Blasphemy: Verbal Offense Against the Sacred, from Moses to Salman Rushdie [Hardcover]

Leonard Levy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 17, 1993

A legal historian reviews the history of blasphemy, from Moses to Rushdie, showing what forms of speech societies have found intolerable, tracing the changing meanings of blasphemy, and discussing the costs and benefits of free speech.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Socrates, Jesus, Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno, Quakers George Fox and William Penn, Daniel Defoe and Thomas Paine were all condemned for blasphemy. In a tour de force of lively writing and keen historical interpretation, prolific legal historian Levy shows that the charge of blasphemy has served as a means to besmirch opinions or people held objectionable to those in positions of authority. For centuries the Catholic Church persecuted blasphemers and heretics for their divergent views. Protestant reformers adopted the epithet "blasphemer" to castigate dissidents within their own ranks. Proceeding from fifth century B.C. Athens to medieval persecution of the Jews to the "hysteria" over Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, this work is both an essential casebook and an outspoken, feisty, important study of the struggle for intellectual and religious liberties. History Book Club alternate.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

In an eloquent, monumental study that retraces some of the ground covered in his Treason Against God (1981), Levy (Humanities/Claremont Graduate School; Original Intent and the Framers' Constitution, 1988) recounts the often shameful history in the West of ``the suppression of freedom of expression in the field of religious belief and experience.'' Although Levy focuses on the development of the concept, plus the common law, of blasphemy in the Anglo-American tradition, he covers the evolution of the offense everywhere in Judeo-Christian thought through the Reformation (Christian thinkers, he says, expanded the technical ancient Jewish understanding of blasphemy to encompass idolatry, heresy, sacrilege, and related offenses of nonconformist thinking). Both the ancient Church and, later, Protestantism gave birth to fluid, heterodox religious cultures in which politically powerful factions established standards of religious orthodoxy and punished nonconformists as heretics and blasphemers. Showing how flexible the offense of blasphemy became, Levy recounts 17th-century English persecutions of nonconformist Christians (leading to a 1676 holding that ``Christian religion is part of the law itself''); persecutions of Protestant sects in Colonial America; and 18th-century prosecutions for obscenity. The author surveys the gradually dwindling number of prosecutions in 19th- and 20th-century England and America, culminating in the 1976 Gay News case in which a British court held as blasphemous a homosexual poem about Jesus, and in the confused reaction of the British legal establishment to The Satanic Verses (unquestionably blasphemous under Islamic law). Levy concludes that ``the feculent odor of persecution for the cause of conscience, which is the basic principle upon which blasphemy laws rest, has not yet dissipated.'' While the criminal law of blasphemy may appear to be ``in a persistent vegetative state,'' Levy does a service in pointing out that prosecutions of people on religious grounds aren't unthinkable--and indeed sometimes still occur. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 688 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1st edition (August 17, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679402365
• ISBN-13: 978-0679402367
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.6 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,264,064 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars schmeviticus, September 2, 2007

By 

Dr. Eigenvalue (Montreal, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Blasphemy: Verbal Offense against the Sacred, from Moses to Salman Rushdie (Paperback)

The interesting part of the book is the way the justification for blasphemy laws morphed smoothly over the years, even as the punishment changed very little. If you go back thousands of years, blasphemy laws made a great deal of sense -- people literally believed that gods were offended by blasphemy and that they would take revenge against communities that harbored blasphemers. So blasphemy was, from the point of view of a lawmaker, no different from arson.

However, as the centuries wore on, the purported role of the Christian God in daily life became more abstract. By the 16th century the justification for blasphemy laws had become more vague: Since the religion was part of the government (in England, the focus of the book), the blasphemer was essentially advocating the overthrow of the government. A few centuries later, following the appearance of numerous alternatives to the officially sanctioned version of Christianity, the justification switched again: Blasphemy was bad because it threatened to undermine the Church/State-sanctioned oppression of poor people! During all these centuries, the punishment was often quite brutal, ranging from imprisonment to mutilation to death.

By the 20th century blasphemy laws were, not surprisingly, being used to punish homosexuals and others who deviated from the church's views on social issues (notably birth control). In England and parts of the U.S. there are still blasphemy laws on the books, waiting for the right combination of an overzealous prosecutor and someone to pick on.

A lot of this sounds eerily familiar. The U.S. started a War on Drugs in the early 1970s under the reasonable premise that certain narcotics posed a health hazard. But when research showed the health risks of drugs like marijuana and LSD to be comparatively minor, the justification suddenly changed to crime prevention, and more recently, to a component of the War on Terror (which itself started as a legitimate response to a serious problem, then morphed into a way for right-wing loons to consolidate power). There's a lesson here: The Man has no use for democracy.

Minor complaints: The book is almost entirely about England and Christianity, and it's too detailed. Unless you're writing a thesis on the topic, you don't need to read about many of the minor blasphemy prosecutions mentioned in the book. It would have been more interesting to take a wider view of the subject, which is quite interesting and relevant to current politics.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars No one said history was pretty!, July 24, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Blasphemy: Verbal Offense against the Sacred, from Moses to Salman Rushdie (Paperback)

I assume from the first reviewer of this book that he hates to admit that evil has been done in the name of Christianity. He has a hard time seeing it done today, because we have a seperation of church and state. Look, this book may come as a shock to many Christian readers, but these are facts we can't deny. For example, America is a beautiful country, but in our history there is racism (KKK), the Civil War and the brutal murder of gay student, Matt Shepard. The same goes true for any other organization/country. What ever has done good, has done bad too.

This book provides a very detailed, factual account of people being killed in the name of Christianity from it's inception up to the present. You read about mennonites (anabaptists) getting executed by Protestants and Catholics, Jews being stripped of their Civil Rights, and everyone else who didn't take Jesus as their saviour. It is truly sick and stupid that the laws in those days prosecuted someone just because of a difference of opinion, espeically religious. How gruesome and brutal were Christians to people who differed with them on an opinion? Well, picture you are a Muslim, and preaching the Koran on the streets of England. First the government burns your books, since they are not pro-Christian. Second, you get whipped over 300 times until you have no flesh on your body. Third offense, you will get your tongue cut off, a "B" burned into your skin for "blasphemer", exiled or executed. Isn't that a good reason, and why our founding fathers established a seperation between church and state?

This is a good book, though very long. But, hey it's a history book, right?

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars How Free the Speech?, June 15, 2000

By 

"freethoughtmecca" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Blasphemy: Verbal Offense against the Sacred, from Moses to Salman Rushdie (Paperback)

Were it not for the digressions into post-modernist chic, I might be able to give a more resounding endorsement. Nevertheless, Levy did successfully acquaint the reader with the common court precedents for blasphemy in British law, while furnishing modern examples such as the 1976 blasphemy trial of a homosexual poet. Though the traditional branding, mutilation, and execution of blasphemers has stopped in modern-day Britain, Levy points out that the Anglican Church has argued for an extension of the outmoded blasphemy laws to other religions in the wake of the Rushdie affair. Rather than forego the Church of England's privileged status altogether, the Archbishop of Canterbury proposed the use of government coercion to protect all flights of lunatic fancy from their deserved ridicule. Needless to say, the lack of separation of Church and State in Europe, and the diluted freedom of speech provided by speech codes (e.g. laws against the expression of unpopular speech, such as Holocaust denial) surely constitute an important area of debate as far as the limitations of freedom. At present, the only US equivalent I can think of is the attempts to mold hate crimes legislation. Though certainly justice demands proper sanctions for those who violate the rights of others, this acts to punish criminals on the basis of their beliefs rather than actions. What next? Love crimes legislation that reduce a person's sentence if the jury thought they were acting for a more socially acceptable cause?