The Transatlantic Mingling of Christian, European Jewish and Islamic Views of Mosaic and Islamic Law, 1625–1800

This chapter sails back across the Atlantic to the early seventeenth century to focus on the empiricist-based Scientific Revolution as well as European explorations which both transformed Europe epistemologically and paradigmatically. These experiences significantly revamped understandings of the relation between divine revelation and human-based empirical and rational discovery of the natural order—inclusive of natural law—over the next two centuries. Against this backdrop, the chapter covers the shifting empiricist- and rationalist-based views, attitudes, and approaches of key political and theological thinkers regarding both Mosaic and Islamic-Sharia Law in relation to natural law and the (potential) political implications of those views, whether explicitly or implicitly expressed. Seminal voices include Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), John Bunyan (1628–88), Richard Baxter (1615–91), and several other influential sources of both European theology and law-ethics in the early to mid-seventeenth century. The exchange between Baruch Spinoza and Richard Simon between 1670–80, followed closely by the work of John Locke (1632–1704) and Samuel von Pufendorf (1632–1694), then marks the hazy beginnings of Enlightenment rationalist thinking which emerged across the latter part of the seventeenth into the eighteenth centuries, in both compliment and challenge to the ongoing development of empiricist-based views. Rousseau in the mid-eighteenth century marks the early beginnings of (proto-)Romanticist views, all of which rise and eventually form the complicated intermixing of ideas and influences which shaped various perspectives on Mosaic and natural law emerging in dialogue with one another. Meanwhile, a much deeper strain of Islamic rationalist thought making its way into Europe from as early as the tenth or eleventh century via Ibn Tufayl and finding its greatest advocate in the work of the late twelfth-century Islamic scholar Ibn Rushd (Averroes) is an additional and inseparable part of the storyline. There is, in fact, evidence for a renewed interest in these Islamic rationalist views precisely in the crucial transitional period from the more theologically based to the more empirically and rationally based views which came to prevail in the socio-political affairs of Europe from the late seventeenth century onward. The rise of progressivist notions within Enlightenment thinking also provides Europe (and America) with new standards for comparatively reflecting on the Jewish and Islamic (as well as other world) cultural and legal traditions, placing the Jewish and Islamic both within the “middle stages” of development within a historically grounded hierarchical scheme of cultures and civilizations. Amid this intermingling, both more liberal empiricist-rationalist and conservative-religious leaning voices—including Jewish traditional rabbinic and modernist reform thinkers—which are at times difficult to neatly separate out, all contribute reflexively together to the rearticulations of and debates over Mosaic and natural law in relation to the socio-political nation-state which arose and took shape across Europe in these centuries and eventually fed into the outworkings of related processes taking shape in the American colonies.