenomenon. Religious societies and clubs also made important contributions to the development of cultural, political, and social life, not just at the local, regional, and national level but also in ways that frequently transcended state and national borders. The argument about religious voluntarism’s modernity rests only partially on its ties to the voluntary association, which scholars have long regarded as an essential component in the development and spread of (modern) civil society (Göçek 1996; Bermeo and Nord 2000; Hoffmann 2006; Bradley 2009). As the preceding pages have made clear, not only did the members of Europe’s faith communities come to embrace the voluntary association, they also exploited it to deal with challenges arising from modern times and to take advantage of new opportunities. Groups like the Home Mission, for instance, sought to organize resources and outreach to contend with problems arising from industrialization and rapid urbanization, notably insufficient ministerial care, and shocking levels of poverty and social misery. Similarly, Catholics responded to liberal anticlericalism and renewed anti-Catholicism by forming organizations to advocate for religious liberty and to provide services, even schooling, that were independent of the state. In their organization and practices, too, religious voluntary associations manifested a palpably Weberian form of modernity. Over the course of the century, religious associational life was increasingly rationalized. At times this proceeded from the top down, with the creation of local chapters of such organizations as the British and Foreign Bible Society, the Kolping Societies, or the Alliance Israélite Universelle, but it also occurred from the bottom up, with local clubs—youth groups, church choirs, missionary societies—banding together to form regional, national, and even international federations. Likewise, the City Missions founded in Basel, Manchester, and Stockholm, among other locales, endeavored to promote more efficient ministry in the urban environment by better coordinating the services offered by its auxiliary societies and by targeting services to particular groups and neighborhoods. Lastly, as noted previously, associations like the German Caritas-Verband were formed with the explicit aim of re-

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placing local, patronage-based charities and social action committees with a supralocal agency run by trained administrators that also employed professional experts in social work and health care. Scholars in the twentieth century have picked up on nineteenth-century criticism of religious “club mania,” using it to argue in favor of secularization. Indeed, many contemporary churchmen, both Protestant and Catholic, opposed turning to religious associations because they believed that the parish should be the center of local religious life and, at least in Catholic circles, that priests and the religious should lead parochial devotional and charitable groups. In addition, church leaders felt that associational activities challenged traditional notions of religious community by encouraging a certain specialization that became difficult to differentiate from segmentation and privatization. In his study of English and Welsh Nonconformity after 1850, Yalden (2004) demonstrates, too, that the proliferation of societies gradually transformed regular chapel meetings into purely administrative gatherings, while the associations themselves increasingly became more valued for their recreational and social than their religious and devotional offerings. Alternatively, starting in the late 1970s, a spate of revisionist scholarship has contended that Europe’s increasingly vibrant religious associational life reflected not secularization but rather constituted a serious force of religious renewal and sacralization. The proliferation of Wesleyan and other nonconformist chapel societies in Britain after 1800, for example, filled notable shortcomings in the existing Anglican and Presbyterian ecclesiastical infrastructures, leading to the emergence of a diverse, competitive “religious marketplace” (Cox 1982), whose very existence helped British Christians maintain important ties to their faith communities. Similarly, whereas scholars have long cited data suggesting low levels of church attendance as a clear indication of secularization, more recent studies have maintained that such statistics fail to consider the increasing prominence of “informal” religious activity, notably participation in the religious and confessional activities sponsored by voluntary associations (Cox 1982; Steinhoff 2006). During a century marked by heated theological conflict within several of the faith traditions, the voluntary association once again provided a model for forming alternative and separatist communities: Evangelical-Reformed Free Churches in Geneva and Lyon, Reformed synagogue associations in London (West End) and Berlin, Orthodox Temple societies in Frankfurt am Main and Strasbourg, Baptist congregations in Hamburg and Budapest, and, in several German states during the 1840s, even liberal Catholic (deutschkatholisch) communities. Furthermore, through their missionary activities and support for diaspora communities, a large number of associations established in northwestern Europe gave critical support to religious communities in other parts of the Continent: the British and Foreign Bible Society helped translate, publish, and disseminate materials in Hungarian, Italian, and Greek to local Protestant congregations; English Wesleyans founded a chapel in Rome, while in 1870 a Berlin-based society encouraged the growth of a Spanish Protestant church. With its training of local teachers and establishment of local schools, the Alliance Israélite Universelle, too, provided invaluable assistance to Jewish

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communities across the Balkans. And, of course, the activities of Europe’s many missionary societies spread Europe’s faiths to other parts of the world, through which “national” traditions like Anglicanism became truly international faith communities, and European—Western—ways of life implanted across the globe (see also Norman Etherington’s chapter in this handbook). Recent research has likewise exposed an important competitive dynamic that animated the foundation of a considerable number of voluntary societies. In part, this simply means that the rivalries that existed within and between faith communities prompted the creation of competing associations. Because of their doctrinal differences, for example, Orthodox Lutherans in Germany and eastern Europe generally did not support the Pietist mission societies in Basel and Barmen but instead such organizations as Leipzig’s Evangelical-Lutheran Mission. Later in the century, ongoing complaints about proselytization within Pietist associations prompted Strasbourg’s Liberal Protestant Society to form a Protestant Youth League to rival the local YMCA chapter and a Children’s Patronage Society as a counterpart to the local Home Mission’s “vacation colonies” (Ferienkolonien); it even built its own clubhouse to provide meeting space for the city’s new, liberal Protestant associations. In Ireland, the success of Daniel O’Connell’s Catholic Association incited the creation of a Protestant Association in 1836, while in Germany, as noted earlier, German Catholics responded to the 1886 foundation of the Protestant League—which sought to protect Protestant values in Germany by, among other things, opposing the Jesuit order’s return to Germany—with the creation of the Volksverein in 1890. Associational competition could also be patently defensive in nature. At the same time that middle-class Jews in London and Manchester, Paris and Strasbourg, Berlin and Dresden aspired to assimilate into gentile society by joining (effectively Protestant) societies, they also recognized the need to found associations that could offer training, poor relief, and other social services to less well-off Jews because the latter were excluded from public and confessional-based networks of assistance. Again, rising anticlericalism and anti-Catholicism after 1850 provoked strong associational responses from Catholics, especially in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Here, as Wilfried Loth (1991) once observed, Catholics fervently embraced modernity (not just voluntary societies but also modern political parties and the press) to defend the Catholic Church and its traditions (although Loth also contended this was a recourse to modernity for “antimodern” purposes). Notably, laity and clergy collaborated to develop dense webs of associations to encompass nearly every aspect of Catholic daily life, which scholars have variously dubbed a Catholic subculture, ghetto, milieu, or camp (Lager) (Altermatt 1989; AKKZG 1993; Blaschke and Kuhlemann 1996; Strikwerda 1997). After 1870, the Netherlands even witnessed the construction of a Calvinist “pillar” (zuil), alongside the emergent Catholic one (Wintle 1987). Although some historians have usefully pointed out that these milieux were neither monolithic nor, in places like Catholic Bavaria and Württemberg, even very developed (Heilbronner 1998), the channeling of social life through these confessional organizations created pronounced social segmentation that survived deep into the twentieth century. It also fostered a sense of

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Catholic inferiority that, in Germany and Switzerland, remained palpable even after 1945. Nevertheless, as Jonathan Sperber (1992) has adroitly observed, Catholics’ associational engagement was not just a case of filling new skins with old wine. While experimenting with new organizational forms and approaches to outreach and ministry, Catholics also developed new areas of activity, from social policy and workers’ issues to the economy. In the process, they added a distinctly Catholic note to broader social and political discourses on the same questions. Although Sperber’s reflections concentrated on developments within Catholic Europe, in one important sense they can be generalized to the Continent’s other faith communities. Through religious voluntarism and the expansive recourse to religious voluntary associations, nineteenth-century faith communities and their members indeed constructed new notions of religious community and understandings of religion’s place in the modernizing world. Religious leaders may not always have been comfortable with these changes; from the 1850s on they complained ever more frequently that churches and synagogues were insufficiently attended or that men were increasingly ignorant of the ways of the faith. Nevertheless, on the eve of the First World War, still more Europeans were members of churches, chapels, and synagogues than they were members of labor unions or political parties. And in many parts of Europe, voluntary associations played a key role in maintaining ties to the faith communities. As we have seen, they provided additional and varied opportunities for women and men, but also girls and boys, to live their faith. Furthermore, in an age when rapid growth led to the overcrowding of many an urban parish and synagogue, voluntary associations allowed for more intimate forms of fellowship and religious sociability than did, say, formal worship services on Saturday or Sunday. Particularly in Protestant areas, voluntary associations’ programs routinely offered critical short- and middleterm solutions to an established church’s pressing shortages of ministers and worship space. Religious voluntary associations certainly contributed to “diffusive” religion. They helped establish and fund schools and Sunday schools where youths received religious instruction alongside more secular subjects (reading, writing, arithmetic, etc.). They made the faith and religious values known through the publication and diffusion of Bibles, religious newspapers, and pamphlets. Through their charitable and philanthropic work, religious associations likewise made the faith visible and alive, especially in the city. In addition, these organizations played a role in religion’s spatial conquest of the urban environment. Independent religious communities acquired tracts on which they constructed chapels, temples, and churches, marking these areas as sites of religious activity, just as did parish halls and club houses. In fact, by 1900, a number of religious leaders and lay activists began to conclude that voluntary associations played a vital and not just a supporting role in the faith community. For example, Friedrich Curtius, the (lay) president of Alsace-Lorraine’s Lutheran Church between 1905 and 1914, argued that the old model of the established state church, which obliged it to minister to all the faithful who inhabited a particular territory, was no longer tenable. He suggested instead that the territorial church should

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reimagine itself as a cooperative made up of local parish faith associations. Not only would this shift make the local faith community more attractive to active members, he contended, but it would help it flourish while also enabling a better harnessing of local resources to promote the gospel message in the community through works of outreach and charity. Although Curtius did not start to publish these sorts of reflections until just after World War One, he was articulating this notion of church as voluntary association already in his promotion after 1907 of a major reform of Alsace-Lorraine’s Lutheran Church (Steinhoff 2008, 400 – 30). In this respect too, late nineteenthcentury discussions on and experiences with religious voluntary associations helped set the stage for the evolution of religious culture in Europe’s twentieth century.

References and Bibliography Altermatt, Urs. 1989. Katholizismus und Moderne: Zur Sozial- und Mentalitätsgeschichte der Schweizer Katholiken im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Zürich: Benziger Verlag. Arbeitskreis für kirchliche Zeitgeschichte (AKKZG). 1993. “Die Katholiken zwischen Tradition und Moderne: Das katholische Milieu als Forschungsaufgabe.” Westfälische Forschungen 43: 588 – 654. Batalden, Stephen K. 2013. Russian Bible Wars: Modern Scriptural Translation and Cultural Authority. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bebbington, David. 2006. “The Growth of Voluntary Religion.” In The Cambridge History of Christianity. Vol. 8, World Christianities, edited by Sheridan Gilley and Brian Stanley, 53 – 69. Cambridge: Cambridge University of Press. Bermeo, Nancy, and Philip Nord, eds. 2000. Civil Society Before Democracy: Lessons from Nineteenth-Century Europe. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Blaschke, Olaf, and Frank-Michael Kuhlemann, eds. 1996. Religion im Kaiserreich: Milieus—Mentalitäten— Krisen. Gutersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus. Bradley, Joseph. 2009. Voluntary Associations in Tsarist Russia: Science, Patriotism, and Civil Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Carey, Patrick. 1979. “Voluntaryism: An Irish Catholic Tradition.” Church History 48: 49 – 62. Clark, Peter. 2000. British Clubs and Societies, 1580 – 1800: The Beginnings of an Associational World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cox, Jeffrey. 1982. The English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth, 1870 – 1930. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Endelman, Todd M. 1999. The Jews of Georgian England, 1714 – 1830: Tradition and Change in a Liberal Society. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Fyfe, Aileen. 2006. “A Short History of the Religious Tract Society.” In From the Dairyman’s Daughter to Worrals of the WAAF: The Religious Tract Society, Lutterworth Press and Children’s Literature, edited by Dennis Butts and Pat Garrett, 13 – 35. Cambridge: Lutterworth Press. Göçek, Fatima Müge. 1996. Rise of the Bourgeoisie, Demise of Empire: Ottoman Westernization and Social Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harrison, Carol. 1999. The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France: Gender, Sociability, and the Uses of Emulation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heilbronner, Oded. 1998. “The German Bourgeois Club as a Political and Social Structure in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.” Continuity and Change 13: 443 – 73. Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig. 2006. Civil Society: 1750 – 1914. London: Bloomsbury. Kaiser, Jochen-Christoph. 1996. “Die Formierung des protestantischen Milieus: Konfessionelle Vergesellschaftung im 19. Jahrhundert.” In Blaschke and Kuhlemann 1996, 257 – 89.

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Lässig, Simone. 2004. Jüdische Wege ins Bürgertum: Kulturelles Kapital und sozialer Aufstieg im 19. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Loth, Wilfried, 1991. “Einleitung.” In Deutscher Katholizismus im Umbruch zur Moderne, edited by Wilfried Loth, 9 – 19. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer. Markkola, Pirjo. 2022. “Working-Class Women Living Religion in Finland at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” In Histories of Experience in the World of Lived Religion, edited by Sari Katajala-Peltomaa and Raisa Maria Toivo, 219 – 44. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Maurer, Catherine. 2000. Le modèle allemand de la charité: La Caritas de Guillaume II à Hitler. Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg. McLeod, Hugh. 2022. Religion and the Rise of Sport in England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Milán García, José Ramón. 1998. “El asociacionismo católico español en 1900: Un intento de aproximación.” Hispania Sacra 50 (102): 639 – 65. Morris, Robert John [R. J.]. 1990. “Clubs, societies and associations.” In The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750 – 1950. Vol. 3, Social Agencies and Institutions, edited by Francis M. L. Thompson, 394 – 444. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nicolaidis, Efthymios. 2011. Science and Eastern Orthodoxy: From the Greek Fathers to the Age of Globalization. Translated by Susan Emanuel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Nipperdey, Thomas. 1988. Religion im Umbruch: Deutschland 1870 – 1918. Munich: Beck. Penslar, Derek J. 2001. Shylock’s Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Prochaska, Frank [F.K.]. 1990. “Philanthropy.” In The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750 – 1950. Vol. 3, Social Agencies and Institutions, edited by Francis M. L. Thompson, 357 – 94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Prochaska, Frank. 2006. Christianity and Social Service in Modern Britain: The Disinherited Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sperber, Jonathan. 1992. “Kirchengeschichte als Sozialgeschichte—Sozialgeschichte als Kirchengeschichte.” Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 5: 11 – 17. Steinhoff, Anthony J. 2006. “Religious Community and the Modern City: Reflections from German Europe.” In Die Gegenwart Gottes in der modernen Gesellschaft: Transzendenz und religiöse Vergemeinschaftung in Deutschland, edited by Michael Geyer and Lucian Hölscher, 115 – 43. Göttingen: Wallstein. Steinhoff, Anthony J. 2008. The Gods of the City: Protestantism and Religious Culture in Strasbourg, 1870 – 1914. Leiden: Brill. Strikwerda, Carl. 1997. A House Divided: Catholics, Socialists, and Flemish Nationalists in Nineteenth-Century Belgium. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Van Rooden, Peter. 1995. “Contesting the Protestant Nation: Calvinists and Catholics in the Netherlands.” Etnofoor 8 (2): 5 – 30. Veidlinger, Jeffrey. 2009. Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wintle, Michael J. 1987. Pillars of Piety: Religion in the Netherlands in the Nineteenth Century, 1813 – 1901. Hull, UK: Hull University Press. Yalden, Peter. 2004. “Association, Community and the Origins of Secularisation: English and Welsh Nonconformity, c. 1850 – 1930.” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 55: 293 – 324. Yeo, Stephen. 1976. Religion and Voluntary Organisations in Crisis. London: Croon Helm. Zalar, Jeffrey T. 2019. Reading and Rebellion in Catholic Germany, 1770 – 1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zelepos, Ioannis. 2011. “Amateurs as Nation-Builders? On the Significance of Associations for the Formation and Nationalization of Greek Society in the Nineteenth Century.” In Conflicting Loyalties in the Balkans: The Great Powers, the Ottoman Empire, and Nation Buildings, edited by Hannes Grandits, Nathalie Clayer, and Robert Pichler, 64 – 85. London: I. B. Tauris.

Siegfried Weichlein

19 Religion and National Politics Religion and National Politics: Challenges and Structures

In the nineteenth century, churches and religions faced at least two challenges to which they had to respond politically if they wanted to survive under the new conditions: the formation of nation-states and industrialization. Nationalism challenged the churches by propounding popular sovereignty as a new myth for legitimizing political power, which conflicted with the religious legitimation of power. After the abolition of ecclesiastical rule in the former Holy Roman Empire in 1803, for example, both Protestants and Catholics had to adjust their routines to the requirements of the new states. Protestants subsequently found integrating into the new states and nation-states easier than did Catholics. Jews, however, regularly suffered accusations of being disloyal to the nation. In fact, regime change was a common experience for religious communities across Europe. Surveying the grand-scale territorial reordering after 1803 and again between 1861 and 1871, the Swiss historian Werner Kaegi spoke in 1942 of the “two great catastrophes for the small states of Europe” (cited in Langewiesche 2020, 9). Poland ceased to exist after the Third Partition of 1794, while Prussia, Bavaria, Württemberg, and Baden all acquired large territories after 1803. Belgium materialized in 1830, Italy in 1861, and the German Empire in 1871. Whereas the former group of states emerged from the revolutionary era fully transformed, the latter were newly born in the era of nation-state formation. In all these cases, both individual attitudes toward the new state and the state’s interventions in science, education, and religious affairs shaped social and cultural life. Industrialization posed other challenges for religious communities. In particular, it sharpened social tensions and forced the churches to take positions on private property, liberalism, capitalism and, from the end of the nineteenth century, socialism. The churches’ stances on these issues, however, immediately affected their relations with both workers and employers. The more the churches identified themselves with the existing national order and system of property relations, the more the workers regarded religion skeptically. In short, ambiguities in the new relations between religion and national politics after 1800 created opportunities for integration, but also conflict. The dual processes of nation-state formation and industrialization created new majorities and minorities, structured politics and power, and brought political parties, civil associations, and a variety of new forms of action into existence. Religious and social minorities often overlapped, as was especially the case for Catholics in states dominated by Protestants. In this context, structures arose that influenced Catholics’ rehttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110609059-021

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lationship to the nation-states into the twentieth century: political parties, Christian trade unions, civil associations, and newspapers. At the same time, the churches’ political engagement had a reciprocal effect and changed them. The more Catholics and Protestants pursued national politics, the more the influence of the laity in the German and French churches increased. By contrast, Orthodox clergy remained dominant actors in southeastern Europe, in large part because the Orthodox Church did not see itself as an institution with interests distinct from the state. One might even argue that, to a degree, the clergy sacralized the rulers. Indeed, across Europe, the relationship between religion and nationalism became a hotly debated question. The Kulturkämpfe or “culture wars” in the nineteenth century’s second half revolved around national questions and the issue of who possessed the correct method of interpreting the nation. One spoke of Les deux Frances (the two Frances) and the Dos Españas (two Spains). However, even the constant accusations that Catholics were disloyal to the nation could not hide the many traits that nation and religion shared: nations possessed religious characteristics (e. g., myths, martyrs, sacred scriptures, heroes, liturgies), while churches took on national traits. The historian Michael Geyer (2004) has pointed out that nationalist and religious movements sprang from similar origins. The nation did not constitute an alternative to religion, but instead represented a continuation of religion by other means. According to Benjamin Ziemann (1997), even the average man’s willingness to fight in the First World War depended on the usurpation of religious rituals and ideas by the German, French, Italian, or British nations. Modernization theory long saw things differently. It advanced the thesis of the replacement of religion by the nation. The literary locus classicus is Joseph Roth’s 1932 novel The Radetzky March, in which he narrates the struggles among the nationalities in Austria-Hungary at the end of the nineteenth century: “One no longer believes in God. The new religion is nationalism. The people don’t go to church anymore. They join national associations” (cited in Haupt and Langewiesche 2001, 11). Moreover, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, such as Eric Hobsbawm, Ernest Gellner, and Benedict Anderson, assumed that the nationalist community narrative replaced the religious one. Religion and ethnicity “had or have no necessary relation with the unit of territorial political organization which is a crucial criterion of what we understand as a ‘nation’ today” (Hobsbawm 1990, 47). This view of religion and nationalism has run into criticism on multiple grounds. Both modernization theory and secularization theory became increasingly less persuasive as it became clear that their generalizability was doubtful and that they played a role in the Cold War by propping up claims for Western superiority (Gilman 2003; Langewiesche 2018). Modernization and secularization are no longer equated, which has brought greater attention to the connections between religion and nationalism. Historians of non-European societies have spoken of “religious nationalism” (van der Veer 1994) or of “pious nationalism,” but a “religiously impregnated nationalism” was evident in Europe as well (Hübinger 2000). Nationalism sought support in religious communities and did not replace them. With the aid of the religious expectations of salva-

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tion, it sacralized the nation to endow the nation’s demands on its citizens with a legitimacy that far exceeded that of ordinary political rationales. Nationalist mass demonstrations resembled religious rites and enveloped the nation in an aura of eternity. Similarly, nations’ origins reached back into immemorial times and their futures seemed unlimited. Dieter Langewiesche has even argued that “national community spirit and the practices necessary to produce and preserve such a national community spirit” lived “to a great degree in the vicinity of religion. When the representatives of religion put themselves at the service of a nation and charged it with sacred significance, they strengthened the persuasiveness and impact of the idea of the nation and its spokesmen” (2009, 530 and 546 ff.). In short, religion offered a rich storehouse of semantic and iconic symbols for nationalist narratives. The relation between religion and nation-state generally depended on the prevailing semantic oppositions in which the latter was conceived. In Germanspeaking countries the conflict between church and state dominated, while in France it was the opposition between laïcité and culte, and in Great Britain the distinction between the Anglican High Church and the dissenting Methodist chapels (Hölscher 2007). The preceding reflections indicate that the relation between religion and nationalist politics encompassed various semantics and forms of participation as well as multiple venues and types of conflict. The remarks that follow examine different levels and fields in the relationship between religions and nationalism. The first section looks at the religious origin myths of European nations. Then, the focus shifts to religious political parties in the nation-states. A third section addresses the autocephalous Orthodox churches in eastern and southeastern Europe, which often constituted germ cells for nationalism, while the fourth explores the Jewish public’s relationship to the national question. The chapter concludes with thoughts on religious minorities and the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in Europe’s nation-states.

Religious Origins of the Nation Strikingly often, European nations’ origin myths revolved around the struggle between religions. Spanish historians in the nineteenth century, for example, frequently depicted the country as arising out of the medieval struggle against Islam, thus firmly anchoring the Spanish nation in Christianity. This historiographical strategy was less feasible in confessionally mixed societies, such as Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. In Germany the different confessions produced multiple interpretations of the idea of election. But German Protestants’ approach differed from that of their British counterparts. While the latter (and Americans) saw themselves as a “chosen people” in the Old Testament sense, in the German Lutheran tradition the Reformation marked the beginning of a German and decidedly non-Roman identity. Similarly, religions generally affected nationalism differently in monoconfessional societies than in those with multiple confessions. When two nationalisms based on different religions stood opposed to

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each other, they could stabilize themselves in mutual dislike, as in the case of the Irish and British, but also the Poles and Germans. Even if the Christian churches did not apply the concept to themselves, one could nevertheless speak of a more strongly discernible confessional identity. The nineteenth century was as much a time of Catholic revival as of Protestant awakening, which was apparent from Ireland to Poland and from Sweden to Switzerland (Anderson 1995). The historian Olaf Blaschke thus proclaimed it a “second confessional era” (2002). Yet, it hardly applies to the entire nineteenth century and not at all to the entirety of Europe. Confessions neither completely sealed themselves off from each other nor did the confessionalized nation gain ground. Still, Catholics and Protestants attempted to exclude each other from the nation by defining it in confessional terms. Such exclusionary narratives of the authentic nation’s origin and essence existed in the German Empire but also in Switzerland and the Netherlands. But not every conflict between nationalities involved confessional conflict. While the British and the Irish clearly distinguished themselves along confessional and nationalist lines, confessional difference characterized public life in England, Scotland, and Wales without ever becoming nationalized. Even in Austria-Hungary, ethnic conflicts were only rarely expressed in confessional terms; indeed, ethnic questions routinely divided confessional communities. Over the course of the century, both nationalists and the Christian churches increasingly sought to construct identities that admitted less ambiguity. Mixed identities, so typical of the early modern period, were expected to recede (Bauer 2011). For example, before the Polish partitions (1772 – 95), one could describe oneself as “canon of Krakow, of the Polish nation, Ruthenian by birth, of Jewish origin,” but after 1815 the Polish nationalist movement increasingly defined itself in terms of Catholicism and the Polish language. Within Catholicism, the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception (1854) or papal infallibility (1870) had a similar effect: they established clear-cut criteria for determining one’s adherence to Catholicism. Moreover, by causing particular challenges to enlightened Catholics, it was hoped that the latter would leave the church. This drive to root out ambiguity was never completely successful. Take the case of the project to complete the Cologne Cathedral between 1842 and 1879, which King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia promoted not just as a Catholic or even Prussian initiative but as a national campaign uniting Protestants and Catholics (Nipperdey 1981). Religions and nations related to each other in different fields and with varying views of each other and neither the “confessional nation” nor the “nationalized confession” reigned as the European model. The historian Adrian Hastings has delineated six typical ways in which Christianity could influence nationalism (1997, 188 – 98); I propose to draw on them now to investigate further the relations between religion and nationalism. First and most prominent among these was “sanctifying the starting point or shaping and canonizing origins and the discovery of a unique national destiny.” Religious narratives provided the foundations for nationalist origin myths. According to these interpretations, the continuity of a nation lay not in ethnic or linguistic identity over a long period of time, but rather in a particularly outstanding foundational historical event that was constantly recalled. Holy kings moved into the center of na-

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tionalist origin myths in the nineteenth century: the Piast dynasty in Poland, Bohemia’s King Wenceslas, Saint Stephen in Hungary (Flacke 1998; Klimó 2003). The official cult of Saint Stephen, the first Hungarian king, began in 1860, with his right hand as a relic, and his feast day (August 20) became a national holiday in Hungary in 1891. Thirty thousand visitors participated in the opening of Saint Stephen’s Basilica in 1905. Here the monarchy celebrated itself in the Hungarian part of the empire, monopolized the first Christian king, and thereby distanced itself from the Revolution of 1848 and its Protestant hero, Sándor Petőfi, who was himself of Serbo-Slovakian descent and could thus be doubly marginalized at the same time (Klimó 2003, 92 – 130). Besides the tendentiously anti-Roman narrative of nos ancêtres les Gaulois (our ancestors the Gauls) led by Vercingetorix, the Frankish king Clovis stood out among France’s nationalist myths. Clovis supposedly founded France in 496, and for French Catholics after the Restoration in 1814 this mythical narrative anchored French identity in Roman Catholicism. The nationalist motif of France as the “eldest daughter of the Church,” a widespread antiliberal topos of the era, combined with Clovis as Rex christianissimus to create a tradition of identifying kingdom and religion. The Catholic veneration of Joan of Arc also stood in this tradition. The “Maid of Orleans” secured the crown for the Dauphin Charles VII by defeating the English and later fell victim to the English Inquisition. For French Catholics, her religious visions proved the identity of France, monarchy, and Catholicism. But French Republicans also claimed Joan of Arc as a national hero, emphasizing how she had defended France against the English and rescued the country. Thus, Catholics and Republicans competed over Joan of Arc as a symbolic resource. Lucien Herr, the socialist librarian at the École normale supérieure in Paris, thus spoke in 1890 of “notre Jeanne d’Arc,” while Pope Leo XIII declared four years later “Joanna nostra est” (Krumeich 1989; Mollenhauer 2004). Rome played a prominent role in German origin myths as well. The myths of both Hermann the Cheruscan, who in 9 CE destroyed three Roman legions in the Teutoburg Forest, and of Martin Luther’s Reformation narrate the nation’s origin in opposition to Rome. Celebrations of Luther and monuments to him sustained the memory (Flacke 1998, 111 – 16). By 1848 Catholic authors and bishops, Bishop Wilhelm von Ketteler of Mainz in particular, responded with the national myth of Saint Boniface as the “Apostle to the Germans.” For Ketteler, Germany came into existence through Boniface’s missionary activity: he founded monasteries and bishoprics and established an ecclesiastical organization for Germany where none had existed before (Weichlein 2020). The figure of the Apostle to the Germans was aimed at the nationalist Protestant archetype, Martin Luther. Catholic authors saw only division and decline in the Reformation and in opposition they set the founder of unity with Rome. In England, no holy foundational figure, but rather a sense of election or “chosenness” constituted the nation. Starting in the seventeenth century, countless authors applied the Old Testament concept of election to England. Different from the nationalism of the “Britons” (Colley 1992), early English nationalism was inconceivable without this sense of chosenness, which applied not just to the king, but also to the English people. This contrasted with France where Clovis personified the nation’s religious origins. His

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successors healed the sick through the laying on of hands after their coronation in Reims, even if King Charles X reportedly wore gloves at his coronation in 1824 (Bloch, LeGoff, and Märtl 1998). England’s election, however, was not a conversion to Christianity, but instead a quasi “religious injection” (Hastings 1997, 189). Not only English Quakers, Dissenters, and other Nonconformists but also Swedish Lutherans and Dutch Reformed Protestants claimed for their nation the self-understanding of the people of Israel and spoke of a covenant with God, which made them too an “elected people.” In addition, they had to reckon with God’s punishment should they become unfaithful to their mission. Election was tied to a divine commandment that the elect had to obey. There were, however, gradations within the concept of the chosen nation. The election of the “holy nation” was irrevocable and definitive; the holy nation was as it were a “chosen people with tenure” (O’Brien 1988). It no longer had to fear God’s punishment and had been justified by God. Friedrich Ludwig Jahn thus spoke of the Germans as a holy nation. But the Poles’ Romantic nationalism also defined Poland as a holy nation; even Serbian nationalists commonly spoke of “Holy Serbia.” The highest gradation was the “deified nation,” which superseded all other authority and was a divine law unto itself. The Dutch Reformed Church even went so far as to declare itself (not the Dutch nation) as divine (O’Brien 1988; Weichlein 2012, 138 ff.). Within German nationalism, the nation’s chosenness was a prevalent notion. This conception contained a dark side, however, as election excluded others, notably Jews. As Michael Geyer has observed, “If the Jews were the people who the Germans under Protestant leadership wanted to become, then it was difficult to conceive of the Jews as an integral element of the nation” (2004, 25). Similarly, antisemitism thwarted Jewish attempts to fit into the German Volk (people) as an ethnically and religiously defined Jewish “tribe” (Rahden 2006). Secondly, what Hastings describes as a “mythologization and commemoration of great threats to national identity” accompanied religious narratives of national origins (1997, 187). Here, another confession or religion usually represented such a danger to the “authentic” national identity. In these narratives, religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants (Holland), Catholics and Muslims (Spain and Portugal), Orthodox Christians and Muslims (Serbia), as well as Orthodox Christians and Catholics (Poland) stood at the nations’ beginnings. Dutch nationalists traced Holland’s origins back to the struggle against Catholic Spain, while in Spain and in Portugal national origins were traced back to the fight against the Muslims in the Reconquista. In Portugal, this religious foundation myth resulted in an especially militant, aggressive, nationalistic, and anti-Islamic form of Catholicism. Religious origin myths also relied on a narrative structure of “us versus them” kept present through constant repetition, as in the ritualized recounting of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot or the 1689 Siege of Derry in England. Similarly, the “us versus them” narrative produced a host of heroes and martyrs in Ireland, Bohemia, Poland, Ukraine, and Russia. Significantly, these same martyrs and heroes could also serve secular ends. Czech nationalists, notably, vigorously commemorated

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the Reformer Jan Hus, although as a victim of religious fanaticism. Indeed, this secularism saw itself in opposition to every Christian confession (Schulze Wessel 2001). Thirdly, among religious actors, the lower clergy were especially implicated in nineteenth-century nationalist movements, as events in Poland, Ukraine, Germany, and Ireland demonstrate (Cowell-Meyers 2002; Scholz 2005; Vulpius 2005; Schulze Wessel 2011). On the Catholic side, the lower clergy had long shared the nationalist feelings of their congregations, at least until the latter came into conflict with the church hierarchy. The Polish lower clergy, for example, supported the “organic work” of developing authentically Polish social and economic structures in the Prussian East. Nonetheless, conflicts between the clergy and Polish nationalists did arise, but only in the late nineteenth century (Bjork 2008). In ethnically but not religiously divided societies, however, the clergy often prioritized ethnicity over confession (Schulze Wessel 2001). For instance, when Czech and Austrian Catholics faced off in Bohemia, the lower clergy tended to show more solidarity with the Czechs. Fourthly, Hastings maintains, religious communities helped to build the nation through the “production of the vernacular literature,” for example through the translation of the Bible into everyday language, which in turn enhanced the status of national languages (1997, 188). Even in the nineteenth century, translations of the Bible into the various national languages helped mark the beginning of linguistic national consciousness. The translation of the Bible into Ukrainian in 1861 decisively influenced the nationalist movement in the Ukraine, which up until then Russians had dubbed “Little Russia.” Moscow, which saw itself as the protector of Slavia orthodoxa, recognized the danger inherent in the translation and prohibited its publication. The Ukrainian clergy demanded a reauthorization of publication, which endeared it to the nationalist movement. After the October Revolution in 1917, the Ukrainian nationalist movement demanded “freedom from Petrograd”; the clergy took up the cry and called for “freedom from Moscow” (Vulpius 2005, 379). In general, language became a central concern for nationalists in the nineteenth century. The origins of linguistic nationalism lay not least in the philosophy of language inspired by Protestant pastors in the late eighteenth century. Since Johann Gottfried Herder, German nationalist pastors had enhanced the status of language as the medium through which the nation communicated itself and the criterion by which it knew itself. Language united people and was the foundation for communication. Herder, the court chaplain in Bückeburg, viewed this consolidation of a people through language not as the beginning of prejudice, but instead as a pointed advantage, the beginning of a national public. As he noted in “This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity” (1774): Thus all pairs of nations whose inclinations and circles of happiness collide—it is called prejudice!, mob-thinking!, limited nationalism! Prejudice is good in its time, for it renders happy. It forces peoples together into their center, makes them firmer on their tribal stem, more blooming in their kind, more passionate and hence also happier in their inclinations and purposes. The most ignorant, most prejudiced nation is in such a regard often the first; the age of wishful foreign migra-

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tions and journeys abroad in hope is already sickness, bloating, unhealthy fullness, intimation of death! (Herder 2002, 297).

And yet, contrary to later readings that concluded that one nation or linguistic majority should prevail over minorities within the nation-state, the Riga-born Herder actually defended minority interests. He emphasized how folk-songs could express their identities. Similarly, he felt that the Protestant tradition of territorial churches was better suited to reflect the “spirit of the people” (Volkscharacter) than was “universal” Catholicism. Herder thus also became a reference point for eastern Europe’s “small nations.” Linguistic nationalism’s origins in the philosophy of language also explain why, even as the nineteenth century began, nationalism and cosmopolitanism were not considered mutually contradictory. As the century progressed, however, this connection faded rapidly and linguistic nationalism became increasingly exclusive. Language united ever less, divided ever more. Fifthly, nations drew on biblical metaphors that went beyond notions of chosenness and election. In Greece and Italy, for instance, nationalists exploited the idea of religious rebirth: in the 1820s, Greeks celebrated the “rebirth of ancient Hellas” as an anagenesis, while the Italian national movement was termed the Risorgimento. After the failed Polish uprising of 1830 – 31, Adam Mickiewicz even turned to the image of Christ’s crucifixion to interpret Poland as a “Christ among the nations.” Most consequential of all however may have been nationalist messianism, a nationalist sense of mission that took up ancient Israelite as well as New Testament notions of mission, but directed itself toward the future. The Israeli historian Jacob Talmon and others have seen in political messianism one of the sources of modern totalitarianism (Talmon 1960; Schreiner 2003).

National Religious Parties After 1800, churches increasingly exerted political influence either directly or indirectly through political parties. Indirect religious influence on parties was particularly lasting in Great Britain. While the Anglican establishment remained closely associated with the Tory Party, the workers’ movement never severed its ties to Methodism and Nonconformism. Within the British labor unions, it was considered advantageous to have had a Methodist education. The Labour Party secretary, Morgan Phillips (1902 – 63), even observed that “Socialism in Britain owed far more to Methodism than to Marx.” For J. Keir Hardie, the Scottish labor union leader and founder of the (Scottish) Independent Labour Party, the connection between Labour and Nonconformism was obvious:

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It was reading the Gospels and studying the story of the life of Jesus Christ and his spirit and teaching, that brought me into the labour movement. I tell you brothers of the Continental Countries that without the spirit and teaching of Jesus Christ you will fail to realise your ideal of the reconstruction of society on a juster and more human basis. (Cited in Catterall 2016, 1).

Indeed, the Nonconformist churches wielded considerable influence on the early Labour Party (Scotland 1997), which helps to explain differences between the labor movements in Scotland and in England. Among the Presbyterians and the Covenanters in Scotland, resistance to Anglican episcopacy extended into their own particular forms of anticlericalism. This tradition of resistance to authority bound them to the early Independent Labour Party (ILP). In England, however, anticlericalism was weaker. Here, Nonconformists met for worship services privately or in independent chapels, which made them less likely to be associated with the ecclesiastical establishment. In fact, more than half of Protestant churchgoers in England did not attend services in a parish church. The affinity between Nonconformists and the Labour Party rested less on common theological assumptions than on the fact that the Methodist and Presbyterian chapels constituted nodes in the web of social life. As community institutions, they served as natural starting points for social protest. For example, having spent years imparting to workers their duty to educate themselves (autodidacticism), the Methodist preacher George Edwards emerged as the natural contact for the organization of a farm workers’ union in Norfolk. Primitive Methodists were overrepresented among the farm workers and thus also in the Labour Party of Norfolk (Catterall 2016, 8). Traces of the Labour Party’s Presbyterian roots in Scotland and of its Nonconformist roots in England lingered long after. In both instances the labor movement never set itself up in opposition to religion, such that political radicalism there rarely led to atheism and criticism of religion as it did on the Continent. On the Continent, where the confessional divide was often a basic fact of religious and political life, things looked different. In fact, the national party systems that emerged were not based solely on factors such as class and the representation of social interests, as long assumed, but at least as much on religion and confession. During the fierce culture wars of the late nineteenth century, religious parties arose to represent the political interests of Catholics in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Italy. In the Catholic lands of southern Europe, however, Catholic parties remained rare because the Catholic Church itself rejected parliamentarism. The political sociologist Stein Rokkan thus views (Catholic) religious parties as one of the four typical party families in European societies: conservatism, liberalism, socialism, and political Catholicism. That these parties emerged in the new nation-states, he argues, reflects a basic fact: the “aspirations of the mobilizing nation-state and the corporate claims of the churches” stood in a hostile relation to each other (1970, 103). In Great Britain, France, Scandinavia, and Iberia, separate religious parties also did not arise, despite equally sharp conflicts between church and state there. Instead, the nascent bipolar party system absorbed the lines of religious conflict, usually to the advantage of conservatives (Ertman 2009).

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Religion still influenced the party systems indirectly. In Great Britain, France, and Switzerland, religion tended to promote the liberal cohesion of the middle classes vis-àvis the conservatives. Indeed, renewed middle-class anticlericalism helps to explain the extended reign of the liberals in Switzerland (1848 – 1914) and in Belgium (1847– 84). Similarly, in Great Britain resistance to the Church of England long held Gladstone’s Liberals together and strengthened them. The situation in France was especially dramatic. Because the French Catholic Church so actively supported the cause of monarchy, liberals and republicans in this overwhelmingly Catholic state increasingly found themselves compelled not just to champion anticlerical positions, including the 1905 separation of church and state, but to eliminate religion altogether from their view of the nation. Conversely, the decline of liberalism in the German Empire demonstrates that a shared anti-Catholicism was not always enough to bring liberals and Protestants together in political coalition (Ertman 2009, 42 – 44). Rather than building religious parties to defend the confessional churches, religious communities in Spain, Portugal, Great Britain, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway entered into coalition with already established parties on the right-left spectrum and thereby influenced politics indirectly. The Whig Edward Gladstone, for instance, worked with Dissenters in northern England on a range of questions where they had common interests, such as church rates, the disestablishment of the Irish Anglican Church, and state support for confessional schools, which tied them to the moderate Whigs, who shared Nonconformists’ aversion to the Anglican High Church’s privileges. But workers who were repelled by the “killjoy teetotalers” preferred to join the Tories so they could continue to drink. Beginning in the 1830s, Methodist preachers brought the evangelical revival from the British Isles to Scandinavia. Evangelicals and Methodists demanded more of a voice in politics and an end to the Lutheran state churches’ privileges, which allied them with the leftist Venstre parties. When these parties later renamed themselves, for instance as the Christian People’s Party in Norway, the term “people” did not connote secularism and anticlerical politics as in France, but rather the “people of God” as opposed to “God’s clergy,” that is, the pastors of the established churches. Although often anticlerical in orientation, these parties were not themselves anti-church (Madeley 2013, 28). The fight against alcohol also brought leftist parties and Nonconformists together. As the Venstre parties lost ground to the labor parties, the latter took over the alliance with Dissenters and teetotalers. By the turn of the century progressive parties and religiously-motivated voters in Scandinavia also combined to realize universal manhood suffrage: Norway in 1898, Denmark in 1901, and Sweden in 1917 (Ertman 2009, 52). In other states, the churches sought to influence political life not by supporting existing parties with which they had certain political-cultural affinities, but instead by forming new parties that drew on their own recruitment base. In the confessionallydivided societies of Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, political social milieus arose that were closely connected with particular religious parties. In addition to church membership, voters were secondarily integrated, which ensured a persistently high vote share at the polls. For example, in the Netherlands, “pillarization” (verzuil-

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ing) produced a society with distinct socialist, liberal, Reformed Protestant, and Catholic pillars. Each one organized not just its own political party, but its own schools, universities, labor unions, leisure activities (e. g., sport clubs), even taverns and shops. Imperial Germany also witnessed the emergence of a strong Catholic milieu that carried one from the cradle to the grave. In Switzerland too a similar Catholic “subculture” took form (Altermatt 1991). In all three cases, a dense pre-political associational milieu provided the Catholic parties with votes. The bitter culture wars in Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands drove the growth of confessionally-based civil organizations. Liberal governments everywhere sought to bring education and social welfare under the purview of the nation-state and thus of civil authority; they also introduced civil marriage. Catholic parties took their resistance to such measures into the parliaments: the German Center Party (from 1870), the Catholic People’s Party in Switzerland (1912), the Christian Socials in Austria (1891), as well as somewhat belatedly in Belgium (1921) and the Netherlands (1926). Many of these parties either hid their religious affiliation behind a nondescript name like “Center Party” or “Conservative Party” or they only mentioned a general Christian orientation. This ensured their independence both externally and internally from the bishops and Rome, but it also allowed them to appear non-confessional to others. In the Netherlands, the construction of political-religious milieus extended beyond Catholics. In 1878, the Reformed theologian and politician Abraham Kuyper founded a conservative, decidedly Reformed Protestant formation, the Anti-Revolutionary Party, as a “radical mass Calvinist movement.” Its political slogan, “Sovereignty in our own sphere” (soevereiniteit in eigen kring), ably summarized the motivation of the “parties of religious defense”: they wanted to keep control over education, family, culture, and welfare in their own hands. Although the establishment of religious parties was motivated by the European culture wars with the primary goal of resisting anticlerical policies, these initial motivations and intentions subsided after 1890. As labor movements became increasingly successful in elections, the Catholic parties moved closer to the conservatives and liberals and were, by 1914, largely integrated into the political system under the banner of antisocialism. In Switzerland, where liberals had controlled the Federal Council without interruption since 1848, Josef Zemp (Lucerne) became the first Catholic to enter the federal government in 1891. The waning of the culture wars, however, also meant that the ambivalence, contradictions, and uneven temporal development within the Catholic parties stood out more starkly. In Germany, the Center Party regularly activated the culture war reflex to turn out its voters for elections, but this did not prevent it from becoming a pro-government party; it even effectively acquired veto power because it was indispensable to the formation of conservative-liberal majorities. After 1900, with the rise of a new generation of politicians around Matthias Erzberger, this situation produced more and more contradictions and engendered lively battles within the parliamentary caucus (Loth 1984). What from the outside looked like opportunistic deal-making with the imperial government was, in fact, due to the social and political contradictions inherent in the Center Party.

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In the Netherlands, too, Catholic conservatives did not remain in opposition. Even before 1900 they had developed a practical and positive attitude toward the democratic state, while still dogmatically condemning democratic equality and the rule of law. The historian Theo Salemink has called this an “orthodox modernization,” a paradox that stemmed from neo-Scholastic theology’s tendency to argue on two levels, the supernatural plane of the economy of salvation and the natural plane of the individual, the state, and society (2007). In 1917, Dutch Liberals and Catholics even struck a compromise over schools that solidified pillarization for a generation: Liberals accepted confessional schools as special schools, while Catholics accepted universal suffrage, which had been anathema to them up to then.

Orthodoxy and Nationalism Sixthly and finally, religion influenced nationalism through the creation of national churches in eastern and southeastern Europe, such as the autocephalous (self-governing) Orthodox churches in Greece and Serbia. Although not Orthodox, the Lutheran Church of Finland, which also belonged to the Russian Empire, likewise nurtured a Finnish nationalist movement (Laitila and Loima 2004). As Hastings has observed, “The total ecclesiastical autonomy of a national church is one of the strongest and most enduring factors in the encouragement of nationalism because it vastly stimulates the urge to tie all that is strongest in God’s Old Testament predilection for one nation and New Testament predilection for one church contemporaneously to one’s own church and people” (1997, 196). Nationalists also saw in this close association between church and nation their “unique national destiny.” In eastern and southeastern Europe, the rise of self-governing Orthodox churches helped foster nationalist discourse and then direct it against the multinational and multireligious empires. The Habsburg Empire, the Russian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire were admittedly heterogeneous, but not pluralistic. They all suffered from religious tensions that easily erupted into nationalist conflict. In the European portion of the Ottoman Empire, Islam was the state religion, but the preponderance of the population was Orthodox Christian. Orthodoxy was the Russian state church, but numerous non-Russian nationalities were Muslim, Catholic, or Protestant. In Austria-Hungary, Roman Catholicism preponderated, but among Hungary’s Serbian and Romanian populations, Orthodoxy predominated, while in Ukraine (Galicia) the Greek-Catholic Church held sway. Prussia had a Protestant majority, but also a sizeable Catholic minority, especially the Poles in the east and the Sorbs in Upper Lusatia (Schulze Wessel 2006). If religion served as an important buttress of imperial structures, it could also inflame the struggle between the nationalities. Indeed, since minority ethnic groups could not fall back on the state, they had to rely on cultural, especially religious resources (Schulze Wessel 2006, 12). In sum, religion was a vital “resource” for all nationality groups in the multiethnic empires.

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At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the notion of a true national, Orthodox Church was appealing throughout eastern and southeastern Europe, where the Byzantine-Orthodox tradition of symphonia, which signified a close relationship between church and state, remained influential. The Byzantine emperors had presented themselves as the thirteenth apostle (isapostolos), giving political leaders a divine mission that, significantly, only allowed for a Christian state. In the Balkans, regional churches all looked back to the Middle Ages as a golden era when the principle of symphonia prevailed. A self-governing Serbian Church existed already in the thirteenth century, and a Bulgarian one in the ninth century. The Orthodox churches in the Balkans also shared a common enemy in Islam, which was identified with the Ottoman Empire. Thus, the Orthodox churches became everywhere the focal point for a national community of memory (Laube 2006). Interesting here is also the case of the Greek Catholic Church in Galicia, which separated from the Orthodox Church and united with Roman Catholicism. It soon played a key role in the emergence of Ukrainian and Ruthenian national consciousness because it actively opposed assimilation into both Polish and Hungarian culture. Nevertheless, there were conspicuous differences among the histories of these churches and their attitudes toward nationalism (Leustean 2008). In Greece, for example, nationalist aspirations rapidly came into conflict with the views of the panOrthodox Church. In 1828, the Patriarch of Constantinople, Agathangelos, insisted that the church in the new Greek state remain bound to the Patriarchate, but Greek leaders objected to this demand. Strongly backed by Greek public opinion, King Otto broke with the Patriarchate in Constantinople in 1833 and established an autocephalous Greek Orthodox Church. In 1850, the Patriarch in Constantinople finally recognized Greece’s ecclesiastical independence, but refused to see this as a precedent for the region more generally (Kitromilides 2006, 233 – 37). In Serbia, the Orthodox Church was the most important pre-national institution, giving an early form to the idea of a Serbian nation. For the Serbian Church, the Nemanjic dynasty and Saint Sava, who separated the Serbian Church from Byzantium and established it as an autocephalous church in the thirteenth century, stood at the beginning of the Serbian nation. During the first half of the twentieth century, the cult of “Saint Savaism” (called svetosavlje since the interwar period) aimed not only to demonstrate the origins of Serbia and the Serbian Church, but also to situate them within the world of Christian Orthodoxy. Along with Saints Cyril and Methodius, the “Apostles of the Slavs,” Sava represented a pan-Slavic moment: they Slavicized what up to then had been Greek or Latin Christianity (Buchenau 2006). In 1766, the Serbian Church lost its autocephalous status; thereafter, Serbian ecclesiastical and political developments ran in parallel. In 1830, the Ottomans granted Serbia full autonomy within the empire; one year later, the Serbian Church was recognized as autonomous. The Serbian constitutions of 1838 and 1869 then made Orthodoxy the state religion. A year after the Congress of Berlin recognized Serbia as an independent kingdom in 1878, King Milan I Obrenovic and Metropolitan Mihailo Jovanovic succeeded in having Constantinople recognize the Serbian Church’s self-governing status (autocephaly).

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Neither the Romanian nor the Bulgarian Church followed the Serbian example of achieving independence in cooperation with Constantinople. Instead, they followed the Greek path of unilateral action. The Romanian Orthodox Church placed Prince Stephen the Great (not to be confused with the Hungarian King Stephen) at the center of its national origins myth. After the union of Wallachia and Moldavia in 1859, Prince Alexander Cuza strove to establish a Romanian Orthodox Church that would be under state supervision and free of Constantinople’s jurisdiction. Toward this end he confiscated monasteries and church property; an 1865 law then proclaimed the Romanian Orthodox Church’s full independence and subjected it to state control. Constantinople vehemently protested this one-sided act and the dispute dragged on for some twenty years. On March 25, 1882, the Romanian bishops performatively underscored their independence by consecrating the holy oil for the coronation of the king themselves, an act previously reserved for the patriarch. Only in 1885 did Constantinople finally recognize the Romanian Church’s autocephaly. The conflict between nationalism and patriarchate was most pronounced in Bulgaria, lasting well into the twentieth century. While the country still belonged to the Ottoman Empire, the sultan’s government established in 1870 an exarchate for Bulgaria, that is, its own ecclesiastical administration. The Bulgarian bishops, however, demanded their own autocephalous national church. Not only did Constantinople deny this request, but it continued to nominate Bulgarian bishops, many of whom did not speak the local language. This explains why, in Bulgaria, the nationalist movement sprang not from the church, but from the ranks of craftsmen and merchants. Local nationalist councils refused to continue financing the patriarchs in Constantinople. They drove out Greek bishops and priests and replaced them with native clergy. Resistance in Bulgaria went so far that the local councils instructed local churches not to mention the patriarch’s name in the liturgy. This only hardened Constantinople’s opposition to Bulgarian demands for autocephaly. On September 10, 1872, a pan-Orthodox “Synod of the Holy and Great” under the direction of Patriarch Anthimos VI condemned “ethnophyletism,” namely the founding of churches along ethnic lines, as “phyletistic religious nationalism.” In spite of these tensions, the Bulgarian Constitution of 1879 still assumed the Bulgarian Church’s unity with the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople (Leustean 2020, 3 – 5). Still, the fact that the Bulgarian Orthodox Church’s ecclesiastical leadership sat in Constantinople until 1945 took its toll, most clearly in discouraging engagement in the church, as measured by the frequency of church attendance. By contrast, religiosity in the other national Orthodox churches was high. In the Russian Empire, Orthodoxy operated somewhat differently, both supporting and stabilizing tsarist rule. Church and state looked back on a long history that expressed itself in the concept of “Holy Rus” and every state institution was closely tied to the church. Nineteenth-century Russian cultural theorists liked to reach back to theoretical concepts from Orthodoxy in order to differentiate Russia from the West, especially from Catholicism. Catholicism stood for a rational type of rule and production, while Orthodoxy stood for faith and the Russian soul. Indeed, “culturosophy”

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interpreted the difference between Eastern and Western Christianity as the basis of a much greater opposition between the Eastern and the Western worlds. The writer Fyodor Dostoevsky, for instance, drew on this prominent leitmotif in the debate between Westerners and Slavophiles. For him, France with its Catholicism embodied the Roman idea of worldwide power and the unification of humanity in a political and worldly sense. He thus argued that Russia should turn away from the West and toward a Slavic and Orthodox future (Urban 2006, 241). Orthodoxy also offered a range of saints who could be invoked for more broadly nationalist purposes, even by other faith communities. In addition to Saint Sava in Serbia, Saints Cyril and Methodius played important roles in the nationalization of Christianity in eastern Europe. This is especially evident in the area around the village of Velehrad in Moravia, the historical center of their missionary activity. During the 1848 Revolution, for example, both Catholic and Lutheran authors in the circle around the Slovakian activist L’udovit Štúr called on the “Apostles to the Slavs” to advance their own Slovakian nationalist interests. After 1848, Catholics founded the “Heredity (Union) of Saints Cyril and Methodius” in Brno/Brünn to celebrate Moravia and Bohemia’s Christian origins; similar events played out in Slovenia in 1846. The Russian Orthodox Church likewise claimed Cyril and Methodius in the jubilee years of 1863, 1869, and 1885. In Bulgaria, Cyril and Methodius expressed the “national rebirth,” whereas the “Saints Cyril and Methodius Society,” founded in Sofia in 1891, placed every Bulgarian who lived outside the country’s borders under its special protection. It thus differentiated itself polemically from the Serbian “Saint Sava Society,” founded in 1886, which had previously done the same for the Serbs outside of Serbia. In short, Catholics and Orthodox, nationalist Slavs and Pan-Slavs, Bulgarians and Serbs all claimed for themselves primacy in the interpretation of Cyril and Methodius (Rohdewald 2014; Bahlcke 2013, xv–xxxiii). Such nationalist struggles over religion as a symbolic resource also possessed an important social dimension, and not just in eastern Europe. In short, the more that confessional and social conflicts gained in intensity, the more that religion became politicized. The western Ukrainian “peasant nation,” for instance, turned to the Greek Catholic Church to oppose Polish Catholic landowners. Religion also contributed to the “politicization of ethnicity and the ethnicization of culture” in Latvia, where Protestant German-speaking estate owners and a mostly Catholic Latvian-speaking rural population confronted each other and built their own “ethnic milieus” (von Hirschhausen 2006, 370). And in the German Rhineland, the emergence of social Catholicism reflected the conflict between Catholic workers and Protestant employers, which was especially palpable in the industrial region around Elberfeld.

Judaism and the National Question Throughout Europe, widespread antisemitism weighed heavily on Jews’ relation to the majority society and made difficult their integration into the national community. Still,

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up until the end of the nineteenth century, educated middle-class Jews, in Germany for example, adopted nationalism and universalism (Sieg 1996). Jews in Frankfurt and Berlin declared their faith in Germany and attached themselves to universal values. The contradiction between Germans and Jews constructed by Heinrich von Treitschke in his 1879 article, “The Jews are Our Misfortune,” was incomprehensible to Jewish citizens with a literary and philosophical education. After all, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, constitutionalism, and liberalism had long before created a new legal framework for Jewish existence within a society in which the majority belonged to another faith. And yet, Europe’s Jews encountered more and more external pressure just as the very notion of being Jewish was changing from within. The Scholem family in Berlin provides an eloquent example of the diverse political paths open to the Jewish bourgeoisie. After August von Hardenberg emancipated Prussian Jews in 1812, the Scholems moved from Glogau in Lower Silesia to Berlin. There they gradually established themselves economically, building up a printing business that garnered work from the university and the government. In terms of religion, they adapted to their surroundings without ever converting and moved primarily in Jewish circles. Arthur and Betty Scholem had four sons in the 1890s. Reinhold and Erich followed in their father’s footsteps and took over the business; politically, Reinhold was conservative and Erich liberal. Gerhard Scholem, born in 1897, devoted himself to his own variant of intellectual Zionism, changed his name to Gershom, and emigrated to Israel in 1923, where he became a leading international expert on Jewish mysticism. Werner Scholem became a left-wing Socialist, later a Communist, and one of the early leaders of the German Communist Party (before being expelled in 1926). Jewish existence in late nineteenth-century Germany was compatible with all four of these widely divergent paths (Geller 2019). On the European level, Jews faced the question of what position they should take toward the new nation-state and toward nationalism more generally. The historian Michael Brenner and others have worked out four typical reactions: emancipationist, autonomist, Zionist, and pluralist. The emancipationist stance toward the nation aimed at equal civil rights for Jews, who would then integrate into the majority society. The founders of the modern academic study of Judaism (Wissenschaft des Judentums)— Isaac Markus Jost (1793 – 1860), Leopold Zunz (1794 – 1886), Abraham Geiger (1810 – 74), and Heinrich Graetz (1817– 91)—represented this position. Supporters of emancipation wanted to integrate but still remain Jewish and build a religious community with equal rights in a “religiously open-minded nation” (Langewiesche 2009). As Heinrich Graetz noted in the 1846 essay, “Die Construction der jüdischen Geschichte, eine Skizze” (The Construction of Jewish History: A Sketch), the “members of the Jewish tribe never ceased to view themselves as one people, united by religious faith, historical memory, traditions and hope.” He portrayed Jewish history as a story of suffering and martyrdom. The Diaspora ended with the Enlightenment and Jewish emancipation, giving way thereafter to a bright modernity as Jews took down the “fences of Talmudism.” He and others resolutely spoke up for the denationalization of the

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Jews and their confessionalization as one of many religious communities. Christian observers mockingly dubbed this “de-Jewing the Jews.” Rabbi Abraham Geiger even went a step further and recognized no authentic Jewish nationality; instead, as he observed in Das Judentum und seine Geschichte (The Jews and Their History, 1856), Jews were “descendants of Jacob or Israel, but not Israelites in the sense of members of the Kingdom of Israel.” The same was true for the psychologist Moritz Lazarus, who, in Was heißt national? Ein Vortrag (What Does “National” Mean? A Talk, 1880), saw the continuing unity of all Jews not in a national, but in a religious and ethical sense: Jews no longer have their own nationality; there are simply no more Jews who still have only a Jewish spirit. For this reason, they necessarily draw on the spirit of every nation of which they have become a part and contribute back to them in turn.

A strikingly large number of Jewish historians participated in these debates, which reflected the fact that a minority’s ability to survive in a majority society depended on them writing their own history. By contrast, Jewish Diaspora nationalism in the multinational empires of central and eastern Europe reacted in an autonomist fashion, since integration into a national majority society was not really an option. Securing Jewish existence in these areas meant constructing a Jewish nationality within the framework of a multinational state, as the Austro-Marxists Otto Bauer and Karl Renner notably demanded for all of Austria-Hungary. The Jewish historian Simon Dubnow (1860 – 1941) became the best-known representative of this position, which regarded full assimilation as betrayal and Zionism as an insufficient guarantee of safety. In the treatise Die Grundlagen des Nationaljudentums (The Foundations of National Jewry, 1905), he contended that the nation was a natural lifeform into which one was born; therefore, there was no such thing as Germans or Frenchmen of Jewish faith, but only German Jews and French Jews. Dubnow went on to argue that only the large Jewish Diaspora could ensure the survival of the “Jewish world nation.” His tripartite typology of the nation served to promote a certain harmony between the Jewish nation and European nations. On the lowest level was the tribe, followed by the territorial and political nation; on the highest level was the historical and spiritual nation, which was no longer tied to a state or territory. Only the historical and spiritual nation was indestructible, he argued, and only the Jewish nation had reached this level. The Jewish nation was open to development, full of conflicting voices, and possessed an “all-encompassing worldview that comprised religious, ethical, societal, messianic, political and philosophical elements” (Dubnow 1958, 91). Every Jew, from the strictly Orthodox to the free-thinking unbeliever, belonged to the Jewish world nation. Consequently, when Dubnow set about to write this nation’s history, the first volume of which appeared in Saint Petersburg in 1914, he opted for the title A World History of the Jewish People. In short, the Jews’ world nation

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was located in the Diaspora and because they lived in a discordia concors they did not need their own nation-state. A nation-state was exactly what Zionists wanted. In his 1896 pamphlet, The Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question, Theodor Herzl (1860 – 1904) demanded a Jewish state. For him, every Jew in every state was part of “one people,” and they must become citizens of their own nation-state. Zionism became publicly prominent in 1896 with the holding of the First Zionist Congress in Basel. A year later, Herzl and his like-minded colleagues founded the World Zionist Organization, which brought together delegates from every Zionist organization and party annually until 1901, and biennially thereafter. The Zionist leadership was secular and argued with political, rather than religious concepts. At the Second Zionist Congress, held in Basel in 1898, the Hungarian doctor and Zionist Max Nordau, who worked in Paris, coined the term “muscular Jew,” meaning a Jew hardened by physical training who was ready to “return lost vigor to the flabby Jewish body.” Thereafter, a Jewish sport movement, with its newspaper, the Jewish Gymnast, emerged, both with the goal of founding a state in Palestine. The overwhelming majority of Zionists were secular. This secularism encountered resistance from cultural Zionists, whose most important advocate was Asher Ginsberg (1856 – 1927). While he encouraged the project of establishing a Jewish state, he demanded that the Hebrew language provide the spiritual and cultural foundation for the new state in Palestine, which led him to change his name to Ahad Ha’am. Unlike Herzl, he did not see a purely political founding with the great powers’ agreement as likely. The General Jewish Labor Bund in Poland and Russia, founded in Vilnius in 1897 (referred to as the Bundists), as well as its youth organization, Tsukunft (Yiddish for “future”), founded in 1910, completely rejected a Jewish state in Palestine, preferring to bring Jewish workers together in a socialist party (Brenner 2008). The fourth and final option for Jews to locate themselves politically, namely the pluralization of Jewish self-understanding, renounced entirely the idea of a unitary history of the Jews and Judaism. It gained importance however only in the second half of the twentieth century.

Nationalism and Religious Minorities Being a majority or a minority was pivotal in the nation-state building process. This was particularly true for religious communities, which on the one hand experienced religious revival and various awakenings, but on the other were tightly constrained by the structural conditions of their majority or minority status. The combination of religious revival and minority status may be one factor explaining religion’s enormous political energy in nation-states as well as their distinctive nationalism, especially in such states as Great Britain, Germany, Switzerland, Serbia, the Netherlands, and the Habsburg Empire. After 1815, the only way most religious minorities could conceive of ending their minority status, that is, becoming a religious majority, was to have their own nation-

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state. Apart from Irish and Polish Catholics and Jewish Zionists, however, this path was never really an option. Even in these cases, it took the First World War and, then, the Holocaust to bring such a nation-state into existence. Instead, faith communities’ most important options for responding to nationalism’s challenges were national integration and the creation of their own versions of national narratives. Catholic Germans thus emphasized Saint Boniface as opposed to Luther. Similarly, pious French Catholics privileged their religious interpretation of Joan of Arc over the republican and secular one. Religious dissenters also displayed decidedly nationalist views, although in ways often out of step with their own church’s mainstream. This was true for the German Catholics (Deutschkatholiken), a splinter group that formed a national church and produced the 1848 revolutionary Robert Blum, and even more so for the Old Catholics, a group that rejected papal infallibility in 1870 and became some of the fiercest opponents of Roman Catholicism and (in Germany) the Center Party. Johann Friedrich von Schulte was not only president of the Old Catholic Congress from 1871 to 1890, but also a National Liberal member of the Reichstag from 1874 to 1879 and an enthusiastic culture warrior (Smith 1995). If Roman Catholics and Old Catholics differed profoundly in their respective views of the church, they clashed all the more over their views of religion’s relevance for the nation. In the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian empires, the national question presented itself differently. Here, religious minorities concentrated neither on integration into a nation-state nor on recasting the national narrative, but instead on using religion to underpin, if not outright invent their own national identity.

Concluding Thoughts On the eve of the First World War, not much remained of monotheistic universalism. The integration of the religious communities into Europe’s nation-states was so successful that every church soon joined its country’s declaration of hostilities and supported the war effort. German Catholicism supported the German war position especially aggressively to avoid the traditional accusation of being hostile to the nation. As the Reichstag opened on August 4, 1914, the Prussian (Protestant) Senior Court Chaplain, Ernst Dryander, preached in the Berlin Cathedral on Romans 8:31—“If God is for us, who can be against us?”—marking the beginning of Protestant war nationalism. Just as nationalism took form as a set of ideas after 1800, so too did Catholicism emerge as an integrated set of ideas only during the wave of new dogmas proclaimed in 1854, 1864, and 1870. During the “culture wars,” the Protestant churches too moved closer to each other. Moreover, the culture wars and other conflicts within the nationstate created common ground among coreligionists that could now be mobilized. For example, only in the heat of the culture wars did Catholics from the Rhineland and Silesia begin to vote for the same party, read the same newspaper (Germania), and join the same associations. Breton and Alsatian Catholics also began to commune with each other. In the eastern empires, this process took longer.

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Across Europe, nationalism aimed at homogenization and ethnic community, a program that overlapped with political liberalism’s tendency to promote state centralization. To a large degree, religious communities’ ability to resist such pressures reflected their own forms of internal organization. Hierarchical, multi-tiered institutions like the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Orthodox churches could adopt different strategies at different organizational levels, a possibility localized and centralized communities like Judaism and Nonconformism lacked. Herein lies an explanation for the great success that ultramontane (international) Roman Catholicism enjoyed in central Europe: it developed diversified organizational structures to promote its interests at the local and national levels, while at the supranational level it promoted the image of a centralized, uncompromising institution. Down to the end of the century, religious communities maintained their reservations about parliamentary democracy, republics, and even popular sovereignty. Among the historical baggage the churches carried into the twentieth century was a series of unresolved political issues left over from the previous century. This included a refusal to comprehend the freedom of religion as a defensive right, that is, as freedom from the church that was not just a right of religious communities but also of individuals. In addition, it involved a precarious and unsettled relation to societal pluralism, the basis of democracy. Nationalism tended to reinforce this ideological heritage within Europe’s religious communities; it did not moderate their drive towards national unity and religious homogeneity. Indeed, for all the religious communities’ nationalist stubbornness and all the culture wars, their conceptions of religious oneness were highly compatible with nationalist visions of unity. Furthermore, churches and nationalists were all too likely to see a pluralistic and open-ended society as their (common) opponent. Therein lay the most important burden on religious communities’ capacity to embrace democracy in the twentieth century.

References and Bibliography Altermatt, Urs. 1991. Katholizismus und Moderne: Zur Sozial- und Mentalitätsgeschichte der Schweizer Katholiken im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. 2nd ed. Zürich: Benziger. Anderson, Margaret Lavinia. 1995. “The Limits of Secularization: On the Problem of the Catholic Revival in Nineteenth-Century Germany.” Historical Journal 38: 647 – 70. Bahlcke, Joachim. 2013. Religiöse Erinnerungsorte in Ostmitteleuropa: Konstitution und Konkurrenz im nationen- und epochenübergreifenden Zugriff. Berlin: De Gruyter. Bauer, Thomas. 2011. Die Kultur der Ambiguität: Eine andere Geschichte des Islams. Berlin: Insel Verlag. Bjork, James E. 2008. Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European Borderland. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Blaschke, Olaf, ed. 2002. Konfessionen im Konflikt: Deutschland zwischen 1800 und 1970: ein zweites konfessionelles Zeitalter. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Bloch, Marc, Jacques LeGoff, and Claudia Märtl. 1998. Die wundertätigen Könige. Munich: C. H. Beck. Brenner, Michael. 2008. Geschichte des Zionismus. Munich: C. H. Beck. Buchenau, Klaus. 2006. “Svetosavlje und Pravoslavlje: Nationales und Universales in der serbischen Orthodoxie.” In Schulze Wessel 2006, 203 – 32.

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Catterall, Peter. 2016. Labour and the Free Churches, 1918 – 1939. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Colley, Linda. 1992. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707 – 1837. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Cowell-Meyers, Kimberly. 2002. Religion and Politics in the Nineteenth Century: The Party Faithful in Ireland and Germany. Westport, CT: Praeger. Dubnow, Simon. 1958. “Letters on Old and New Judaism (1897 – 1907).” In Dubnow, Nationalism and History: Essays on Old and New Judaism, 73 – 241. Philadelphia: Jewish Publishing Society of America. Ertman, Thomas. 2009. “Western European Party Systems and the Religious Cleavage.” In Religion, Class Coalitions, and Welfare States, edited by Kees van Kersbergen and Philip Manow, 39 – 55. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Flacke, Monika. 1998. Mythen der Nationen—ein europäisches Panorama: Eine Ausstellung des Deutschen Historischen Museums; Begleitband zur Ausstellung vom 20. März 1998 bis 9. Juni 1998. Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum. Geller, Jay Howard. 2019. The Scholems: A Story of the German-Jewish Bourgeoisie from Emancipation to Destruction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Geyer, Michael. 2004. “Religion und Nation—eine unbewältigte Geschichte: Eine einführende Betrachtung.” In Religion und Nation, Nation und Religion: Beiträge zu einer unbewältigten Geschichte, edited by Hartmut Lehmann und Michael Geyer, 11 – 32. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag. Gilman, Nils. 2003. Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hastings, Adrian. 1997. The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haupt, Heinz-Gerhard, and Dieter Langewiesche, eds. 2001. Nation und Religion in der deutschen Geschichte. Frankfurt a. M.: Campus-Verlag. Haupt, Heinz-Gerhard, and Dieter Langewiesche, eds. 2004. Nation und Religion in Europa: Mehrkonfessionelle Gesellschaften im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt am Mein: Campus Verlag. Herder, Johann Gottfried. 2002. “This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity.” In Herder, Philosophical Writings, translated and edited by Michael N. Forster, 272 – 358. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hirschhausen, Ulrike von. 2006. Die Grenzen der Gemeinsamkeit: Deutsche, Letten, Russen und Juden in Riga 1860 – 1914. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Hobsbawm, Eric J. 1990. Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hölscher, Lucian. 2007. Baupläne der sichtbaren Kirche: Sprachliche Konzepte religiöser Vergemeinschaftung in Europa. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag. Hübinger, Gangolf. 2000. “Sakralisierung der Nation und Formen des Nationalismus im deutschen Protestantismus.” In “Gott mit uns”: Nation, Religion und Gewalt im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Gerd Krumeich and Hartmut Lehmann, 233 – 47. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Kitromilides, Paschalis M. 2006. “The Legacy of the French Revolution: Orthodoxy and Nationalism.” In The Cambridge History of Christianity. Vol. 5, Eastern Christianity, edited by Michael Angold, 229 – 49. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Klimó, Árpád. 2003. Nation, Konfession, Geschichte: Zur nationalen Geschichtskultur Ungarns im europäischen Kontext (1860 – 1948). Munich: Oldenbourg. Krumeich, Gerd. 1989. Jeanne d’Arc in der Geschichte: Historiographie—Politik—Kultur. Sigmaringen: Thorbecke. Laitila, Teuvo, and Jyrki Loima. 2004. Nationalism and Orthodoxy: Two Thematic Studies on National Ideologies and Their Interaction with the Church. Helsinki: Renvall Institute. Langewiesche, Dieter. 2009. “Nation und Religion.” In Europäische Religionsgeschichte: Ein mehrfacher Pluralismus, edited by Hans Kippenberg, vol. 2, 525 – 53. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Langewiesche, Dieter. 2018. “Säkularisierung und religiöse Vitalisierung: Religion, Staat und Gesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert in Westeuropa.” In Religion im säkularen Europa, edited by Ottfried Höffe und Andreas Kablitz, 33 – 52. Leiden: Wilhelm Fink.

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Langewiesche, Dieter. 2020. Vom vielstaatlichen Reich zum föderativen Bundesstaat: Eine andere deutsche Geschichte. Heidelberg: Kröner Verlag. Laube, Stefan. 2006. “Nationaler Heiligenkult in Polen und Deutschland: Ein erinnerungspolitischer Vergleich aus dem 19. Jahrhundert.” In Schulze Wessel 2006, 31 – 50. Leustean, Lucian N. 2008. “Orthodoxy and Political Myths in Balkan National Identities.” National Identities 10 (4): 421 – 32. Leustean, Lucian N. 2020. “Orthodox Christianity and Nationalism: An Introduction.” In Orthodox Christianity and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Southeastern Europe, edited by Lucian N. Leustean, 1 – 13. New York: Fordham University Press. Loth, Wilfried. 1984. Katholiken im Kaiserreich: Der politische Katholizismus in der Krise des wilhelminischen Deutschlands. Düsseldorf: Droste. Madeley, John. 2013. “Acta non verba: Typifying Europe’s Religious Political Parties.” In Religious Actors in the Public Sphere: Means, Objectives and Effects, edited by Jeffrey Haynes and Anja Hennig, 26 – 43. London: Routledge. McLeod, Hugh. 2000. Secularisation in Western Europe, 1848 – 1914. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Mollenhauer, Daniel. 2004. “Symbolkämpfe um die Nation: Katholiken und Laizisten in Frankreich (1871 – 1914).” In Haupt and Langewiesche 2004, 202 – 30. Nipperdey, Thomas. 1981. “Der Kölner Dom als Nationaldenkmal.” Historische Zeitschrift 233: 595 – 614. O’Brien, Conor Cruise. 1988. God Land: Reflections on Religion and Nationalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rahden, Till van. 2006. “‘Germans of the Jewish Stamm’: Visions of Community Between Nationalism and Particularism, 1855 to 1933.” In German History from the Margins, edited by Mark Roseman et al., 27 – 48. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Rohdewald, Stefan. 2014. Götter der Nationen: Religiöse Erinnerungsfiguren in Serbien, Bulgarien und Makedonien bis 1944. Cologne: Böhlau. Rokkan, Stein. 1970. Citizens, Elections, Parties: Approaches to the Comparative Study of the Processes of Development. New York: McKay. Salemink, T. A. M. 2007. “Katholisches Milieu und demokratischer Nationalstaat: Orthodoxe Modernisierung in den Niederlanden.” In Religion und Nation: Katholizismen im Europa des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, edited by Urs Altermatt und Franziska Metzger, 177 – 202. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer. Scholz, Stephan. 2005. Der deutsche Katholizismus und Polen (1830 – 1849): Identitätsbildung zwischen konfessioneller Solidarität und antirevolutionärer Abgrenzung. Osnabrück: Fibre Verlag. Schreiner, Klaus. 2003. “Messianismus: Bedeutungs- und Funktionswandel eines heilsgeschichtlichen Denk- und Handlungsmusters.” In Zwischen Politik und Religion: Studien zur Entstehung, Existenz und Wirkung des Totalitarismus, edited by Klaus Hildebrand, 1 – 44. Munich: Oldenbourg. Schulze Wessel, Martin. 2001. “Das 19. Jahrhundert als Zweites Konfessionelles Zeitalter? Thesen zur Religionsgeschichte der böhmischen Länder in europäischer Hinsicht.” Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung 50: 514 – 530. Schulze Wessel, Martin, ed. 2006. Nationalisierung der Religion und Sakralisierung der Nation im östlichen Europa. Stuttgart: F. Steiner Verlag. Schulze Wessel, Martin. 2011. Revolution und religiöser Dissens: Der römisch-katholische und russischorthodoxe Klerus als Träger religiösen Wandels in den böhmischen Ländern und in Russland 1848 – 1922. Munich: Oldenbourg. Scotland, Nigel. 1997. “Methodism and the English Labour Movement 1800 – 1906.” Anvil 14 (1): 36 – 48. Sieg, Ulrich. 1996. “Bekenntnis zu nationalen und universalen Werten: Jüdische Philosophen im Deutschen Kaiserreich.” Historische Zeitschrift 263: 609 – 37. Smith, Helmut Walser. 1995. German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870 – 1914. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Talmon, Jacob. 1960. Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase. London: Secker & Warburg.

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Urban, Vera. 2006. “Nationalisierung der Religion durch Abgrenzung? Orthodoxie versus Katholizismus in russischen Kulturtheorien des 19. Jahrhunderts.” In Schulze Wessel 2006, 233 – 53. Van der Veer, Peter. 1994. Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Vulpius, Ricarda. 2005. Nationalisierung der Religion: Russifizierungspolitik und ukrainische Nationsbildung 1860 – 1920. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Weichlein, Siegfried. 2012. Nationalbewegungen und Nationalismus in Europa. 2nd ed. Darmstadt: wbg. Weichlein, Siegfried. 2020. “Boniface as Political Saint in Germany in the 19th and 20th Centuries.” In A Companion to Boniface, edited by Michel Aaij und Shannon Godlove, 404 – 27. Leiden: Brill. Ziemann, Benjamin. 1997. “Katholische Religiosität und die Bewältigung des Krieges: Soldaten und Militärseelsorger in der deutschen Armee 1914 – 1918.” In Volksreligiositä t und Kriegserleben, edited by Friedhelm Boll, 116 – 36. Mü nster: Lit Verlag.

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20 Church and State Introduction

Throughout the long nineteenth century, religious life in Europe took place within the framework of state regulations and norms set by the churches. This chapter examines the evolution of this framework of state regulations and its consequences for the development of religious culture. Because another chapter of this volume (Chapter 19, “Religion and National Politics”) addresses the conflict-laden relationship between religion and the nation-state, the focus here is on the narrower question of the state’s regulation of the religious-ecclesiastical sector, both constitutionally and legislatively. Similarly, with respect to such areas as educational policy, this chapter is less interested in the social organization of the religious sector but rather proceeds primarily from the perspective of the state and how changing notions of (national) state interest affected religious-ecclesiastical prerogatives vis-à-vis public policy. Given the importance of state-sponsored and state-recognized religious communities in nineteenth-century Europe, they form the starting point for the chapter, facilitating too reflection on the legal position of other communities. In recent years, research on the relationship between church and state in nineteenth-century Europe has largely moved away from the once dominant secularization paradigm (see Böckenförde 1967). Instead, scholars have stressed that this relationship was shaped by a creative tension between two dialectical processes that accompanied and outlasted the Enlightenment, Revolution, and Restoration eras: the secularization of the ecclesiastical and the sacralization of the political. For example, attention to the phenomenon of popular religion (Schieder 1986; Van Dülmen 1989; Weinzierl 1997) has promoted a comparative awareness of how modernity also promoted sacralization, confessionalization, and re-Christianization (Lehmann 1997; Ziemann 2007), thereby thwarting or at least limiting the secularization process. Nevertheless, studies of the modern European state continue to embrace a nuanced version of the secularization thesis, stressing in particular the growing institutional separation of the church from the state and from public law (Langenfeld and Schneider 2008; Link 2010; Wesel 2010). Systematic, comparative studies of the legal and constitutional relations between church and state in Europe, however, are notably lacking (cf. Brandt et al. 2006; Daum 2012, 2020), although some valuable work has been done on religious affiliation and access to civil rights (Fahrmeir 2007; Raphael 2008). Similarly, research on developments in the Orthodox and Islamic lands of eastern and southeastern Europe remains limited (but see Basdevant-Gaudet and Jankowiak 2009, 23 – 175; Klieber 2010; Krzoska 2011). This chapter provides a synthetic account of church-state relations across the whole of nineteenth-century Europe. Since it cannot attempt to fill the many gaps in https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110609059-022

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the literature, it is hoped that the following reflections will serve as inspiration for future research. The chapter takes up first the constitutional and legal regulation of the relationship between state and church. It then examines the church’s integration into state administrations and its participation in administrative tasks. Finally, the chapter explores the impact of church-state relations on evolving notions of civil rights.

The Constitutional Context Church and State between Revolution, Restoration, and Constitutionalism On the eve of the French Revolution, prevailing notions of natural law and then Enlightened absolutism had largely subjected the Christian churches to the state. That is, the prince ruled the church regime as sovereign and not as head of the church. This territorial principle applied to the Lutheran churches in Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Norway, to the churches in the reformed cantons of Switzerland, and throughout the Holy Roman Empire, where the post-Reformation disintegration of the old imperial church into territorial churches continued apace. The 1701 Act of Settlement confirmed that the British monarch led the Anglican Church as “Supreme Governor of the Church of England.” In Catholic lands, church and state were essentially united in the ecclesiastical states; elsewhere, notably Austria, Bavaria, and Spain, the church was intimately involved in affairs of state, without ever being fully subjected to it. In France, too, Gallicanism gave the Catholic church a privileged position in the state. In southeastern and eastern Europe, the Orthodox Church was directly subordinate to the ruler. Under Catherine II, too, the Russian state and the Orthodox Church became tightly interlocked with the creation of the office of procurator, a state official who effectively served as the Holy Synod’s lay head. The French Revolution and Napoleon challenged the old regime’s understanding of church-state relations on a number of levels. First, the revolutionaries in France invoked the new rhetoric of the nation to impose a new “constitutional” organization on the Catholic Church. When Catholics resisted, the National Assembly obliged the clergy to swear an oath to the constitution itself. During the Terror, the French state banned the public exercise of religion and closed the churches. Napoleon wished to end the religious impasse and in 1801 signed a Concordat with the pope that restored the Catholic Church in France. But Napoleon then unilaterally imposed a set of laws, the “Organic Articles,” that made not just the Catholic but also the two Protestant churches national organizations, subject to state oversight and surveillance. France thus provided Europe with a new model both for organizing state-church relations and for tying the church to a notion of the “national good” (Hastings 1997; Haupt and Langewiesche 2004).

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Elsewhere in Europe, the impact of Napoleon was felt most heavily in Catholic areas. In the Holy Roman Empire, the Catholic religious princes lost their temporal power (“secularization”) with the Imperial Recess of 1803. Strengthened by these territorial upheavals, Napoleonic reform states such as Bavaria were able to prevail over the Catholic Church. In Switzerland, the formation of the Helvetic Republic (1798 – 1803) weakened the Catholic position, but in the Netherlands, the creation of the Batavian Republic (1795 – 1806) actually strengthened the Catholic Church. On Napoleonic Europe’s southern periphery, especially in the French satellite states of Italy and Spain, Catholicism was able to defend its traditional social significance, as evidenced by such anti-revolutionary and religiously motivated popular uprisings as the 1799 anti-Jacobin Sanfedismo movement in the Kingdom of Naples. If the French Revolution briefly endorsed the idea of a strict separation between church and state, this was an exceptional moment. Napoleon himself admitted the need to coopt the church and gave it an important public role. In the Napoleonic reform states, too, the churches functioned as state-maintaining, administratively integrated forces (Rémond 2000, 26, 60 – 61). The church’s public importance was especially evident outside the Napoleonic sphere of power. In Sicily, the Catholic Church escaped secularization altogether, while in tsarist Russia, the state sought to reject the French “madness” by emphasizing the Orthodox Church’s social importance. During the Restoration era, the Holy Alliance concluded between Russia, Prussia, and Austria provided international sanction for the renewal of the alliance between throne and altar, a notion that was also firmly supported by the papacy. The restoration of the Papal State at the Congress of Vienna as Europe’s only religious state weakened the idea of national Catholic churches in favor of ultramontanism, especially in the German lands. The papacy’s claim to universal authority was especially evident in its recourse to concordats, modeled on the French prototype of 1801, to adapt the church’s administrative structure to the boundaries and organization of the newly defined states, notably Bavaria (1817), Prussia (1821), and Hanover (1824). In these concordats, the state asserted its primacy over the church that now lay within its borders, without having to commit to a policy of confessional neutrality. With time, however, the religious renewals of the Restoration period prompted the faithful to question the state’s new prerogatives in religious affairs, as seen in the mixed-marriage controversy that flared up in Catholic Cologne (1837– 39) and Poznan (1839) but also in the socalled “kneeling controversy” in the Protestant regions of Bavaria (1838 – 45). In Protestant lands, by contrast, the conservative climate and constitutional initiatives of the early 1800s tended to strengthen the state (Protestant) churches. For example, the Swedish Constitution of 1809 confirmed Parliament, in which pastors sat as a separate estate, to be the Lutheran Church’s supreme body. It also required that state officials—king, ministers, judges, and theology professors—all profess the Lutheran faith. With the creation of the bicameral Parliament in 1867, however, the pastors’ estate was eliminated. Henceforth, the Reichstag and the royal government would set Swedish church policy, while the cultural affairs ministry administered the church itself. At the same time, though, the state gave the church a greater voice in managing its

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internal affairs, via the church assembly (first convened in 1868) and, later, a regularlymeeting synod comprised of local church representatives. The Norwegian Constitution of 1814 too reiterated the Evangelical-Lutheran Church’s status as state church (while also banning the Jewish faith and Jesuits). The constitution required the Norwegian king to belong to this church, over which he exercised all power as its legal head. While the Norwegian Parliament passed general church laws, the royal government (the “church department” or ministry of cultural affairs) was responsible for the actual church government. In Denmark, the Basic Law (constitution) of 1849 divided church and state into two different but closely cooperating bodies: The king was regarded as a member of the broad-based, state-sponsored and controlled Evangelical Lutheran Church. In Britain, the Anglican Church retained its close ties to the state well into the twentieth century. The monarch remained the head of the church, Parliament legislated for it, and Anglican archbishops and bishops (the Lords spiritual) sat in the House of Lords. However, beginning in the 1820s, Protestant dissenters and Irish Catholics succeeded in breaking the Anglican monopoly over public life, such that non-Anglicans could hold public office and, in time, attend Oxford and Cambridge universities. Modern constitutionalism came late to the German lands, becoming a general feature of German state government only after the Revolution of 1848 (after initial projects in the southwestern states). As part of this constitutional shift, control of the state Protestant Church generally passed to a state-appointed ecclesiastical council (often called a consistory), while state oversight of the church remained in the hands of the culture ministry. In 1850, for example, the Prussian king vested the administration of the Protestant Church in the newly established Oberkirchenrat, which reported directly to him, no longer in his function as head of state but now in his role as head of the church, the Summepiskopat. This revised state church system (landesherrliche Kirchenregiment) characterized Protestant church government in the German states until the November revolution of 1918. In Catholic states, constitutional but also legal and administrative reforms tended to limit the church’s powers at the papacy’s expense. In the constitutional states of southwestern Germany (e. g., Baden and Bavaria), reforms subjected the church to the state’s administrative oversight, while also dramatically limiting the Roman Curia’s role in local church affairs. In Spain and Portugal, the abolition of tithes pushed the church into a position of financial dependence on the state, whereas in Liechtenstein, some Swiss cantons, and parts of Italy (Massa-Carrara and Modena-Reggio) the state arrogated to itself the administration (and sale) of church property. Elsewhere, states pursued a more general program of secularization, which aimed to restrict the Catholic Church’s role in civil governance, as seen in Congress Poland, the Romanian principalities, Greece, Piedmont-Sardinia (after 1850), and Spain during the progressive biennium of 1854 – 55. In the 1850s, however, Catholics succeeded in reversing some of the state’s gains via the negotiation of new concordats, notably in Spain and Tuscany (1851), Austria (1855), and Modena (1857).

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Nonetheless, relations between church and state in Catholic countries remained volatile. In France, the 1814 Charter reestablished Catholicism’s status as the state religion but denied the church any formal political role in the restored monarchy. Moreover, following the Revolution of 1830, the July Monarchy returned to the previous Napoleonic formula whereby Catholicism was only the country’s majority religion. The concordatory system created in 1801 – 2, however, remained in force until 1905. In Luxembourg and Austria, the renewed alliance between throne and altar that held prior to the promulgations of constitutions in 1841 and 1867, respectively, actually tended to promote the church’s alienation from society. In Liechtenstein, where Catholicism was effectively regarded as the state church, the clergy was firmly anchored in the Parliament under constitutional law until 1862. On the Iberian Peninsula, too, relations between church and state were subject to heated debate, as liberals sought to dismantle the political institutions of the restored absolutist state. Catholicism helped fuel the anti-Napoleonic, national liberation struggles of 1808 – 15, and in 1812 it was reestablished as the state religion in Spain. Although liberals sought to curb the church’s influence—the revolutionary Cortes of 1820 – 23 proposed to reorganize it radically; in the 1830s the Inquisition was abolished, and religious orders curbed—they also benefitted from “regalist” arrangements that gave the state a role in episcopal appointments and powers to regulate the church’s internal affairs. The 1851 Concordat represented a major compromise: Pius IX recognized the sales of church property, while Spanish authorities promised to respect the state’s Catholic character and pay clerical salaries. However, the democratic Constitution of 1869 ended the church’s monopoly position by establishing religious freedom. In Portugal, too, the liberal agenda sought to limit the church’s role in public life, which until the 1860s made for tense relations between church and state. By 1870, though, moderates in the Regenerator party reached out to pragmatists in the church to promote reconciliation. Accordingly, while the church remained under state supervision, it retained its role in municipal life, place in Parliament, and legal influence until the establishment of the Republic in 1910. The Orthodox Church also formed a state church in the Tsarist Empire and in several southeastern European countries. In the Russian Empire, Orthodoxy, with the tsar as head, was elevated to state doctrine in 1833, although there was a marked decline in the privileges of the ecclesiastical estate over the course of the century. In the three autocephalous Orthodox churches of the Habsburg Empire—Kalovci (Serbia), Bukovina-Dalmatia, and Hermannstadt (Romania)—the bishops were confirmed by the emperor and subject to the state bureaucracy. In southeastern Europe, the Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople was responsible as ethnarque (millet-basi) for all Orthodox Christians under Ottoman rule. Although officially elected by the clerical aristocracy, the patriarch effectively served at the pleasure of the sultan. The General Regulations of 1860 provided for lay participation in these elections, but they also regularized the legal relationship between the Patriarchate and the theocratic Ottoman Empire. The nationalist movements that erupted in southeastern Europe after 1820 prompted the construction of national Orthodox churches that, in time, asserted their independence

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from the Patriarchate. In Greece, the government proclaimed its church to be autocephalous in 1833, but Constantinople recognized the status only in 1850. In Serbia, the church in Belgrade gained its autonomy in 1831, but autocephaly had to wait until the Ottoman Empire granted Serbia full independence in 1878. Similarly, after the Danubian territories became the sovereign Kingdom of Romania in 1878, recognition of an autocephalous metropolitan soon followed (1885). In Bulgaria, the sultan recognized the independence of the metropolitan in 1870, granting him the title of exarch; however, the Patriarchate of Constantinople stubbornly opposed this act. Nonetheless, in 1895, the Tarnovo Constitution formally established the Bulgarian Orthodox Church as the national religion.

State Churches and the National Ideal In general, the relationship between church and state was especially conflict-laden in countries characterized by ethnic-religious conflicts and foreign domination; in such areas, the ecclesiastical-religious sector was particularly prone to nationalist politicization. For instance, in the United Netherlands the alliance between the liberal national movement and Catholicism led to the separation of the southern part of the country (Belgium) in 1831. Even after the announcement of the Catholic-liberal “Union” in the mid-1840s, Catholicism knew how to maintain its strong social and political position in the new Belgian nation-state. However, Belgium’s tradition of “mutual independence” of church and state was exceptional. A political alliance between liberals and Catholics also continued in the Netherlands until 1866, in part because Catholic interests benefitted from the abolition of the Calvinist state church in 1848. Nevertheless, the ongoing tension between Protestantism and Catholicism was stoked by the school law of 1857, which replaced the denominational (largely Calvinist) public schools with “neutral” (nondenominational) ones. And a decade later, Catholic bishops succeeded in obtaining state support for Catholic schools. The explosive national political power of Polish Catholicism found new expression in the November uprising of 1831, which the partition powers sought to confront by strengthening the Orthodox elements in the Kingdom of Poland (Congress Poland) and the Protestant elements in Prussian-administered Poznan. In Habsburg Hungary, the Christian denominations formed a national consensus, but in its southern regions the Orthodox Church tended to position itself as a Serbian national institution, which was ill-received by the Romanian-speaking Orthodox Christians in Austria-Hungary. In Serbia itself, the Orthodox Church was granted autonomy from Constantinople in 1831, but full independence had to wait until the principality became a sovereign state in 1878. Indeed, throughout the Balkan region, the Orthodox churches played major roles in nation-state formation and nation-building: in Bulgaria, in Greece, and even in Romania, where, after the Crimean War (1853 – 56) the state’s secularization policies curbed the church’s social influence. In Greece, the Orthodox Church also promoted Westernizing tendencies in the new nation-state. In Finland, the (Orthodox) tsar was

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the official head of the state Lutheran Church. Whereas the imperial promotion of Orthodoxy pushed the Lutheran Church out of communal tasks such as schooling, the church itself gained greater autonomy as the century progressed. In Italy, the Neo-Guelphism of the late 1840s temporarily allied Catholicism with the nascent national movement, which promoted a united Italy with the pope as king. But, under the leadership of Camillo Cavour and Piedmont-Sardinia, the nationalist movement tended to advocate the separation of church and state. Cavour’s slogan was “Libera chiesa in libero stato” (a free church in a free state). Upon its creation in 1861, the Kingdom of Italy was staunchly secular in nature. When it finally acquired Rome in 1870, Pope Pius IX adopted a policy of irreconcilable opposition (intransigentismo) to the new nation-state; his Non expedit of 1874 also banned Catholics from voting in the elections to the national parliament, a policy that remained officially in place until 1929. Political tensions in Switzerland also bear witness to the nationalization of the churches and confessions. Conflicts broke out both within the mixed-denominational cantons and between Protestant and Catholic cantons over the liberalization of political life and culminated in the Sonderbund War of 1847. The Catholic cantons’ defeat prompted the transformation of the loose Swiss confederacy into a true federal state. In the new Swiss federation, founded in 1848, the recognized Christian denominations were subject to cantonal regulation, which meant that the churches generally had greater autonomy in the conservative cantons than they did under the liberal cantons’ state church system. Despite efforts by both Protestants and Catholics, the creation of the German Confederation in 1815 did not lead to the creation of national church organizations for either faith. Indeed, the 1815 Federal Act only established the legal parity of the Christian confessions at the individual state level. This promoted ecclesiastical particularism, such that the position of the Catholic Church and the Protestant state churches varied from one state to another. Apart from the short-lived attempt in the Constitution of 1849 to introduce a nondenominational and uniform state church law for Germany, this ecclesiastical particularism in the individual German states persisted even after German unification in 1871, ending only in 1919. Nonetheless, the territorial reorganizations of the Napoleonic period did prompt numerous initiatives to unify and consolidate local Protestant churches. Territorial administrative unions were established in Hesse-Darmstadt (starting in 1803), Prussia (from 1808), Bavaria (1808 – 49), Hanover (1816 – 64), and Kurhessen. Elsewhere (Nassau 1817, Hanau 1818, Pfalz 1818, Baden starting in 1821), consensus unions were formed. In Prussia, the royal initiative of 1817 to strengthen the state’s hand over the church by uniting Reformed and Lutherans into a single community provoked considerable opposition, notably among Lutherans. King Friedrich William III’s efforts to impose a uniform liturgy (Agenda) in the 1820s was also met with a storm of protest and prompted the formation of dissenting Lutheran congregations (e. g., the Silesian “Old Lutherans”). A Prussian initiative of 1846 to form a pan-German Protestant Church was also unsuccessful, encountering the resistance of the state princes who feared for their sovereignty. However, starting in 1852 the biennial Eisenach Church Conference provided the

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state churches an opportunity to meet and discuss matters of common concern. And in 1903, the German Evangelical Church Committee was formed as the Conference’s decision-making and executive organ.

Escalation during the “Culture Wars” As a result of the papacy’s anti-modern positions in the Syllabus errorum (1864) and its promotion of infallibility and the universal episcopate (1869 – 70), the antagonism between political liberalism and Catholicism (especially the ultramontane movement) mounted during the last third of the century. In many countries, the conflict developed into what in 1873 the German scientist and politician Rudolf Virchow called an open “culture war” (Kulturkampf). In the newly founded, multi-confessional German nation-state, the culture wars were especially animated. In Prussia, Otto von Bismarck, in alliance with the liberals, issued special legislation (1873 – 75) that subjected the Catholic Church to increased, systematic state oversight, especially with regard to clerical training, appointment, disciplining, and dismissal. It prohibited priests from discussing politics from the pulpit and transferred responsibility for school supervision from the churches (Protestant or Catholic) to the state. Other German states pursued similar policies towards the Catholic Church, notably Baden, Hesse-Darmstadt, and Saxony. In 1867, liberals took advantage of Austria’s defeat in the 1866 war with Prussia to obtain a constitution from Emperor Francis Joseph. Three years later, they succeeded in annulling the unloved Concordat of 1855. Although the state reestablished significant oversight over church affairs, care was taken to avoid a full-fledged fight with the Catholic Church, which remained a privileged social institution. In France, the Third Republic was declared in 1870, but only after republicans came to power in 1879 could they pursue their anticlerical agenda and promote the laicization of both state and society (laïcité), a program that included the removal of religious influences in public schooling and the restoration of divorce. In Spain, the conflict over church-state relations became explosive with the collapse of the monarchy in 1873. The traditionalist-legitimist Carlists strove once again to seize power and promote Catholicism (provoking the third Carlist war, 1872 – 76), while in February the Cortes proclaimed a Republic that called for a strict separation of church and state. In Switzerland, the crisis that developed in the cantons of Bern, Jura, and Geneva in 1873 as Catholics demonstrated against the cantons’ decisions to dismiss bishops and priests, impose oaths on priests, reorganize parishes, and claim custodial control over parish registers, precipitated the breakdown of diplomatic relations with the Vatican at year’s end (which were restored only in 1920). While the culture wars had subsided in some states by the mid-1880s (Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands), elsewhere the final agreement with the Catholic Church was drawn out beyond the turn of the century. In France, notably, the Dreyfus Affair (1898) suggested once more that Catholicism was irreconcilable with the Republic. In its wake, the state expelled the religious congregations and then, in 1905,

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unilaterally separated church and state, a move that affected not just the Catholic but also the Protestant and Jewish communities. Similarly, in 1911 the Portuguese Republic took steps to separate church and state, limit ecclesiastical autonomy, and abolish religious instruction in schools. Overall, the culture wars confirmed the state’s prerogatives over the churches and society at large, especially in schooling. In Prussia, civil marriage, the ban on political speech from the pulpit (the “pulpit paragraph”), and state school supervision remained on the books. In the Low Countries, the picture is more mixed. The drive to secularize public education (for example, the Belgian Law of 1878) provoked the establishment of independent Catholic schools. Similarly, the Dutch school law of 1889 provided for state funding of denominational schools, Calvinist and Catholic. In addition, in some Swiss cantons, the culture wars paved the way for a relatively conflict-free separation of church and state (Geneva 1907, Basel-Stadt 1911). The culture wars also reinforced Catholicism’s social and political significance. They prompted the faithful to mobilize, revitalized community life, and encouraged a wave of publishing activity. Above all, they led Catholics to create formal political parties through which they could influence political life at the local, regional, and national levels. Catholic parties arose first in Bavaria and Baden (1869), followed by the Prussian and pan-German Center party (1870), Austria’s Christian Social Party (1891), and the Dutch Catholic party (1898, becoming the General League in 1904). In general, the culture wars of the final third of the nineteenth century hardly affected the Protestant or the Orthodox churches, which all remained connected with the state. Nonetheless, the gradual withdrawal of the Ottoman Empire from southeastern Europe did reshape church-state relations in the region. For as the new nation-states left the empire and gained full sovereignty, the territorial Orthodox Church (Romania, Serbia, Montenegro) also gained full autonomy from the Patriarch of Constantinople and became an autocephalous state church.

Churches, Public Administration, and Civil Law Between 1800 and 1914, the respective tasks of church and state were differentiated and distributed in new ways. This process was expressed, on the one hand, in the progressive integration of the churches into the state administration. On the other hand, the churches contributed to the reform of state policy in the application of marriage and family law as well as in educational policy. The churches’ administrative integration into the state was primarily expressed through the clergy’s reclassification as civil servants, continuing a development that had begun with the Reformation (in Norway and the Reformed Swiss cantons) but had also taken root in Catholic Austria and Liechtenstein and Orthodox Russia. After 1800, the Protestant state churches of Germany were tightly embedded in the public administration as state institutions. Candidates for ministry had to fulfill the educational requirements of civil servants (university education and state-supervised examina-

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tions). In France, the Netherlands, some Swiss cantons, and the Romanian principalities, clerical training in state universities was also required. The French state took on an obligation to pay the salaries of Catholic (and to a lesser degree, Protestant) clergy with the nationalization of clerical property in 1789; in 1803, all Protestant ministers were salaried by the state and also, in 1831, Jewish rabbis. Increasingly, state salaries and pension payments replaced previous arrangements for ministers in Belgium, the Romanian principalities, and the Swiss cantons but to a lesser degree also in the Ottoman lands, Poland, Serbia, Spain, and Portugal. In the German Empire, the need to regularize and reorganize church financing led (with local exceptions, as in Bremen) to the levying of church taxes on Protestant church members. Changes to the church tax law in 1905 extended the obligation to Catholics and provided Catholic communities greater financial security, but they also allowed any German to leave a state-recognized religious community and, thereby, be exempt from the tax. In Sweden, the state finally replaced tithing in 1910 and granted ministers a fixed salary that was financed by a government-managed church foundation funded by a general church tax and the newly established state income tax. If the transformation of the clergy into civil servants generally proceeded smoothly, the states’ new ideas on civil law were more problematic since they touched on matters the churches considered ecclesiastical prerogatives, in particular marriage and family law. Once more, the French Revolution broke new ground. In 1792, the state took over the registration of all births, marriages, and deaths. Moreover, the state only recognized civil marriages; church weddings were optional and could not occur before the state marriage license was signed. The 1792 legislation permitted divorce, but this was again abolished in 1816 as part of the Bourbon restoration; only in 1884 did the Third Republic authorize it again. Elsewhere in Europe, great variety existed in the degree of laicization of family law and civil status. Among the territories incorporated into Revolutionary France, only Belgium and the Netherlands retained the French laws on civil status and civil marriage. Divorce, too, was authorized but with restrictions. In many Swiss cantons and in Austria (at least until 1855), church marriages were recognized, but civil marriage was also possible. In other parts of Europe, however, the state maintained or restored the obligation of church marriage and the precedence of ecclesiastical family law, as seen in Italy and Spain, the Kingdom of Poland, Russia, the Ottoman Empire but also in the Scandinavian countries and under the Austrian Concordat (1855 – 68). In part, this latter situation reflected the Catholic Church’s vigorous efforts to protect its prerogatives, and not just under Napoleon. The Prussian mixed-marriage dispute of 1837– 39, too, stemmed from the church’s opposition to the (Protestant) state’s refusal to respect Catholic teaching on the religious upbringing of children from such marriages. Marriage law and civil status were also issues in the late-century culture wars. In 1874, the widespread disruption of parish life compelled the Prussian state to take over registration of births, marriages, and deaths; the following year, the requirement was extended to all of Germany. The introduction of obligatory civil marriage was also ac-

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companied by the authorization of divorce. In Spain, civil marriage was only mandatory from 1870 to 1875, otherwise it was valid for non-Catholics or subsidiary to a church marriage. In Italy, only after national unification in 1861 did the state refuse to recognize church marriage alone. In Austria-Hungary, the campaign to introduce compulsory civil marriage failed in Austria (1876 – 78), but in 1894 it was implemented in the Hungarian portion of the empire. Outside the sphere of influence of the Roman Catholic Church, states were slower to challenge notions of ecclesiastical family law. In Norway and Denmark, civil marriage was initially reserved for citizens who were not members of the Lutheran state church. In Norway, dissenters gained access to civil marriage in 1845, non-Christians (Jews in particular) in 1863. In Denmark civil marriage was first authorized in 1851. In Sweden, voluntary civil marriage was available after 1873 but only if one of the spouses was not a member of the state Lutheran Church. The freedom to choose between church and civil marriage, however, existed in Sweden only after 1908 (and 1917 in Finland). In the territories gradually falling away from the Ottoman Empire, marriage and family law was subject longer than elsewhere to the ecclesiastical law of the recognized Orthodox churches. For example, in Bulgaria, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Serbia, and Montenegro, even after the turn of the century, only church marriage was recognized. In Russia, civil marriage had to wait until the October Revolution of 1917. Finally, diplomatic efforts to unify civil law across countries bore important fruit at the beginning of the century, especially concerning family and marriage law, with the international conventions of the Hague of 1902 and 1905 (Jayme 2020, 272 – 73). Changing understandings of the state also produced conflicts with churches regarding educational policy. While this topic is treated at greater length in this volume’s chapter on education (Chapter 8), a few comments are necessary here. In short, after 1800, states increasingly saw education as necessary for preparing both civil servants and citizens of the nation-state. Hence, it could no longer be left to other institutions, namely the churches, although in many instances some sort of church-state cooperation in education was not only possible but desirable. In the first half of the century, Prussia exemplified the “statist” model. By the 1810s, it had taken over the running of secondary and primary schools, which were primarily organized by confession (Protestant and Catholic). The churches, however, generally determined the curricula for religious education—a required subject in both school types—provided the teachers for it, and supervised this instruction, and to varying degrees, the schools themselves on the state’s behalf. In Belgium and in France, reforms introduced in the 1830s provided the Catholic Church new opportunities to influence the schools. The Belgian Constitution of 1831 established a “freedom of education,” which facilitated the development of a Catholic school system alongside that of the state. In France, the 1833 Guizot Law required communes of a certain size to found and maintain primary schools, but in many cases, the communes simply contracted out this responsibility to the religious teaching orders. Moreover, the 1850 Falloux Law gave the churches, Catholic and Protestant, the right to supervise schools as well as allotting them seats on the local school councils. In other countries, the school system remained almost entirely within the

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churches’ hands into the second half of the century (Finland until 1866, Great Britain until 1870). In Denmark, ecclesiastical supervision of elementary schooling ended only in 1933. In the Ottoman lands, the millet system also ensured that religious authorities remained primarily responsible for primary schooling, although, after 1850, internal reforms in Constantinople and the creation of new nation-states in the Balkans allowed for states to assert new rights over primary education. By the 1870s, the question of schooling was complicated by the emergence of the nation-state, in that new pressure rose to make schooling, especially at the elementary level, obligatory. In 1870, Great Britain responded to this pressure by creating a staterun system to complement the schools maintained by the churches (Catholic and Protestant). If one consequence of the culture wars was to restrict the church’s supervision of schools (notably in Prussia), another was the introduction of non-confessional schools in which ecclesiastical influences were limited to religious instruction (e. g., Baden). But in the Netherlands, Belgium, and France, Catholics (in particular) seized on new opportunities to open denominational private schools, even “free” universities (at Lille, Lyon, and Paris). However, after 1880, the French Third Republic made education a state priority. In 1882, schooling became obligatory for all youth (to age thirteen); furthermore, the state’s schools would henceforth be fully lay establishments and religious education was eliminated from the curriculum. In the short term, the Catholic schools survived, but the banning of religious congregations in 1901 deprived many of these institutions of teachers and administrators. By century’s end, Austria and even Great Britain were also restricting the churches’ supervisory role in the educational systems.

Religion and Civil Rights The European age of revolutions and constitutionalization, with their postulate of civil freedom and equality, recast the relevance of church and religion as a matter of civil law. While the goal was to uncouple citizenship and creed in the interest of religious freedom, religion and nation, despite their growing mutual estrangement (Rémond 2000, 154 – 55), nevertheless remained connected to one another. Indeed, the nationalization of religion and the sacralization of the nation attests to their high level of interpenetration (Metzger 2004). The principle of religious freedom, first formally established in Europe with the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (August 1789), fundamentally challenged the traditional connection between church and state by making non-Catholics full citizens of the French nation-state. The same religious liberties were extended to other parts of Europe—Belgium, the Netherlands, the left bank of the Rhine—as they came under French control or were annexed to the French state. Moreover, Napoleon used the Organic Articles of 1802, published at the same time as the Concordat was promulgated, to underscore the full legal equality of Protestants and Catholics (between 1806 and 1808 Jews obtained the same status). Thus, for the first time in Europe,

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civil rights were separated from creed. With the Civil Code of 1804, the French state also largely realized the Enlightenment ideal of a comprehensive, secular codification of the law, abandoning completely ecclesiastical legal traditions. Nonetheless, in the satellite republics and monarchies, the new course—religious freedom and secularized law codes—was, at best, only a recommendation. With the Constitution of 1807 and the Organization Patent of 1810 respectively, Westphalia and Frankfurt guaranteed religious freedom. Catholic regions, however, were much less enlightened. In the Jacobin sister republics of Italy (1796 – 99), Catholicism was retained as the state religion and other confessions only barely tolerated. In the Italian Republic (1802 – 5), religious freedom existed only in private practice. In Napoleonic Spain, the Constitution of Bayonne (1808) proclaimed Catholicism as the official state religion but prohibited all other faiths what would be authorized in 1812, at least in private practice, by the anti-Napoleonic constitutional authorities in Cádiz. Similarly, in the formerly denominationally uniform Swiss cantons, the Act of Mediation (in effect 1803 – 14) prompted a return to the pre-revolutionary practice of religious intolerance and forced belief. The idea of religious freedom advanced even more slowly outside the immediate sphere of French influence. Until the 1820s, only members of the Anglican state church enjoyed full civil rights in Britain; non-Anglicans were excluded from Parliament, state offices, and universities. The abolition of the Test Acts (1828) and the passage of the Catholic Emancipation Act (1829) started the repeal of various civil disabilities faced by non-Anglicans. In other states, the question of religious freedom was regulated by law, sometimes within the framework of a comprehensive codification. In Sweden, foreigners enjoyed religious freedom. The General State Laws for Prussia of 1794 (Allgemeines Landrecht) established freedom of conscience, including religion, and toleration towards Protestant sects but strictly limited the right to worship. The Prussian Edict of Emancipation (1812) gave Jews the same rights and duties as other citizens, but they could not be army officers, serve in the government, or work in the legal system. In Russia, too, state policy officially linked Russianness with Orthodoxy. While other faiths were tolerated on the empire’s borders (Lutheranism, Roman Catholicism, Islam, Judaism), they were subject to discrimination, persecution and, in the case of Jews (after 1880), outright violence. Finally, in the Ottoman Empire, members of non-Muslim faiths benefitted from the right to worship under the “millet system,” but they did not enjoy civic equality with the empire’s Muslim subjects (although the criminal system generally made no distinction between Muslim and non-Muslim). In the decades following the Congress of Vienna, the religious emancipation of Europe gained ground, both in the sense of an advance of religious freedom and the decoupling of religious affiliation from citizenship. Political and legal necessity, notably the need to better adjudicate claims from competing faith communities, promoted change, as did states’ gradual adoption of constitutionalism and the liberal notion of equality under the law. But progress was halting. Even in states where religious freedom and civic equality was officially established as a matter of (constitutional) law, important limitations often existed in practice. In France, for example, the concordatory

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settlement privileged the four “recognized faiths” (Catholicism, Calvinism, Lutheranism, and Judaism); individuals could hold other beliefs, but there was no right of religious assembly. Indeed, even for the recognized faith communities, prior police authorization was required for informal religious gatherings. The emergence of denominationally pluralistic German states after 1800 necessitated a certain extension of religious freedom within the German Confederation (1815 – 66). Article 16 of the Final Act, namely, stated that religious differences among Christians could not give rise to distinctions in the enjoyment of civil and political rights. The question of how to improve the civil position of Jews, however, was left to future action. In real terms, the Final Act created a system of confessional parity, that is legal equality among the established confessional churches (Protestant and Catholic) and, generally speaking, for their members. But there was no general freedom of religion or religious emancipation within the Confederation. Although some of the German states tolerated independent (or dissident) Christian communities, they were everywhere subject to police authorization and oversight. Jewish emancipation also made little progress prior to 1848. The Prussian Emancipation Edict was not introduced into the new Prussian territories; in 1847 the convert Friedrich Julius Stahl even asserted that the Prussian state was fundamentally Christian. Finally, the regime of confessional parity did not preclude preferment of one confessional group in education or in employment, practices that helped to provoke interconfessional strife in religiously mixed areas (e. g., the Rhineland, Silesia, parts of Bavaria). Even with the advance of constitutionalism, the existence of established or preferred churches limited religious freedom in Europe and prevented the complete divorce of civil rights from religious affiliation. In Great Britain, for example, while Nonconformists and Catholics acquired greater political rights in 1828 – 29, they remained excluded from Oxford and Cambridge until the 1850s and paid church rates to the established church until 1868. Until 1866, Catholic political figures had to swear publicly that they did not intend to subvert the church establishment or the Protestant religion and government. In Ireland, a sense of religious equality was created only with the disestablishment of the (Anglican) Church of Ireland in 1869. Nonetheless, well into the twentieth century, anti-Catholic prejudice remained a strong factor in British social and political life. In Denmark, the Constitution of 1849 introduced freedom of religion, but Lutheranism remained the state, privileged church. In Norway, Catholics won limited rights of public worship in 1843; eight years later, the constitutional ban on Jewish settlement was lifted. Moreover, in 1845, the Storting passed a law permitting adult Norwegians to secede from the state Lutheran Church, thereby freeing them from all church obligations (including payment of church rates). The same law also regulated the formation and administration of nonconformist denominations; nonetheless, the Lutheran clergy remained hostile to dissident communities, especially those of foreign origin (e. g., Baptists, Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists). In 1880, legislation opened up most civil service positions to non-Lutherans (excepting those of the king, members of the royal council, theology professors, and teachers); in 1892, non-Lutheran jurists were also admitted

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to the bench. In Sweden, religious freedom gained ground with the Conventicle act of 1858, which made it easier to hold private religious gatherings, and the “Dissenter Acts” of 1860 and 1873. These latter laws allowed Swedish citizens to leave the state church, provided they joined a state-approved Christian denomination. Dissenters, however, still had to support financially the established church; those leaving the church also lost their rights to participate in local school councils. In 1848, an alliance between Dutch Catholics and liberal Protestants yielded major constitutional reforms, including the establishment of freedom of assembly and association, the freedom of the press, and freedom of religion. Catholics took advantage of their new freedoms—their emancipation—in 1853 to reestablish the episcopal hierarchy. Reformed Calvinists, most notably King William III, opposed this development, but ultimately they all had to respect the new constitutional order. Confessional tensions remained prominent in the Netherlands, giving way by the 1870s to the “pillarization” (verzuiling) of Dutch society, namely the establishment of separate but legally equal confessional communities (Brandt 2020, 59). The question of religious freedom was particularly problematic in the Russian Empire because minority religious groups were usually also ethnic minorities in the empire’s border regions. Under Nicholas I (1825 – 55), the Muslim communities along the empire’s southern borders enjoyed considerable autonomy until late in the century. In Finland, the fundamental laws establishing the country as a grand duchy in 1809 largely protected the established Finnish Lutheran Church from Russian (and Orthodox) interference. However, the tsar still served as head of the church. A decree of 1827 opened Finland’s military and civil offices to the Orthodox; however, as elsewhere in the empire, proselytizing the Orthodox was strictly forbidden. The Church Act of 1869 allowed Lutherans to leave the state church, a possibility denied the Orthodox until 1905. The organization of dissenting Protestant congregations was permitted in 1889, as long as they were founded on the Bible and the Apostles’ Creed. Nicolas II’s efforts to curb Finnish autonomy, however, meant that the Lutheran state church also suffered along with other Finnish institutions. In Russia’s Polish territories, Catholicism was the dominant religion. But from the 1830s onward, the tsars were especially anxious about the links between Catholicism and Polish nationalism, making it unthinkable to provide any sort of religious liberty there. In the wake of the 1830 revolts, Polish-language schools were closed and admission to seminaries restricted. After the 1863 uprising, the tsarist government redoubled its campaign against Polish nationalism and Catholicism, especially in Lithuania. The state blocked vocations to the ministry and banned public devotions and processions; even the repair of churches was forbidden. In 1865, the tsarist government tried to organize a Catholic Church that would be independent of Rome but without success. The 1905 Toleration Edict did not in and of itself lessen Russian pressures on Polish Catholicism, but it did legalize conversion from Orthodoxy (apostasy) to other Christian confessions, allowed mixed marriage, and granted certain civil rights to members of nonOrthodox faiths.

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Beyond France and Belgium, the record of religious freedom in Catholic Europe was mixed. In Habsburg Austria, at least until 1848, the watchword was “toleration”: Catholicism was privileged, but the Josephinist tradition of toleration towards Protestantism and Orthodox Christianity was maintained. Under the 1855 Concordat, Catholicism’s preferential treatment was restored, but the Constitution of 1867 established the principle of religious equality in the predominantly Catholic monarchy. In addition, after 1867, religious background was deemed largely irrelevant in demands for citizenship. Similarly, in Italy, the establishment of the Kingdom of Italy (1861) as a constitutional state paved the way for widespread religious freedom. While the Constitution recognized Catholicism as the “only State religion,” other denominations were “tolerated according to the laws.” Moreover, soon after the Constitution was promulgated, the Italian parliament passed a law that specified that all citizens, regardless of faith, enjoyed the same civil and political rights and that they were eligible to all civilian and military posts. In Liechtenstein, the attainment of personal fundamental rights such as freedom of establishment and the right to marry depended on religious affiliation. In Portugal, the 1822 Constitution granted religious liberty on paper, but in practice full religious freedom and the decoupling of civil rights and religious affiliation was achieved only with the establishment of the Republic in 1910. The Spanish Constitution of 1869 maintained state support of the Catholic church but guaranteed religious freedom for foreigners and, to a degree, Spaniards. But the Constitution of 1876 only granted religious “toleration” to non-Catholics, provided they respected Christian morality and did not have public ceremonies; it also restored the union of church and state. In multi-confessional Switzerland, efforts to promote religious freedom and disentangle religious affiliation and citizenship were complicated by the fact that religious policy and citizenship was a cantonal prerogative, at least until 1848. Prior to 1846, each canton maintained an established Reformed and/or a Catholic church. Where both existed, a sort of legal parity existed among local members of both churches, but dissenting communities faced discrimination. In addition, certain cantons prohibited or made difficult changing one’s faith. Starting in the 1830s, the democratic-liberal “regeneration” movement promoted the idea of separating church and state; however, this dream became reality only in Geneva, and in 1907. The Confederal Constitution of 1848 established the concept of Swiss citizenship; its “bill of rights” included the freedom of worship and right to settle anywhere in the federation, at least for Christians. Jews could not settle freely in Switzerland until 1866. The constitutional revision of 1874 finally guaranteed individual freedom of conscience, freedom of worship, and religious liberty to all citizens. Nonetheless, the recognized Protestant and Catholic churches remained established, enjoying certain privileges and duties based on public law. The Tanzimat reform era in the Ottoman Empire also led to a notable degree of religious freedom in its domains. While stopping short of promising legal equality to all regardless of religion, the Gülhane Decree of 1839 provided that no one was above the law, and that all, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, had the right to be protected by it. In subsequent years, Islamic Law (sharia) was reduced primarily to the field of family law (for Muslims). The 1843 penal code likewise embraced the principle of

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equality, and in 1844 the death penalty was abolished for apostasy from Islam. The following year, Christians even gained the right to serve in the army alongside Muslims. Nonetheless, according to the prevailing Islamic-Sunni law, religious affiliation remained decisive for the enjoyment of most forms of personal freedom. With the 1876 Constitution, all subjects became Ottomans under the law, regardless of their religion. Accordingly, they enjoyed such liberties as freedom of the press and free education, and the right to serve in the Chamber of Deputies. Although the Christian communities within the Ottoman Empire benefitted from the competing patronage of the major European powers, helping them to win autonomy and independence, the empire’s progressive withdrawal from the Balkans (which accelerated in the wake of the 1875 – 78 Balkan crisis) generally had a negative impact on the region’s Muslim populations. For example, while still technically under Ottoman rule, Serbia used the 1844 Civil Code to deny Muslims the civil rights that the 1838 Serbian Constitution had defined as universal. Upon independence, many Balkan states closed mosques or converted them into Orthodox churches, depriving the remaining Muslim communities of public prayer space. By contrast, after taking over the administration of Bosnia-Herzegovina and its 600,000 Muslim inhabitants in 1878, the Habsburg Empire decided to create a kind of Islamic regional church there in 1882. It was under the supervision of a governing body (Medschlis i Ulema), whose members were appointed by the emperor. The Austrian Islamic Law of 1912 marked the first European recognition of Islam as a religion. Outside southeastern Europe however, there was no systematic regulation of Islamic faith communities in Europe, with the exception of French initiatives during the Second French Empire (1852 – 70) with respect to Algerian Muslims. European Jewry, too, was greatly affected by continued restrictions on religious freedom after 1789. France was the first to grant full emancipation, but until the July Monarchy anti-Jewish prejudice remained strong, especially in eastern France. Thereafter, France came to be regarded as a model for successful Jewish integration and assimilation in Europe. The events of the Dreyfus Affair, however, seriously called this achievement into question. Well into the second half of the century, the French situation appeared exceptional. After the Congress of Vienna, discrimination against Jews was evident in Catholic and Protestant territories alike. In Italy, Jews were denied access to public offices and denied the right to purchase land or marry Catholics. Modena-Reggio reestablished Jewish ghettos and in the Papal States Jews were explicitly denied citizenship. Only in Tuscany and Parma were Jews at least legally tolerated. Within the German Confederation, the initiative on Jewish matters effectively lay with the states. Although Jews gained broad access to education, thanks to the introduction of compulsory schooling, they remained second-class citizens. The constitutions adopted by many German states in 1849 abolished legal disabilities for Jews, but by the 1850s, most of these guarantees had been rescinded. The 1850 Prussian Constitution declared that civic and citizenship rights were independent of confession, but Jews remained excluded from state employment. In the “Liberal Era” of the 1860s, Jewish emancipation finally gained traction in the German lands. It was enshrined in the Constitution of

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the North German Confederation of 1867, the Austrian Constitution of 1867, and the German Constitution of 1871. In northern and western Europe, the years after 1830 also saw improvements in Jews’ civic and political rights. The 1831 Belgian Constitution stated that all Belgians were equal before the law, making no reference to religious minorities. However, only in 1836 were Jews dispensed from swearing the “More Judaico” oath in courts. The Danish Constitution of 1849, by establishing freedom of religion, similarly emancipated Danish Jews. Norway relaxed its restrictions on Jews in 1851. Two years later, Sweden’s Riksdag began to dismantle the civic disabilities Jews faced; by 1900 Jews enjoyed full citizenship rights, but, as non-Lutherans, they remained excluded from certain public offices. Jews had been tolerated in Britain since the seventeenth century, but only following Catholic emancipation in 1829 did a movement for Jewish emancipation develop there. The Jews Relief Act of 1858 removed the barriers to Jews entering Parliament, but other disabilities remained. Like Protestant Nonconformists, Jews remained subject to (Anglican) church rates until 1868, but the Education Act of 1870 made it possible to form Jewish schools. After 1795, the Russian Empire was home to Europe’s largest Jewish community. Jewish residency was generally restricted to the Pale of Settlement (including Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Ukraine); within the Pale, however, certain cities remained off limits to Jewish residence. Under Alexander II (1855 – 81), wealthy and educated Jews gained the right to leave and live beyond the Pale. Alexander’s assassination in 1881 triggered waves of state-sponsored violence (pogroms) against the Jews and new restrictive decrees, prompting thousands of Jews to emigrate to central Europe, and from there to western Europe and North America.

Conclusion Over the long nineteenth century, the relationship between church and state in Europe was shaped above all by the state’s growing claim to supervise and order civil society, to which the church was now essentially consigned. The integration of church and, to a degree religion, into the state, which began in earnest with the reforms of the Enlightenment and Revolutionary eras, also took place against the backdrop of, and at times in tension with, the epochal processes of constitutionalization and nationalization. The churches could hardly escape these developments, but in some cases they were able to take advantage of them. Indeed, despite increasing state supervision and control, Europe’s churches maintained considerable autonomy and social relevance. Moreover, in an effort to preserve a certain social-cultural influence, faith communities learned to mobilize politically. Their innovative employment of voluntary associations and, especially, political parties contributed to the modernization of European political life and helped ensure that religion and the churches became significant forces in the political affairs of the Continent’s constitutional regimes.

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Apart from the fusion of secular and temporal rule in the Papal States (after 1870, the Vatican), the specific form of how the relationship between church and state was regulated ranged widely in Europe, from a clear separation, to mixed forms, to the privileging of a certain faith (or faiths) as formal state churches. These arrangements were established as part of the process of legal codification but even more so constitution-making. In constitutional states, parliaments played decisive roles in the negotiation of the relationship between church and state and the claiming of new competencies for the state, frequently at the churches’ expense. In particular, the state claimed authority over many domains formerly claimed by the church such as marriage and family law, education, and poor relief (on the latter, see also Chapter 17 in this volume). Nonetheless, in these areas, states often strove to maintain some sort of partnership with ecclesiastical authorities, benefitting thereby from the church’s experience and personnel resources. In the course of the legal reforms and constitutional revolutions, Europe’s churches were profoundly affected by demands for civil rights, in particular for religious freedom. Although religious minorities welcomed and often campaigned actively for such changes, the established churches regarded them as affronts to their understanding of their own social and moral responsibilities. Still, the uncoupling of citizenship and faith occurred slowly, and nowhere were church and state truly separated before 1900. The rise of the nation, too, posed a potential threat to the churches, for it offered a competing focus for the allegiance of the state’s citizens. In the face of such challenges, established churches ultimately accepted the new constitutional and national arrangements in order to fend off competing religious communities. In the Balkans (Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria), the Orthodox churches played major roles in imagining the new nation-states, but in Belgium, Italy, and Germany, nation and church, at least the Catholic Church, became fiercely opposed to one another, as was vividly revealed in the late-century culture wars. Overall, within the framework laid down by the constitution and the nation, church and state saw themselves forced to rely on each other throughout the century. Religious affiliation too remained a decisive factor in access to legal protection and basic civil liberties. Indeed, given this considerable and ongoing interpenetration, it seems that the period’s dominant narrative is not the separation of church and state but rather the state’s growing supervision of church affairs and generally unilateral reclassification of public and private competencies. In many states, the predominant church (or churches) managed to ward off the civil rights claims associated with constitutionalism and liberalism, but the challenges provided by the rising discourse of the nation-state powerfully affected state churches across the Continent, and not always to their benefit. The history of Jewish emancipation in particular highlights the blind spots in the discourse and practice of religious liberty in nineteenth-century Europe. Not only did Jews, as non-Christians, long face civil and religious restrictions, but after 1870 a racialized nationalist discourse provided new rationales for denying them citizenship or acknowledging them as full members of the national community. Significantly, this discrimination was rooted both in prejudice and in law. For much of

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the period, Islam was a significant force in southeastern Europe and the Russian Empire. But as the Ottoman Empire’s hold over the Balkans collapsed, only in Habsburgadministered Bosnia-Herzegovina did the state seek to incorporate the Muslim community into the existing set of church-state arrangements.

References and Bibliography Basdevant-Gaudet, Brigitte, and François Jankowiak. 2009. Le droit ecclésiastique en Europe et à ses marges (XVIIIe–XXe siècles); Actes du colloque du Centre Droit et Sociétés Religieuses (Université de Paris-Sud, Sceaux, 12 – 13 octobre 2007). Louvain: Peeters. Böckenförde, Ernst-Wolfgang. 1967. “Die Entstehung des Staates als Vorgang der Säkularisation.” In Säkularisation und Utopie: Ebracher Studien; Ernst Forsthoff zum 65. Geburtstag, 75 – 94. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Brandt, Peter. 2020. “Grundlinien der sozialökonomischen, sozialkulturellen und gesellschaftspolitischen Entwicklung in Europa 1848 – 1870.” In Daum 2020, 34 – 69. Brandt, Peter, et al., eds. 2006. Handbuch der europäischen Verfassungsgeschichte im 19. Jahrhundert: Institutionen und Rechtspraxis im gesellschaftlichen Wandel, vol. 1, Um 1800. Bonn: Verlag J. H. W. Dietz. Burleigh, Michael. 2005. Earthly Powers: Religion and Politics in Europe from the Enlightenment to the Great War. London: HarperCollins. Clark, Christopher, and Wolfram Kaiser, eds. 2003. Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in NineteenthCentury Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Daum, Werner, ed. 2012. Handbuch der europäischen Verfassungsgeschichte im 19. Jahrhundert: Institutionen und Rechtspraxis im gesellschaftlichen Wandel, vol. 2, 1815 – 1847. Bonn: Verlag J. H. W. Dietz. Daum, Werner, ed. 2020. Handbuch der europäischen Verfassungsgeschichte im 19. Jahrhundert: Institutionen und Rechtspraxis im gesellschaftlichen Wandel, vol. 3, 1848 – 1870. Bonn: Verlag J. H. W. Dietz. Dittrich, Lisa. 2014. Antiklerikalismus in Europa: Öffentlichkeit und Säkularisierung in Frankreich, Spanien und Deutschland (1848 – 1914). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Dreier, Horst. 2018. Staat ohne Gott: Religion in der säkularen Moderne. Munich: C. H. Beck. Fahrmeir, Andreas. 2007. Citizenship: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Concept. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hastings, Adrian. 1997. The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haupt, Heinz-Gerhard, and Dieter Langewiesche, eds. 2004. Nation und Religion in Europa: Mehrkonfessionelle Gesellschaften im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt am Main: Campus-Verlag. Jayme, Erik. 2020. “La fortuna di Mancini in Europa.” In Per la costruzione dell’identità nazionale: Francesco De Sanctis e Pasquale Stanislao Mancini dalla provincia meridionale all’Europa, edited by Renata De Lorenzo, 263 – 74. Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino. Klieber, Rupert. 2010. Jüdische—christliche—muslimische Lebenswelten der Donaumonarchie 1848 – 1918. Vienna: Böhlau. Krzoska, Markus, ed. 2011. Zwischen Glaube und Nation? Beiträge zur Religionsgeschichte Ostmitteleuropas im langen 19. Jahrhundert. Munich: Meidenbauer. Langenfeld, Christine, and Irene Schneider, eds. 2008. Recht und Religion in Europa: Zeitgenössische Konflikte und historische Perspektiven. Göttingen: Universitäts-Verlag. Lehmann, Hartmut, ed. 1997. Säkularisierung, Dechristianisierung, Rechristianisierung im neuzeitlichen Europa: Bilanz und Perspektiven der Forschung. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Link, Christoph. 2010. Kirchliche Rechtsgeschichte: Kirche, Staat und Recht in der europäischen Geschichte von den Anfängen bis ins 21. Jahrhundert. Munich: Beck.

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Metzger, Franziska. 2004. “Die Reformation in der Schweiz zwischen 1850 und 1950: Konkurrierende konfessionelle und nationale Geschichtskonstruktionen und Erinnerungsgemeinschaften.” In Haupt and Langewiesche 2004, 64 – 98. Raphael, Lutz, ed. 2008. Zwischen Ausschluss und Solidarität: Modi der Inklusion/Exklusion von Fremden und Armen in Europa seit der Spätantike. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Rémond, Réné. 2000. Religion und Gesellschaft in Europa: Von 1789 bis zur Gegenwart. Munich: Beck. Schieder, Wolfgang, ed. 1986. Volksreligiosität in der modernen Sozialgeschichte. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Van Dülmen, Richard. 1989. Religion und Gesellschaft: Beiträge zu einer Religionsgeschichte der Neuzeit. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Weinzierl, Michael, ed. 1997. Individualisierung, Rationalisierung, Säkularisierung: Neue Wege der Religionsgeschichte. Vienna: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik. Wesel, Uwe. 2010. Geschichte des Rechts in Europa: Von den Griechen bis zum Vertrag von Lissabon. Munich: Beck. Ziemann, Benjamin. 2007. “Säkularisierung, Konfessionalisierung, Organisationsbildung: Dimensionen der Sozialgeschichte der Religion im langen 19. Jahrhundert.” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 47: 485 – 508.

Index Abadie, Paul 242 Abduh, Muhammad 49 – 51 Abdülhamid II (Sultan) 45 – 46, 53 Aborigines Protection Society 366 Abramovitsh, Sholem Yankev 277 Adler, Hermann 70 – 71 Adler, Nathan Marcus 59, 65, 70 – 71 al-Afghani, Jamal ad-Din 48 – 50 al-Arabi, Muhammad Nur 54 Alas, Leopoldo 279 Albania 15, 23, 36, 39 – 41, 47 – 48, 52 – 55, 131 Albanianism 47 – 48 Alevis. See Kizilbash Alevization 54 Alexander I (Russia) 182, 410 Alexander II (Russia) 464 Ali Pasha of Ionnina 40, 53 Allgemeine Bauzeitung, Die 249, 251 Alliance Israélite Universelle 222, 392, 413, 417 – 18 alms 170, 382 – 84, 389, 399. See also charity Alsace 69, 94, 96, 173, 176, 183 Alsace-Lorraine 185, 414, 420 – 21 altars 243, 258, 260 alternative spiritualities 7, 136, 342 Althoff, Friedrich 192 American Colonization Society 364 Amsterdam 72, 177, 385, 397, 408 – 9 Anabaptists 86 Anaplasis (New Creation) 415 – 16 Anarchism 145, 147, 149, 159, 161 Anatolia 37, 40 – 41, 53, 55 Anthimos VI (Ecumenical Patriarch) 21, 436 anthropology 3, 193, 199, 283, 296, 299, 368 anticlericalism 25, 86, 108, 116, 118 – 16, 145, 147 – 50, 176, 183, 193, 279, 311 – 12, 344, 354, 391, 417, 419, 431 – 33, 454 anti-Judaism 120, 137, 219 – 20 antisemitism 61, 67, 75 – 76, 88, 98, 120, 158 – 59, 219, 278 – 79, 286, 293 – 94, 318 – 22, 343 – 44, 387, 413, 428, 437 – 38 apocalyptic art 92, 282, 308 – 11 Arabic 37, 39, 48, 51, 170 – 71, 173, 330 Árkay, Aládar 256, 260 – 61 Armenia 15, 22, 138, 171, 370, 372 Arndt, Ernst Moritz 199 Arnim, Bettina von 387 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110609059-023

Arnold, Matthew 272 – 73 Arnoldi, Wilhelm 116 art nouveau 230, 236, 253 – 54, 257 Arts and Crafts movement 252 Asad, Talal 143 Asher Ginsberg (Ahad Ha’am) 77, 440 Ashley-Cooper, Anthony 389 atheism 136, 143, 145 – 56, 158, 159 – 62, 182 – 83, 431 Athens 176, 247 – 48, 415 – 16 Auerbach, Erich 282 Augustine of Hippo (Saint) 291, 361 Austria 16, 21, 60, 66, 67, 75 – 76, 81, 103, 119 – 20, 125, 131, 178, 182, 211, 219, 411, 413, 415, 429, 431, 433, 448 – 51, 454 – 56, 458, 462 – 64. See also Austria-Hungary Austria-Hungary 15, 42, 44 – 45, 50 – 51, 55, 60, 113, 180, 213, 234, 238, 253, 372, 393, 424, 426, 434, 439, 452, 457, 466 autocephaly 16 – 23, 30, 425, 434 – 36, 451 – 52, 455 Avenir, L’ 105 awakening 81 – 83, 90 – 96, 100, 126, 275, 348, 363, 390 – 91, 426, 440 babas 39, 131 Baden 62, 175, 183, 216, 237 – 38, 423, 450, 453 – 55, 458 Baeck, Leo 64 Bakunin, Mikhail Alexandrovich 159, 161 Balkans 5, 21, 35, 39 – 41, 46 – 48, 53 – 55, 60, 73 – 74, 130 – 33, 136, 138, 185, 211 – 13, 222, 231, 246 – 47, 370, 413, 419, 435, 458, 463, 438, 465 – 66 Balkan Crisis 463 (see also Eastern Crisis) Balkan Wars 55, 74 Balyan, Gabaret 236 baptism 93 – 94, 97, 114, 136, 146, 148, 308 Baptists 81, 92 – 93, 99, 177 – 78, 241, 263, 348, 363, 374, 376, 410, 418 Baptist War 365 bar mitzvah 170, 289 Barasch, Iuliu 75 Barbara (Saint) 134 Barth, Karl 90, 100, 198, 201 Basel 85, 89 – 90, 95 – 96, 98 – 99, 198, 374, 406 – 7, 417, 419, 440, 455

470

Index

Baudelaire, Charles 229, 281 Bauer, Bruno 111, 198 Baur, Ferdinand Christian 88 – 89, 196, 200 Bavaria 83, 119, 129 – 30, 217, 237, 241, 315, 318, 326, 409, 419, 423, 448 – 50, 453, 455, 460 Begoña (Spain) 131 Bektashis 38 – 39, 41, 52 – 54, 131 Bektashi networks 38 – 39 Belgrade 23, 30, 75, 233 – 34, 452 Benigni, Umberto 112 Berdyaev, Nikolai 203 Bergson, Henri 290 Berlin 8, 61 – 62, 65 – 66, 76, 82, 86, 95, 97, 129, 136, 177, 179 – 80, 194 – 96, 198 – 200, 202, 222, 233, 235 – 36, 241, 247, 250, 259, 261 – 64, 272, 306, 407 – 8, 418 – 19, 438, 441 Berlin Conference (1884 – 85) 374 Besant, Annie 152 – 53 Bessarabia 21 – 22 Bethel Foundation 97, 99 Bethune, Jean Baptiste 240 Bialik, Chaim Nachman 278 Bible 24, 67, 84, 88 – 89, 92, 94 – 96, 111, 129, 151, 153, 161, 170 – 71, 173, 179, 193, 195, 199 – 200, 208 – 12, 215 – 16, 218, 268 – 69, 272, 275 – 76, 303, 305, 307, 314, 347, 368, 374, 377, 390, 406, 410 – 11, 420, 429, 461 Bibelfrauen. See Bible women Bible societies 95, 211, 347, 407, 416 – British and Foreign 24, 47, 95, 134 – 35, 211, 406, 417 – 18 – Russian 24, 410 Bible stories 171 – 73, 210, 272, 275, 314, 416 Bible women 95, 211 biblical criticism 25, 63, 65, 200, 268 – 70 Biedermann, Alois Emmanuel 87 Bildung 173, 222, 277 Bildungsbürgertum 87 Bildungsroman 273 – 74 birdsong 286, 299 Bismarck, Otto von 87, 154, 178, 183, 373 – 74, 394 – 95, 398, 454 Bizet, Georges 297 Black Madonna of Częstochowa 138 Blake, William 272, 309 Blaschke, Olaf 2, 118, 176, 341, 426 Blavatsky, Helena 280 Bloch, Ernst 297 – 98 Blondel, Maurice 111 – 12 Bloy, Leon 280

Blum, Robert 441 Bodelschwingh, Friedrich von 97 Bohemia 81, 85, 91, 113, 128, 184, 427 – 29 Bolsheviks 126 Bonaparte, Napoleon 69, 104, 191 – 94, 197, 236, 275, 308, 316, 364, 367, 448 – 49 Bonfils, Félix 317 – 18, 324 Boniface (Saint) 427, 441 book markets, secular 208 – 9, 220 Book of Common Prayer 84 Booth, Charles 387 Booth, William and Catherine 92, 97, 348 – 49, 372, 390, 412 Borodino 125 Borromeo, Charles (Saint) 221, 409 Borzęcki, Konstanty (Mustafa Celaleddin Pasha) 47 Bosco, John 119 Bosnia-Herzegovina 36, 39 – 47, 49 – 52, 54, 119, 213, 234, 457, 463, 466 Bost, Ami 91 Bourbon Restoration 232, 261, 456 Bourdieu, Pierre 3 Bousset, Wilhelm 198 Bradlaugh, Charles 153 Brandts, Franz 118 Branting, Hjalmar 153 Bremen 82, 129, 411, 456 Brentano, Clemens 115 Breslau 65, 177, 179, 184 Bretegnier, Georges 94 – 95 British and Foreign Bible Society. See Bible societies: British and Foreign British East India Company 361, 363, 368, 371 British Empire 361, 366 – 367 Brittany 81, 328, 330 Brockes, Bartold Heinrich 269 brotherhoods, mystical (tarikats) 38 – 41, 52 – 54 Brown, Callum 2, 344 Brussels 1, 89, 127, 148, 239, 333 – 34, 389 Bucharest 75, 247, 249 Büchner, Ludwig 156 Budai-Deleanu, Ion 277 Budapest 177, 179, 233, 236, 249 – 51, 256, 260 – 61, 263, 386, 418 Buisson, Ferdinand 87 Bukovina 131 Bulgaria 15, 18 – 21, 23, 27, 29 – 30, 36, 39, 41 – 46, 49 – 52, 60, 75, 176, 181, 185, 233 – 34, 246 – 47, 413, 435 – 37, 452, 457, 465

Index

Bulgarian Exarchate 20 – 21, 27, 44, 248, 436 Bultmann, Rudolf 201 Bunting, Jabez 91 Burnand, Eugène 94 Burney, Charles 294 – 95 Busch, Wilhelm 279 Butler, Samuel 274 Buxton, Thomas Fowell 364, 369 Caliphate 45 Cambridge 84, 177, 190, 201, 238, 257, 296, 450, 460 Camden Society 257 Cappellari, Mauro 103 – 4 (Pope Gregory XVI) caricature 25, 147 – 48, 154, 278, 312 – 13, 321, 333 Caritas Federation (Caritasverband) 392, 395, 398, 412, 417 Carlyle, Thomas 376 catechism 7, 76, 96, 170 – 73, 210, 212, 216 – 17, 220, 346, 354 Catherine II (Russia) 26 – 27, 36, 160, 448 Catholic Action 353 – 54 Catholic Association (United Kingdom) 409 Catholic Book Society (Ireland) 212 Catholic Emancipation Act 84, 181, 233, 459, 464 Catholic revival 126, 128, 295, 345, 352, 391, 426 Caucasus 23, 35 – 36, 49, 376 Čaušević, Džemaludin 51 Cavour, Camillo 453 cemaat 37 censorship 110, 149, 151, 160, 193, 215, 268, 311 – 12 Center Party (Zentrumspartei) 107, 353 – 54, 394, 413, 433, 441, 455 Central-Verein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens 413 Chadwick, Owen 7, 109, 112, 169 Chantepie de la Saussaye, Pierre Daniel 89 chants 38, 93, 118, 170, 285, 288 – 89, 292 – 95, 298 charity 2, 135, 381 – 83, 388 – 91, 393 – 400, 403, 405, 413, 421. See also alms Charles X (France) 428 Chateaubriand, François-René 115, 255 China 24, 92, 99, 368, 370 – 371 choirs 71, 276, 286, 292, 415, 417 chosenness (national) 425, 427 – 28, 430 Christian democracy 105, 118, 120 – 21 Christian Social Union 98, 197 – 98

471

Christian-Muslim relations 20, 28, 35 – 48, 53 – 54, 130, 132 – 33, 138, 184 – 85, 233, 361, 367, 370, 428, 434, 459, 461 – 63 Christian-Social Party (Christlich-soziale Partei) 98 Christliche Welt, Die 87 church and state, separation of 70, 82, 105 – 6, 108, 144 – 45, 148 – 149, 153, 156, 161, 279, 432, 447, 449, 453 – 55, 458 – 59, 461 – 62, 465 Church Missionary Society 99, 363, 366 church–state relations 21, 146, 150, 280, 394, 398, 415, 447 – 66 churches, established 85, 136, 169, 181, 190, 346, 348, 350, 394, 420, 432, 461, 465. See also Landeskirchen cities 1, 23, 35, 91, 96 – 97, 114, 119, 130, 133 – 34, 136, 172, 181, 208, 218, 232 – 34, 261 – 63, 314, 372, 386, 392 – 93, 397, 408, 411, 417, 419 – 20, 464. See also urbanization citizenship 46, 61, 69, 181, 222, 250, 458 – 59, 462 – 65 city missions 261, 408, 411, 417 Civil Code (France) 459 civil marriage 433, 455 – 57 civil rights 31, 42, 105, 157, 392, 438, 447 – 48, 458 – 65 civil society 9, 59, 62, 214, 403, 409 – 10, 417, 464 Civiltà Cattolica 119 – 20, 217 Clapham Sect 91, 364 clerical formation 8, 21, 171, 173, 176, 178 – 9, 189, 213 Clermont-Ferrand 262 Clubs. See voluntary associations; youth clubs Cohen, Hermann 64 Cologne 115, 192, 217, 229 – 31, 238, 240, 407, 412, 426, 449 Cologne Cathedral 229 – 31, 238, 240, 426 Commune, Paris (1871) 148 concordats 108, 233, 448 – 51, 458, 459 – 60 – Austria (1855) 178, 450, 454, 456, 462 – France (1801) 233, 448 – 49, 451, 458 confessional age 2, 176, 199, 268, 341 confessionalism 83, 351, 353 confessionalization 83, 118, 145, 341, 343, 345, 439, 447 confirmation 64, 66, 70 – 71, 155, 170, 348. See also bar mitzvah confraternities 113, 117, 128, 134, 405 Congrès des œuvres sociales 391 Congrès internationaux de bienfaisance 389

472

Index

Congress of Berlin (1878) 36, 41, 435 Congress of Vienna 104, 113, 115, 192, 449, 459, 463 conservatism 66, 87, 200, 431 Considérant, Victor 381 consistories 44 – Jewish 62, 69 – 70, 243 – Protestant 44, 450 Constant, Benjamin 88 Constantinople 15, 18, 20, 35 – 38, 42 – 45, 47 – 49, 51, 55, 74, 233, 236, 245, 256, 258 – 59, 262 – 63, 435 – 36, 451 – 52, 455, 458 constitutions: – Austria (1867) 464 – Denmark (Basic Law, 1849) 450 – Belgium (1831) 457, 464 – Germany (1871) 465 – Norway (1814) 450 – Prussia (1850) 82, 463 – Sweden (1809) 449 – Swiss Confederation (1848) 207 conversion 35 – 36, 54, 70, 81, 91 – 93, 117, 128, 184, 200, 211 – 12, 321, 349, 352, 361 – 62, 368, 372 – 77, 428, 461 conversos 72 Copenhagen 89, 177, 232, 408 Cortes 451, 454 Courbet, Gustave 325 – 26 Cox, Jeffrey 4, 414 Crete 43 – 44, 247 Crimea 23, 35, 38, 49, 245 Crimean War 36, 40, 47, 135, 370, 452 Croix, La 120 Crowley, Aleister 280 Crowther, Samuel 364 Crystal Palace 276, 298 – 99 Cuijpers, Petrus Josephus 238 – 39 cultural Protestantism (Kulturprotestantismus) 87, 156, 201 culture wars (Kulturkampf) 7, 107, 118, 145, 169 – 70, 183 – 84, 268, 278, 424, 431, 433, 441 – 42, 454 – 456, 458, 465 curia 45, 345, 450 Curtius, Friedrich 420 – 21 Curwen, John 295 Cuza, Alexander 27, 436 Cvijić, Jovan N. 52 Cyril (Saint) 435, 437

Darbyism 92 Darwin, Charles 99, 151, 156, 176, 280, 286 – 87, 298, 376 Darwinism 151, 156, 158, 176, 280 Daubermesnil, François Antoine 146 De Liefde, Jan 389 De Wette, Wilhelm Martin Leberecht 195, 199 de-Ottomanization 233 – 34, 246 deaconesses 96, 347 – 48, 388, 391, 397, 399, 408 Deaconess Institute 135, 347 – 48, 352, 408. See also Kaiserswerth Deaconess Institute Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen 81, 303 – 4, 313, 458 Dei Filius (1870) 106 – 7 Denmark 82 – 83, 99, 129, 172, 181 – 82, 216, 394 – 96, 432, 450, 457 – 58, 460 Deutsche Christentumsgesellschaft 406 Deutschkatholiken (German Catholics) 81, 155, 412, 419, 441 devotional activism 133 devotional reading 211, 214 Diakonie 96, 388, 391, 411. See also alms; charity Diakonissenanstalt. See Deaconess Institute Dickens, Charles 376, 387 diffusive Christianity 4, 414 Dissent 82, 92, 94, 190, 232, 376, 404, 425, 428, 432, 461, 450 divorce 454, 456 – 57 Döllinger, Ignaz von 110 – 11 dönmes 54 Doré, Gustave 314, 321, 323 Dorpat 184 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 281 drama 282 Dresden 95, 249, 256 – 57, 408, 419 Drey, Johann Sebastian 110 Dreyfus Affair 70, 77, 120, 148, 183, 219, 279, 322, 454, 463 Dryander, Ernst 441 dual faith (dvoeverie) 17 Dublin 217, 236 Dubnow, Simon 439 Ducpétiaux, Edouard 387, 389 Dutch East India Company 365 Džabić, Ali Fehmi 45 Eastern Crisis 48 ecumenical councils

15

Index

Ecumenical Patriarch. See Patriarchate of Constantinople ecumenism 22, 24 – 25, 31, 82, 98, 238 Edict of Emancipation (1812, Prussia) 459 – 60 Edict of Toleration (1781, Austria) 81 Edinburgh 177, 407 Education Act of 1870 (England) 89, 181, 184, 464 Education, religious 8, 49, 51, 73, 169 – 74, 180, 185 – 86. See also clerical formation; heder; madrasas; mektebs; talmud torah Egypt 15, 46, 316 Eindhoven 131, 239 Eisenach Church Conference 238, 240, 252, 453 – 54 Eisenach Guidelines 238, 251 – 52 Elberfelder system 391 Eliezer, Israel ben 67 Eliot, George 223, 270 Elizabeth of Thuringia (Saint) 134 emancipation 25, 28, 59 – 63, 66, 70, 84, 130, 136, 150, 153, 159, 181, 210, 218, 233, 246, 252, 277, 341 – 42, 352, 376, 392, 409, 413, 438, 459 – 65 emigration 1, 67, 77, 93, 130, 365, 394 Emmerich, Anna Katharina 127 encyclicals, papal 105 – 6, 109 – 12, 139, 150, 202, 392. See also under names of individual encyclicals Engels, Friedrich 277, 387 England 16, 23 – 25, 60 – 61, 70 – 72, 83 – 86, 92, 96 – 97, 113, 115, 128 – 30, 134, 136 – 37, 151, 176, 179, 185, 190, 197 – 99, 215 – 16, 219, 221, 231 – 32, 240 – 41, 255, 261, 276 – 77, 295, 308 – 9, 312, 362, 364 – 65, 386 – 87, 391, 395, 403, 412, 426 – 28, 431 – 32, 448, 450, 458 – 460 Enlightenment 17 – 18, 59, 61, 86, 103, 115, 128 – 29, 139, 143, 145, 151, 158, 160, 189, 192 – 93, 195, 209 – 10, 267 – 72, 276, 309, 315, 438, 447, 459, 464 Enlightenment, Jewish 136, 320. See also Haskalah Ensor, James 1, 333 Épinal 313 Epirus 36, 40, 43, 48 Erlangen 90 esoterism, Islamic 39 – 40, 52 ethnarque 451 ethnography 99, 124, 294, 296, 368 Evangelical Alliance 5, 410 Evangelical Social Congress (Evangelisch-Sozialer Kongress) 197 – 98, 392

473

Evangelicals 87, 200, 210, 261, 364, 367, 405, 407, 410, 416, 432 Evangelische Bücher-Verein 216 Evangelischer Bund (Protestant League) 413 everyday religion. See lived religion exegesis, historical–critical 81, 86 – 89, 100, 275 Exeter Hall 366 – 67, 376 – 77 Faber, Frederic William 115 Falk, Adalbert 183 Fallot, Tommy 98 Falloux Law 181 – 82, 312, 457 Fatima 116, 351 Fauré, Gabriel 298 Febronianism 103 feminization 114, 343 – 46, 350 – 51, 355, 393, 397 Ferdinand of Coburg-Gotha 21 Fernandes, Aron 76 Ferry, Jules 182 Feuerbach, Ludwig 160, 274 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 194, 275 fiction 214 – 16, 218, 220 – 22, 267 – 70, 274 – 75, 279, 282 – 83 Fielding, Henry 269 fikh 49 filioque 15 – 16 fin de siècle 223, 268, 280 – 282 financing, church 235, 262, 404, 436, 450, 456, 461 Finland 15, 21 – 22, 82 – 83, 390, 407, 415 – 16, 434, 448, 452, 457 – 58, 461 First Communion 94, 112, 114, 170 – 71 First World War 1, 45, 55, 98, 138, 190, 281, 424, 441 Flandrin, Jean-Hippolyte 308 Flaubert, Gustave 220, 274 Fliedner, Frederike 135, 408 Fliedner, Theodor 96, 135, 197, 408 folklore 7, 131 – 33 Förster, Ludwig 250 Francke, August Hermann 91, 405 François, Étienne 83 Franconia 129 Frankfurt am Main 136, 180, 250, 259 – 60, 389, 418 Franzos, Karl Emil 277 Frashëri, Naim 53 Frashëri, Shemseddin Sami 48 Frazer, James 199

474

Index

Frederick the Great (Prussia) 193 Frederick William III (Prussia) 192 – 93, 236 Free Churches 93, 418 freethought 7, 145 – 57, 182 French Empire 376 – 78, 463 French Revolution 18 – 19, 69, 75, 104, 126, 128, 130, 139, 145, 191, 269, 275, 303, 308, 320, 334, 364 – 65, 367, 393, 396, 438, 448 – 49, 456 Frere, Bartle 373 Friedrich Wilhelm III (Prussia) 82 Friedrich, Caspar David 309 – 10 Gabon 99, 364 Galicia 60, 66 – 67, 75, 131, 135, 184, 231, 277 – 78, 434 – 35 Gallen-Kallela, Akseli 333 Gallicanism 103, 448 Galton, Francis 321 Gasprinski, Ismail 49 Gauguin, Paul 328, 330 Geiger, Abraham 63, 65, 198, 438 – 39 gender 2, 64, 71, 114, 124, 146, 162, 169, 173, 212, 214, 260, 272, 341 – 56, 395, 397, 414, 416. See also feminization; masculinity Geneva 85, 89, 96, 207 – 8, 215, 411 – 12, 418, 454 – 55, 462 Geneva Society of Religious Publications, The 207 – 8, 215 George, Stefan 281 Gereformeerde Kerk 86 German Confederation 460, 463 – 64 German Empire 82, 97, 155, 201, 232, 372, 423, 426, 432, 456 Gérôme, Jean-Léon 318, 324 ghettos 261, 277, 419, 463 Gide, André 94 Gifford Lectures 89 Gladstone, William 108 Glasgow 248, 411 Glover, Sarah 295 Gobineau, Arthur de 376 Goblet d’Alviella, Eugène 89 Goddard, Joseph 295 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 215, 222, 272 – 73, 377, 310 Goeze, Johan Melchior 190 Goldsmith, Oliver 94 Goncharova, Natalia 334 – 35 Görres, Joseph 115

Gothic (aesthetic movement) 197, 229, 237 – 41, 248 – 49, 256, 262 – 63, 269 – 70. See also neoGothic Gounelle, Élie 98 Goya, Francisco 311 – 12 Graetz, Heinrich 438 Great Commission 362 Great Disruption of 1843 93 Greece 15, 18 – 21, 26 – 27, 36, 41 – 43, 55, 74, 132, 172 – 73, 176, 181 – 82, 185, 203, 213, 232 – 33, 246 – 48, 250, 393, 413, 416, 430, 434 – 35, 450, 452, 465 – War of Independence 19 – 20, 23 Gregorian Chant 22, 118, 288, 292, 294 – 95, 298 Gregory XVI (pope) 104 – 7, 110, 112, 115 Grenada 35 Grundtvig, Nikolaj Frederik Severin 174 Guéranger, Prosper 118, 292 – 93 Guizot Law (1833) 70, 181, 457 Gülhane Decree 462. See also Tanzimat reforms Gunkel, Hermann 198 Gustav Adolf Association 497, 413 Gutzkow, Karl 270 Ha’am, Ahad 77, 440 hadiths 37, 131, 171 Haeckel, Ernst 99, 156 haham basi 73 – 75 Haiti 364, 376 Hajj 28 – 29, 133 halachah 179 Haldane, Robert 407 Halveti networks 38, 40 – 41, 54 Hamburg 62, 82, 97, 129, 136, 190, 197, 233, 259, 261, 263 – 64, 408, 411, 418 Hamdi, Osman 325 – 26 Hamilton, Anna 96 Hangi, Antun 52 Hanover 59, 65, 69, 193, 449, 454 Hansen, Christian Frederik 232 Hardenberg, Friedrich von (Novalis) 271 Hardie, J. Keir 430 – 31 Harnack, Adolf von 8, 89 – 90, 111, 202 Hasidism 61, 67 – 69, 131, 218 Haskalah 62, 75, 136 Hasluck, Frederick W. 53 Hatti-Hümayun Decree (1856) 233. See also Tanzimat reforms Haussmann, Georges-Eugène 262

Index

Hebrew 64 – 65, 67, 71 – 72, 137, 170 – 71, 173, 179, 200, 218, 277, 288 – 89, 294 – 95, 330, 408, 440 heder 70, 171, 222 Heine, Heinrich 272, 277, 320 Hellenism 47 – 48 Helsinki 22, 236 – 37, 333 Hengstenberg, Ernst Wilhelm 199 – 200 Herbert, John Rogers 385 Herder, Johann Gottfried 271, 276, 429 – 30 Herero and Nama Wars 374 Herrmann, Wilhelm 201 Herrnhut 91, 362 Herzl, Theodor 77, 440 Hess, Moses 77 Hibbert Trust 89 Hildesheimer, Esriel 65 – 66, 177 Hirsch, Maurice de 73, 77 Hirsch, Samson Raphael 66 historicism 63, 189 historicism (architectural) 230, 247 – 48, 252 history of religions 6, 49, 89, 198, 201 Hitze, Franz 118 hocas 53 – 54 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 270 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 281 Hölderlin, Friedrich 272 Holst, Gustav 297 Holy Alliance 449 Holy Communion 94 Holy Rus 125, 436 Holy Synod (Russia) 22, 24, 179, 182, 410, 448 Holy Synod of the Greek Church 416 Holyoake, George Jacob 152 – 153 Home Mission (Innere Mission) 97, 347, 391 – 92, 394, 395, 398, 411 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 218 Horton, Robin 361 household doctrine 349 Huerne de Pommeuse, Michel 389 Hugo, Victor 274 Huguenots 85 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 194 Hume, David 272 Hungary 427, 434, 452. See also Austria-Hungary Hunt, William Holman 314, 318 – 19, 323 hutbes 37 hymns 93, 129, 170 – 72, 216, 229, 257, 285, 287, 290 – 92, 296 – 98

475

Iași 75, 248 icons 16 – 17, 19, 27, 125, 130, 136, 138, 212, 281, 327, 329, 336 ilmiyye 37 imams 37 – 39, 43, 174, 186 Immaculate Conception 117, 123, 150, 367, 426 Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society 29 imperialism 1, 9, 77, 98, 153, 325, 332, 361 – 62, 364, 371 – 376 Independent Labour Party (Scotland) 430 – 31 Index of Forbidden Books 119, 221 indulgences 117 – 18, 151 industrialization 1, 6, 9, 25, 114, 124, 197, 273, 312, 314, 334, 346, 351, 372, 386 – 87, 417, 423 Ineffabilis Deus (1854). See Immaculate Conception Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique 308, 314 Innere Mission. See Home Mission Inquisition 427, 451 International Blue Cross 96, 412 International Federation of Catholic Women’s Leagues 342, 353 Iosif I (Bulgarian Exarch) 21 Ireland 105, 113 – 14, 116, 119, 123, 128, 130, 134 – 35, 176, 181, 183, 211 – 13, 216 – 17, 231 – 32, 235 – 36, 386, 390, 392, 394 – 95, 397, 404, 406, 419, 426, 428 – 29, 460 Islam 3, 5 – 6, 35 – 55, 59, 171, 184, 213, 249 – 51, 275, 306, 324, 370, 374, 378, 382 – 83, 409, 425, 434, 459, 462 – 63, 466. See also Sufism – Shia 39, 131 – Sunni 53, 131 Israelitische Religionsgemeinschaft 65 – 66, 250, 260 Italy 36, 73, 75 – 76, 85, 92, 95, 103 – 4, 106, 108, 113, 119, 123, 130 – 31, 134, 149 – 51, 158, 169, 172, 176, 181 – 83, 210 – 11, 213, 217, 221, 233, 278 – 79, 332, 353, 372, 386, 390, 394, 415, 423, 430 – 31, 449 – 50, 453, 456 – 57, 459, 462 – 63, 465 Jacobins 125 – 26, 146, 449, 459 Jaffa 29 Jahn, Friedrich Ludwig 428 Jamaica 365, 376 James, William 274 Jerusalem 15, 28 – 29, 61, 92, 130, 258, 309, 315, 317, 334 Jesuits 119 – 20, 134, 154, 279, 343, 353 – 54, 367, 450

476

Index

Jesus prayer 26, 131 Jewish Board of Guardians 412 Jewish Theological Seminary (Breslau) 177 Joan of Arc 280, 427, 441 Joseph II (Austria) 27, 103 Joseph (Saint) 134, 221, 354 journals 49, 151, 158, 180, 196, 209, 217 – 19, 238, 252, 279 Jovanovic, Mihailo 435 Joyce, James 281 Judaism: – Ashkenazi 69 – 70, 72 – 73, 75, 131, 261, 263, 405, 409 – Liberal 59, 61, 71 – 72, 158, 348 – Orthodox 65 – 66, 69, 71, 137, 250, 259 – 60, 392 – Reformed 60 – 73, 76, 137, 258 – 60, 288 – Sephardic 67 – 68, 71 – 73, 75, 132, 222, 404 – 5 Jugendstil. See art nouveau Kabbalah 67 – 68 kadıs 37, 40, 143 – 45, 51 Kaiserswerth Deaconess Institute 96, 135, 197, 347, 391, 408. See also Deaconess Institute Kalevala 277, 332 – 33 Kant, Immanuel 86, 143, 193, 272, 310 Katholikentag 412 Kazan Theological Academy 24 kehillot 60, 62 Keller, Gottfried 274 Kern, Stephen 285, 290 Ketteler, Wilhelm von 392, 427 Khomyakov, Alexsei 161, 203 Kierkegaard, Søren 129, 198 Kiev 23, 28 – 29, 361 Kizilbash 39, 53 kıraathanes 49 – 50 Kleist, Heinrich von 276 Kleutgen, Joseph 111 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb 269 knee–bending controversy (Bavarian) 449 Knock Shrine 116, 123 knowledge: – religious 4, 8, 37 – 38, 157, 169 – 75, 180, 186, 208 – secular 137 Kollyvades 26 Kolping, Adolph 109, 111, 412, 417 Körner, Theodor 254, 275 Kosovo 36, 40, 43, 52 – 54

Kotzebue, August von 199 Kraus, Karl 282 Kuenen, Abraham 89 Kultur 138, 157, 277 Kulturkampf. See culture wars Kurtćehajić, Mehmed Šakir 47 Kuruman, Robert Moffat 369 Kuyper, Abraham 86, 99, 216, 413, 433 La Salette 123 Labanca, Baldassare 89 Labouré, Catherine 116 Lagerlöf, Salma 92, 94 laïcité 145 – 46, 162, 279, 373, 394, 425, 454 Lamennais, Félicité 104 – 5 Lamentabili Sane Exitu (1907) 112 landesherrliches Kirchenregiment 82, 450 Landeskirchen 82. See also church, established language crisis 281 – 82 language, vernacular 51, 59, 66, 93, 137, 210, 222, 277 – 78, 289, 429 Lassus, Jean-Baptiste-Antoine 238 – 39 Lateau, Louise 127 Latin 15, 51, 178 – 79, 210, 435 Lausanne 85, 87, 89, 93, 411 Laveleye, Émile de 88 Lavigerie, Charles 367 – 68 law: – civil 455 – 58 – family 43, 278, 455 – 57, 462, 465 Law, Harriet 152 Lazarus, Moritz 439 Lazzeri, Maria Domenica 127 Le Play, Frédéric 387 League of Nations 55 Leibl, Wilhelm 325 – 26, 328 Leiden 177 Leipzig 145, 250, 407, 419 Lennstrand, Victor 153 Leo XIII (pope) 108 – 11, 120, 139, 288, 392, 427 Leopold II (Belgium) 369 – 70, 377 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 190, 271, 320, 322 Liberal Jewish Synagogue 71 liberalism 16, 31, 81, 90, 105 – 6, 150, 180, 200, 278, 312, 341, 394, 398, 423, 431 – 32, 438, 442, 454, 465 Liberia 364 liberté subsidiée 398 liberté d’enseignement 183

Index

libraries and reading rooms 8, 49, 133, 174, 202, 209, 212, 215 – 16, 221 – 23, 263, 403, 405, 409. See also kıraathanes – parish 212, 221, 263 Lichtfreunde (Friends of Light) 155 Liebermann, Max 306, 318 – 19 Liechtenstein 450 – 51, 455, 462 Liguori, Alphonsus 115 literacy 8, 94, 119, 133, 135, 207 – 15, 220 – 22, 273, 377, 390 literary criticism 268 Lithuania 35, 38, 67 – 68, 179, 461, 464 lived religion 7, 25 – 31, 124 Liverpool 24 – 25, 35 – 36, 407 – 8 Livingstone, David 99, 314 – 15, 369 Locke, John 86, 144 Löhe, Wilhelm 197 Loisy, Alfred 111 – 12, 202 London 24, 70 – 72, 91, 95 – 97, 99, 211, 233, 236, 259, 261, 263, 289, 298 – 99, 314, 363, 366, 386 – 87, 389 – 90, 404 – 12, 418 – 19 London Board of Deputies 71 London Missionary Society 99, 211, 314, 363, 406, 409 Lönrot, Elias 277 Lord Byron 272 Los von Rom 81 Loth, Wilfried 419 Lourdes 115 – 17, 123, 126 – 27, 138 – 39, 250, 279 Lovejoy, Arthur 290 Luise of Baden 216 Lund 177 Luther, Martin 346, 427 Lutteroth, Henri 93 Lycurgus, Alexander 25 Macedonia 15, 21, 27, 36, 43, 54, 132 – 33, 136 Macpherson, James 269 madrasas 37 – 40, 43, 49 – 50, 171 Mahler, Gustav 285 – 86, 290 – 92, 298 Mahmud II (Sultan) 40, 52 Maistre, Joseph de 104, 197 Makarios of Corinth 26 Malevich, Kazimir 335 – 36 Malthus, Thomas Robert 384 Manchester 24, 71, 123, 261, 417, 419 Mannheimer, Isaac Noa 66 Manning, Henry Edward 110, 392, 395 Manzoni, Alessandro 279 Marheinecke, Phillipp 195

477

Marian apparitions 116 – 17, 123, 138, 279, 331, 351 Marian devotions 116, 123, 344 Maritain, Jacques 109 Marks, David Woolf 289 Marpingen 116, 123, 138 marriages, mixed 66, 115, 461 Marseille 24, 35 – 36, 256 Martin, John 316 Marx, Karl 159, 277 masculinity: – and Catholic clergy 342, 353 – Christian 342 – 43, 349 – 50, 353 – 56 – Jewish 356 maskilim 62, 68, 76, 176, 222 masonry 145, 147, 149, 151, 157, 160, 269 Massenet, Jules 297 Maturin, Charles Robert 270 May Laws (1873) 183 – 84. See also Kulturkampf Mayhew, Henry 387 Mazenod, Eugène de 367 Mearns, Andrew 97, 387 mektebs 171, 173 Melami networks 38, 54 melodies 93, 288 – 89, 296 Melun, Armand de 389 Melville, Herman 275 Mendelssohn, Moses 61 – 62, 86, 320, 322 Mennonites 86 mescids 37 Methodism 91, 257 – 58, 292, 362 – 63, 375, 415, 425, 430 – 31 Methodius (Saint) 435, 437 Methodus (1854) 352 Meyer, Conrad Ferdinand 279 Mickiewicz, Adam 277, 430 migration 1, 5, 23 – 24, 35, 67, 72, 77, 82, 93, 130, 143, 233, 365 – 66, 381, 386, 394 Milan 150, 236, 415 Milan I (Serbia) 435 milieus (Catholic) 355, 394, 433 millet 18, 20 – 21, 73, 451, 458 – 59 Millet, Jean-François 325, 327 minorities, religious 15, 23, 42, 66, 82 – 83, 85 – 86, 113, 148, 155, 176, 180, 219, 277 – 78, 343, 361, 407, 410, 423, 425, 434, 439, 440 – 41, 461, 464 – 65 miracles 17, 19, 27 – 28, 54, 106 – 7, 111, 115 – 16, 130 – 31, 269, 279, 309, 319, 330 Mirari Vos (1832) 105 – 6 mission literature 211, 216

478

Index

Mission of America 362 missionaries 5, 22, 24, 53, 92, 99, 172, 212, 342, 347, 349 – 50, 352, 355, 361 – 78, 405 – 6 missionary societies 92, 99, 314, 349, 365, 371, 407 – Baptist Missionary Society 99, 363 – Basel Foreign Mission Society 99 – Church Missionary Society (Anglican) 99, 363, 366 – German Rhenish Missionary Society 373 – 74 – London Missionary Society 99, 211, 314, 363, 406, 409 – Moravian Missionary Society 362 – Netherlands Missionary Society 407 – Orthodox Missionary Society (Russian) 24, 363, 415fn – Paris Evangelical Missionary Society 367 – White Fathers 368 Mitnagdim 68 modernism 112, 197, 202, 230, 236, 253, 273, 282, 305, 307, 334 modernity 1 – 2, 4, 6, 8 – 9, 25 – 26, 29, 59, 61, 65, 67, 73, 75, 77, 87, 90, 108, 124, 144 – 45, 150, 199, 216, 236, 256, 259, 271, 273, 277 – 78, 281, 285, 303, 305 – 6, 334, 350, 381, 417, 419, 438, 447. modernization 16, 49, 60, 69, 72, 130, 169, 195, 197, 262, 285, 288, 327, 381, 393, 399, 404, 424, 434, 464 Möhler, Johann Adam 110, 196 Moldavia 27, 436 Moleschott, Jakob 156 monasticism 8, 16, 19 – 20, 23, 26 – 30, 108, 118, 125, 130 – 32, 135, 191, 232, 345, 350, 353, 383 – 84, 393, 427, 436 monism 7, 99, 145, 147, 156, 162, 280 Monod, Gabriel 88 Montagu, Lily 71 – 72 Montalembert, Charles de 105 Montbéliard 94 – 95 Montefiore, Claude 198 Montefiore, Moses 71 Montenegro 15, 36, 41, 43, 46, 455, 457 Montmartre 242, 253 – 54 Moravian Brethren 91, 99 Mörl, Maria von 127 Mortara Affair 76 – 77 Moscow 49, 125, 160 – 61, 235, 244 – 45, 248, 254, 334, 429

mosques 4, 8, 36 – 40, 43, 52, 231, 233 – 36, 256, 258 – 59, 262 – 63, 316, 463. See also mescids Mount Athos 19, 26, 28, 30, 42 Moureau, Gustave 331 Mpande (Zulu king) 369, 373 müderris 37 – 38, 40 muftis 37 – 38, 43 – 45, 50, 54 Müller, Friedrich Max 89, 198, 280 Mun, Albert de 392, 412 musar movement 68 Muscular Christianity 343, 350, 354, 414 Music 285 – 99. See also chants; hymns; melodies; singing, congregational Myers, Charles Samuel 296 – 97 mysticism 39, 131, 160, 280, 330 – 34, 438. See also brotherhoods, mystical; esoterism, Islamic; Hasidism; Jesus Prayer; Kabbalah mythology 271, 307, 333 Nabis 330 – 31 Nahda 274 – 75 Naismith, David 408 Napoleon III (France) 108, 373 Napoleonic Wars 17, 104, 126, 128, 139, 211, 232, 236, 273, 316, 407 Naqshbandi networks 38, 40 – 41, 54 nation-states 1, 5, 16, 18, 20, 27, 74 – 75, 138, 145, 150, 158, 181, 203, 233, 275, 277 – 78, 382, 393, 423 – 25, 430 – 31, 433, 438, 440 – 41 nationalism 9, 16 – 17, 19, 22 – 23, 30 – 31, 46 – 47, 51, 59, 61, 67, 73, 76, 98, 162, 219, 243, 268 – 69, 274, 306, 330, 345, 354, 362, 377 – 78, 423 – 30, 434 – 36, 438 – 42, 461 National Secular Society 153 Naumann, Friedrich 98 Nazarenes 305, 309 Neale, J. M. 290 Neander, August 195, 200 Nemanjic dynasty 435 Neo-Byzantine 236, 243 – 48, 252, 256 Neo-Gothic 230, 236 – 43, 247 – 48, 249, 255 – 56, 258 Neo-Guelphism 453 Neoclassicism 230, 232, 236 – 37, 247 – 48, 309 Netherlands, The 60 – 61, 69, 72, 83, 85 – 86, 113, 131, 169, 176, 180 – 81, 191, 212, 216, 219, 239, 259, 262, 294, 365, 384, 389 – 91, 394 – 95, 403, 407, 411, 413 – 14, 419, 425 – 26, 428, 431 – 34, 440, 449, 452, 454, 456, 458, 461

Index

new imperialism 77, 372 – 76 Newman, John Henry 84, 110, 128, 197 newspapers. See press Newton, John 93 Nicholas I (Russia) 17, 68, 105, 202, 243, 410, 461 Nietzsche, Friedrich 198, 281 Nightingale, Florence 96, 135, 391 Nikodemos the Hagorite 26 Nipperdey, Thomas 403 Non expedit (1874) 108, 150, 453 Nonconformism 84, 177 – 78, 185, 190, 232, 235, 241, 263, 347, 363, 403 – 4, 418, 428, 430 – 32, 442, 460, 464. See also Dissent Norway 82, 96, 129, 182, 343, 387, 391 – 92, 394 – 95, 432, 448, 455, 457, 460, 464 novel 92, 94, 161, 208 – 9, 218, 220, 221 – 23, 267, 269, 273 – 82, 387, 424. See also Bildungsroman – historical 274 – 76, 278 – 79 Numanagić, Hadži Hafiz Husni Efendi 54 O’Connell, Daniel 409, 419 Oberkirchenrat (Prussia) 83, 98, 450 Oblates of Mary Immaculate 367 Odessa 23, 68 Old Catholics 25, 441 Omerović, Mustafa Hilmi Omonoia 26 Ongman, John 92 Opera dei congressi e dei comitati cattolici 415 Oppenheim, Moritz 320 – 22 ordination 27, 175 – 176 Orenburg Assembly 38 Organic Articles of 1802 (France) 458 organs 64, 66 – 67, 71, 137, 257, 259, 288 – 89, 291, 293 Orientalism 5, 250, 275, 306, 323 – 25 Orthodox Christianity (Eastern) 6, 15 – 31, 44, 47 – 48, 74, 113, 130, 133, 160, 171, 189, 202, 210, 212 – 13, 221, 230, 233, 235, 242 – 49, 254, 262, 409 – 10, 428, 434, 451 – 52, 462 Oslo (Christiania) 89, 411 Osterhammel, Jürgen 5 Ostwald, Wilhelm 156 Otto, Rudolf 198 Ottoman Empire 16, 18, 21 – 22, 36 – 37, 41 – 50, 54 – 55, 60, 73 – 74, 130, 138, 203, 219, 233 – 34, 236, 246, 249, 263, 361, 370, 383, 389, 434 – 35, 451 – 52, 455 – 57, 459, 462 – 63, 466 Ottomanism 46 – 49, 74

479

Owen, Robert 152 Oxford 84, 89, 190, 197 – 98, 200 – 1, 450, 460 Oxford Movement (Tractarianism) 84, 197, 199, 257 Ozanam, Frédéric 109 Pacific Islands 365, 368, 375 Padua 177 Pale of Settlement 67, 131, 222, 464 pan-Islamism 45 – 46 papacy 17, 103 – 6, 109, 112, 119, 126 – 27, 202, 217, 219, 305, 312, 374, 449 – 50, 454 papal infallibility 25, 103 – 6, 110, 117, 120, 150 – 151, 426, 441 Papal States 104 – 6, 110, 149 – 50, 449, 463, 465 Paris 24 – 25, 36, 69, 89, 92, 96, 99, 116 – 17, 134, 136, 149, 177, 191, 213, 222, 230, 232 – 33, 238, 242, 252 – 54, 261 – 62, 264, 275, 325 – 26, 328, 330, 367, 386, 392, 407, 411, 413, 419 parity, confessional 453, 460, 462 Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907) 112, 202 Pastor Aeternus (1870) 103, 106 – 7 pastoral care 115, 124, 177 – 78, 180, 195 – 96, 411 pastors (Protestant) 90 – 91, 93 – 94, 97 – 98, 171, 173 – 75, 177 – 78, 181, 186, 190, 195 – 96, 207, 215, 223, 251, 256, 274, 283, 349, 388, 394, 429, 432, 449 Patriarchate of Constantinople 18 – 21, 23, 25 – 26, 31, 435 – 36, 451 – 52, 455 patriarchy 341, 377 Pécaut, Félix 87 Peguy, Charles 280 Pelagia (Saint) 19, 30 Pentecostalism 92, 130 Périn, Charles 395 periodicals 158, 215 – 17, 221 – 22, 238, 319, 322, 406. See also journals; press Petőfi, Sándor 427 Pfleiderer, Otto 89 philanthropy 2, 65, 71, 77, 134, 210, 342, 344, 347 – 48, 366, 385, 388 – 89, 405, 407 – 10, 416 Philip, John 365 Philokalia 26 philology 88, 193, 276 – 77, 280, 282 philosophy 89, 107 – 8, 111, 152, 159, 177 – 79, 222, 274, 281, 290, 309 – 10, 429 – 30 photography 117, 210, 281, 296, 314, 316 – 17, 321 – 22, 324 phyletism 18, 21, 23, 436

480

Index

Piedmont 81, 85, 104, 108, 450, 453 Pietism 81, 91, 128, 193, 195, 200, 345, 362, 405 – 7, 411, 414, 419 piety, popular 25, 31, 115 – 17, 341, 351 pilgrimages 17, 19, 23, 26 – 30, 39, 115 – 17, 123, 125 – 27, 130, 133, 138, 275, 279, 315, 351 pillarization (verzuiling) 83, 183, 262, 398, 403, 432 – 34, 461 Pius Associations 413 Pius IX (pope) 103, 105 – 10, 112, 117, 150, 183, 202, 287 – 88, 394, 412, 415, 451, 453 Pius VI (pope) 103 Pius VII (pope) 104, 110, 119, 126 Pius VIII (pope) 110, 287 Pius X (pope) 110 – 12, 114, 118, 202, 415 poetry 216, 218, 222, 267, 269 – 73, 275, 294, 309 Poland 35, 60, 67, 85, 105, 114, 123, 128, 130 – 31, 135 – 136, 148 – 49, 162, 213, 217, 235, 259, 423, 426 – 30, 440, 450, 452, 456, 464 Polish League of Freethinkers 149 Pompeii 123 Pontmain 123 poor relief 134, 348, 383, 387 – 389, 393 – 95, 397, 399 – 400, 408, 412, 419, 465 popular literature 219, 276 popular religion 7, 31, 123 – 39, 311 – 15, 334, 447. See also lived religion Portugal 36, 73, 108, 116, 279, 351, 415, 428, 432, 450 – 51, 456, 462 poverty 109, 123, 213, 221, 281 – 84, 384, 386 – 97, 394 – 96, 412 – 13, 417 Poznan 449, 452 Prague 233, 238 prayer 16, 26 – 28, 37, 42, 52, 62 – 67, 70 – 71, 74, 84, 117, 123, 129, 131, 137, 170 – 73, 210, 212, 216 – 17, 222, 232, 251, 256, 258, 263, 288, 293, 343, 348, 350, 353, 382 – 83, 405, 410 – 11, 414, 416, 463 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 305 – 6 press 26, 47, 49 – 51, 59, 63 – 65, 83, 105, 119, 174, 208, 213, 216 – 18, 221 – 22, 279, 282, 373, 387, 420, 424, 440 – 41. See also journals; periodicals – antisemitic 159, 219, 279, 322, 344 – organizations, Catholic 217, 412 – Yiddish 222 Pressburg/Bratislava 89 priests 19, 25, 27 – 28, 42, 94, 112, 114, 117, 126, 131, 133, 145 – 46, 148, 171, 173 – 78, 181, 183 – 84, 186, 218, 221, 223, 274, 279, 343, 346,

349, 352 – 54, 361, 363, 388, 397, 409, 418, 436, 454 processions 114, 126, 131, 136, 138, 247, 263, 461 professors, theology 196, 449, 460 Protasov, Nicholas 179 Protestantism: – Anglican 25, 82 – 84, 86, 91, 93 – 94, 96, 137, 173, 177, 185, 223, 232, 235, 238, 240 – 41, 256 – 57, 263, 292, 312, 347, 363, 384 – 85, 387, 389 – 90, 392, 395, 399 – 400, 404 – 5, 425, 430, 432, 442, 448, 450, 459 – 60 – liberal 87 – 90, 154, 156 – 57, 413, 419, 461 – Lutheran 22, 69, 81 – 86, 90 – 93, 96, 98, 129, 171 – 72, 174, 184, 190, 193 – 94, 199, 216, 237, 242 – 43, 251 – 52, 254, 256, 262 – 63, 283, 346 – 50, 352, 355, 374, 383 – 85, 391 – 92, 394, 396, 407, 415, 419, 421, 425, 428, 432, 434, 448 – 50, 453, 457, 460 – 61 – Reformed (Calvinist) 69, 82 – 86, 93 – 94, 96, 99, 93 – 94, 96, 99, 172, 193 – 94, 233, 236, 256, 260 – 62, 385 – 86, 390, 394 – 95, 407, 413, 419, 428, 433, 452 – 53, 455, 460 – 461 Proust, Marcel 281 Providentissimus Deus (1893) 111 Prussia 35, 65, 82, 88, 98, 107, 113, 115 – 16, 126 – 27, 135, 155, 172, 178, 181, 183 – 84, 192 – 94, 196, 199, 202, 211 – 12, 215, 232, 233, 235 – 36, 277, 372, 394, 405, 409, 413, 423, 426, 429, 434, 441, 449 – 50, 452 – 60, 463 Prussian Bible Society 211 Prussian Union Church 82 psalters 85, 92 – 93, 173, 210, 218 public assistance 392, 395 – 96, 398 – 99. See also poor relief public sphere 63, 65, 124, 134, 153, 160, 213 – 15, 219, 223, 263, 268, 342, 347, 349, 416 publishing, industrial 208, 217 – 18 Pugin, Augustus 238 Pusey, Edward 84, 200 – 1 Pustet, Frederick 288 Quam Singulari (1910) 112 Quanta Cura (1864) 106, 150 Queiroz, Eca de 279 Quilliam, William H. (Abdullah) 35 – 36 Quran 37, 39, 41, 49, 53, 131, 170 – 71, 173, 325 – 26 Raabe, Wilhelm 274 rabbis 59, 62 – 76, 158 – 59, 174 – 77, 179, 185 – 86, 218, 223, 259, 264, 277, 318, 344, 439, 456

Index

racism 372, 376 Rade, Martin 87 Raess, Andreas 183 Raikes, Richard 96 Ranyard, Ellen Henrietta 95 rationalism 81, 106, 128 – 29, 150, 183, 190, 200, 203, 268, 406 Ratisbon (chant) 288 – 89, 295 reading revolution 208, 273 realism (aesthetics) 275, 281 – 82, 305, 314, 325 – 29, 337 Redemptorists 174 Reformation 81 – 82, 85 – 89, 117, 128, 144, 151, 155, 175, 190, 192, 197, 199, 209, 219, 268, 271, 276, 279, 341, 383, 425, 427, 455 regeneration 69, 76 Reichensperger, August 240, 328 Reimarus, Herman Samuel 88, 190 reis-ul-ulema 44 – 45, 51 relics 16, 27, 117, 125, 130 – 31, 151, 303, 305, 427 religion, official 132 religious activism 129, 211 religious culture 3 – 6, 9, 125, 186, 207 – 8, 224, 263, 282, 285 – 86, 288, 290, 296 – 99, 342, 352, 355, 398, 410, 421, 447 religious education. See education, religious religious fiction 216, 218, 221, 268, 275, 309, 347 religious field 3, 7 religious freedom 42, 174, 451, 458 – 63 religious hierarchy, Islamic 42 – 44, 51 religious orders 107 – 8, 149, 154, 355, 370, 383 – 84, 388, 395, 409 – men’s 154 – women’s 119, 135, 352 religious practice 4, 21, 39, 51 – 52, 59 – 60, 113 – 14, 129, 137, 144, 151, 344 – 45, 404 Religious Tract Society 94, 211, 220, 299, 406 religious turn 2, 9, 342 Renan, Ernest 48, 88 – 89, 106, 111, 198, 319 Rendu, Rosalie 109, 119 Rerum Novarum (1891) 109, 392 Réveil. See awakening Réville, Albert 89 revivalism, Protestant 81, 86, 91 – 93, 109, 128 – 30, 133, 347 – 49, 432 Revolutions of 1848 – 49 47, 82, 87, 150, 155, 202, 410, 427, 450 Rheinisch-Westfälischer Verein für Israel 407 Rhineland 114 – 15, 126 – 27, 129, 176, 192, 232, 391, 437, 441, 460

481

Rhodes, Cecil 374 Rida, Rashid 49 Riehl, Wilhelm Heinrich 83 Rilke, Rainer Maria 281 Ritschl, Albrecht 87, 200 – 1 Roberts, David 316 – 17 Roberts, Evan 92 Rochat, Louis-Lucien 96 Roman Catholic Relief Act 233 Roman Catholicism 3, 16 – 17, 21, 24 – 25, 69, 76, 81 – 87, 90, 103 – 21, 123, 126 – 28, 130, 133 – 38, 145 – 51, 154 – 55, 162, 170 – 76, 178 – 86, 189 – 92, 196 – 97, 202, 207, 210 – 13, 216 – 19, 221, 230, 232 – 33, 235 – 36, 238 – 42, 255 – 56, 261 – 63, 276 – 79, 285, 287 – 88, 292, 295, 298, 303, 312, 328, 342 – 45, 348, 350 – 55, 367 – 68, 370, 373 – 75, 383, 385, 388n1, 389 – 92, 394 – 98, 403 – 4, 409, 412 – 15, 417 – 20, 423 – 24, 426 – 34, 436 – 37, 441 – 42, 448 – 64 Romanesque 238, 240 – 43, 247 – 48, 251 – 52, 256 Romania 15, 18, 20 – 21, 26 – 30, 36, 41, 43, 46, 49 – 50, 60, 75, 85, 138, 172, 176, 182, 185, 213, 233, 246 – 47, 249, 277, 434, 436, 450, 452, 456 Romanticism 160, 270 – 72, 305, 309 – 11, 331, 337 Rome 5, 15, 89, 103 – 4, 106, 108, 119, 151, 156, 202, 221, 233, 235, 248, 262 – 63, 275, 293, 307, 353, 409, 418, 427, 453 rosary 109, 131, 136, 139, 217, 326 Rothe, Richard 87 Rum millet 18, 20 – 21 Rumelia 36 – 37, 39 – 41, 46 Rundbogenstil (“round-arch” style) 241 rüşdiyes 49 – 50 Russian Bible Society 24, 410 Russian Revolution: – of 1905 30, 55 – of 1917 55, 429, 457 Russian Style 243 – 44 Russification 21 – 22, 184, 246 Sabbath 74, 93, 96, 129, 137, 179, 259, 289, 320 – 21, 410 Sacré-Coeur, Basilica of 242 Sacred Harmony (hymnal) 292 Sacred Heart of Jesus 126, 344, 351, 354 Saint Petersburg 68, 233, 236, 243, 245 – 46, 261 – 63, 327, 410, 439 saints, patron 128, 287, 354 salafiyya 48 – 49 salat 52

482

Index

Salonika 54, 73 – 74, 136, 242 Salvation Army 92, 97, 133, 348 – 49, 372, 390, 412 Sand, Karl Ludwig 199 Sanday, William 201 Sanfedismo 113, 449 Sangnier, Marc 118 Sanjak of Scutari 43, 124 Sanneh, Lamin 362 Sarajevo 37, 41, 44, 51 – 52, 54, 235 Sava (Saint) 30, 123, 247, 435, 437 Savitsky, Konstantin 327, 329 Scandinavia 82 – 83, 92, 96, 128 – 29, 185, 212, 347 – 48, 352, 373, 391, 394, 397, 400, 411, 415, 431 – 32, 456 Scheler, Max 281 – 82 Schenk, Elias 174 Scherer, Edmond 90 Schiller, Friedrich 222, 271, 273, 277 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich 236 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 62, 87 – 88, 91, 129, 177, 179, 193 – 96, 199 – 200, 272, 287, 297 – 98 Scholem, Gerschom (Gerhard) 438 schooling 70, 73 – 74, 87, 94, 147, 169 – 75, 179 – 87, 210, 312, 351, 377, 417, 453 – 55, 458 – mass 172, 175, 181 – obligatory 162, 174 – 175, 181, 183, 185, 208, 212, 258, 463 schools: – primary 87, 181, 258 – secondary 169, 171, 173, 175, 179 – 80, 182, 276 Schulte, Johann Friedrich von 441 Schweitzer, Albert 88, 100 science 8 – 9, 47, 49 – 50, 86, 90, 124, 149, 152, 156, 158, 162, 176 – 77, 180, 194 – 95, 201, 208, 220 – 22, 283, 287, 344, 423 Scotland 85 – 86, 89, 92 – 93, 181, 201, 232, 404, 426, 431 Scramble for Africa 373 – 74 secularism 4, 7, 143 – 62, 278, 432, 440 secularization 1 – 2, 7, 60, 67, 83, 86, 89, 100, 114, 126, 144 – 45, 169, 191, 196 – 99, 217, 229, 263, 267, 280, 282 – 88, 341, 344, 347, 400, 417 – 18, 424, 447, 449 – 50, 452 Seeberg, Reinhold 202 Seebohm Rowntree, Benjamin 387 seminaries 175 – 76, 178, 180, 190, 202 – 3, 232, 461. See also clerical formation – Catholic 112, 175 – 76, 178 – 80, 190, 202 – 3, 232 – Eastern Orthodox 23, 30, 176, 178 – 79 – Protestant 176, 178, 180

– rabbinical 65, 68, 72, 74, 176 – 77 Semler, Johann Salomo 88 Semper, Gottfried 249, 256 separate spheres 341, 345, 349 Serafim of Sarov (Saint) 30 Serbia 15, 18, 20 – 21, 23 – 24, 27, 30, 36, 41, 43, 45, 47, 51 – 52, 75, 123, 176, 185, 203, 233 – 34, 246 – 47, 428, 434 – 37, 440, 451 – 52, 455 – 57, 463, 465 Serbian Orthodox Church 18, 20, 23, 30 sermons 37, 59, 62, 65 – 66, 71, 91, 129, 137, 156, 170, 178, 196, 216 – 17, 269, 287, 289, 367, 369, 407, 414 şeyhülislam 37, 43 – 46 sharia 37, 40 – 43, 45, 54, 462 shaykhs 38, 40, 54 Shelley, Mary 272 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 272 shtibl 67, 70 Siberia 24, 36, 372 Sicily 35, 47, 449 Sienkiewicz, Henryk 275 Sierra Leone 364 Sieveking, Anna 408 Silesia 82, 135, 184, 438, 453, 460 Sillon, le 118 singing, congregational 286, 288, 292 – 93 Singulari Nos (1834) 105 slavery 96, 152, 321, 363 – 64, 366, 369 – 70, 377 Smiles, Samuel 91 Smith, William Robertson 198 – 99 social Catholicism 109, 392, 394, 437 social Christianity 81, 98 social inequality 143, 382 social insurance 392, 395, 399 social policy 9, 94 – 100, 105, 118, 135, 342, 348, 381, 383, 386, 388 – 89, 392 – 93, 395, 397, 399 – 400, 412 – 13, 420. See also public assistance social thought 381, 397 socialism 7, 25, 67, 83, 90, 108 – 9, 133, 144 – 45, 147, 149 – 50, 152 – 56, 159, 187, 197, 280, 333, 354, 381, 391 – 92, 394, 398 – 99, 414, 423, 427, 430 – 31, 433, 438, 440 – Christian 98, 313, 333, 343 Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews 92, 407 Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia (OPE) 68

Index

Society for the Promotion of the True Doctrine and True Godliness 406 Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge 405 Society for the Propagation of the Faith 409 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel at Home 407 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts 363, 405 Society of Catholic Italian Youth 415 Society of Saint Cecilia 287 – 88, 412 Society of Saint Charles Borromeo 221, 409 Society of Saint Vincent de Paul 109, 134, 391, 409, 415 Söderblom, Nathan 98 Sofia 19, 44 – 45, 234, 247, 437 Solesmes (chant) 118, 288 – 89, 292, 295 Sonderbund War 85, 87, 207, 453 songs 93, 208, 210, 217, 271, 275, 286 – 87, 296, 299, 430 Soubirous, Bernadette 116 – 17, 123, 138 space (architecture) 230 – 31, 251, 255 – 56, 260 – 63 Spain 35 – 36, 73, 108, 114, 126 – 27, 130 – 33, 135, 149, 172, 180, 182 – 83, 211, 216 – 17, 353, 361, 391, 394, 415, 424, 428, 432, 448 – 51, 454, 456 – 57, 459 speech, impassioned 286 – 87, 297 Spencer, Herbert 286 – 87, 297 – 98 Spener, Philipp Jakob 91 Sperber, Jonathan 116, 420 spirituality 4, 8, 67, 128, 134, 156, 217, 243, 280, 293, 309, 342, 345, 367, 393 Spittler, Ludwig Timotheus von 193 Spontini, Gaspare 293 Spurgeon, Charles 177 – 78 Staël, Germaine de 88 Stafford, William 295 Stahl, Friedrich Julius 460 Stanislaw (Saint) 138 startsy 26, 131 Stefanoni, Luigi 150 Steinkopf, Carl Friedrich Adolf 406 – 7 Sterne, Lawrence 269 Stevens, Wallace 281 stigmata 126 – 27 Stockholm 96, 98, 417 Stoecker, Adolf 98 Strasbourg 85, 96, 183, 216, 233, 241 – 43, 256, 260, 262 – 63, 409, 411, 419

483

Strauss, David Friedrich 88, 111, 198, 270, 319 Stravinsky, Igor 297 Subsidiarity 398 Sufism 38, 40, 54, 131, 213. See also brotherhood, mystical; Bektashi; Halveti networks; Melami networks; Naqshbandi networks; tekkes Sulpicians 176 sultans 18, 35, 40, 42, 45 – 46, 48, 52 – 54, 74, 235, 263, 361, 370, 436, 451 – 52 Sulzer, Salomon 66, 289, 294 Sunday schools 96, 172, 210 – 11, 348, 390, 406, 420 Sundt, Eilert 387 Suringar, Willem Hendrik 390 Sweden 82 – 83, 89, 92, 96, 129, 153, 171, 177, 182, 211, 252, 394 – 95, 406, 426, 432, 448, 456 – 57, 459, 461, 464 Switzerland 85, 87, 89, 93, 95 – 96, 172, 176, 207, 219, 278, 390, 396, 411 – 12, 415, 419 – 20, 425 – 26, 431 – 33, 440, 448 – 49, 453, 462 Syllabus of Errors (Syllabus errorum, 1864) 106, 150, 202, 454 symbolism (art) 330 – 32, 337 symphonies 285 – 86, 290 – 92, 298 symphonia 384 – 85, 393, 435 synagogues 59, 62, 64, 70 – 72, 74, 137, 171, 218, 222, 231 – 33, 235 – 38, 243, 247 – 54, 256 – 59, 261 – 63, 263, 289, 348, 382, 404 – 5, 412, 418, 420 Synod, Holy 22, 24, 179, 182, 410, 416, 448 Talmud 63, 68, 75, 131, 179, 222 talmud torah 68, 72, 74, 172, 409 Tanzimat reforms 46, 73, 462 tarikats. See brotherhoods, mystical Tatars 35 – 36, 49, 55, 184 Tauride Directorate 38 Taylor, Charles 132 tekkes 38 – 41, 52 – 54 Temo, Ibrahim 46 Test Acts (Great Britain) 84, 459 theology 8, 84, 152, 169, 180, 185, 189 – 91, 204, 210, 216, 283, 291, 293, 345 – Catholic 103, 110 – 11, 115, 178, 184, 191, 202, 287, 353, 434 – Eastern Orthodox 19, 26, 178, 202 – 3 – Islamic 49 – Jewish 198 (see also Wissenschaft des Judentums) – natural 272

484

Index

– Protestant 84, 87 – 89, 100, 175, 177 – 78, 192 – 202, 347, 383 Thessaly 36, 42 – 43 Tholuck, Friedrich August Gottreu 200 Thompson, Edward P. 91 Tiele, Cornelis Petrus 89 Tillich, Paul 201 Tinos Island 19, 30 tkhines 64, 171 Tocqueville, Alexis de 88 toleration 83, 230, 233, 248, 361, 404, 459, 461 – 62 Tolstoy, Leo 161, 280 Ton, Konstantin 244 Tonic Sol-fa 286, 295 – 96 Toniolo, Guiseppe 392 Töpffer, Rodolphe 94 Torah 63 – 66, 68, 71 – 72, 76, 170 – 71, 179, 222, 258 – 59, 382 tourism 123, 264, 314 – 15 Tractarianism. See Oxford Movement trade unions 118, 387, 392, 414 – Christian 2, 98, 414, 424 Transylvania 85 travel 26, 29 – 30, 47, 116, 222, 314, 316, 361, 369, 371, 376, 380 Treaty of Berlin (1878) 41 Trier 115 – 117, 127 Troeltsch, Ernst 81, 87, 90, 198, 201 – 2 Trollope, Anthony 94 Tübinger Stift 178 türbes 39, 52 Turgenev, Ivan 270 Turkey, Republic of 55 Turner, Joseph Mallord William 310 – 11 Tuscany 450, 463 two kingdoms doctrine 82 Tyrol 125, 127 Tyrrell, George 202 tzaddik 67 Tzatzoe, Jan 366 Ukraine 15, 21, 67, 131, 428 – 29, 434, 464 ulama 37, 40, 44 – 45, 50 – 51, 186 ultramontanism 103 – 5, 108 – 11, 115 – 18, 120, 123, 147, 305, 308, 314, 345, 352 – 55, 367, 442, 449, 454 unbelief 7, 143, 145, 155, 159, 161 – 62 Uniate Christians 17, 113, 233 Union chrétienne, L’ 25

Universal Exposition (1900) 334 Universities Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) 369 universities 88 – 89, 112, 176, 191 – 96, 198 – 99, 201 – 2, 370, 456, 458 – 59 – Berlin 8, 180, 194, 199, 202 – Cambridge 84, 190, 450 – Halle 192, 194 – Leuven/Louvain 178, 191, 202 – Oxford 84, 190, 187, 450 – Tübingen 89, 110, 178, 192, 196, 198, 200 – Vienna 178 Uppsala 89 urbanization 25, 114, 133, 136, 143, 260 – 61, 346, 381, 411, 417 Urlsperger, Johann 406 Vatican Council, First 103 – 4, 106 – 7, 151, 287 Vaudoyer, Léon 256 Velichovsky, Paisy (Saint) 26 verzuilung. See pillarization Veuillot, Louis 120, 123 Vicent, Antonio 392 Vienna 35, 60, 66 – 67, 230 – 31, 233, 238 – 39, 249, 253 – 255, 258 – 59, 262, 264, 289, 292, 408 Viennese Secession 253 Villermé, Louis-René 387 Villers, Charles de 81, 88 Vilnius 177, 246, 440 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène 197, 237 Virchow, Rudolf 454 vocation 90, 218, 345 – 47, 350, 352, 355 Vogelsang, Karl von 392 Volksverein für das katholische Deutschland 118, 354, 413, 419 Voltaire 17, 86, 115, 123, 144, 269 voluntarism, religious 404 – 5, 410, 415 – 17, 420 voluntary associations 403 – 5, 408 – 411, 414 – 15, 417 – 18, 420 – 21, 464 Wackenroder, Wilhelm 309 Wagner, Otto 249, 253, 255 Wagner, Richard 1, 276, 294 Waitaingi, Treaty of 366, 375 Wakefield, Edward Gibbon 366 Waldensians 85 Wales 83, 92, 130, 232, 395, 426 Wallace, Lew 275 Wallachia 27, 36, 75, 436 Walpole, Horace 270 wandering Jew 270, 320 – 21, 323

485

Index

waqfs 38 – 40, 42 – 45, 50 Ward, Elisabeth 274 Wars of the Vendée 113, 125 Warsaw 136, 149, 176, 222, 230, 235, 246, 248, 262 – 63 Watts, Isaac 93 Weber, Max 3, 81, 88, 90 – 91, 273, 282 – 84, 417 Weiss, Johannes 198 welfare state 96, 396, 399 welfare, mixed economy of 398 Wells, H. G. 290 Welsh Revival 92 Wesley, Charles, junior 292 Wesley, John 91, 257, 362 Wessely, Napthali Herz 75 West London Synagogue 71, 259, 289 West, Benjamin 308 Westphalia 127, 288, 407 – 8, 459 White Fathers. See missionary societies Whitefield, George 91 Wichern, Johann Hinrich 97 – 98, 197, 391, 411 Wiegmann, Rudolf 241 Wilberforce, William 91, 96, 364, 407 Wilde, Oscar 332 Wilhelmsstift. See Tübinger Stift Willem I (Netherlands) 126 Williams, George 411

Wissenschaft des Judentums 63, 157, 198, 438 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 281 Wöllner, Johann Christoph 193 Wordsworth, William 271 working class 36, 91, 96 – 98, 109, 114, 130, 134, 155, 157, 172, 181, 207, 220 – 21, 262, 313, 333, 349, 377, 381, 386 – 87, 390, 406 – 8, 410, 414, 416, 420, 423, 430 – 32, 437, 440 Wrangel, Carl Magnus 406 Württemberg 95, 178, 192, 251, 407, 419, 423 Yeats, W. B. 281 yeshivot 68, 73, 179, 222 Young Men’s Christian Society (YMCA) 215, 411 – 12, 414, 419 Young Ottomans 46 – 48 Young Turks 49, 53 – 54 youth clubs 415 – 16

5, 96, 133,

Zaydan, Jurij 274 – 75 Zezos, Demetrios 247 Zinzendorf, Nikolaus Ludwig von 91, 362 Zionism 61, 68, 73, 73, 77, 343, 438 – 40 Zionist Congress, First 440 Zola, Émile 221, 279 – 80 Zurich 85, 89, 177 Zwingli, Huldrych 85