How religious education could help combat extremism: ‘Nathan the Wise’

A global storm of protests was unleashed by Israel’s response to the brutal attack on its citizens by Hamas last October. These protests have been directed not just at the scale of Israel’s military response, but its continued existence as a Jewish state. The British authorities remain on heightened alert lest some major terrorist incident occur targeting the country’s Jewish community, still considering Islamist extremism the likeliest source of violent extremism there.

In response to this threat, the authorities have reiterated the need for all citizens to uphold what they continue to call the “fundamental British values” of democracy, rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance for those of different faith and belief. Since 2014, all Britain’s schools have been required by law to have a clear strategy for embedding these values in their work with pupils and be able to show how they have been effective in doing so.

While nothing is remiss in wanting these values inculcated in all British schoolchildren, there well could be a problem in presenting them as “British values”. Doing so unnecessarily and unwarrantably implies they are not shared by those hailing from elsewhere. Recently settled communities could well feel aggrieved by the imputed slight carried by that designation. A more accommodating and effective way of encouraging their embrace would be to emphasise how supportive of these values are all the world’s main religions, in their moderate forms.

A golden opportunity to present these values in this way is provided by the religious education that all Britain’s publicly-funded schools are required by law to provide, but which the Chief Inspector of Schools in England and Wales deemed to be of “generally poor quality” in her outgoing report in 2023. Religious education would be greatly improved in Britain were its curriculum to include consideration of the celebrated play Nathan the Wise by the 18th-century German playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.

Some might balk at the suggestion that a play written so long ago and far away could have much to offer British schoolchildren today, especially one written in the country from which Nazism sprang and which continues to harbour antisemitism in certain quarters. To dismiss this remarkable play, however, would be a mistake.

Nathan the Wise was the first play the “Cultural Federation of German Jews” staged in Berlin in 1933, after being granted permission by the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda, albeit only before a Jewish audience. The Nazis subsequently banned the play. They also demanded that the Jewish organisation withdraw the word “German” from its name.

Nathan the Wise was also the first play many German theatres put on after reopening at the end of World War Two. They chose it because of its strong message of hope for reconciliation and friendship between adherents of different faiths, especially the Abrahamic ones.

The play is set in Jerusalem during a brief truce in the Third Crusade, shortly after the Sultan Saladin had recaptured the holy city and readmitted Muslims and Jews to it, in addition to Christians. It is around him that the play interweaves its two central plots.

The first plot is an unsuccessful attempt by Saladin to replenish his exchequer, emptied by his prodigious charitable-giving, by entrapping the wealthy Jewish merchant, Nathan, a resident of the city, who, besides riches, enjoys a reputation for wisdom. Saladin summons Nathan to his palace to enquire which of the three Abrahamic faiths he considers truest. The Sultan claims that preoccupation with affairs of state has denied him the leisure needed to answer the question himself.

Nathan is acutely aware that if he were to declare that his own Jewish faith is most true, Saladin as a Muslim would feign outrage: how dare a Jew deny the truth of Islam? Yet should he nominate Islam instead, Nathan is also aware that Saladin would demand to know why he had not converted to the one true faith. Finally, were Nathan to nominate Christianity, Saladin would respond in both ways. Nathan knows, too, that his life depends on how he answers the Sultan’s question.

In posing that question, Saladin was aware Nathan would be unable to answer it candidly. Hence the Sultan is counting on Nathan trying to buy his way out of his quandary by offering Saladin money. Nathan feigns genuine inability to answer the question, but instead recounts a story he claims has a bearing on the matter.

There was once a man in the East, Nathan relates, who acquired a ring from someone he held dear. This ring had the remarkable property of making its wearer beloved by God and his fellow men — but only provided that the wearer believed in its power. He passed the ring to his dearest son with the proviso that the son should do the same. This duly happened, until the ring came into the possession of the father of three equally worthy sons, equally loved by him, and to each of whom he separately promised the ring when alone with them. Approaching death without knowing to whom to give the ring, the owner had two identical copies made, before giving one to each son separately. Upon his death, a quarrel broke out between the three sons as to which one had been given the authentic ring. Just like adherents of the three faiths, Nathan concludes his story.

Saladin immediately objects that, unlike the rings, the three faiths manifestly differed in such ways as their liturgies, prescribed dress, and permitted foods and drink. Nathan dismisses these differences as superficial in comparison with their similarities. Each faith is acquired, typically, from those who love and care for its recipient, who loves and trusts its donors in return. The religions are also similar, he observes, in their common reliance on ancient sacred texts, texts that had to be taken on trust. The only way anyone could authenticate their faith was by behaving as if it were truest, just as the only way each of the three sons could establish the authenticity of his ring was by believing it to be the genuine one and acting to render themselves worthy of God’s love and that of their fellows.

Won over by this reply, Saladin offers Nathan his friendship. Nathan delicately reciprocates by asking Saladin to look after for him a large quantity of money he had recently acquired by collecting debts during a recent business trip abroad.

It was during Nathan’s absence that an incident had occurred which forms the backdrop to the play’s second plot. A fire had broken out at his home from which his eighteen-year-old daughter Rachel had been rescued by a passing young Templar knight. The couple had then fallen in love. The Templar, along with several of his fellow knights, had been brought to Jerusalem by the Saracens for execution. All these Templars had broken the terms of a truce. Saladin had spared this young Templar on account of an uncanny resemblance he bore to a younger brother of his who had disappeared many years previously.

Unbeknownst to Rachel, Nathan is not her real father. As a three-month old baptised Christian, she had been placed by her father in his friend Nathan’s temporary care, after her mother had died in childbirth. Her father had to go into battle (in Gaza of all places) where he had then been killed. As the play’s action unfolds, it transpires that Rachel and the Templar cannot marry, not because of their different faiths, but because they are both the children of Saladin’s long-lost brother. The play ends with all the principal characters — Jewish, Muslim and Christian — embracing in mutual affection and respect, their religious differences totally transcended.

Incorporating Lessing’s Nathan the Wise into religious education would be a perfect way to invite Britain’s increasingly religiously diverse schoolchildren to appreciate the need for and value of religious pluralism. It could also help them to reflect on who might today best be considered the Holy Land’s true colonisers and who its originally colonised inhabitants.

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