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In 1601 William Biddulph, a staunch Protestant ministering to his community in Aleppo, wrote up an account of his travels to the neighboring Holy Land. In the section entitled "On the Jews," he made a special point of noting how "They obserue still all their old Ceremonies and feasts, Sacrifices only excepted." One might initially assume that by "Sacrifices" Biddulph meant the blood offerings that had ceased with the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. After all, many Protestants of the day linked the end of Temple ritual with Christ's triumphant supersession of the old law, and often emphasized such cessation when repudiating Christianity's own sacrificial rite, the Eucharist. Yet Biddulph was referring to something more sinister. As he went on to explain, "[The Jews] were wont amongst them to sacrifice children, but dare not now for feare of the Turkes. Yet some of them haue confessed, that their Physitians kill some Christian patient or other, whom they haue under their hands at that time, in stead of a sacrifice." 1 By presenting the killing of "some Christian patient or other" as an expedient substitute for child sacrifice, Biddulph effectively established a link between the "old Ceremonies and feasts" of Jewish culture, now forcibly abrogated, and the practice of child murder he claimed was likewise suppressed under Ottoman rule.Biddulph's equation of child murder, divinely mandated sacrifice, and salvific promise is striking but not singular. His version of Judaism, shared Our thanks to Barnaby Taylor and Imogen Black for their help with this article.

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William Heminge’s critically neglected play The Jewes Tragedy (c. 1628–30; pub. 1662) presents a singular illustration of the seventeenth-century preoccupation with the siege and destruction of Jerusalem described by Josephus in The Jewish Wars (75 CE). Unlike other early modern retellings which habitually interpret the tragic event as divine punishment for the Jews’ rejection of Christ, Heminge eschews the conventional Christian moral and its accompanying providentialist rhetoric in favor of a thoughtful political analysis of the Jews’ defeat at the hands of the Romans. This article analyzes Heminge’s secular focus in the context of the fraught political and religious climate of the late 1620s, when the play was composed, as well as the Restoration during which it was first published. Specifically, it investigates the contentious interrogation of providentialism and the corresponding shift away from religious etiology and a deterministic worldview (in which God assigns the outcome) to a conception of history that emphasizes human actions over divine intervention.

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