Religious tolerance in the context of "European Jews"

The Age of Enlightenment (also the Age of Reason) was a period in the history of Europe and Western civilization during which the Enlightenment, an intellectual and cultural movement, flourished, emerging in the late 17th century in Western Europe and reaching its peak in the 18th century, as its ideas spread more widely across Europe and into the European colonies, in the Americas and Oceania. Characterized by an emphasis on reason, empirical evidence, and scientific method, the Enlightenment promoted ideals of individual liberty, religious tolerance, progress, and natural rights. Its thinkers advocated for constitutional government, the separation of church and state, and the application of rational principles to social and political reform.

The Enlightenment emerged from and built upon the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, which had established new methods of empirical inquiry through the work of figures such as Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Francis Bacon, Pierre Gassendi, Christiaan Huygens and Isaac Newton. Philosophical foundations were laid by thinkers including René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, and John Locke, whose ideas about reason, natural rights, and empirical knowledge became central to Enlightenment thought. The dating of the period of the beginning of the Enlightenment can be attributed to the publication of Descartes' Discourse on the Method in 1637, with his method of systematically disbelieving everything unless there was a well-founded reason for accepting it, and featuring his dictum, Cogito, ergo sum ('I think, therefore I am'). Others cite the publication of Newton's Principia Mathematica (1687) as the culmination of the Scientific Revolution and the beginning of the Enlightenment. European historians traditionally dated its beginning with the death of Louis XIV of France in 1715 and its end with the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. Many historians now date the end of the Enlightenment as the start of the 19th century, with the latest proposed year being the death of Immanuel Kant in 1804.

The Fatimid Caliphate (/ˈfætɪmɪd/; Arabic: الخلافة الفاطمیّة, romanized: al-Khilāfa al-Fāṭimiyya), also known as the Fatimid Empire, was a caliphate extant from the tenth to the twelfth centuries CE under the rule of the Fatimids, an Isma'ili Shi'a dynasty. Spanning a large area of North Africa and West Asia, it ranged from the western Mediterranean in the west to the Red Sea in the east. The Fatimids traced their ancestry to the Islamic prophet Muhammad's daughter Fatima and her husband Ali, the first Shi'a imam. The Fatimids were acknowledged as the rightful imams by different Isma'ili communities as well as by denominations in many other Muslim lands and adjacent regions. Originating during the Abbasid Caliphate, the Fatimids initially conquered Ifriqiya (roughly present-day Tunisia and north-eastern Algeria). They extended their rule across the Mediterranean coast and ultimately made Egypt the center of the caliphate. At its height, the caliphate included—in addition to Egypt—varying areas of the Maghreb, Sicily, the Levant, and the Hejaz.

Between 902 and 909, the foundation of the Fatimid state was realized under the leadership of da'i (missionary) Abu Abdallah, whose conquest of Aghlabid Ifriqiya with the help of Kutama forces paved the way for the establishment of the Caliphate. After the conquest, Abdallah al-Mahdi Billah was retrieved from Sijilmasa and then accepted as the Imam of the movement, becoming the first Caliph and founder of the dynasty in 909. In 921, the city of al-Mahdiyya was established as the capital. In 948, they shifted their capital to al-Mansuriyya, near Kairouan. In 969, during the reign of al-Mu'izz, they conquered Egypt, and in 973, the caliphate was moved to the newly founded Fatimid capital of Cairo. Egypt became the political, cultural, and religious centre of the empire and it developed a new and "indigenous Arabic culture". After its initial conquests, the caliphate often allowed a degree of religious tolerance towards non-Shi'a sects of Islam, as well as to Jews and Christians. However, its leaders made little headway in persuading the Egyptian population to adopt its religious beliefs.

The philosophes (French for 'philosophers') were the intellectuals of the 18th-century European Enlightenment. Few were primarily philosophers; rather, philosophes were public intellectuals who applied reason to the study of many areas of learning, including philosophy, history, science, politics, economics, and social issues. They had a critical eye and looked for weaknesses and failures that needed improvement. They promoted a "Republic of Letters" that crossed national boundaries and allowed intellectuals to freely exchange books and ideas. Most philosophes were men, but some were women.

They strongly endorsed progress and tolerance, as they distrusted organized religion (most were deists) and feudal institutions. Many contributed to Diderot's Encyclopédie. They faded away after the French Revolution reached a violent stage in 1793.

Religious pluralism is an attitude or policy regarding the diversity of religious belief systems co-existing in society. It can indicate one or more of the following:

• Recognizing and tolerating the religious diversity of a society or country, promoting freedom of religion, and defining secularism as neutrality (of the state or non-sectarian institution) on issues of religion as opposed to opposition of religion in the public forum or public square that is open to public expression, and promoting friendly separation of religion and state as opposed to hostile separation or antitheism espoused by other forms of secularism.
• Any of several forms of religious inclusivism. One such worldview holds that one's own religion is not the sole and exclusive source of truth, and thus acknowledges that at least some truths and true values exist in other religions. Another concept is that two or more religions with mutually exclusive truth claims are equally valid; this may be considered a form of either toleration (a concept that arose as a result of the European wars of religion) or moral relativism.
• Perennialism (based on the concept of philosophia perennis) is the understanding that the exclusive claims of different religions turn out, upon closer examination, to be variations of universal truths that have been taught since time immemorial. While some perennialists are universalists who accept religious syncretism, those of the Traditionalist School reject it, and uphold the importance of the historical, "orthodox" faiths.
• Sometimes as a synonym for ecumenism, i.e., the promotion of some level of unity, co-operation, and improved understanding between different religions or different denominations within a single religion.
• As a term for the condition of harmonious co-existence between adherents of different religions or religious denominations.

Roger Williams (c. 1603 – March 1683) was an English-born New England minister, theologian, author, and founder of the Providence Plantations, which became the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations and later the State of Rhode Island. He was a staunch advocate for religious liberty, separation of church and state, and fair dealings with the Native Americans.

Initially a Puritan minister, his beliefs evolved and he questioned the authority of the Puritan church in enforcing religious conformity. He was expelled by the Puritan leaders from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and he established Providence Plantations in 1636 as a refuge offering what he termed "liberty of conscience" making Rhode Island the first government in the Western world to guarantee religious freedom in its founding charter. His ideas on religious tolerance and civil government directly influenced the principles later enshrined in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. He briefly became a Baptist, and in 1638 he founded the First Baptist Church in America in Providence. He then moved beyond organized religion, becoming a "seeker" who did not identify with any specific church. Williams studied the language of the New England Native Americans and published the first book-length study of it in English.

The Edict of Fontainebleau (18 October 1685, published 22 October 1685) was an edict issued by French King Louis XIV and is also known as the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The Edict of Nantes (1598) had granted Huguenots the right to practice their religion without state persecution. Protestants had lost their independence in places of refuge under Cardinal Richelieu on account of their supposed insubordination, but they continued to live in comparative security and political contentment. From the outset, religious tolerance in France had been a royal, rather than popular, policy.

The lack of universal adherence to his religion did not sit well with Louis XIV's vision of perfected autocracy.

The history of the Jews in Europe spans a period of over two thousand years. Jews, a Semitic people descending from the Judeans of Judea in the Southern Levant, began migrating to Europe just before the rise of the Roman Empire (27 BCE), although Alexandrian Jews had already migrated to Rome, and some Gentiles had undergone Judaization on a few occasions. A notable early event in the history of the Jews in the Roman Empire was the 63 BCE siege of Jerusalem, where Pompey had interfered in the Hasmonean civil war.

Jews have had a significant presence in European cities and countries since the fall of the Roman Empire, including Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, and Russia. In Spain and Portugal in the late fifteenth century, the monarchies forced Jews to either convert to Christianity or leave and they established offices of the Inquisition to enforce Catholic orthodoxy of converted Jews. These actions shattered Jewish life in Iberia and saw mass migration of Sephardic Jews to escape religious persecution. Many resettled in the Netherlands and re-judaized, starting in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In the religiously tolerant, Protestant Dutch Republic Amsterdam prospered economically and as a center of Jewish cultural life, the "Dutch Jerusalem". Ashkenazi Jews lived in communities under continuous rabbinic authority. In Europe Jewish communities were largely self-governing autonomous under Christian rulers, usually with restrictions on residence and economic activities. In Poland, from 1264 (from 1569 also in Lithuania as part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth), under the Statute of Kalisz until the partitions of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795, Jews were guaranteed legal rights and privileges. The law in Poland after 1264 (in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in consequence) toward Jews was one of the most inclusive in Europe. The French Revolution removed legal restrictions on Jews, making them full citizens. Napoleon implemented Jewish emancipation as his armies conquered much of Europe. Emancipation often brought more opportunities for Jews and many integrated into larger European society and became more secular rather than remaining in cohesive Jewish communities.