John Foxe and the Jews (Expressions of cultural and racial stereotyping inthe Protestant Reformation)

It is little known that John Foxe's Book of Martyrs included stories of Jew s. Contradictory and complex, Foxe's writings on Jews show how a powerful w riter conceived of the place of Jews in a newly self-conscious, Protestant English national identity amidst conflicting currents of theology, race, an d politics. The ideologies of Reforming Protestantism supplied the explicit political frameworks through which age-old stereotypes about the cultural or racial other could be expressed. Our understanding of early modern philo -judaism and toleration should be revised accordingly.