ABSTRACT
Mennonites were the most prominent of the Protestant nonconformist groups in the Northern Netherlands to benefit from the Regents’ position on freedom of conscience. Pieter Jansz Twisck relates several stories about Jews who had converted to Christianity, such as those Conversos employed in the court of the Habsburg duke Albert of Austria, who later became emperor elect in 1438. Perhaps Twisck’s greatest opportunity to condemn Catholic superstitious belief in Jewish ritual murder came with the infamous 1475 case of Simon of Trent. The strength of spiritualism in the Dutch Republic is a critical if underappreciated ingredient in Dutch exceptionalism; that a spiritualist’s approach to religious identity could infiltrate the mindset of such a prominent leader of traditionalist Mennonitism as Twisck suggests that spiritualism was, as its critics complained, pernicious in its influence.
