What do Sabbath crimes have to do with the Enlightenment? Civil legislation to keep Sunday holy was issued in several Protestant states in the course of the seventeenth century, by way of implementing the Third Commandment of the Decalogue.¹ In the Danish monarchy, an extensive ordinance regarding church discipline, published in 1629, declared that failure to attend the Sunday sermon was a crime, to be punished by the local clergyman. The ordinance was motivated by the need to practise collective repentance as a united community faithful to God. Consequently, fighting Sabbath crimes became an integrated part of the reforms linked to Lutheran confessionalization.² About one century later, in 1735, an updated version of the ordinance introduced a number of exceptions to the general obligation to rest from activities, especially for selected commercial business pursuits. Such mitigations of confessional legislation might typically be ascribed to the arrival of the Age of Enlightenment, with reference to the gradual separation of religion from law.³ However, while such a characterization captures a significant conceptual shift in the foundations of law-making, it does not tell us how the still-existing confessional legislation functioned in the everyday world of local officials, as well as of inhabitants of the realm.

The Danish Sabbath ordinance remained an active element in legislation until as late as 1845. Focusing on the eighteenth century, one could not very well argue that the issue of whether this law should remain in force was simply a matter of a conflict between remaining orthodoxy and emerging Enlightenment. The Sabbath ordinance could be used, neglected and opposed for a variety of purposes.

First, Sabbath regulation served as an instrument for those who wished to keep on reforming habits in accordance with the Third Commandment, such as the highly influential Lutheran Pietists.⁴ The revised ordinance of 1735 was itself formulated in harmony with the pietist ethos of King Christian VI, highlighting the importance of letting oneself be edified by the word of God instead of wasting time on ‘unnecessary occupations’ such as worldly enjoyment or pure vice.⁵ As a direct application of that view, the eighth paragraph of the ordinance instructed local clergy to teach the parish youth for thirty minutes after the end of the sermon on Sunday mornings.⁶ This focus was emphasized by the introduction in the same year of mandatory confirmation.⁷ But the renewed Sabbath regulation contained more than these pious concerns.

Second, the 1735 ordinance was also presented as a remedy against so-called tumult in the streets. The responsibility for pursuing this task was transferred from the clergy to the existing civil authorities in the form of the local bailiff or, in cities where public professionalized offices were increasing in number, the police master.⁸ In this way, the issue of Sabbath crimes was intertwined with safeguarding, or protesting against, ideals pertaining to ‘good polic[ing]’ (god politi). As far back as the early seventeenth century, confessional legislation in both Nordic realms had been partly motivated by the desire to maintain such ideals.⁹ But in the early eighteenth century, police regulation also developed as a scientific novelty. Professors of cameral science were installed in various parts of the Lutheran world – in Halle (1727), Frankfurt (Oder) (1727), Rinteln (1730) and Uppsala (1741) – and growing literature on ‘good police’ triggered institutional reforms.¹⁰ In theological terms, police regulation earned recognition from Christian Wolff, who connected its focus on order and security to ideals regarding welfare and societal perfection.¹¹ Besides such visionary ideals, research on police regulation has detected rather more practical ambitions arising from a wish to prevent conflicts between townsmen, and to balance ordinances against local circumstances.¹²

Third, the Sabbath ordinance was also perceived as securing a weekly rhythm of work and rest. The existing scholarship on the regulation of time in the eighteenth century has demonstrated how the prescribed Sunday rest was largely confirmed, and even invigorated, in the paradigmatic calendar reforms of the mid- and late eighteenth century. These reforms specifically targeted the holy days inherited from the medieval Church. Consequently, they supported a regular weekly rhythm which included both more days of work and a routinized Sunday rest.¹³ Research on religiously moderate voices that experienced these shifting tendencies in the Protestant world has pointed to a persistent ideal of keeping Sunday holy; but that ideal coexisted with increasing flexibility in respect of reinterpreting the function of the Sunday as a day of rest. While Protestant reformers of the seventeenth century considered complete rest pure idleness, mid-eighteenth-century thinkers praised the lack of activities on the resting day as corresponding to ideals of simplicity.¹⁴

Initiating a discussion on Sabbath crimes thus amounted to opening a multifunctional toolbox. Despite these multiple views and functions of Sabbath regulation in the eighteenth century, research on its practical implementation in this period has been scant. As Kyle Dieleman has rightly remarked regarding the early modern Netherlands, there is especially a lack of studies on ‘how the Sabbath was policed and practiced’.¹⁵

The present chapter investigates how Sabbath legislation was discussed and implemented in the case of Altona.¹⁶ This was the first commercial free town of the Danish monarchy, and its inhabitants enjoyed freedom of trade, tolls and religion. Obviously, a legislation aiming to honour religious practice by sacrificing working hours did not go well with the concept of a free town. Nevertheless, the Danish Lutheran ordinance against Sabbath-breaking was severely implemented here in 1754, during the very heyday of Enlightenment ideas. As we will see, the reason for this unexpected timing was the introduction of a professional police regulation for the city. In accordance with Danish standards, the very first part of the new police instruction for Altona, issued in 1754, announced strict measures against breaches of the Sabbath. It was not there only for formal reasons. Intriguingly, Altona’s second police director, Johann Peter Willebrand (who served in that capacity from 1759 to 1766), defended Sabbath regulation in the very name of the Enlightenment. In his most prominent book concerning ‘good police’ in towns and cities, Willebrand concisely stated that ‘enlightened’ governments should take care that Sunday was kept sacred in order to maintain a functioning religious pluralism. This apparent paradox, as well as other entanglements between Enlightenment ideas and confessional legislation in mid-eighteenth-century Altona, is in the focus of this chapter. The present study hence contributes to the recent scholarship on early modern Denmark, which has characterized the eighteenth century as a period when ambitions to foster good Christians and good citizens were intertwined in various ways.¹⁷

This chapter analyses the process of implementing Sabbath legislation in Altona, starting with the discussions that followed upon the request from the townsmen. These discussions involved the city council, the Supreme President and the German Chancellery in Copenhagen. Their correspondence reveals both practical problems with Sabbath-breaking and suggestions on how these might be resolved. The analysis then returns to police director Willebrand’s statement on the reasons why enlightened governments should care about Sabbath legislation, looking at how these ideals were reflected in his practical service as police director. What makes Willebrand especially interesting is that he constitutes an intriguing combination of a theorist and a practitioner. His books set forth his ideas about the purposes of Sabbath legislation; and his practical work as the police director of Altona gives us an idea of his struggles to implement the royal police instruction to the best of his ability. First, however, something needs to be said about the particular case of Altona as well as about the emergence and development of Sabbath ordinances as a legislative tool.

Altona: the Enlightenment city

Eighteenth-century Altona, which was the third largest city of the Danish monarchy after Copenhagen and Bergen, is far from being representative of Nordic cities at the time in question. Still, it offers the most striking opportunity for a case study examining how mono-Lutheran legislation was applied when directly confronted with distinct markers of Enlightenment.

Like other free towns of the Holy Roman Empire and the United Provinces, Altona developed its Enlightenment features in an urban setting based on a combination of commercial interest and religious pluralism.¹⁸ At its foundation in 1601, the Holstein-Pinneberg Duke Ernst von Schaumburg (1569–1622) invited persecuted religious minorities to settle freely in the city without paying any taxes. The purpose was to benefit from North Sea trade, particularly from business connected to Hamburg, the trade hub of the region, which was situated a mere three kilometres from the north-eastern Altonian city gate. This policy attracted numerous Mennonites and French Huguenots, who were granted permission to erect their own church buildings in Altona – churches which subsequently attracted members of those communities who lived in Hamburg but went to Altona on Sundays for worship. Reformed Germans also established both their business and their site of worship in the city, as did the Catholic minority and German as well as Portuguese Jews.

After becoming part of the Danish realm, Altona was made its first free town (although Catholics had to wait twenty years extra for official recognition). It was soon followed by Fredericia on eastern Jutland (1682) as well as by Fredrikstad (1682) and Kristiansand (1686) in southern Norway.¹⁹ Following a major fire in 1713 which destroyed as much as two-thirds of its buildings, King Frederik IV issued another royal letter in French, German and Dutch, inviting people to settle in Altona without paying taxes, regardless of confession.²⁰ Eighteenth-century Altona hence functioned as an intellectual cradle for numerous key agents of the Enlightenment. It was here that the radical royal counsellor Johann Friedrich Struensee started his career by teaching at the city’s school of midwifery in the 1760s. In the same decade, the prominent moral philosopher Johann Bernhard Basedow was transferred from the Sorø Academy to a school in Altona after having been accused of heterodoxy. And before that, Altona had attracted several iconic free-thinkers in religious matters, such as Jean de Labadie (1610–1674) and Johann Conrad Dippel (1673–1734).²¹

The religious minorities of Altona each possessed one site of worship that was announced as a public building on official maps (Figs 12.1 and 12.2). The façades of these churches and synagogues clearly announced the type of building. At first glance, the public status of the buildings may come across as an unusual sign of official recognition. In most early modern cities where religious minorities found a safe haven, including the Dutch cities that were famous for practising religious toleration, minority groups were only allowed to gather for worship inside private houses which were demonstratively hidden from the street and did not signal the type of building with any outside decoration or marker. Despite this lack of visibility, such private arrangements were somewhat public secrets. The sites were neither clandestine nor illicit, and information about their location was widely accessible in popular guidebooks.²² Both research on police regulation and research on religious minorities have pointed to this kind of private arrangement as particularly successful examples of furtive practices that went beyond the increasing control of public authorities in the early modern period.²³ This implies, somewhat paradoxically, that the public status of the Altonian minority churches made them a more direct target for public surveillance once police regulation was implemented. The lists of ‘public spaces’ that would be patrolled regularly according to the instructions for the police director, as well as according to the instruction for the street bailiff, mentioned the churches and churchyards.²⁴ This means that the implementation of Sabbath legislation jeopardized not only the freedom of commerce but also the mosaic of religious pluralism in the free town.

Figure 12.1 Sketch of Altona listing the minority churches among the noteworthy buildings of the town. Note the dense area of minority churches in the north-eastern corner of the city, called ‘The Freedom’, ‘Die Freiheit’ in German. Photo: The Royal Library in Copenhagen.

Figure 12.2 Copper engraving of Altona listing the minority churches among the noteworthy buildings of the town, from C. Praetorius, Grund-Riss der Stadt Altona, 1780. Photo: The Royal Library in Copenhagen.

Sabbath legislation between confessional culture and public order

Prior to the Reformation era, the Third Commandment was generally interpreted in symbolical terms as a call for spiritual rest.²⁵ Certainly, disturbing the peace on Sundays and holy days was categorized as a violation that encompassed a dimension of sacrilege.²⁶ But there was no demand for a complete cessation of activities until the late sixteenth century, when Puritan movements in England and rigid branches of the Dutch Reformed tradition introduced literal interpretations of the Third Commandment. In these groups, issues regarding Sunday profanation were closely linked with attempts to form a unique confessional identity as a contrast to Roman Catholics and less pious Protestants.²⁷ In the Swedish realm, the Clerical Estate raised the question of introducing Sabbath legislation at the Riksdag in 1617, but without managing to persuade the other three Estates of its necessity. When the question had been raised repeatedly for almost half a century, an ordinance against Sabbath-breaking was finally established in 1665. It focused on combating various activities, such as gluttony, drinking and dancing, on Sundays and holy days.²⁸ The Swedish church historian Hilding Pleijel has characterized the Sabbath ordinance of the realm as a general tool for keeping order during Sweden’s thirty-eight years of absolute rule (1680–1718).²⁹

The introduction of Sabbath legislation in the Danish realm was quicker. In accordance with the 1629 ordinance, the local clergy were instructed to record cases of drinking, gambling and guild celebrations which, in practice, replaced Sunday service and led to ‘neglect of the sermon and abuse of the Holy Day’.³⁰ A fixed fine of 1 rigsdaler was set for the crime. This fine was to be paid unless the sinner repented after having experienced a ‘secret, Christian, meek, brotherly admonition’.³¹ The Sabbath regulations were further specified in the Penal Law of the Danish Code issued in 1683, of which the first ten sections consisted of legal prescriptions issuing from each of the Ten Commandments. The Code declared each paterfamilias responsible for not letting his children play outside the church, or fail to participate in catechism class after the service. The law text also introduced some exceptions. For example, it stated that city gates must be opened for clergymen on duty and animals in need of pastures.³²

The revised ordinance of 1735 briefly repeated the risk of provoking God’s wrath by dishonouring the Sabbath. However, it devoted more space to expanding the list of exceptions. Now taverns were allowed to serve drinks after 5 p.m., if handled with moderation, and they were also allowed to serve travellers and sick people before that hour. Bakers were permitted to conduct their business on Sundays, except during the sermons in the morning and in the afternoon. People were allowed to work in the fields even on the Sabbath during harvest seasons, and when the weather offered beneficial circumstances. Pharmacies were permitted to stay open day and night, including Sundays. The only type of business that was explicitly identified as having no excuse for not stopping their work completely was retail.³³ Now we will look at what happened when this legislation was applied in the free town of Altona.

Discussing Sabbath crimes in Altona, 1752–1754

It all started with a petition. In March 1752, a group of townsmen wrote to the Danish king asking for a police master. They also attached an outline for a set of instructions for the police (hereafter ‘police instruction’).³⁴ The request from the citizens emphasized that the police master should be educated in law, especially in ‘the ordinances and city constitutions regarding police regulation’, a reference to cameralist sciences.³⁵ Since these tasks were being carried out at the time by the local bailiff, the townsmen’s request was fundamentally a call for professionalization.³⁶ ‘Spiritual matters’ was the headline of the first section of the draft. In several respects, the townsmen requested stricter application of the Sabbath ordinance, whereas the local authorities expressed their unwillingness to accept most of the suggested changes. The specification of the original request, as well as the responses to it, reveal the various dimensions at play when discussing Sabbath crimes in an eighteenth-century free town.

First, exceptions were discussed from the perspective of commercial concerns. Here, the petitioners suggested a delimitation of the restrictions for producers of liquor (Brandtwein Brenner) to comprise Sundays only, not other holy days. Otherwise, they simply maintained that the Sabbath ordinance should be applied.³⁷ Supreme President Henning von Qualen (1703–1785) argued against this, declaring that Altona could not be treated in the same way as other cities of the realm. He suggested that taverns should count as a general exception for travellers – as stipulated in the Danish Sabbath ordinance – but also for the regular guests from Hamburg who paid a visit to Altona over the day, which resulted in considerable business.³⁸ His predecessor, Bernhard Leopold Volkmar von Schomburg (1705–1771), supported this argument in a letter sent to the German Chancellery in Copenhagen, in which he pointed out that Altona had derived huge benefits from Sunday business ever since Hamburg introduced a Sabbath ordinance in 1741, during his presidency. Schomburg stressed that Altona’s sole source of prosperity was what he referred to as ‘conversation, trade and flux’, thereby interestingly highlighting the informal conversations that would typically take place at taverns as something that the city could not afford to lose for economic reasons. Consequently, keeping the city open on Sundays offered a valuable opportunity to benefit economically from more social interaction, and this was business that Altona could ill afford to lose.³⁹ The city council argued that taverns could be kept open on Sundays, as long as guests avoided ‘music, noisy games and fights’ during the time when sermons were delivered in the morning and in the afternoon.⁴⁰ The limited time-span of the two sermons coincided with the mitigated Sabbath ordinance of 1735; but the suggestion to keep all taverns open, and merely reduce the level of sound from them, amounted to a further scaling-down of the restrictions. Moreover, the townsmen’s request to introduce these additional exceptions was a flagrant violation of the Sabbath ordinance, which condemned excursions that omitted a Sunday service.⁴¹

Second, the petitioners expressed their wishes to prevent ‘sectarians’ and ‘forbidden conventicles’ from gathering in the city.⁴² This request was turned down as well and even deemed illegitimate by the local authorities. Both the city council and the Supreme President declared that the city privileges of 1664 guaranteed all religious minorities (except the Socinians!) the right to practise their religion freely, and they added that any complaints about the character of religious activities should be directed to church authorities instead.⁴³ Nevertheless, the occurrence of this request once more demonstrates how townsmen expressed confession-related wishes when the implications of Sabbath regulations were at play. Their wishes were heard. The city’s first police instruction of 1754 confirmed the formulations used by the townsmen, stipulating that the police master should protect the city from any ‘public outbreaks carried out by mockers of religion’.⁴⁴ The instruction also made clear that it was the clergy’s responsibility to ‘maintain the purity of religion’, thereby confirming that that purity was still a legitimate concern.⁴⁵ The discussion around this question reveals loopholes for religious dissenters; but it also confirms the persistent legitimacy of church authorities against those whose reduced engagement was viewed as directed against the official Church. This focus on targeting the public character of activities – often designated as scandals – while sparing those that were concealed corresponded well to the tendency of the time when it came to dealing with religious dissenters.⁴⁶

Third, the petitioners listed churches and churchyards among their preferred sites of surveillance (besides streets and public houses). In doing so, they involved the spaces of the religious minorities. They specified their wish that the police master should make sure he punished those who actively acted in a provoking or disturbing way during divine service. They also expressed a specific demand that the city’s Jewish butchers keep their commerce closed on Sundays and holy days.⁴⁷ While local authorities defended taverns that were staying open on Sundays, they did not argue along the same lines regarding shops, presumably as shops did not serve the same purpose as taverns when it came to supporting publicly profitable interaction with people visiting from Hamburg. In any case, the discussions between responsible authorities in Altona reveal that there was also another concern at play in relation to people from Hamburg. In a letter sent to the German Chancellery in Copenhagen, Supreme President von Qualen passed on complaints from the French Reformed community about particular shopkeepers in the city:

The geography of the recounted conflict is revealing. The French Reformed church was situated in the north-eastern quarter of the city called ‘the Freedom’ (‘die Freiheit’ in German), on the road connecting Altona with Hamburg. Ideally, this was the area of the city that was to fulfil the dual promises of freedom of religion and trade, as well as expanding contacts with the powerful neighbouring city. Most sites of worship were situated here, but so were numerous shops and taverns. As a result, while some people took to ‘the Freedom’ to eat and drink, thereby violating the Sabbath, others came with the contrary intent to honour the Sabbath by partaking in the religious services on offer. This was obviously not appreciated by the Reformed community, which was known for harbouring the strictest Sabbatarians, a view of them that formed part of the Reformed confessional identity in pluralist environments.⁴⁹ Irritation over Jewish business activities in proximity to the church during the time of worship was channelled through the discussion on how to apply the existing Sabbath regulation. In this regard, the public status of the minority church actually served to promote the wish to establish surveillance around it. Ironically, this complaint about Sabbath-breaking was directed against members of a Jewish community for following the original concept of keeping the Sabbath on Saturdays holy instead of that on Sundays.

Johann Peter Willebrand: an agent of Enlightenment

There is good reason to speak about Altona’s second police director, Johann Peter Willebrand, as an agent of Enlightenment. With a background as a Doctor of Law, educated in Halle – the first university to introduce a chair in cameral sciences – he was appointed police director of Altona in 1759.⁵⁰ The introductory paragraph of his book on police regulation, published in French during the final year of his service under the title Abrégé de la Police (1765), echoes the Wolffian theology that was topical for Lutheran Enlightenment. Here, the fundament of police regulation is defined as ‘[t]he fear of God, founded in the knowledge of the natural and revealed light, and opposed to superstition and atheism’.⁵¹ Furthermore, God’s invisible arm is depicted as the supporting element of the police director’s vocation.⁵² It follows that the above-mentioned statement according to which rules against the profanation of the Sunday must be kept emanates from this point of departure; it does not constitute a remnant from the past but outlines a highly desirable active intervention which could be expected from ‘enlightened governments’:

According to Willebrand, then, the overarching reason behind the implementation of Sabbath regulation was a desire to support dignity. There is no direct mention of collective duties within a religious community, which were what originally motivated the introduction of Sabbath laws. Instead, the principle presented to the reader was one of non-interference: the value of not disturbing those who performed religious practices, no matter whether they took place in private homes or in public churches. This reasoning is imbued with ideals of tolerance, and it is noteworthy that it was written in French only three years after Voltaire published his famous treaty on the subject.⁵⁴

If the quotation above supported religious practices carried out in private, another passage in Willebrand’s book idealized functioning religious pluralism by taking the example of the tolerant environment in Altona, highlighting amiable everyday relations among Christians and Jews:

Before ascribing the tone in this passage exclusively to the French Enlightenment, we should take the fifth paragraph of the Danish Sabbath legislation into account. Willebrand was entirely committed to abiding by the regulating documents for his service as police director. Here, all inhabitants were exhorted to ‘show all Christian and appropriate veneration’ when taking part in the Sunday service. According to Willebrand, such veneration was extended to all devotional activities in the city.⁵⁶ The coincidence regarding the formulation of the Sabbath regulation thus indicates that Willebrand’s terminology was not only embedded in the symbolic world of the Enlightenment, seemingly paraphrasing Voltaire; at the same time, it corresponded to the Danish Sabbath legislation. Consequently, the Sabbath ordinance of 1735 could – perhaps unexpectedly – be taken to support peaceful religious pluralism in a free town where such a condition was, by way of exception, allowed and regulated. The outcome was a more generally motivated obligation to show veneration towards practices of devotion conducted on Sundays.

As a man who emphasized the value of education, Willebrand particularly valued Sundays as the day when young people received public teaching in catechism classes. This attachment was the reason behind his best-documented conflict with a group of Jews in the city. In correspondence with his superiors in Copenhagen, Willebrand recounted that some Jewish men in Altona let children work on Sundays, with the devastating consequence that they were deprived of ‘the first fundament of their religion’.⁵⁷ He stressed that this was not only an offence against the Sabbath ordinance, which instructed parents to let their children receive one hour of catechism teaching on Sundays, but also in a wider sense an attack on the value of education. In his theoretical work, Willebrand argued that education prepares the young generation for becoming citizens, and that all education that is based on love for God moulds them so that they become ‘virtuous and reasonable’.⁵⁸ Indeed, when catechism teaching was made compulsory in the eighteenth century, this was often the context in which children learnt to read, write and recite. The example shows that Willebrand’s preference for catechism education once more targeted the Jewish minority specifically. In the conflict about children working on Sundays, he bluntly stated that the Jewish community belonged to the ‘tolerated religions’, which had to adapt to ‘the dominant religion’ of the country determined by the government.⁵⁹ This was Lutheran Christendom, which both in the matter of education and the matter of Sunday rest shared views with the Christian minorities of the city, for example the French Huguenots who complained about business activities on Sundays conducted by Jewish shopkeepers.

Willebrand’s handwritten log containing more than 700 fines imposed between 1759 and 1764, preserved at Landesarchiv Schleswig-Holstein, confirms that the Jewish minority was particularly targeted when fighting Sabbath crimes, at least in the beginning. When the category ‘profanation of the Sunday’ first occurs in the log, 6 and 10 January 1760, for instance, six Jews were fined for profaning the Sunday; and for the rest of the year, all fines posted in the register under this category concerned Jews.⁶⁰ Interestingly, these notifications also include a case concerning a Jewish man who had allegedly disturbed Jewish worship by bad manners and commercial activities (‘liederliche Conduite und Zählerei’) on a Friday evening. The offender was reported by another Jewish man, and he was sentenced to two days in prison on bread and water.⁶¹

After 1760, however, only a small number of Sabbath-violation cases involved the Jewish population.⁶² Instead, the logged police interventions mainly targeted public houses (inns and taverns) that exceeded the permitted opening hours in the evenings and on Sundays and holy days, and addressed the issue of games taking place.⁶³ In addition, the police director worked proactively by warning a shopkeeper close to the Reformed church that if he were to offer products for sale on another Sunday morning, he would have to pay a substantial fine. Willebrand is likely to have been impelled by a wish to prevent any further conflict with Sabbatarian-minded Reformed Christians from Hamburg, who frequented the church.⁶⁴

On New Year’s Day 1762 Willebrand initiated a third type of campaign against Sabbath offenders, as he penned a rather extensive account to his superiors in Copenhagen complaining that local farmers were profaning the Sabbath by trailing their milk carts into the city on Sunday mornings. Three days later, a handful of farmers were charged for the crime, and the same procedure followed on two other Sundays that winter.⁶⁵

These temporary and variegated campaigns against, in chronological order, the Jewish population, public houses and local farmers bear witness to a selective and impromptu implementation of Sabbath regulations. In all these matters, the police director gave up his ambitions after a limited period of intensified efforts. This was certainly not because he was reluctant to apply the legislation. No less than 9.4 per cent (63 out of 679) of the entries in his fines log concerned profanation of the Sunday.⁶⁶ The instruction to the police assistants in 1766, which was launched as an effort to improve the efficiency of the police, exhorted these servants of the law to keep a vigilant eye on Jewish shopkeepers on Sundays, as well as on public houses. With regard to the latter, he instructed his assistants not to allow sitting guests at the time when sermons were being preached in churches (9–11 a.m. and 2–3 p.m.), which means that he preferred the stricter policy stated in the Sabbath ordinance to the exemption suggested by local authorities.⁶⁷ Similarly, the sale of milk on Sundays – which Willebrand counteracted by punishing the farmers who came with their carts on Sunday mornings – appears in the scholarly literature as a recurring example of commercially motivated exceptions to Sabbath regulation.⁶⁸ His efforts met with varying degrees of success. On 14 March 1762 Willebrand noted that he had fined a shoemaker for commissioning his journeyman to repair his own shoes on a Sunday, while on 8 May 1763 he noted that he had failed to forbid people to go to work in one of the city’s major factories on Sunday mornings.⁶⁹ On Christmas Day 1761 the police director successfully closed down the city’s confectioner’s sale of Christmas pastry – even though bakers were listed among the exceptions in the 1735 ordinance.⁷⁰

The correspondence between Willebrand and his superiors in Copenhagen offers revealing annotations about the agony behind these twists and turns. Under the resigned headline ‘Lack of police in Altona’, the police director blamed the failures of his various efforts on the fact that Altona was situated on the outskirts of Hamburg, where hardly any rules applied at all.⁷¹ Moreover, he stressed that the tradition of the free town was strong, which meant that ‘there is no reason to fear that the Sunday ordinance will be applied to the letter beyond what circumstances allow’.⁷² Here, Willebrand might have put too much blame on Altona’s status as a free town. According to Jørgen Mührmann-Lund’s thorough study of police regulation during the eighteenth century in Aalborg, Sabbath crimes were only punished in transient campaigns in the northern Danish city as well.⁷³ Nevertheless, and importantly for this book, Willebrand’s note reveals an ambition to increase control over Sabbath-breaking more than proved possible, partly for reasons attached to Enlightenment ideas, partly with reference to the sovereignty of what he referred to as the dominant religion.

Three passages in Willebrand’s book on ideal police regulation in cities comment on precisely the imperfection of regulations in practice. In a section regarding the matter of imposing fines on citizens, he declared that ‘if [ordinances] are moderate, they are lasting; if they are rigorous, they cease of their own accord’, adding that it was not possible to apply them to cases that occur every day.⁷⁴ In another passage, he declared that rigorous measures ‘hold back strangers instead of accelerating expansion and tranquillity’.⁷⁵ And when commenting on the profanation of Sunday during the weekends of the relocating seasons around Ascension Day in May and Saint Martin’s Day in November, when large numbers of people were permitted to use the time for moving in and out of households, the police director travestied a certain biblical idiom about flexibility, stating that ‘unfortunately, there are sometimes circumstances when one must remind oneself that the Sabbath was made for human beings, and not human beings for the Sabbath’.⁷⁶

Conclusion

So, what did Sabbath crimes have to do with the Enlightenment? This chapter has demonstrated that legislation against Sabbath crimes modelled in the mono-Lutheran North had its place even in a city much marked by the Enlightenment, such as Altona. The Sabbath ordinance was not handled as an obsolete remnant from the past. On the contrary, it functioned as a productive element of available legislation as the city was reformed by the introduction of topical police regulation. The discussion between townsmen and various authorities concerning stricter implementation of Sabbath regulation included confessional standpoints, pragmatic exceptions and mediating solutions to conflicting ideals of routinized Sunday practices.

Sabbath legislation in eighteenth-century Altona was multifunctional. It supported collective pauses in the rhythm of urban public life during Sunday sermons, public education for children in the form of catechism classes and respect for the traditions of Christian minorities. Conversely, the Jewish minority was obliged to adapt to the Christian concept of the Sabbath, which demonstrates how Sabbath legislation still carried an element of confessional strife. Each of these key elements of eighteenth-century Sundays deserves more thorough study from the perspective of what changes, adaptations and continuations the Age of Enlightenment entailed in actual practice: rest, churchgoing, catechism teaching, public order and potentially the day for the articulation of sovereignty over the Jewish population (real or imagined).

Three markers of the Enlightenment formed the special dynamics inherent in the implementation of the ordinance in Altona: commercial concerns, religious pluralism and Enlightenment-driven reforms, which included Sabbath regulation. All these markers were particularly strong in Altona; but as the century wore on, they became increasingly tangible for the Nordic countries at large. The legal intervention sparked a typical tension between religion and commerce, or between God and Mammon, to use a biblical idiom. Interestingly, the religious concerns included complaints expressed by members of one of the city’s religious minorities, the French Huguenots, against members of another, Jewish businessmen. For an in-depth understanding of such conflicts, confessional culture and Enlightenment need to be understood as coexisting and intertwined phenomena in the eighteenth century.

In conclusion, the case of Altona provides an example of what a focus on practices and institutions as sites of interaction can tell us about the relationship between confessional legislation and ideas of the Enlightenment in the Nordic countries. The implementation of Danish Sabbath legislation was carried out with numerous exceptions and mitigations, but the result was nevertheless increased control over Sunday practices. The bureaucracy that was set up to achieve the ideals posed by regulation was equipped with contradicting instructions: both for making exceptions and for boosting public surveillance. This raises questions concerning contentions between the furtive religious practices established as a response to confessional antagonism and the increasing public control over religious minorities which came with the official recognition: did religious minorities benefit from public recognition, or did such recognition in fact create fresh problems related to the minority status? And did the extensive lists of exceptions increase not only permission for but also rejection of what was not included among the exceptions? One thing is clear: while public control may have increased, so did flexibility in the application of Sabbath regulation, at least from the perspective of local officeholders. And such a flexibility was not only linked to the decline of orthodoxy. Police director Johann Peter Willebrand’s book on ideals of regulation is instructive in that it shows how local authorities could find legitimacy in biblical references for choosing moderation over strictness. Ultimately, the coexistence of divergent standpoints in the form of the duty to keep Sunday holy, the detailed discussions about exceptions to the rule to rest from activities and, finally, the legitimacy of a moderate approach to Sabbath regulation all show that Sabbath crimes remained a relevant concern in the Enlightenment city as elsewhere.