Served Tsar Peter the Great, Jacobite, left many sons and kinsmen in Russia.

Walter Sharp 1752

Malcolm Sinclair 1709

George Skene 1617

Albert Stewart 1678

Gile Stewart 1632

Neill Stewart 1739

William Stewart 1610**

John Stranack 1770s

(Freemason)

 

The Religions of Scotland:

Did Presbyterianism Have

Crypto-Jewish Origins?

 

 

This book began with a provocative idea: Scotland is, or was, Jewish. The previous

chapters have explored the Jewish ancestry and culture of some of Scotland’s leading fam-

ilies and much of her population. We now present an equally unlikely thesis, which we

nonetheless believe is correct: that the origins of the Protestant Reformation and espe-

cially the particular form it took in Scotland — Presbyterianism —also lie in Judaic

influences. Both authors of this investigation were not only told growing up that we were

of Scottish origin, but we were also raised in the Protestant faith. Just as we subsequently

discovered that our “Scottish” roots were not Celtic, but Sephardic and French Jewish,

so also were we led to question the traditional origins of Scottish Protestantism.

 

As was the case with us, most readers probably “learned” that Scotland began as a

pagan country, Druidic, worshiping nature and the sun. And then, around 560 C.E. St.

Columba (Columcille, born around 521, died 597) 1 arrived from Ireland, established the

first Christian monastery at Iona and began converting the surrounding countryside to

Christianity. Ostensibly, the entire land was then won over to Roman Catholicism and

remained loyal to that form of Christianity until John Knox and other reformers led

Scotland to Protestantism in the 1560s.

 

As we saw in chapter 1, however, the actual history of religion in Scotland is much

more equivocal and unsettled. Modern-day pilgrims who visit “St. Columba’s abbey

church” on the remote island of Iona to revel in its Celtic past usually do not stop to

think that the cruciform structure actually dates from the ninth century, four hundred

years after Columba lived, and was built as a monument to mark the triumph of Roman

Catholicism over the Celtic religion, which was then consigned to oblivion. There are

very few artifacts preserved of the original Celtic church, and almost no texts that have

not been overlaid with subsequent (and suspect) traditions of orthodoxy. The oldest

authentic symbols that can be tied to the Columban church occur on the Monymusk reli-

quary, which lacks any depiction of a cross, Chi-Ro, or other Christian iconography,

exhibiting only a zoomorphic form of decoration similar to that of the surrounding

“pagan” population.

 

Indeed, Donald Meek, professor of Celtic Studies at the University of Aberdeen, has

suggested that the great bulk of what we think we know about the Celtic church is a

romantic construction, the creation of poets like the eighteenth-century “Ossian” and,

more recently, of “feel-good Celticists” and New Age enthusiasts (2000, chapters 1-6).

 

Moreover, the term “Celtic” lay dormant from antiquity until it was revived by the

humanist George Buchanan, the tutor to Mary Queen of Scots and later to her son, the

future James I of England (Atherton 2002, pp. 24-28). The label itself is a misconcep-

tion, and recent critics have even withdrawn the use of the word “church” from the phrase

“Celtic church” on the grounds that it implies a hierarchy and organization that never

existed (pp. 51-52).

 

There are glimmers of Judaism as a precursor and companion to Christianity in the

British Isles. Deansley (1963) notes that the earliest Roman-era saints were named Alban,

Aaron and Julius, though they do not appear in official martyrologies (p. 6), while we

have remarked previously on the unique status of Wales’s St. David. We have also seen

that the earliest saint of the Irish church, Ninyas, was perhaps so named because he came,

via Gaul, from Ninevah in the Middle East. There is some evidence of relations with

Mediterranean Greeks, Jews and Syrians in the Roman period, increasingly so in the sixth

century and later. Moreover, the greatest point of difference between the old-style “Celtic”

monks and those of Anglo-Saxon England revolved around the celebration of Easter: the

Scots “reckoning like Jews... [even though] they knew that Christians always celebrate

the Resurrection on the first day of the week” (p. 85). The Scots and “northern Irish” long

clung to their custom of celebrating Easter (Latin Paschua, “Passover”) on the same day

as Jews, even after the Synod of Whitby attempted to settle the controversy in 664 C.E.

(pp. 85-90). Finally, we should raise the possibility that the second point of divergence

often emphasized by scholars, the “Celtic” tonsure in which the front of the head, rather

than top, was shaved, may have been inspired by a literal adherence to the injunction of

the Torah to signal one’s Jewish identity to other nations by ensuring that the Shema

(creed) and Commandments “serve as a symbol (frontlet) on your forehead” (Ex. 6: 8).

This peculiar badge of faith and ethnicity also persisted in Scotland, down to the age of

the Templars, and nowhere else in all of Christendom. 2

 

As for the underlying paganism that both Judaism and Christianity fought, forms

of nature worship such as the Green Man fertility cult can be found in castles and kirks

across Scotland. Indeed, paganism died a hard, slow death in Celtic lands, which devel-

oped a religious identity of their own and often proved immune to the militant Chris-

tianity on the continent, according to Jones and Pennick (1995, pp. 96-110):

 

In Wales, Scotland, Ireland and Brittany, the old gods, worshipped sometimes under the

guise of Celtic saints (i.e. those not canonized by the Pope), were revered in truly Pagan

fashion.... In 1589, John Ansers reported that bullocks were sacrificed “the half to God and to

Beino” in the churchyard at Clynog, Lleyn, Wales.... Such cattle were... sold for slaughter by

the churchwarden on Trinity Sunday. The custom fell into disuse in the nineteenth cen-

tury.... Pagan observances continue in the twentieth century in Celtic countries. A Pagan

prayer, collected around 1910 by W.Y. Evans- Wentz from an old Manx woman, invokes the

Celtic god of the sea.... In the Scottish Highlands, libations of milk are poured on a special

hollowed stone... in honour of the Gruagach, a goddess who watches over the cows.... Until

modern times in Iona similar libations were poured to a god corresponding to Neptune....

 

Paganism flourished in Scotland after the break-up of the Catholic Church. In the region

of Gaerloch, Wester Ross, the “old rites” of the divinity Mhor-Ri, the Great King, trans-

formed into St Maree, Mourie or Maelrubha, were observed until the nineteenth century. In

1656, the Dingwall Presbytery, “findeing amongst uther abhominable and heathenishe prac-

tices, that the people in that place were accustomed to sacrifice bulls at a certaine tyme upon

the 25 of August, which day is dedicate, as they conceive, to St Mourie, as they call him...

and withal their adoring of wells and uther superstitious monuments and stones, ” attempted

to suppress the observances of Mhor-Ri, which, according to the Presbytery Records, Ding-

wall, included “sacrificing at certain times at the Loch of Mourie... quherein [wherein] ar

monuments of Idolatrie, ” also “pouring of milk upon hills as oblationes.” Strangers and

“thease that comes from forren countreyes” participated in the “old rites” of Mhor-Ri.

 

The attempted suppression failed. Twenty years later, in 1678, members of the Mackenzie

clan were summoned by the Church at Dingwall for “sacrificing a bull in ane heathenish

manner.”... In 1699, a man was arraigned before the Kirk Sessions at Elgin, Morayshire,

charged with idolatry.

 

Such belated eradication of idolatry, much of it rooted in Roman, pre-Roman, and matri-

archal Middle Eastern customs such as the worship of the Triple Goddess (Graves 1975),

speaks to Scotland’s general record of religious tolerance, as well as to the diversity and

amalgamation of its religions over the course of centuries.

 

When Malcom Canmore, the Scottish king, and his Hungarian-born consort, Mar-

garet, were married in 1069, the ceremony was performed by a Culdee, 3 or Celtic, priest,

named Fothad. The Celtic church had its own priests and religious practices, which, as

we discussed in chapter 1, corresponded more closely to Judaic customs and beliefs than

to the Roman rite. Culdean priests continued to officiate in Scotland at most churches

well into the 1200s (Howie 1981, pp. 4-8), at which time, we maintain, a large contin-

gent of Crypto-Jewish aristocrats, nobles, merchants and tradespeople dwelt in Scotland

and were “alive and well.”

 

There is evidence to show that some of the houses of worship even after 1200 were

staffed by Jewish or Crypto-Jewish personnel. The list below shows known priors for

Inchmaholme Abbey in south central Scotland. The list is incomplete; notably, it has

gaps caused by the destruction of records in the age of iconoclasm under the Tudor kings.

But take a look at the names that do survive. The first prior was named Adam (1296), a

Hebrew name rather than a saint’s name or one coming from the New Testament; the

second was named Maurice, a common French Jewish version of Moses. From 1419 to

1469 we find surnames listed in the French, or Norman, style (e.g., de Port). A second

Maurice/Moses appears in 1445, a Gilbert de Camera (Sephardic) in 1450-1469, and a

David Noble (Nobel, also French Jewish), in 1468.

 

 

A List of Known Priors of Inchmaholme Abbey

 

The known bishops and archbishops of St. Andrews Cathedral, where several Tem-

plar tombs and the famous David sarcophagus were found, appear below. Among them

we see a series of Chuldee/Celtic religious leaders: Maeldwin, Tuthald, Fothad, Turgon,

a gap, then a Robert, an Arnold, a Richard, a John Scot, and another Roger. But in 1202

something very interesting happens: William Malvoisin (1202-1238) succeeds, and his

surname is French. He is followed by David de Bernham (with a Hebrew given name),

Abel de Colin (Hebrew again), Gamelin (Hebrew), a Wishart, a Fraser (Crypto- Jewish

family), and, in 1328-1332, James Ben (Jewish surname). In 1478-1497, for nearly 20

years, the see was ruled by William Scheves (Jewish surname). He was followed by sev-

eral Stewarts, Beatons, a Douglas, and an Adamson. With the arrival of the Reformation,

we find a George Gledstanes (Gladstone, often Jewish). The Spottswood family, which

follows, included more than one physician and had ties to Morocco; a lieutenant gover-

nor of Virginia of the same name settled countless of his countrymen and co-religion-

ists in that colony to explore for precious metals and develop trade and industry. 4

 

 

Bishops and Archbishops of St. Andrews

 

 

Maeldwin

? c. 1028-1055

Tuthald

? 1055

Fothad

 

c. 1070-1093

Turgot

c. 1107-1115

Robert

1123-1159

Arnold

1160-1162

Richard

1163-1178

John Scot

1178-1188

Roger

1189-1202

William Malvoisin

1202-1238

David de Bernham

1239-1253

Abel de Golin

1254

Gamelin

 

1255-1271

 

William Wishart

 

1271-1279

 

William Fraser

 

1279-1297

 

William Lamberton

 

1297-1328

 

James Ben

 

1328-1332

 

William Landallis

 

1342-1385

 

William Trail

 

1385-1401

 

Henry Wardlaw

 

1403-1440

 

James Kennedy

 

1440-1465

 

Patrick Graham (archbishop 1472)

 

1465-1478

 

William Scheves

 

1478-1497

 

James Stewart

 

1497-1504

 

Andrew Forman

 

1514-1521

 

James Beaton

 

1521-1539

 

David Beaton

 

1539-1546

 

John Hamilton

 

1546-1571

 

John Douglas

 

1571-1574

 

Patrick Adamson

 

1575-1592

 

George Gledstanes

 

1604-1615

 

John Spottiswood

 

1615-1638

 

James Sharp

 

1661-1679

 

Alexander Burnet

 

1679-1684

 

Arthur Ross

 

1684-1689

 

 

Equally remarkable are the names of the bishops of Dunblane Cathedral, situated

just above Stirling. We find the usual early entries of Culdee/Celtic names (S. Blane,

Colum), but then, incongruously, a Daniel appears in 640-659, followed by a Ronan

(689-737), a Maelmanach (possibly Aramaic or Arabic, 737-776) and Noe (Portuguese

Sephardic, 776-790). A large 300-year-plus hiatus occurs next, when the list resumes with

 

a Lawrence (French) succeeded, remarkably, by a Symon (Hebrew), a W, a

 

Jonathan (Hebrew), and an Abraham (1212-1225). The latter would certainly seem to be

Jewish, and he served for 13 years.

 

Bishops and Ministers of Dunblane Cathedral

 

 

S. Blane

602-?

Colum

640

Daniel

640-659

Iolan

659-689

S. Ronan

689-737

Maelmanach

737-776

Noe

776-798

M?

1155—?

Lawrence

1160-1178

Symon

1178-1196

 

W?

 

1196-1197

 

Jonathan

 

1198-1210

 

Abraham

 

1212-1225

 

Ralph

 

1225-1226

 

Osbert

 

1227-1230

 

St. Clement

 

1233-1258

 

Robert de Prebenda

 

1258-1284

 

William

 

1284-1296

 

Alpin

 

1296-1300

 

Nicolas

 

1301-1307

 

Nicolas de Balmyle

 

1307-1319

 

Maurice

 

1322-1347

 

William

 

1347-1361

 

Walter de Coventre

 

1361-1371

 

Andrew

 

1312-1380

 

Dougal

 

1380-1403

 

Finlay Dermoch

 

1403-1419

 

William Stephan

 

1419-1429

 

Michael Ochiltree

 

1429-1447

 

Robert Lawder

 

1447-1466

 

John Hepburn

 

1466-1486

 

James Chisholm

 

1487-1526

 

William Chisholm

 

1526-1564

 

William Chisholm

 

1561-1573

 

Robert Pont (du Pont)

 

1562

 

Thomas Drummond

 

1564

 

Adam Bellenden

 

1615-1635

 

William Fogo 5

 

1619-1623

 

 

Keep in mind these patterns of office holding predate the enormous out-migration

of Iberian Jews due to the Inquisition. Indeed, religious scholars have pointed out that

it would be foolhardy to assume that the estimated 200, 000 Jews expelled from Spain and

Portugal after 1492, added to the millions of others who had already converted, genuinely

or not, to Catholicism, had no impact upon the religious practice in the countries to

which they migrated (see Lavender 2003, p. 1). How could they fail to have a rather large

one? They were well educated, in many cases more steeped in learning and better trained

in the professions than the Christian majority. They were multilingual, well traveled, and

socially active, often holding key positions in government, finance and civil administra-

tion. (For instance, John Mossman was royal treasurer to James IV of Scotland, and an

architect-master mason named Moise Martyne designed the East Range facade of Falk-

land Palace for James V.) Their numbers included a high proportion of physicians, pro-

fessors, artists, philosophers, international traders, astronomers, manufacturers,

craftsmen, cartographers, ship builders, architects, bankers, brokers, metallurgists, jew-

elers, smiths, glaziers and chemists. Some moved in the upper ranks of society, becom-

ing counselors to kings and emperors, popes and princes; indeed, not a few had careers

within the Catholic Church (Gitlitz 2002, pp. 563-69).

 

In all these social roles, their private religious beliefs must have influenced their dis-

course, actions and counsel. Lavender (2003), who recently uncovered the Sephardic

ancestry behind his family’s French Huguenot roots in Charleston, S.C., draws attention

to the fact that the Huguenot Seal of 1559 has the same four Cabalistic Hebrew letters,

YHVH (the Tetragrammaton), 6 engraved upon it — within a burning bush, no less— as

we found emblazoned on the title page of the Edward Raban psalter in Aberdeen in 1623.

Many of the Huguenots were formerly Jews and Moors (Roth 1932), and in France, the

persecution of Jews and Huguenots went hand in hand. The King’s dragonnards came

after both with equal ferocity, and often the same legislation was used to condemn them

 

This headstone from the Dunblane Cathedral cemetery has a Judaic Ten Commandments motif.

Photograph by Elizabeth Caldwell Hirschman.

 

This headstone, also from Dunblane Cathedral cemetery, displays the Judaic dove and olive branch

symbol. Photograph by Elizabeth Caldwell Hirschman.

 

in the courts and seize their assets. Could it not be more than merely fortuitous that the

Protestant Reformation sprang from those very countries to which Sephardim fled —

France, Switzerland, Germany, Holland, England and Scotland?

 

Remarking on the main difference between the Reformation in Scotland and in

England, M’Gavin wrote:

 

England... retained many of the ceremonies, the habits, and almost all the frame-work, of the

previous [Catholic] establishment. In Scotland, these were generally swept away; and an order

was established, simple and unostentatious, having more of a spiritual kingdom, and much

less of the splendour of this world, than our neighbour in the south [Howie 1981, p. xi].

 

Curiously, few scholars have actively pursued this angle of investigation in explor-

ing the origins of Protestantism. We suspect it is for the same reasons Scottish history is

normally told as a monothematic battle for independence from the British “elephant”

that one popular writer finds himself “in bed with” (Kennedy 1995) — told with such par-

tisan zeal, in fact, that “Scots” and “Scottish” come to be defined only as a counterfoil to

“British, ” eclipsing all other strains of nationality and culture that went into the making

of modern Scotland. We propose that the Reformation, beyond being a movement against

Catholicism, should also be seen as a movement toward Judaism.

 

 

John Calvin/Cauvin (1509-1564)

 

John (Jean) Calvin was born in 1509 in Picardy, France; the family name was per-

haps actually Cauvin. John’s father, Gerard, was employed as an attorney by the Lord of

Noyon. Of John’s youth we know only that he served the noble family of deMontmor and

studied for the priesthood. In early adulthood, Calvin moved to Paris, where he became

friends with the two sons of the French king’s physician. Given their surname and their

father’s occupation, Nicholas and Michael Cop were likely of Crypto-Jewish descent.

Calvin’s father persuaded him to abandon training for an ecclesiastical career and instead

pursue an education in the law. However, in 1529 Calvin decided instead to seek an edu-

cation in the humanities under scholar Andrea Aciate 8 in Bourges, France. Calvin was

joined there by a friend from Orleans, Melchior Wolmar. Wolmar instructed Calvin in

Greek and later in Paris, Calvin became proficient in Hebrew, as well.

 

From 1532 to 1534, Calvin experienced a religious epiphany, turning to Protes-

tantism. Concurrently, his friend Nicolas Cop was elected rector of the University of

Paris. Calvin helped prepare Cop’s inaugural address which was strongly Protestant in

tone. As a result, Cop was ordered to appear before the Parisian Parliament, but fled

instead to Basel, Switzerland — a Protestant stronghold.

 

At the time, a war was in progress between Francis I and Charles V, so Calvin was

forced to make his own way to Switzerland through Geneva. In Geneva, William Farel 9

(bearing a Sephardic surname), founder of the Reformed Church in Geneva, convinced

Calvin to stay and help preach the new Protestant theology. Calvin obliged and set up

several Protestant religious schools in the city.

 

However, theology within the new Protestant movement was in flux; a diversity of

theological positions was present even from the earliest days, perhaps due to the desire

to overthrow the strict orthodoxy of the Catholic doctrine. Thus Calvin’s views were

shared by some but not by all Reform theologians of the time period. Calvin next moved

on to Strasbourg where he married a widow, Idelette de Burre, in 1540. He continued to

preach, write and teach in Strasbourg, establishing himself as one of the prime movers

of the new theology.

 

From this capsule biography we learn that Calvin’s father was an attorney in Picardy,

which contained at the time a flourishing Marrano colony. 10 Obviously his father was lit-

erate and well-educated; he was also an advisor to nobility— common traits of Crypto-

Jews. Gerard Cauvin was clearly ambitious for his son, guiding his career with an eye

toward social and economic advancement. He was not a force of Catholic religious fer-

vor or conventional piety.

 

We read also that John chose to learn both Greek and Hebrew, languages which

would have permitted him to read the Old Testament (i.e. Torah) in its original ancient

form, rather than relying upon Christian translations into Latin. We perceive as well that

he favored universal literacy, a Judaic value, that two of his closest friends, Cop and Farel,

both had Sephardic surnames, and that he married a woman named Idelette de Bure, evi-

dently of possible Sephardic descent. A surviving sketch of John Calvin shows him with

leather head covering, full beard and dark features. While we do not presume to judge

the sincerity or Christian orientation of his beliefs, we do hold that he was of Crypto-

Jewish descent, that he moved in circles that included Marranos, and that his theology

would naturally have been influenced by these ancestral and communal ties.

 

 

John Knox (1513/14? to 1572)

 

Details of John Knox’s childhood and even his birth date are unknown. Historians

believe he was born around 1513 or 1514 in Haddington, Scotland. It is known that Knox

attended a university, but unknown whether it was St Andrews or the University of Glas-

gow. 12 It appears unlikely that Knox graduated, choosing instead to take up the priest-

hood as a career around 1540. By the early 1540s he was serving as a theological lecturer

and by 1545 had come under the influence of George Wishart, a Lutheran-oriented min-

ister.

 

In March 1546, Catholic Cardinal Beaton ordered Wishart burned at the stake for

heresy and Scotland entered the bloody throes of the Reformation. The Cardinal him-

self was killed by an angry mob of Protestants, among them John Knox, who stormed

his castle at St. Andrews.

 

The Protestant radicals were soon defeated, however, and Knox was sent in chains

to serve as a galley slave in France for 19 months. When pro-Protestant King Edward VI

of England obtained his release, Knox made his way back to the Scottish borders, serv-

ing as a royal minister in Berwick and New Castle. Sickly Edward soon died, however,

bringing the staunchly Catholic Mary Tudor (“Bloody Mary”) to the throne of England.

Knox fled to Europe, first to Frankfurt, Germany, and then on to Geneva, Switzerland,

where he joined forces with John Calvin and also assisted in the translation of the Bible

from Latin to English, resulting in the Geneva Bible. It was also in Geneva that Knox

wrote the tract “Faithful Admonition” (1554) which advocated the violent overthrow of

“godless rulers” by the populace. He became pastor of the English Reformed Church in

Geneva (1556-1558) and subsequently published his tract “First Blast of the Trumpet

against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, ” which attacked the policies and right to

rule of Catholic monarchs Mary of Guise (Scotland) and Mary Tudor (England).

 

In 1557, several Protestant Scottish noblemen, including James Stewart, the Earl of

Moray (see chapter 1), signed a covenant declaring Protestantism the national religion of

Scotland. Knox had been in correspondence with them and returned to Scotland at their

request in May 1559. With Knox’s leadership, the Scottish Parliament declared itself a

Protestant nation and adopted the “Scots Confession”; Catholicism was banned from

Scotland.

 

In 1560, a general assembly was held to assist the reformation of the Scottish church.

By 1561, the “Book of Discipline” was adopted by the Scottish Parliament, placing Calvin-

ist Presbyterian structure at the center of church governance. In this treatise, Knox out-

lined a system of education and welfare covering the entire Scottish population that was

to be financed by the sale of former Catholic properties. 13 Knox also re-designed the con-

tent of the worship service itself, determining that all rites and practices must be based

in scripture.

 

To go a little more deeply into Knox’s theology, let us have a look at the recent biog-

raphy by Rosalind Marshall (2000). While Marshall never doubts that Knox was a whole-

hearted Christian, she characterizes him as modeled largely after the Old Testament

prophets. In her narrative, Knox emerges as a Biblical purist, much like the Jewish

Karaites. He believed that the Bible was the word of God and that only the scriptures

should serve as a religious guide. Among his favorite texts were the Book of Daniel,

Psalms (especially Psalm 6), Exodus and passages describing David and Moses. He was

virulently anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish, viewing both Mary Stuart Queen of Scots and

Queen Mary of England as “idolatrous harlots” and “Jezebels.” He advocated that “God

should send ajehu to slay Mary Stuart.” 14 He once threw a painting of the Virgin Mary

into the river saying (p. 25), “Such an idol is accursed and therefore I will not touch it.”

 

He railed against women as monarchs, especially Mary of England, stating that under

her rule the English were “compelled to bow their necks under the yoke of Satan and of

his proud mistress, pestilent Papists and proud Spaniards” (Marshall 2000, p. 107). 15 His

exhortations to his congregants were likewise rooted in the Old Testament (p. 145). For

instance, he applied Psalm 80 (“Turn us again, O Lord God of Hosts, cause thy face to

shine and we shall be saved”) to current events, equating his present congregation to the

ancient Israelites.

 

Knox also urged the adoption of Mosaic law as the governing rule of Scotland. Under

it, “certain crimes [including] murder, blasphemy, adultery, perjury and idolatry” (Mar-

shall 2000, p. 67) would be punishable by death. He further proposed that Scotland cre-

ate a universal system of education so that every individual in the population would be

literate and able to read the scriptures; he also envisaged a universal charity system to care

for the indigent, ill and disabled. All three of these concepts are rooted in Judaic tradi-

tion, not in Christianity. Knox described the resulting society as one in which events on

Earth would mirror those in Heaven— a metaphor which Marshall attributes to St. Augus-

 

tine, but which could just as easily, and more immediately, be derived from the Cabalis-

tic tradition in France. In Knox’s view, Scotland was “a new Israel dedicated to uphold-

ing God’s law” (Smout 1969).

 

By 1656 the Scottish Parliament had institutionalized Sabbatarianism, “forbidding

anyone to frequent taverns, dance, hear profane music, wash, brew ale or bake bread,

profanely walk or travel or do any other worldly business” on the Sabbath (Smout, p.

79). Also forbidden on the Sabbath were “carrying in water or casting out ashes, ” a pro-

vision that had been in effect in Aberdeen as early as 1603, according to Smout (p. 79).

These restrictions echo in remarkable detail the Jewish mitzvoth regarding the keeping

of the Sabbath (Gitlitz 2003, pp. 317-354).

 

Knox also developed very detailed guidelines for the religious training of ministers.

“Trainee ministers would study not only theology, but Hebrew, mathematics, physics,

economics, ethics, and moral philosophy” (Marshall 2000, p. 153), a curriculum that

appears to be patterned more on the Islamic and Jewish ideals emanating from Spain and

southern France than on any prior Christian educational scheme.

 

Knox advocated that every household have its members instructed in the principles

of the Reform religion, so they could sing the psalms at Sabbath services and hold house-

hold prayer services morning and evening in their homes (Marshall 2000, p. 153). Both

parents were to “instruct their children in God’s law” (p. 29); highly reminiscent of the

familial worship practices of Orthodox Jews. Virtually the only exceptions to the Judaic

nature of his religious ideology were the absence of dietary rules, or kashrut (for instance,

a prohibition of pork); and the requirement that males be circumcised.

 

Examining Knox’s family and friends helps shed some additional light on his think-

ing and sympathies. Among his most ardent supporters was Thomas Lever, formerly mas-

ter of St. Johns College in Cambridge and later a Protestant minister living in Zurich.

Lever is a surname of Semitic origin. Descendants of this same family afterwards immi-

grated to the American colonies and established the Lever Brothers Corporation; they

were practicing Jews. Also among the early Protestants in Frankfurt, Germany, with one

of the largest Jewish communities in Europe, were Thomas Parry (a common Sephardic

surname) and John Foxe (= Fuchs, an Ashkenazic surname). When Knox returned to

Scotland, he lodged in the house of a “well-known Protestant merchant, James Syme”

(Marshall 2000, p. 89), and had for his assistant another Scot, James Barron (both, of

course, are Sephardic surnames).

 

In 1652, Knox performed the wedding ceremony uniting Lord James Stewart and

Lady Agnes Keith, the former a man who was self-consciously of Jewish descent and the

latter a woman from an Aberdonian family that we have suggested was also of Jewish ori-

gin. Knox himself had married Marjorie Bowes (the surname Bovee is French Jewish),

and the couple named their two children Nathaniel and Eleazer, Old Testament Hebrew

names uncommon among Christians at the time. When Marjorie died in 1560, she gave

her sons her blessing, “praying that they would always be as true worshippers of God as

any that ever sprang out of Abraham’s loins” (Marshall 2000, p. 155) — a strange injunc-

tion for a Christian mother.

 

In 1564 Knox remarried at the age of 50 to Margaret Stewart, age 17, a member of

the royal Stewart family. Of course, because of its linking of a noblewoman with a com-

moner (especially one who had presided over Catholic Mary Stewart’s downfall), and

because of the pairing of a young woman with an elderly man, this marriage makes lit-

tle sense — unless it is viewed from a Judaic perspective. As Marshall (2000, p. 199)

explains, Knox was the “leading minister” in Scotland at that time. If we recognize Knox

as the Head Rabbi, then his marriage to a woman of the ruling house, and of Davidic

descent, makes imminent sense. 16

 

So, can we prove that either John Calvin or John Knox were of Marrano descent?

No. But we can sum up our case by pointing to the preponderance of the evidence, which

suggests that their ancestors were Jewish and that they, themselves, were aware of this. If

we are correct in this inference, then perhaps the ultimate irony is that the Spanish Inqui-

sition — intended to crush Judaism and send Spain’s Sephardim into ignominious exile —

actually had the opposite effect. The displaced Jews, like so many tiny floating seeds from

a milkweed pod, landed on fertile ground in Holland, France, Scotland, Germany, Switzer-

land, and England, where they grew into the Protestant Reformation.

 

 

Chapter 11

 

 

Jews in the National Consciousness

of Scotland: Scott’s Ivanhoe

 

Significantly, it was a Scottish lawyer and antiquary who fired the first salvo in the

public debate over Jews in Britain; this debate intensified with the Reform Movement in

national politics and eventually led to their emancipation in the 1830s. And just as

significantly, the Jews were Sephardic. 1 He was Sir Walter Scott, Edinburgh publisher,

national champion of Scots culture and author of the immensely popular Waverly nov-

els (1771-1832). It may be surprising to learn that the best-paid author in Britain in the

first decades of the nineteenth century was a Scotsman. 2 Scottish Border Minstrelsy, bal-

lads that Scott collected on journeys through his native Borders country, had catapulted

him to fame in 1802, and The Lay of the Last Minstrel sealed it. Now he turned to prose,

and with Waverly in 1814 he created a new literary genre, the historical novel, an inven-

tion that would inspire “Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, George Eliot,

Anthony Trollope and other accomplished Continental writers of nineteenth-century

literature, such as Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, and Tolstoy” (Herman 2001, pp. 309-310), not

to mention the American writers Irving, Hawthorne, Melville, Cooper, Twain, and Wal-

lace.

 

The debt author Washington Irving owed to Scott, and vice versa, is especially note-

worthy, for Scott’s Rebecca of York was apparently inspired by Rebecca Gratz, a member

of Philadelphia’s elite and widely regarded as the foremost American Jewess of her day

(1781-1869). 3 The story is told by Stephen Birmingham in The Grandees (1971, pp. 160-62):

 

A particularly close friend of Rebecca Gratz’s was Matilda Hoffman. It was in the office of

Matilda’s father, Judge Ogden Hoffman, that Washington Irving studied law, and presently

Miss Hoffman and Washington Irving became engaged. But before the pair could marry.

 

Miss Hoffman became ill with “wasting disease, ” a common affliction of the day, and

Rebecca went to live at the Hoffmans’ to help nurse her friend. Rebecca was there to close

Matilda’s eyes at the end.

 

The devotion of one young woman to another impressed Irving. When he went to

England to try to forget his sweetheart’s death, Rebecca Gratz and her kindness to Matilda

became almost an obsession with him.... One of the people he told the story to was Sir Wal-

ter Scott.... [W]hen Ivanhoe was published... Scott wrote Irving a letter saying...”How do

you like your Rebecca? Does the Rebecca I have pictured compare well with the pattern

given? ”

 

Thus a vivacious and emancipated Sephardic Jewish American served as the model for

Ivanhoe’s Rebecca, infusing contemporary meaning and life into the ancient tale.

 

It is counter-intuitive for many of us to realize that Scotland at that time was far

more literate and literary than England. In 1696, Scotland’s parliament had passed the

country’s progressive School Act calling for the establishment of a school in every parish

nationwide.

 

In 1790 nearly every eight-year-old in Cleish, Kinross-shire, could read, and read well. By one

estimate male literacy stood at around 55 percent, compared with only 53 percent in England.

It would not be until the 1880s that the English would finally catch up with their northern

neighbors. Scotland became Europe’s first modern literate society [Herman 2001, p. 23].

 

While intellectuals such as Adam Smith and David Hume held sway in the seats of

learning, townspeople flocked to public lectures at the universities and Scotland’s work-

ing classes read avidly. Patrons of lending libraries included bakers, blacksmiths, coop-

ers, dyer’s apprentices, farmers, stonemasons, tailors and servants (Herman, p. 23). “An

official national survey in 1795 showed that out of a total population of 1.5 million, nearly

twenty thousand Scots depended for their livelihood on writing and publishing — and

10, 500 on teaching” (p. 25). With its passion for education and high literacy rate (not

neglecting its mathematical counterpart, computational ability), Scotland was uniquely

prepared to inform the literary tastes of the masses and set the tone for public discourse.

No one was better positioned to lead the popular groundswell that blended nostalgia with

progressiveness than Sir Walter Scott, whose family came of the same background as the

Stewarts, Leslies, Frasers, and Campbells.

 

In 1819, Scott published the first of his novels in which he adopted a purely English

subject. 4 Ivanhoe introduced a set of characters based on a defining moment in English

history, the late twelfth century, and its protagonists and antagonists were all English,

from Richard Lionheart to Robin Hood. 5 Saxons and Jews represented the “other” in this

sweeping book about cultural conflict, while Scots were conspicuously absent. With its

pathos-laden figures of Rebecca the Jewess and her father Isaac, Ivanhoe attacked the

prevailing stereotypes of English history at a time when the experiment in government

called Great Britain was going through “a crisis of acculturation and assimilation...

[when] the fabrication of the (Scottish or Jewish or Irish) Briton through parliamentary

legislation led to a variety of reactions: the attempt by these minorities to reinvent them-

selves, or their rejection of their new identity, or their rejection by so-called true-born

Englishmen” (Ragussis 2000, p. 775). Moreover, in Ivanhoe’s climactic scene, “Scott

rewrites English history as Anglo-Jewish history” (Ragussis 1995, p. 113). Scott also accords

a central role to Templars in the national consciousness and sets his tale in York, about

as close to Scotland as one can get without being in the Borders. Did he know something?

 

A recent writer on collective memory and cultural “forgetting” has demonstrated

that ancestry, pedigrees, dynasties, genealogies and ethnic origins are social constructs.

Like time periods, these notions take shape through a process of collective cognition,

the organization of unrelated and discontinuous events into coherent and meaningful

narratives (Zerubavel 2003). Many people, for instance, conceive that the Roman Empire

ended in 476 C.E., even though its Eastern part, known as Byzantium, continued for

another thousand years. Nationalities are constructed around the genealogies of their

ruling families (Zerubavel, pp. 32-43). Sometimes the dynastic pedigrees have to be rein-

vented or refashioned, as was the case with Saxon England’s Norman invaders, who had

to be recast as British and Celtic in the historiography of Geoffrey of Monmouth and

William de Newbury. To take a modern example, the House of Saxe-Coburg 6 that occu-

pied the British throne was converted into the House of Windsor in short order at the

beginning of hostilities between Great Britain and the German Empire in 1914. A simi-

lar process erased the dynasty’s Scottish links under the Hanoverians in the eighteenth

century. In this spirit, we can appreciate Scott as one of the inventors of British culture.

Notably, it is a culture that includes Jews and is not born in London, the capital, but rather

in a northern province.

 

The city of York was long associated in the minds of Jew and non-Jew with the

pogrom that took place there in the year 1190, the precise timeframe of Scott’s Ivanhoe;

in the words of Joseph Jacobs, a pivotal year that brought “the first proof that the Jews

of England had of any popular ill-will against them” (1911, s.v. “London”). While King

Richard (a philosemite) was away at the Crusades, a number of local Crusaders under

Sir Richard Malebis seized the opportunity to erase their debts by murdering Jews. Those

who escaped took refuge in the King’s castle, where, inspired by one of their celebrated

poets, the visiting French rabbi Yom Tob of Joigny, they committed collective suicide (Bar-

navi 1992, p. 98). Before that disaster, York Jewry enjoyed a high degree of prosperity.

Unlike Jewish communities in the rest of England, there was no Jewish quarter in York;

rather, Jews lived betwixt and between the Christian inhabitants (Adler 1939, p. 132).

 

Knights, fair maidens in distress, bloodthirsty Templars who say things like “Back,

dog! ” and dark heroines whose “long silken eyelashes... a minstrel would have compared

to the evening star darting its rays through a bower of jessamine” (Scott 1988, p. 249)

are apparently no longer in the step of literary fashion. Though generations of Southern

belles and beaus may have been nursed on The Lady of the Lake, our local libraries could

not produce one copy of the works of the author credited with inventing historical

romance and reviving clans and tartans. Assuming our readers would face some of the

same difficulties, we will save them the trouble both of tracking down this classic and

actually reading it. We provide here a plot summary of Ivanhoe. We will then be able to

look at some of the scenes and characters which hark back to a time “when Scotland was

Jewish.”

 

Wilfred of Ivanhoe, son of Cedric, a noble Saxon, loves his father’s ward, the lady

Rowena, who also traces her descent to Saxon King Alfred. Cedric is intent on restoring

the Saxon line to the throne of England, now occupied by Norman King Richard the

Lionheart, and he hopes to accomplish this by marrying his daughter Rowena to Athel-

stane of Coningsburgh. He has banished his own son, Ivanhoe, who has joined King

Richard on the Crusades. In Richard’s absence, his brother Prince John rallies the law-

less, dissolute Norman vassals to his own cause, intending to depose Richard. Among the

knights in John’s party are the fierce Templar Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert and Sir Regi-

nald Front-de-Boeuf.

 

The story centers around two events. At a great tournament at Ashby de la Zouch,

Ivanhoe together with King Richard defeats the Templars, but is wounded. It is at this

point, more than halfway through the novel, that Scott introduces Rebecca the Jewess,

who will upstage Rowena as the love interest for both Saxons and Normans and become

the intrinsic heroine of the tale. The Templars carry off Cedric, Rowena, the wounded

Ivanhoe, Rebecca and her father Isaac to the castle of Torquilstone, where, after an excit-

ing assault by King Richard and a band of Saxon outlaws led by Locksley (Robin Hood),

the prisoners are rescued — all except for Rebecca, with whom Bois-Guilbert falls in love

and carries off to the Templar Preceptory of Templestowe.

 

We relate the rest of the story in the words of The Oxford Companion to English Lit-

erature (Drabble 1985, p. 499):

 

Here the unexpected arrival of the Grand Master of the order, while relieving Rebecca from

the dishonourable advances of Bois-Guilbert, exposes her to the charge of witchcraft, and

she escapes sentence of death only by demanding trial by combat. Ivanhoe, whose gratitude

she has earned by nursing him when wounded at the tournament of Ashby, appears as her

champion, and in the encounter between him and Bois-Guilbert (on whom has been thrust

the unwelcome duty of appearing as the accuser), the latter falls dead, untouched by his

opponent’s lance, the victim of his own contending passions. Ivanhoe and Rowena, 7 by the

intervention of Richard, are united; the more interesting Rebecca, suppressing her love for

Ivanhoe, leaves England [for Spain] with her father.

 

When the book first appeared in 1819, many criticized its author’s sense of history

as wrong-headed. He should not have pitted the indigenous Saxons against the Norman

invaders at so late a period, for by the twelfth century both peoples were well assimilated

with each other. There was no rear-guard Saxon resistance, and Robin Hood belonged

to another era entirely, the fourteenth century and later. Scott anticipated his detractors

with a mock dedicatory epistle humbly addressed to the lofty antiquary “the Reverend

Dr. Dryasdust” and back-dated to 1817. He also fitted later editions of Ivanhoe with a

long introduction, defending his theme and fictional mode of operation (p. vii):

 

The period of the narrative adopted was the reign of Richard I, not only as abounding with

characters whose very names were sure to attract general attention, but as affording a strik-

ing contrast betwixt the Saxons, by whom the soil was cultivated, and the Normans, who still

reigned in it as conquerors, reluctant to mix with the vanquished, or acknowledge them-

selves of the same stock.

 

It is clear then that Ivanhoe is about national identity and the ethnic “Other.” Lest

the point be lost, Scott has his author, in the plodding and subservient persona of Lau-

rence Templeton, apologize for deserting the easy fables of Scotland to venture into the

more treacherous ground of English myth-making:

 

In England civilization has been so long complete, that our ideas of our ancestors are only to

be gleaned from musty records and chronicles, the authors of which seem perversely to have

conspired to suppress in their narratives all interesting details, in order to find room for

flowers of monkish eloquence, or trite reflections upon morals. To match an English and a

Scottish author in the rival task of embodying and reviving the traditions of their respective

countries would be... in the highest degree unequal and unjust [p. xvii],

 

Scott, therefore, will tell the real story of English nationhood, which is not found in any

of the history books. His tale includes not only the noble yet “homely” Saxons along with

the merry band of Robin and his thieves, but also usurious Jews, good and bad Templars,

indifferent kings, and learned Jewesses.

 

Virginia Woolf remarked that there was more originality to Scott’s novels than met

the eye. “Part of their astonishing freshness, their perennial vitality, is that you may read

them over and over again, and never know for certain what Scott himself was or what

Scott himself thought” (Herman 2001, p. 310). The man himself was a bundle of para-

doxes, a Tory among the Whig heirs to the Scottish Enlightenment then getting their sec-

ond wind, a painstaking antiquarian and confirmed reactionary with a flare for modernity,

“the last minstrel” and first promoter of the Edinburgh municipal gas company. He called

himself “half-lawyer, half-sportsman... half crazy... half-everything” (p. 291).

 

Of all Scott’s ethnic types, it is Rebecca, a woman and a Jew, who is at once “most

Other, ” yet at the same time, the quintessential ingredient. When she sails away to Spain

at the end of the novel, suppressing her love at the moment of its requital by the hero Ivan-

hoe, we sense the departure of Jews from English shores and experience a void that can

only be filled with nostalgia, wonder and guilt. Scott’s readers did not like this ending:

 

The character of the fair Jewess found so much favour in the eyes of some [female] readers,

that the writer was censured because, when arranging the fates of the characters of the drama,

he had not assigned the hand of Wilfred to Rebecca, rather than the less interesting Rowena.

But, not to mention that the prejudices of the age rendered such a union almost impossible,

the Author may, in passing, observe, that he thinks a character of [such] a highly virtuous and

lofty stamp is degraded rather than exalted by an attempt to reward virtue with temporal

prosperity.... A glance on the great picture of life will show that the duties of self-denial, and

the sacrifice of passion to principle, are seldom thus remunerated [ Ivanhoe, pp. xiii-xiv].

 

It is interesting to see what kind of prejudice against Jews Scott thought his char-

acters and readers had. As we have already noticed, he reserves the appearance of Rebecca

until the middle of the book. Even then, her identity as a Jewess is hidden from the hero

until she declares herself. At first, recuperating from wounds after the battle with the

Templars, awaking from sleep, Wilfred looks upon the figure who attends his sick-bed

as a dream from Palestine, a “fair apparition” of Eastern exoticism:

 

To his great surprise, he found himself in a room magnificently furnished, but having cush-

ions instead of chairs to rest upon, and in other respects partaking so much of Oriental cos-

tume that he began to doubt whether he had not, during his sleep, been transported back

again to the land of Palestine. The impression was increased when, the tapestry being drawn

aside, a female form, dressed in a rich habit, which partook more of the Eastern taste than

that of Europe, glided through the door, which it concealed, and was followed by a swarthy

domestic.... She performed her task with a graceful and dignified simplicity and modesty,

which might, even in more civilised days, have served to redeem it from whatever might

seem repugnant to female delicacy. The idea of so young and beautiful a person engaged in

attendance on a sick-bed, or in dressing the wound of one of a different sex, was melted

away and lost in that of a beneficent being contributing her effectual aid to relieve pain, and

to avert the stroke of death [pp. 247-48].

 

Wilfred goes so far as to call Rebecca “noble damsel” in Arabic before she dispels his illu-

sions and explains that she is Jewish:

 

“Bestow not on me, Sir Knight, ” she said, “the epithet of noble. It is well you should speedily

know that your handmaiden is a poor Jewess, the daughter of that Isaac of York to whom you

were so lately a good and kind lord.”

 

Now the scales fall from Wilfred’s eyes. At the mere word “Jewess, ” all his preju-

dices come tumbling out:

 

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