Typology and Objectification in George Herbert’S The Temple

Abstract

It is a tribute to the innocent rationalism that shines through Menasseh ben Israel’s powerful, poignant appeals for the readmission of the Jews into England that he evidently fails to grasp the nefarious intricacies of Christian antisemitism. The deplorable truth is that, for many Christians of the early modern period, the above quotation from Thomas Calvert provided an all-too-obvious connection between the two citations from ben Israel. “The Jews” were indeed “confirmed” as a figure for “Traficq” in the popular tropology of Renaissance Europe. They were also believed, by ignorant Christians, to idolize the letter of the law. It was thus an unfortunately simple matter to identify “the Jews” with every kind of idolatrous nominalism, whether this took the form of legalism, literalism, or financial value. In chapter two we saw how Luther accused Karlstadt of idolatry on the grounds of his obsessive iconoclasm; similarly, Judaic anti-idolatry was held to be covertly idolatrous in character, as ben Israel’s story of Jews being burnt for scourging an image indicates. Our secular civilization is not always sufficiently cognizant of the extended afterlife enjoyed by such insidious constructions.