One of my Favourite Footnotes

 

See eg Blau (ed) (n 1) 89 (“It was, of course, impossible for Mr. [Jacob] Henry to affirm the divine authority of the New Testament.”); Brown (n 23) 46 (suggesting that, in 1809, “Gaston, Henry, and others proposed to eliminate the Protestant test oath from the Constitution” and “failed” in their efforts); Frederic Cople Jaher, A Scapegoat in the New Wilderness: The Origins and Rise of Anti-semitism in America (Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press 1994) 138 (noting that Henry was not “forced to take the prescribed test oath”); Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, Jews and the New American Scene (Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press 1995) 39 (asserting that the “North Carolina Constitution require[ed] that all officeholders swear a Protestant oath”); Mark Douglas McGarvie, Law and Religion in American History: Public Values and Private Conscience (NY, Cambridge University Press 2016) 10 (characterizing the debate on Mills’s motion to vacate Henry’s seat as involving a “Protestant test oath”); Roy G Saltman, The History and Politics of Voting Technology (NY, Palgrave Macmillan 2006) 60 (asserting that Henry refused to take “the sectarian oath of office”); Jonathan D Sarna, Coming to Terms with America: Essays on Jewish History, Religion, and Culture (Lincoln, NE, University of Nebraska Press 2021) 265 (describing efforts in 1809 “to deny [Henry] his seat in the state legislature for refusing to subscribe to a Christian test oath”); John E Semonche, Religions & Constitutional Government in the United States: A Historical Overview with Sources (Carrboro, NC, Signal Books 1985) 23 (characterizing Article 32 as a “test oath”); Denise A Spellberg, Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: Islam and the Founders (NY, Alfred A Knopf 2013) (characterizing Article 32 as “an oath to affirm ‘the truth of the Protestant religion’”); ‘Errata’ (2011) 14 Southern Jewish History 237 (clarifying Vann Newkirk’s 2010 publication, and stating that Article 32 involved a “religious test oath”); Faber (n 7) 40-41 (asserting that Henry was “challenged . . . on the grounds that the state’s constitution required that he take an oath affirming the New Testament’s divinity”); Oscar Handlin and Mary F Handlin, ‘The Acquisition of Political and Social Rights by the Jews in the United States’ (1955) 56 The American Jewish Year Book 43, 59 (explaining that Henry’s seat was “challenged because he . . . would not take an oath affirming the divine character of the New Testament”), <https://tinyurl.com/wt78devf>; Samuel Rabinove, ‘How—And Why—American Jews Have Contended for Religious Freedom: The Requirements and Limits of Civility’ (1990) 8 Journal of Law and Religion 131, 137 (Henry’s “seat was challenged on the ground that ‘he denie[d] the divine authority of the New Testament’ and failed to take the required oath concerning ‘the truth of the Protestant religion,’ as required by the state constitution.”); Jay Michael Eidelman, ‘“In the Wilds of America”: The Early American Origins of American Judaism, 1790–1830’ (PhD thesis, Yale University Department of Judaic Studies 1997) 107 (“[Henry] was initially not allowed to take his seat due to the requirement of a Christian oath . . . .”); see also Dershowitz (n 18) 78 (asserting that Henry “was blocked from taking his seat by a law requiring him to accept the divinity of the New Testament”); Melvin J Konner, ‘Jewish Diaspora in Europe and the Americas’ in Melvin Ember, Carol R Ember, and Ian A Skoggard (eds) Encyclopedia of Diasporas, vol 1 (NY, Springer Science+Business Media, Inc 2005) 164, 170 (explaining that “a colleague proposed that [Henry] be barred for not swearing allegiance to the New as well as the Old Testament”); A James Rudin, ‘Mr. President, leave your Bibles at home’ (The Washington Post, 17 January 2013) <https://tinyurl.com/rkjk2zd5> accessed 22 October 2021 (Henry’s “opponents tried to prevent him from serving a second term because a law demanded that legislators affirm the divinity of the New Testament”); cf Hasia R Diner, The Jews of the United States 1654–2000 (Berkeley, Calif, University of California Press 2004) 50 (asserting that Henry “could not, in good conscience, take the oath”); Jon Meacham, ‘A New American Holy War’ (Newsweek, 8 December 2007) <https://tinyurl.com/3yahyseb> accessed 22 October 2021. 

The footnote above appears at note 50 in: Seth Barrett Tillman, ‘What Oath (if any) did Jacob Henry take in 1809?: Deconstructing the Historical Myths,’ American Journal of Legal History (forth. circa 2022) (peer review) (manuscript 1–36), <https://ssrn.com/abstract=3790115>; 

Seth Barrett Tillman, One of my Favourite Footnotes, New Reform Club (Nov. 28, 2021, 5:23 AM),<https://reformclub.blogspot.com/2021/11/one-of-my-favourite-footnotes.html>;