Clandestine church

They were an important advance in religious tolerance in the wake of the Reformation, an era when worship services conducted by minority faiths were often banned and sometimes penalized by exile or execution.

[1] According to historian Benjamin Kaplan, clandestine churches became common in Europe in the wake of the Reformation as a way for governments to permit a degree of religious toleration for minority Christian denominations and Jews.

"[1] Kaplan writes that the pretense of clandestinity "enabled Europeans to accommodate dissent without confronting it directly, to tolerate knowingly what they could not bring themselves to accept fully.

"[1] In a surviving Dutch document from 1691, the Regents of the City of Amsterdam specified the terms under which a Catholic church, called the Glabais, could be built by the Franciscans "to avoid giving any offense."

And, finally, the Catholics must not walk to church in groups, nor carry prayer books, rosaries, or "other offensive objects" in a manner that made them visible to Protestant eyes.

[1] In 1701, the intendant of Alsace, Félix Le Pelletier de La Houssaye ruled against a complaint brought by an abbe, writing that "The worship which the Jews established in Reichshoffen is not as public as one would have you believe.

There is no synagogue per se, only, by a custom long established in this province, when there are seven Jewish families in one locale, those who compose them assemble, without scandal, in a house of their sect for readings and prayers.

"[1] A line was crossed when an actual building was erected as a prayer house, as the Jews of Biesheim, Wintzenheim, and Hagenthal discovered when each community had a newly built synagogue razed by the Conseil Souverain of Alsace in the 1720s.