Jews,Economic Metaphors,and the Healthy Body Politic: The Jewish Role in Christian Economic Narratives and the Birth of Modern Economics

Jewish History - The linguistic structure of the Western Christian discourse about economics as resembling and symbolizing the entire logic of earthly government and order was closely connected to...     

Invention and convention: Jewish and Christian critique of the Jewish fixed calendar

The institution of the Jewish fixed calendar has provoked muchcontroversial discussion not only among Jewish, but also Christian scholars. The significant contributions to the subject by two of the great sixteenth-century polymaths, the Jew Azariah de' Rossi and the Christian Sebastian Münster, pinpoint the delicate nature of calendrical investigation. Münster's frequent use of one particular piyyut (a religious poem) to undermine the basis of the Jewish fixed calendar is intended to defend the contradictory calendrical data in the Gospels. De' Rossi implicitly attacks Muenster for his recourse to this unhistorical text. Yet de' Rossi himself is intent on proving that the Jewish fixed calendar is a late post-talmudic convention, an iconoclastic approach which was not welcome in certain rabbinic circles. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Conversos,Moriscos, and the Eucharist in Early Modern Spain: Some Reflections on Jewish Exceptionalism

Sacrilegious attitudes toward the Eucharistic host are one of the most commonplace accusations leveled against Jews in premodern Europe. Usually treated in Jewish historiography as an expression of anti-Judaism or antisemitism, they are considered a hallmark of Jewish powerlessness and persecution. In medieval and early modern Spain, however, Jews and conversos (Jewish converts to Christianity and their descendants) were not the only proclaimed enemies of the Eucharist. Reports about avoidance, rejection, criticism, and even ridicule and profanation of the consecrated host were similarly leveled against Muslims and moriscos (Muslim converts to Christianity). This essay seeks to assess the parallels and connections between the two groups through a comparative examination of accusations of sacrilegious behavior towards the host. The first part of the essay analyzes religious art, legal compendia, and inquisitorial trials records from the tribunals of Toledo and Cuenca in order to show some evident homologies between the two groups. The second part of the essay focuses on the analysis of the works of Jaime Bleda and Pedro Aznar y Cardona, two apologists of the expulsion of the moriscos, and draws direct connections between Jewish and morisco sacrilege. By exploring the similarities and differences between accusations against conversos and moriscos, this essay aims to offer a broader reflection on Jewish exceptionalism.

     

Ethnic Amalgamation, Like it or not: Inheritance in Early Modern Jewish Rome

Roman Jewry was a composite group in the early sixteenth century, including new arrivals from southern Italy, as well as Sicily and the Iberian Peninsula. There were Italians Jews, and Ashkenazim. By the middle of the century, they had amalgamated well. The out-marriage rate between the different groups was constantly increasing. One reason for this was the need to unify administrative procedures. This is especially noticeable with respect to laws of inheritance, in which, thanks to the Jewish Rabbinic notaries, the father and son Judah and Isaac Piattelli, it had become standard for a widower to return to his father-in-law one-third of the dowry, irrespective of how long the marriage had lasted. Jews found themselves adopting Christian procedures, yet also modifying them for Jewish use, thus creating unified Jewish procedure, but allowing for continued acculturation, even during the ghetto period.     

Lloyd Strickland: Proofs of God in Early Modern Europe: An Anthology

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

Jews and mental illness: medical metaphors, anti-semitism, and the Jewish response

The idea that Jews were prone to a specific set of illnesses is as old as the Middle Ages. In the nineteenth century the view that the Jew was especially prone to developing mental illnesses became an accepted part of medical discourse. Jewish doctors, too, believed this and had to evolve a means of dealing with their own potential madness.     

Blacks,Jews and the racial imagination in the writings of Sephardim in the long seventeenth century

This essay explores facets of the Sephardic racial imagination. Early Modern Catholic Iberian discourse generally scorned Jews and linked them, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, with denigrated Africans, or Blacks. Marginalized and often persecuted, conversos and Sephardim of the sixteenth through the eighteenth century resorted to hegemonic discourse about Blacks to construct their own identity. Central to Sephardic discourse about Blacks was its redemptive logic. In both Iberian Catholic and northwest-European Protestant colonial spheres, conversos and Sephardim sought through anti-Blackness to identity themselves (and hopefully for others to identify them) as members of the dominant White culture and ruling class, their religious otherness aside.Some of the material presented here comes from Jonathan Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own, for which I gratefully acknowledge the help of Hazel Gold, Viviana Grieco and Julia R. Lieberman. In order to convey the meaning of the often overwrought Baroque style of the Spanish originals, my translations are of necessity sometimes rather loose. I would also like to thank Yosef Kaplan, Lisa Moses Leff, Julia R. Lieberman and Kenneth Stow for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this essay.