“This passage can also be read differently …?:” How Jews and Christians censored Hebrew texts in early modern Modena

This article focuses on the impact exerted by the promulgation of the Index of Prohibited Books by Clement VIII in 1596 on the Jews in early modern Modena. In order to explore diverse cultural perspectives among Jews and Christians, it considers how they read, interpreted, and censored controversial passages in the commentary of Rashi (Solomon ben Isaac of Troyes, 1040–1105) on the Pentateuch. It shows parallels between censorship and the expurgation of Hebrew books, as well as the physical ghettoization and expulsion of Jews from Italian cities enacted by Church authorities, on the one hand, and political and cultural negotiations conducted by the Jews themselves, on the other. Just as the city could be protected from Jewish pollution only through the segregation and expulsion of Jews, so too could the Catholic community be effectively shielded from the contamination of Jewish blasphemies only through banning the Talmud and expurgating other Jewish texts. At the same time, Jews developed means of self-vindication, including a straightforward defense of the principal tenets of Judaism and a stratagem of avoiding discussions that referred to the superiority of Jews over Christians in some interpretations of Rashi. These methods enabled Jews to engage in social and political negotiations with Church and ducal institutions.     

Charles V as Last World Emperor and Jewish Hero

Charles V, king of Spain and emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, ruled over vast regions of central and western Europe and the Americas for much of the first half of the sixteenth century. This concentration of power, together with the emperor’s claim to universal monarchy, polarized his contemporaries’ views of him. Pro- and anti-imperial rhetoric and historiography abound, casting Charles V as hero or villain, protagonist or antagonist, depending on the author’s religious, dynastic, or national affiliations, political thinking, and pragmatic interests. While scholars have discussed competing Catholic, Protestant, and Muslim perspectives toward this emperor, Jewish views have not previously been analyzed. This article illuminates how sixteenth-century Jews evaluated Charles V as their own hero. It explores how Jewish witnesses of Charles’s reign perceived the Catholic emperor and his politics of crusade and church reform, contextualizing their reactions within Jewish messianic thought, on the one hand, and political realism, on the other. The article demonstrates that selected contemporaneous sources in Hebrew depict Charles V as a shared hero for European Jews and Christians. Jewish historiographical and prophetic writings from that time drew on the Christian apocalyptic notion of the “Last World Emperor,” adopting widespread Christian tendencies to identify Charles V as the glorious universal monarch who would reign at the culmination of human history as a quasi-messianic figure. Applying Amos Funkenstein’s and David Biale’s approach of counterhistory to these Jewish sources reveals the entangled history of a heroic image that was common to early modern Jews and Christians, albeit ideologically contested.     

REVIEWS

This article identifies a previously ignored social movement that existed in London during 1827–1831. The Jewish rights movement, as it will be called here, actually involved a coalition of Jews and Christians. During the movement’s initial phase, London Jews, led by Moses E. Levy (an activist from the United States), joined in solidarity with their oppressed brethren in Russia: their public protests against tsarist policies drew a broad response from the national and international press. This unparalleled movement influenced national political agendas and major legislative reforms, and resulted in striking changes within the Anglo‐Jewish community. By utilising the modern social movement framework as an essential tool to reconstruct this long‐forgotten collective effort, the Jewish rights movement has emerged as a notable chapter in the development of modern Jewish political identity.

“At the present moment, the eyes of England, of Europe, and of a great part of the civilized world seem to be directed toward us, and… men are looking with something approaching anxiety for the result of the Public Meetings of the Jewish Nation that have been called (the first time for many centuries)” (Levy Jewish Community).     

Buon Purim: proselytizing, professing Jews and the Papal Inquisition in Modena

This essay focuses on an Inquisitorial trial in which a Jewish banker, Moise de Modena, well respected in the Modenese community (Christian as well as Jewish), decided in 1625 to make a stand against two constables and refuse them the customary ‘protection money’ which they demanded during the festival of Purim. The event provided a shaky foundation for their charge of proselytizing. De Modena faced persistent Inquisitorial prosecution but chose also to hire Christian legal counsel to defend him. The trial raises questions about Jews who were able to work behind the scenes during Inquisitorial prosecution in early modern Italy to ensure their acquittal. It also examines gift-giving as a specific social practice between Jews and Christians during he Jews’ ‘carnivalesque’ Purim, which in this particular year fell during Holy Week.     

Division of the Dowry on the Death of the Daughter: An Instance in the Negotiation of Laws and Jewish Customs in Early Modern Tuscany

Tuscan notarial acts permit the exploration of the often elusive relationship of Jewish practice, Jewish law and the corresponding laws of the state. One issue in early modern Italian Jewish marriage negotiations was the eventual disposition of the dowry of a childless wife who predeceased her husband. Jewish law on the succession of the childless woman was complicated by traditional or regional customs and communal ordinances. Moreover, in sixteenth-century Tuscany there was no official code, court or arbiter of Jewish law. Nonetheless, Christian notaries who wrote pre-nuptial stipulations or pacts for Jews worked with the assumption that Jews were allowed to live according to their own law. This essay argues that individual Jews used to advantage the state's assumption that they could follow Jewish law (despite the absence of any universally-acknowledged or applicable law on this specific subject) by employing notaries to write contracts in disregard of both local statutes and well-known Jewish customs. In the second part of this essay I locate the stipulations in the Jewish marriage system and suggest that the process of negotiation over the fate of the dowry was integrally related to the system's emphasis – in contrast to that of contemporary Christians – on universal marriage and procreation.     

Poland: Crises in Christian-Jewish Identity

Fifty years after the Holocaust, Jews in various parts of Poland who were raised as Christians are discovering their Jewish identity. Upon disclosing it, they may undergo personal crises. They are required to revise their sense of identity. Support groups conducted by the writer in the United States served as a model for similar groups in Warsaw, Poland. This paper explains the dimensions of this work, provides clinical examples from accounts of the participants, and discusses the problem of Jewish identity from various vantage points.     

Rethinking Christian and Jewish Exceptionalisms☆

This article argues that Christianity and Judaism, as they have developed historically, express complementary but opposing exceptionalist perspectives. The article defines “exceptionalism” in terms of the singular mission that Jews and Christians each claim for themselves and the varied Jewish and Christian conceptions of how their missions relate to non-Jews and non-Christians respectively. While Jewish exceptionalism consists in the demand to be left alone to live its God-given mission with not much concern for what God expects from the other nations save that it is different from what God expects from the Jews, Christian exceptionalism demands that all peoples follow its singular vision of redemption through Christ. This article develops these arguments by way of considering competing readings of the Book of Ruth, continuing debates about the Apostle Paul in recent historical scholarship, as well as history’s role in theological reflection. The article argues that Christians and Jews need to reckon with their respective exceptionalisms on their own decidedly singular terms, and not on the terms of each other, since to do otherwise would be to renounce their respective exceptionalisms and to lose the theological singularity that defines each faith tradition. Nevertheless, the article concludes by calling for more intellectual honesty from Christians and Jews regarding what their exceptionalisms do and do not entail as well as for the enduring importance of bringing historical research to bear on theology.     

A baronial aljama: The Jews of Empúries in the thirteenth century

The county of Empúries in Catalonia provides an historical laboratory in which to examine the formation of a small Jewish community (aljama) in an independent baronial enclave. While most studies have assumed that Iberian Jews were directly dependent on the king, the ancient dynasty that ruled the county effectively insulated Jews from royal power during the thirteenth century, when the first communal institutions took shape. In 1238 Count Ponç Hug III of Empúries issued an extensive privilege, edited here for the first time, to the Jews in his territory to extend his protection, attract immigrants, and create the outlines for autonomous institutions. The grant in fact preceded the better-known royal charters that structured Jewish communal institutions in Barcelona and other major towns in Catalonia. Because the Jews of Empúries were not caught up in the expanding structures of royal administration, they were also not subject to heavy fiscal burdens and remained unengaged with the local baronial court. Left relatively undisturbed at first by the fiscal demands of their lord, the Jews of Empúries adapted to a provincial, rural environment in the thirteenth century and created a community distinct in its structure and internal social tensions from the aljames in the large towns.     

Prospero Moisè Loria: A Case Study of Jewish Secularism in Liberal Italy

In his will, Prospero Moisè Loria (1814–92) requested an autopsy and cremation and left his large inheritance to the municipality of Milan to establish a secular philanthropic institution, the Società umanitaria, “to enable all the disenfranchised poor, without distinction.” Loria and other Italian Jews were at the heart of secularist activity in Italy’s culture wars, as demonstrated by their engagement with secular philanthropy, battles for cremation, and Freemason activity. By exploring Loria as the most generous nineteenth-century Italian Jewish philanthropist, along with his affiliation with the Alliance israélite universelle as a secular Jewish institution in the Mediterranean, this essay shows how forms of secularism and Jewishness could coexist for Italian Jews and how secularism in Italy could include a commitment to a Jewish collective, and thus seeks to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the composite mixture of secular Italians and to a discussion of Jewish secularism in an international context.     

Four chapters in the history of crypto-Judaism in Brazil: the case of the northeastern New Christians (17th–21st centuries)

The present work examines the history of a group of New Christians who were imprisoned by the Portuguese Inquisition between 1730 and 1740 in the northeastern Brazilian Captaincy of Paraíba. Our purpose is to assess the importance of Jewish interventions to the maintenance or resurgence of Jewish practices and Jewish identity among Portuguese conversos. Our point of departure is a discussion of three specific periods in the history of the New Christians of the Brazilian northeast: First, a period during which an openly-professing and Jewish community existed legally in Pernambuco under Dutch rule (1630–1654); second, the post-Dutch period, when a crypto-Jew who was not related to the group and harbored a stronger faith than its members, revived crypto-Jewish practices and instilled a crypto-Jewish identity among them. Third, we examine a much more recent period, beginning in the 1970s, in which historiography itself has played a central role in causing the local resurgence of crypto-Judaic practice and identity. We attempt to demonstrate that, contrary to the claims of traditional historiography on conversos, the Judaic practices and beliefs of the descendants of the Iberian Jews who converted to Christianity during the fifteenth century did not survive or reappear as a consequence of an uninterrupted cultural transmission of Jewish precepts; rather, these beliefs and practices survived because of external influences that the New Christians experienced in the course of their history.     

Avoiding Charges of Legalism and Antinomianism in Jewish-Christian Dialogue

This article sets forth a theological approach to Jewish-Christian dialogue on the issue of law, which is often thought to be beyond the grasp of that dialogue because Judaism and Christianity are supposed to be in diametrical opposition here. Christians must recognize that for Jews, law is not in opposition to grace as a substitute for faith but, rather, law is the faithful response to grace in the covenant. Christians cannot be antinomians without simultaneously rejecting the very authority of God to command any faithful response. The issue between Judaism and Christianity is which law, Jewish or Christian, best enables a human being to be in the fullest possible relationship with God in the yet unredeemed world. On many points, though, Jewish and Christian law will overlap, thus reveal some essential commonalities.     

The myth of the Jewish origins of philosophy in the Renaissance: from Aristotle to Plato

The myth of the Jewish origins of philosophy and science is an ancient tradition dating from the Hellenistic period. It originated with pagan scholars, as part of the Greek-Hellenistic myth of the eastern origins of wisdom. Hellenistic-Jewish scholars acquired this theme from them, developed it further and transmitted it to the Church Fathers. In time, this myth achieved great popularity among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Aristotle’s prominence in medieval culture gave rise to traditions claiming that he studied with Jewish sages and was deeply impressed and influenced by Jewish books. Some of these traditions even maintain that he converted to Judaism, or was born a Jew. Although stories about the Judaized Aristotle continued to circulate, many accounts of the Jewish sources of Plato also began to appear in various forms among Christian and Jewish scholars. Stories about Plato proliferated especially following the decline of the Aristotelian-Averroist tradition, when kabbalistic-hermetic influences were first discernible in the writings of Ficino and Pico della Mirandola in the late Quattrocento.     

Jews, Christians, and the endtime in early modern Germany

This paper examines some of the ways in which early modern German literary culture portrayed Jewish visions of the endtime. Christians employed notions of Jewish deceit to undermine the meaning of Jewish messianism, reshaping the signs of the endtime to carry a far more sinister meaning. Christian writers transformed Jewish messianic claimants into predictable precursors of the Antichrist and mocked Jewish beliefs as the delusions of a nation of deceived deceivers. Notions of Jewish deceitfulness complicated Christian expectations concerning Jewish conversion at the end of time. The Christian perception of Jews as inherently deceitful encompassed all components of the early modern views of Jews and the Jewish religion. Early modern German literary works devoted to the theme of vain Jewish messianic expectations combined with the literature of the Antichrist, turning the demonic Antichrist who would appear at the endtime into the person the Jews expected as their messiah. Failed Jewish messianic movements played right into Christian literary and theological discourse on the Jewish endtime and provided historical confirmation for what would have otherwise seemed like an absurd polemical exaggeration. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Saint and Countersaint: Catholic Triumphalism and Jewish Resistance in Baroque Prague’s Abeles Affair

In late seventeenth-century Prague, Simon Abeles, a Jewish boy of about eleven or twelve, left the Jewish quarter, studied for conversion to Christianity, returned home without converting, and then died. The boy’s father, Lazar Abeles, was charged with his murder and hanged himself in jail. Löbl Kurtzhandl, a young man who had lived with the family, was accused of being an accomplice and sentenced to death. The case became a cause célèbre as the boy came to be regarded as an unofficial local saint acclaimed in broadsides, pamphlets, and even music. A single Yiddish source, a historical song, tells the story from a Jewish point of view but, surprisingly, does not take up the question of the guilt or innocence of either Kurtzhandl or the elder Abeles, focusing instead on Kurtzhandl’s actions in his final days, hours, and moments. Burning polemics between local Christians and Jews centered on this very question, each population seeking saint-like heroes for its young members to emulate. On the Catholic side, such activity fit within a much broader context of Catholic renewal and triumphalism that capped a decades-long process of ridding Bohemia of Protestant influence. On the Jewish side, it represented active resistance against such trends.     

Muhammad in Christian and Jewish apocalyptic expectations

After the destruction of the Temple by the Romans, Jews continued to look for the coming of the Messiah and the re‐establishment of the kingdom. In this they differed sharply from Christians, for whom the Messiah had already come. The rise of Islam and the Muslim defeat of the Roman‐Byzantine empire was interpreted by some Jews as a sign of the coming of the Messiah. Some of the earliest Christian writings to mention Islam were produced as part of the ongoing Jewish‐Christian polemic, and only with time does the emphasis move into a Christian‐Muslim polemic.     

The Increasing Reliance on Ritual Handbooks in Pre–Print Era Ashkenaz

Handbooks devoted to a single area of ritual practice figure prominently among the works produced by German Jews from the thirteenth century to the fifteenth. These handbooks include minhagim books intended primarily as liturgical guides for cantors and manuals for other types of communal functionaries, such as scribes and ritual slaughterers. Historians typically associate minhagim books with the post–Black Death period and the desire to provide guidance during a time of decline for German Jewry. Similarly, the flourishing of halakhic manuals is considered a fourteenth-century phenomenon, a result of the rabbinate’s professionalization. However, these explanations are insufficient since both genres emerged earlier. This article links the production of ritual handbooks to two trends: geographic mobility and a more text-oriented culture. Between the thirteenth century and the fifteenth, major changes in German Jewish settlement patterns disrupted the transmission of ritual practice and led to a need for practical guides. The proliferation of ritual handbooks was also related to the increase in Ashkenazic society—as in medieval Europe generally—in the production of written texts. These texts included liturgical genres and practical halakhic works, some of which served as sources for the handbooks. However, the handbooks tend to be more accessible than their predecessors and to include more practical details. The proliferation of late medieval ritual handbooks demonstrates that changes typically associated with the advent of print, including a growing reliance on written sources for practical information and a move toward the standardization of ritual practice, began to emerge in earlier centuries.     

Martyrs in rivalry: the 1096 Jewish martyrs and the Thebean legion

As part of his chronicle telling of the persecutions of Jews in 1096 during the First Crusade, Shlomo bar Shimshon, writing about 1140, told the story of the Jewish martyrs of Cologne who had taken refuge in Xanten. This account stands out as the most theological and programmatic text of the entire chronicle. The reason is to be found in the local constellations of Xanten. By probing the different levels of knowledge the Jews of Cologne, and Shlomo, could have had about Xanten and its role in contemporary Christian religiosity, this article shows how Shlomo responded to what is known as the Thebean martyr cult and its associated legends on an almost one for one basis. Christian veneration of the Thebean martyrs and the propagation of their cult are seen through the prism of Shlomo’s text. The essay wishes to show how the realm of shared culture or common ground between Christians and Jews can be further explored by “localizing the sources.”     

IDENTITY AND IDENTIFICATION: JEWISH YOUTH IN ITALY 1870–1938

The criteria by which Jews identify themselves cover a very wide range and change over time. The aim of this essay is to stress that Italian Jewish identity must be analysed in a historical context, in the larger society in which it is located and with which it interacts. Through the study of the activities of Italian Jewish youth, this article will demonstrate, on the one hand, the integration and uniqueness of the Italian Jews and, on the other, that Italian Jewish identity has been transformed by the political ideology and economics of the surrounding society. The only way to analyse Jewish youth in Italy in their struggle with their Jewish identity should be comparatively, that is, to examine the history of Italian Jews and of Italy as a whole, not as separate but as connected entities.     

Counting on Whiteness: Religion,race, ethnicity,and the politics of Jewish demography

American Jews have long been an anomaly for scholars concerned with understanding how they fit into extant social scientific or historical categories. Sometimes they seem best described as an ethnic group, other times as a religious one. This ambiguity has also vexed Jewish communal leaders whose desire to comprehend their communities has largely been underwritten by their intention to protect it. This intersection of sociological methods and schema and Jewish communal concerns has resulted in decisive omissions regarding how best to account for the racial and ethnic diversity of American Jews. An analysis of survey instruments used in 175 American Jewish population studies and community portraits conducted since 1970 reveals a focus on questions of religious practice and an avoidance of those about race and ethnicity, resulting in a “religio-racial formation” of American Jews as White. This approach to studying American Jewish life has marginalized or excluded non-White Jews while ensuring ongoing Jewish communal access to Whiteness without having to claim it explicitly.