toleration

1. Tolerance with respect to the actions and beliefs of others: "Toleration . . . is the greatest gift of the mind" (Helen Keller).
2. Official recognition of the rights of individuals and groups to hold dissenting opinions, especially on religion.

noun

Forbearing or lenient treatment: charitableness, charity, forbearance, indulgence, lenience, leniency, lenity, tolerance. See accept/reject.

A willingness not to interfere with beliefs, attitudes, or actions despite a lack of sympathy for them or despite dislike of them. The value of toleration is said to lie in the absence of interference despite an initial reaction of dislike, even when the capacity (or power) so to interfere is available. Since ‘interference’ is a vague term, covering interventions ranging from the provision of persuasive arguments to legal coercion, the boundaries of toleration are inevitably unclear. For example, a person may claim to tolerate a practice of which he or she disapproves, on the ground that he or she does not support the legal prohibition (under penalty) of that practice. If, however, that ‘legal toleration’ is coupled to a willingness to make disapproval of the practice evident in social life, for example by ostracism or warning others against association with the person whose practices are disapproved, then the degree of toleration is disputable. In political contexts, the toleration of religious diversity has, historically, been the most significant issue: To what extent is the state entitled to require particular religious observance? In a multicultural society, there is always the possibility that one group will think a particular practice incumbent upon it, while other groups will find that practice anathema. An especially troublesome issue about the limits of toleration may be posed thus: To what extent should toleration be extended to the intolerant? This question parallels a problem in democratic theory: To what extent should a democratic polity permit the activities of anti-democratic political organizations?

— Andrew Reeve

Refraining from acting against that which is disapproved of, or politically opposed, or alien. Toleration in religious matters is one of the central planks of the modern democratic state: Locke's Letter on Toleration (1689) is the basic authority, although Locke himself exempted Roman Catholics from the umbrella of protection, on the grounds that their primary allegiance would be to the Church and not to the government. The central philosophical problem is understanding how a principle of toleration can coincide with genuine moral and religious conviction.

Toleration (or its cognate, tolerance) denotes the readiness of an individual or a community to permit the presence and/or expression of ideas, beliefs, and practices differing from what is accepted by that individual or by the dominant part of the community. Toleration demands forbearance only; it does not require approval or endorsement of the tolerated ideas, beliefs, and practices. A tolerant person respects differences between him- or herself and other people; a tolerant community respects differences between groups and/or among individuals within the social totality. Toleration is thus antithetical to the persecution or repression (systematic or individualized) of ideas, beliefs, and practices that differ from one's own. Indeed, a tolerant person or society will protect the ability of such ideas, beliefs, and practices to persist even while acknowledging disagreement with them.

In early modern Europe, the main object of toleration in reality and as an ideal was difference of confession among religious communities, all of which claimed to be Christian. The Protestant Reformation had fragmented—permanently, as it turned out—the institutional and doctrinal unity of the Latin Christian Church that the faith had supposedly upheld since the time of St. Paul. During the sixteenth century, under the impact of Lutheran and Calvinist condemnations of the impurity of the visible Roman Church, not to mention the English Church's institutional break with Rome and the emergence of extreme sects such as the Anabaptists, Christianity was forced to reinvent itself as a creed united in faith but divided in rite. This situation has commonly led scholars to conclude that only in the post-Reformation context did the ideal vision and real conduct of tolerance enter into Europe, expressed by various proclamations of toleration as well as by the theoretical statement found in the Epistola de Tolerantia (1689; Letter on toleration) of John Locke (1632–1704).

Yet the assertion of the singular modernity of toleration, arising in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation, masks the complexity of its history. Prior to the sixteenth century, certain voices at the core as well as on the periphery of European society were prepared to countenance the presence of dissenters and even heretics within Christianity as well as the existence of various non-Christian convictions. Moreover, other important issues, such as the discovery of the New World with its large population previously unexposed to the Christian faith, also drove the debate about the extension of forbearance to cultures and religious rites utterly alien to Europe. Finally, no particularly compelling evidence suggests that the desire to persecute forms of difference and dissent—in religion as in other fields of human endeavor—abated with the rise of modern Europe. Even those prepared to tolerate certain divergent Christian confessions were equally ready to exclude and brutally suppress other self-identified Christians—Roman Catholics, Anabaptists, Hutterites, millenarians—not to mention deists, atheists, and similar free thinkers.

This context needs to be considered when assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the modern European approach to toleration. Even before the monk Martin Luther (1483–1546) nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the church door at Witten-berg in 1517, Europeans were grappling with the consequences of their encounter with the indigenous peoples of the Americas following the discoveries of the 1490s. Spain and Portugal in particular sought and received the authorization of the Roman Church to conquer and settle the lands of the Caribbean and Central and South America under the guise of evangelizing and converting the native populace. Some thinkers recoiled with considerable horror from the slaughter and enslavement that ensued. The towering figure of the School of Salamanca, Francesco de Vitoria (c. 1486?–1546), objected to the appropriation of the Aristotelian categories of barbarism and slavery by nature. Following de Vitoria, the Dominican bishop and former conquistador Bartolomé de Las Casas (1476–1566) composed a series of writings in Spanish as well as Latin defending the rights of the native population to maintain their cultural, political, and religious traditions and practices—even such controversial rites as human sacrifices, not to mention refusal of Christian missionaries and resistance to conquest. In a famous debate with the Scholastic advocate of Spanish dominion over the Indians, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, held at Valladolid in 1550, Las Casas used the materials of Aristotle's corpus, Thomism, and canon law to refute the assertion by the Spanish crown of its right to impose religion and civilization at swordpoint upon indigenous Americans. Rather, a Christian attitude toward the Indians—rooted in divine and natural law as well as the teachings of the pagan philosophers—demanded forbearance of their way of life, even if Europeans found their faith and rituals abhorrent.

At one time, scholars viewed the Reformation as a singularly positive stimulus to the promotion of toleration. It is true that Martin Luther, at least in some contexts, appears to defend tolerance on the grounds that the magistrate should be concerned only with the care of the body and does not have the tools at his disposal to control or alter the state of a person's soul. But other reformers, most notably John Calvin (1509–1564), were inclined to deny any measure of forbearance for religious positions that did not strictly conform to their new orthodoxy. Indeed, one of the important early defenders of toleration during the sixteenth century, Sebastian Castellio (or Sébastien Châteillon) (1515–1563), published pseudonymously a treatise entitled De Haereticis, an Sint Persequendi ('Of heretics, whether they should be persecuted') in reaction to Calvin's instruction to the city of Geneva in 1553 to burn a visiting Spanish heretic theologian, Michael Servetus, who opposed the doctrine of the Trinity. Castellio argued that coercion is an inappropriate tool for effecting a change of religious views, since Christian belief must be held with sincere conviction. Hence, clerics and magistrates must refrain from the persecution of convinced Christians who cling to doctrines that do not coincide with official teachings. While Castellio did not go so far as to license broad dissemination of heterodox theology, he maintained that a Christian's duties extended to tolerating the free and honest faith of fellow believers even in the face of disagreements of understanding and interpretation.

In the short term, voices such as Castellio's went unheeded. Rather, in places such as France and Germany, where the Reformation enjoyed greatest support, violent harassment of religious minorities—Catholic or Protestant—persisted and often threatened to erupt into full-scale religious warfare. It is true that some rulers and regions found ways to stamp out conflict, either by fiat or by negotiation. The most famous resolutions, such as the Religious Peace of Augsburg (1555) and the Edict of Nantes (1598), tended to be short-lived. But in Switzerland, where Reformed and Catholic communities often lived side-by-side, accommodation concerning the sharing of power and mutual respect for different rites succeeded in eliminating persecution in many areas. The Dutch Republic managed to achieve a similar arrangement, as did a number of eastern European states, including Poland, Transylvania, and Moravia.

These tolerant practices were certainly approved by many thinkers who subscribed to a range of confessions. Desiderius Erasmus (1466?–1535), one of the leading humanists of the age and a Catholic who nonetheless sympathized with the cause of reform, promoted a vision of toleration that he derived from the principles of classical rhetoric. According to Erasmus, violence was an inadequate, as well as un-Christian, means of dealing with unbelief. Only by speech might those who strayed from truth be convinced of the error of their ways. And both preaching and conversation—the two predominant ways in which the orthodox express truth to the errant—demanded that one tolerate the heterodox, if only in order to achieve conversion. Another humanist, Jean Bodin (1529/30–1596), pushed this discursive paradigm of tolerance even further. In his Colloquium Heptaplomeres de Rerum Sublimium Arcanis Abditis (1588; Colloquium of the seven about secrets of the sublime), Bodin adapted the standard literary genre of the interreligious dialogue, in this case between advocates of the major world religions and of various philosophical interpretations of divinity. Unlike previous texts of interreligious dialogue, however, Bodin's discussion produced a stalemate: no one changed his mind and no conversions occured. Bodin's point has been understood as the promotion of tolerance, either because the relative merits of creeds cannot ultimately be demonstrated or because dialogue makes us realize that all religions have their merits and demerits. The text of the Colloquium was passed around secretly in manuscript for centuries, none daring to publish until the middle of the nineteenth century such a reputedly notorious challenge to the self-evident superiority of Christianity.

The cause of toleration became more visible as a political and intellectual force during the seventeenth century. As a practical aim, the Levellers in England during the 1640s made freedom to dissent from the established religion a central plank of their political program. Likewise, major figures in European philosophy weighed in on the side of freedom of religion. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) recognized the mischief that religion caused to the maintenance of public peace and order. His solution to the potential for religious conflict was not persecution of dissent but acknowledgment that, since faith was an inward matter, coercion of belief pertained to neither church nor state. So long as one's convictions about God and the afterlife did not produce external political dispute, Hobbesian logic required that the sovereign permit subjects to embrace whatever confession they liked. Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) followed Hobbes in recognizing the inability of the government to control the inward faith of individuals. He therefore claimed a broad application for a right to liberty of thought and conviction without inference from a sovereign's (or a church's) determination of the truth or falsity of an individual's ideas. On the one hand, Spinoza proposed to employ the armed might of the state to rein in the activities of intolerant clergymen and mobs. On the other hand, he set clear limits on the power of the magistrate to persecute all forms of religious and intellectual dissent. The German jurist Samuel Pufendorf (1632–1694), too, advocated the protection of religious freedom in the name of the interests of the state. The sovereign must exercise control over the affairs of religion, not in order to impose "true" religion, but in order to ensure that "hotheads, pride, fame, and ambition" do not lead to civil conflict and sedition.

When viewed from the perspective of this intellectual backdrop, the concept of tolerance proposed by John Locke does not appear especially innovative or creative. Locke built his theory on a clear distinction between the aims of the church and the purposes of government. The church seeks to care for souls, whose condition cannot be changed by force but only by persuasion. Since the role of government is the protection of the life, liberty, and estate of subjects, its work cannot extend to the business of religion. For Locke, the magistrate should maintain public tranquility and defend individual rights. Thus, liberty of conscience was justified in the case of most Christian (and perhaps some non-Christian) rites. Of course, Locke insisted that government must take an appropriate interest in religious ideas and rites when they were capable of undermining social trust and political obedience. For this reason, he sought to exclude atheists and to ban any religious institutions that taught the superiority of the church to the temporal magistrate in civil affairs.

While Locke's account of toleration has received by far the most attention, the version proposed by the pre-Enlightenment thinker Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) is perhaps the most consistent and thoroughgoing of the late seventeenth century. Bayle is sometimes termed a Calvinist advocate of tolerance. Seeking to refute a range of arguments for persecution, Bayle baldly asserted that all forms of suppression of religious diversity encourage hypocrisy and erode social order. Indeed, to harass religious dissenters constitutes an affront to God. An erring conscience, if it be held in good faith, deserves as much protection as a correct one—a principle that Bayle extended even to atheists. Unlike many of his predecessors, he did not embrace a strict distinction between the inward and the outward, and he thus took seriously the ability of the threat of coercion to weaken the beliefs of individuals. But should a person be forced to surrender his or her inner convictions, an act of sacrilege has been committed because God forgives error on account of the purity of the intention. A false belief sincerely held was regarded by Bayle to be superior in the eyes of God to a true conviction held only as a result of external compulsion. Bayle did admit that rites which are likely to detract directly from civil order may be constrained or excluded, but his main concern seems to be fanatical sects that inspire their adherents to engage in conduct that endangers the health and well-being of other inhabitants of the community.

The themes highlighted by seventeenth-century proponents of toleration received further elaboration during the eighteenth century, in particular, the problem of balancing personal liberty of conscience against the need for public order and obedience. For instance, the journalist and novelist Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) railed in his writings against conformity, and he was only too happy to satirize the foibles of the persecutorial impulse. Although a dissenter himself, he once dared to publish a hoax pamphlet, "The Shortest Way with Dissenters" (1702), purportedly written by a High Church spokesman, that called for the hanging en masse of religious nonconformists.

The two most intellectually powerful eighteenth-century proponents of toleration were Christian Thomasius (1655–1728) and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Thomasius, a central figure of the so-called "civil Enlightenment," adopted a jurisprudential approach according to which all supposed heresies were framed in a historical light, and the charge of dissent was viewed simply as a means for different sects to vilify one another. Theological and metaphysical questions should be set aside in favor of a prudential law of religion (Staatskirchenrecht) that permitted and regulated expressions of religious diversity. Like Hobbes, Thomasius showed how an absolutist conception of government might yield a thoroughgoing principle of tolerance. Kant was certainly the more famous figure in the promotion of tolerant attitudes. His essay Was ist Aufklärung? (1784; What is enlightenment?) pronounced a human duty to become liberated from self-imposed mental chains and to develop an independent capacity for critical reflection. This requires a public sphere that is fully tolerant of differences in thought and action among individuals. Yet Kant also asserted the overriding duty that each person has to obey government, so that the subjects of a ruler have a supererogatory responsibility to refrain from public expression of ideas or doctrines that might promote disobedience to the sovereign will. For Kant, too, toleration did not necessitate the institutional primacy of rights associated with political liberalism.

Despite Kant's insistence upon obedience, a considerable number of Enlightenment thinkers in fact defended various forms of toleration in the eighteenth century. Thomas Paine (1737–1809) dismissed the terminology of "toleration" itself as inherently intolerant, since it depended upon the grant of the state, preferring to speak of basic rights associated with freedom of conscience and thought. The French philosophes, who were the main champions of enlightenment, likewise announced themselves to be defenders of tolerance. But perhaps it was with the "Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen," approved by the National Assembly of France on 26 August 1789, that such a basic liberal conception of liberty of belief and worship received its characteristic statement.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Bodin, Jean. Colloquium of the Seven about Secrets of the Sublime. Edited by Marion Leathers Kuntz. Princeton, 1975.

Erasmus, Desiderius. The Collected Works of Erasmus. 22 vols. to date. Toronto, 1974–.

Las Casas, Bartolomé de. In Defense of the Indians. Edited by Stafford Poole. De Kalb, Ill., 1974.

Locke, John. A Letter Concerning Toleration in Focus. Edited by Susan Mendus and John Horton. London, 1991.

Pufendorf, Samuel. Of the Nature and Qualification of Religion in Reference to Civil Society. Translated by J. Crull. Edited by Simone Zurbuchen. Indianapolis, 2002.

Secondary Sources

Creppell, Ingrid. Toleration and Identity: Foundations in Early Modern Thought. New York, 2003.

Grell, Ole Peter, and Roy Porter, eds. Toleration in Enlightenment Europe. Cambridge, U.K., 2000.

Laursen, John Christian. Religious Toleration: "A Variety of Rites" from Cyrus to Defoe. New York, 1999.

Laursen, John Christian, ed. Histories of Heresy in Early Modern Europe: For, Against, and Beyond Persecution and Toleration. New York, 2002.

Laursen, John Christian, and Cary J. Nederman. Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration before the Enlightenment. Philadelphia, 1998.

Murphy, Andrew R. Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent in Early Modern England and America. University Park, Pa., 2001.

Nederman, Cary J. Worlds of Difference: European Discourses of Toleration, c. 1100–c. 1550. University Park, Pa., 2000.

Nederman, Cary J., and John Christian Laursen, eds. Difference and Dissent: Theories of Religious Toleration in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Lanham, Md., 1996.

Remer, Gary. Humanism and the Rhetoric of Toleration. University Park, Pa., 1996.

Waldron, Jeremy. God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations of John Locke's Political Thought. Cambridge, U.K., 2002.

—CARY J. NEDERMAN

"Tolerance" redirects here. For other uses, see Tolerance (disambiguation).

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Minerva as a symbol of enlightened wisdom protects the believers of all religions (Daniel Chodowiecki, 1791)

Early Bible translator William Tyndale, just before being burnt at the stake, from this woodcut from an early edition of Foxe's Book of Martyrs.

Toleration and tolerance are terms used in social, cultural and religious contexts to describe attitudes which are "tolerant" (or moderately respectful) of practices or group memberships that may be disapproved of by those in the majority. In practice, "tolerance" indicates support for practices that prohibit ethnic and religious discrimination. Conversely, 'intolerance' may be used to refer to the discriminatory practices sought to be prohibited. Though developed to refer to the religious toleration of minority religious sects following the Protestant Reformation, these terms are increasingly used to refer to a wider range of tolerated practices and groups, or of political parties or ideas widely considered objectionable.^[1]

Contents 1 History 2 Tolerance and monotheism 3 Tolerating the intolerant 4 Tolerance as a spiritual virtue 5 Criticism 6 References

History

As a practical matter, governments have always had to consider the question of which groups and practices to tolerate and which to persecute. The Edicts of Ashoka issued by Ashoka the Great in the Maurya Empire declared ethnic and religious tolerance. The later expanding Roman Empire faced the question of whether or to what extent practices or beliefs could be tolerated or vigorously persecuted. Likewise, during the Middle Ages, the rulers of Christian Europe or the Muslim Middle East sometimes extended toleration to minority religious groups, and sometimes did not. Jews in particular suffered under anti-Semitic persecutions in medieval Europe.^[2][3] A notable exception was Poland, which served as a haven for European Jewry because of its relative tolerance - by the mid-sixteenth century, 80 percent of the world’s Jews lived in Poland. ^[4]

An early champion of toleration in Europe was Pawel Wlodkowic, who at the Council of Constance advocated the pagan nations' rights.^[5] However, the development of a body of theory on the subject of toleration didn't begin until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in response to the Protestant Reformation and the Wars of Religion and persecutions that followed the breaks with the Catholic Church instigated by Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli and others. In response to the theory of persecution that was used to justify wars of religion and the execution of persons convicted of heresy and witchcraft, writers such as Sebastian Castellio and Michel de Montaigne questioned the morality of religious persecution, and offered arguments for toleration. By contrast, Poland, which had been uniquely tolerant and ethnically as well as religiously diverse, officially confirmed its status as "a place of shelter for heretics" in the Confederation of Warsaw of 1573,^[6] the first toleration act in Europe.^[7]

A detailed and influential body of writing on the question of toleration was produced in Britain in the seventeenth century, during and after the destructive English Civil Wars. John Milton and radical Parliamentarians such as Gerrard Winstanley argued that Christian and Jewish worship should be protected, and it was during the period that Oliver Cromwell allowed the return of Jews to England. These early theories of toleration were limited however, and did not extend toleration to Roman Catholics (who were perceived as disloyal to their country) or atheists (who were held to lack any moral basis for action). John Locke, in his Letter Concerning Toleration and Two Treatises of Government proposed a more detailed and systematic theory of toleration, which included a principle of Separation of Church and State that formed the basis for future constitutional democracies, but also did not extend toleration to Roman Catholics or atheists. The British Toleration Act of 1689 was the political result of seventeenth century theorists and political exigency, which despite the limited scope of the toleration it granted was nevertheless a key development in the history of toleration, which helped produce greater political stability in the British Isles.

The philosophers and writers of the Enlightenment, especially Voltaire and Lessing, promoted and further developed the notion of religious tolerance, which however was not sufficient to prevent the atrocities of the Reign of Terror. The incorporation by Thomas Jefferson and others of Locke's theories of toleration into the Constitution of the United States of America was arguably more successful.

Discussions of toleration therefore often divided between those who view the term as a minimal and perhaps even historical virtue (perhaps today to be replaced by a more positive and robust appreciation of pluralism or diversity), and those who view it as a concept with an important continuing vitality, and who are more likely to use the term in considering contemporary issues regarding discrimination on the basis of race, nationality, gender, sexuality, disability, and other reasons.

There are also debates with regard to the historical factors that produced the principle of toleration, as well as to the proper reasons toleration should be exercised, with some arguing that the growth of skepticism was an important or necessary factor in the development of toleration, and others arguing that religious belief or an evolving notion of respect for individual persons was or is the basis on which toleration was or should be practiced.

Tolerance and monotheism

One theory of the origins of religious intolerance, propounded by Sigmund Freud in Moses and Monotheism, links intolerance to monotheism. More recently, Bernard Lewis and Mark Cohen have argued that the modern understanding of tolerance, involving concepts of national identity and equal citizenship for persons of different religions, was not considered a value by pre-modern Muslims or Christians, due to the implications of monotheism.^[8] The historian G.R. Elton explains that in pre-modern times, monotheists viewed such toleration as a sign of weakness or even wickedness towards God. ^[9] The usual definition of tolerance in pre-modern times as Bernard Lewis puts it was that:

“

I am in charge. I will allow you some though not all of the rights and privileges that I enjoy, provided that you behave yourself according to rules that I will lay down and enforce."[10]

”

Mark Cohen states that it seems that all the monotheistic religions in power throughout the history have felt it proper, if not obligatory, to persecute nonconforming religions. ^[11] Therefore, Cohen concludes, Medieval Islam and Medieval Christianity in power should have persecuted non-believers in their lands and "Judaism, briefly in power during the Hasmonean period (second century BCE) should have persecuted pagan Idumeans". ^[11] Cohen continues: "When all is said and done, however, the historical evidence indicates that the Jews of Islam, especially during the formative and classical centuries (up to thirteenth century), experienced much less persecution than did the Jews of Christendom. This begs a more thorough and nuanced explanation than has hitherto been given."^[11]

Tolerating the intolerant

Philosopher Karl Popper asserted, in The Open Society and Its Enemies Vol. 1, that we are warranted in refusing to tolerate intolerance; illustrating that there are limits to tolerance.

Philosopher John Rawls devotes a section of his influential and controversial book A Theory of Justice to this problem; whether a just society should or should not tolerate the intolerant. He also addresses the related issue of whether or not the intolerant have any right to complain when they are not tolerated, within their society.

Rawls concludes that a just society must be tolerant; therefore, the intolerant must be tolerated, for otherwise, the society would then itself be intolerant, and thus unjust. However, Rawls qualifies this conclusion by insisting, like Popper, that society and its social institutions have a reasonable right of self-preservation that supersedes the principle of tolerance. Hence, the intolerant must be tolerated but only insofar as they do not endanger the tolerant society and its institutions.^{[citation needed]}

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi used tolerance to force the British out of India. He pioneered the use of tolerance which was used by many i.e. Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela.

Tolerance as a spiritual virtue

Swami Tripurari states that the practice of tolerance leads to the ability to distinguish the jiva (soul) from the mind and body.^[12]

In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says "... the nonpermanent appearance of happiness and distress, and their disappearance in due course, are like the appearance and disappearance of winter and summer seasons. They arise from sense perception ... and one must learn to tolerate them without being disturbed.[1] the person who is not disturbed by happiness and distress and is steady in both is certainly eligible for liberation."[2]

Criticism

Due to society being made up of different political, ideological, religious, and philosophical opinions, what a person deems appropriate differs from person to person. Thus creating a society where one person who supports 'A' and labels those who support 'B' as intolerant is in turn labeled intolerant by those who support 'B'. Thus 'A' supporters are intolerant of 'B' supporter, and 'B' supporters are intolerant of 'A' supporters. The hypocrisy is then exposed in the example above, one cannot be tolerant while being intolerant at the same time.

References

1. ^ http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Toleration
2. ^ Vartan Gregorian, "Islam: A Mosaic, Not a Monolith", Brookings Institution Press, 2003, pg 26-38 ISBN 081573283X
3. ^ Granada by Richard Gottheil, Meyer Kayserling, Jewish Encyclopedia. 1906 ed.
4. ^ Jewish Virtual Library - Poland
5. ^ Britannica Online - Poland: The rule of Jagielo
6. ^ Portal UNESCO, Poland - The General Confederation of Warsaw
7. ^ Dzieje podzielone, Prof. Janusz Tazbir, Polityka 03-07-2004
8. ^ Lewis (1997), p.321; (1984) p.65; Cohen (1995), p.xix
9. ^ quoted in Cohen (1995), p.xix
10. ^ Lewis (2006), pp.25-36
11. ^ ^{a b c} Cohen (1995) p. xix
12. ^ Swami Tripurari, "Tolerance: the Ornament of the Saints", Sanga, 1999.

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