The stigmatizing of Puritans as Jews in Jacobean England: Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon and the Book of Sports controversy

John Traske was publicly tortured and sentenced to life imprisonment in London in June 1618 for preaching that Jewish ceremonial laws continued to apply to Christians. Traske's punishment needs to be placed in the context of the government's campaign to discredit Puritan opposition to the Book of Sports, one of the most controversial policies of James's reign. The trial facilitated the polemical identification of Puritan sabbatarianism with the Old Testament legalism of the Jews, who personified the alien, anti‐Christian 'other' in the early modern English imagination even more starkly than Catholics. Francis Bacon, then at the height of his political powers, appears to have been involved in maximizing the publicity value of the Traske affair. This article also examines the stereotypes of the Puritan as Jew that had been developing in England, both in theological tract and on the popular stage, and discusses in particular a play closely associated with anti‐Puritanism and the government's promotion of Sunday sports, Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair (1614).