A dramatic history of religious intolerance and oppression.
The Pilgrims who boarded the Mayflower were a diverse, disordered group of religious rebels.
In a richly detailed chronicle, British historian Tomkins (David Livingstone: The Unexplored Story, 2013, etc.) examines the violent religious conflicts that roiled England from Queen Mary’s reign to the advent of Elizabeth I’s nephew James. When Mary took the throne in 1553, she “embarked on a Catholic spring-clean” that involved defrocking, excommunication, torture and mutilation, hangings, and the public burning to death of accused heretics. “This is where the story of the Pilgrim Fathers starts,” Tomkins writes, “with Mary’s campaign to burn Protestantism out of England.” As violently as Protestants hated Catholicism, many deeply opposed the Church of England, whose “whole shape and organisation,” they believed, “were still founded on unbiblical Catholic principles,” with authority vested in the monarch and a hierarchy that bowed to—and remunerated—the pope. The author examines many reformist movements, the rivalries among leaders, and the beliefs that impelled them. Presbyterianism, for example, “raised the standard of active involvement of ordinary believers in their religion,” requiring discipline and “promoting the virtues that led to success in the growing arenas of industry and commerce.” Puritans, frustrated in their inability to transform the church from within, split off to form radical new sects that edited the Prayer Book, chose their congregation, and elected pastors and elders; “lay members could pray in their own words, preach to one another and even create a new church through a communal act of covenant.” Persecuted in England, some established themselves in the Netherlands. However, in the early 1600s, “life in Dutch cities seemed just too grim” for their church to survive, and young people, especially, were disgruntled. Longing for a brighter future, and seeing their “reflection in countless scriptural parallels, but above all in the exodus,” pilgrims undertook the arduous, four-month sea journey to Cape Cod. There, they created a settlement “governed by consent”—“an idea,” Tomkins notes, “with a future.”
A dramatic history of religious intolerance and oppression.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64-313367-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
An unfocused harangue that leaves the reader feeling as little sympathy for the author as for the traditional Jewish institution she attacks: the separation of men and women during prayer. When Broner's (The Telling, not reviewed, etc.) father died suddenly in 1987, she chose to mourn his death in a traditional Jewish way: by attending synagogue daily to say the kaddish, the mourner's prayer. For Broner, a feminist who identifies strongly as a Jew but is not particularly learned, this decision was somewhat arbitrary. She had never been to daily services before, but she selected a traditional minyan (the ten men required for prayer), expecting it to accommodate her completely. It didn't. She refused to be curtained off behind the mekhitzah, the divider separating men and women. In turn, not all the members of the minyan were comfortable with her presence, with her need to be seen and heard. Thus began a battle filled with invective, derisiveness, even physical violence. Some of the men began a second service an hour earlier. They opposed the long-established mixed seating at the Conservative Sabbath morning service and spoke out against full membership for women. Eventually Broner gave up. Although she makes indisputably valid points about the second-class status of women within traditional Judaism, those criticisms are unfortunately obscured by her many childish gestures (``Don't call me lady...Call me doctor,'' she yells at one minyan member). The reader wonders why Broner chose this particular forum, an aging group of sad and sometimes disturbed men, in which to grandstand. As one friend told her, ``Your mistake is that you went into a fish store...and asked for chicken.'' Broner's interspersed references to her feminist and artistic activities—with Mary Gordon, Grace Paley, and others—comes off as simple name-dropping. If Broner had focused more on her father, both during her year of mourning and in this book, she might have achieved more. Full of sound and fury, signifying very little.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-061071-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
Caveat emptor: This is most definitely not ``the history'' of the Jews. It is, rather, a series of very free-flowing exercises in what the author refers to as ``historical sociology.'' Cantor (History, Sociology, Comparative Literature/New York Univ.; Inventing the Middle Ages, p. 106, etc.) is attempting a huge tripartite task: to write a history of the Jews, to provide a historiographical commentary of some major works on Jewish history, and to offer a cultural critique of modern Jewish life. For the complex saga of the Jews, this is an utterly unrealistic goal for a one-volume work, especially by someone who hasn't specialized in Jewish history. Perhaps the foremost problem here is the author's unsympathetic attitude toward Judaism and observant Jews and his lack of knowledge about them. Cantor dredges up the hoariest stereotypes, claiming for instance that in the late Middle Ages ``the rabbinate drugged itself into comfort with the narcotic of the Cabala, an otherworldly withdrawal into astrology and demonology.'' He also gets far too many facts wrong (he claims that the biblical heroine Esther was Mordechai's sister, when in fact she was his ``uncle's daughter''). Some major developments in Jewish history are scarcely mentioned, such as the origins and development of the Reform and Conservative movements. Cantor champions such Jewish thinkers as Freud, Wittgenstein, and LÇvi- Strauss, who played a key role in shaping the culture of modernity. He appears to have little familiarity with intellectual leaders within the Jewish community such as Franz Rosenzweig, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Yosef Dov Soloveitchik. Thus he rather harshly- -and unjustly—critiques Jewish religious life for not responding sufficiently to the culture of modernity (although he never makes clear exactly what he means by this); yet non-Orthodox Jews have been so accommodating to modernity that, as Cantor acknowledges, traditional Jewish culture has become very attenuated. The lack of footnotes or other documentation is further evidence that this is an intellectually shoddy book. (32 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-016746-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
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