The Early Modern Period, an era of “confessionalization,” provides numerous examples of individuals of immediate, distant, feigned, or merely imputed Jewish origin whose religious and social allegiances shifted radically. The phenomenon of Iberian New Christians or conversos comes to mind. Early modern Jews who became Christians but who, unlike conversos, possessed no personal and familial background in Christianity constitute an allied field of research (See examples in the Bibliography, below). Scholarly assessments of the ways in which these Jewish non-conversos learned and influenced their adopted Christian culture(s) often concentrate on intellectual production. The focus is not surprising, as the converts under discussion were usually educated individuals to whom Christian patrons often assigned prominent roles as anti-Jewish polemicists and missionaries. By contrast to the apologetic works and other religious writings of and about such converts, the texts presented here offer glimpses of the experience of uneducated, relatively inarticulate people of very modest material means who found themselves at a crossroads between Jewish (or Jewish-identified) and Hispano-Catholic identities, and whose formal cultural realignment caused no historical ripple. The folios selected for this workshop comprise large excerpts of two inquisitorial cases dating from the early 1790s. Both dossiers are relatively brief and fragmentary. I offer them together in order to provide more analytical possibilities than each of the documents would offer by itself.
One set of texts is a selection of several seventeenth-century takkanot, rulings, by the Council of Four Lands, the supra-communal organization responsible primarily for collection of taxes levied by the Polish state but also engaging in administration of affairs within Jewish communities. The second text comes from Polish court records and shows a criminal trial of a Jewish tavern keeper, Szmul Dubiński, accused of blasphemy in Rzeszow in 1726.
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This presentation examines two excerpts from the little known early seventeenth-century German memoirs of the non-Jewish Swabian merchant Hans Ulrich Krafft (1550–1621). I would like to present two excerpts from Krafft’s nearly 500-page long memoirs.
In 1735, Immanuel Frommann, a converted Jew who was working at the Institutum Judaicum in Halle translated the book of Luke and wrote a commentary on the text. This text is probably the first printed Hebrew commentary on the New Testament. In his commentary, Frommann uses a wide range of Hebrew sources. He quotes regularly from the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmud, biblical commentaries, midrashim, legal treatises, philosophical texts and historical works. He also makes use of mystical and kabbalistic works. The commentary has several layers of interpretation: relatively short lexical or grammatical explanations of words or phrases; literary explanations of the text that are meant to make it more comprehensive to the readers; as well as “Christological interpretations”. This text is unique because it was written in Hebrew thus mainly for a Jewish (male) audience and not in Latin or vernacular languages as was the case in earlier compositions that made use of Jewish texts like Johannes Lightfoot, Horae Hebraicae et Talmudicae or to Surenhusius Sefer ha- Mashveh. In many ways, Frommann’s commentary is better described as a Jewish-Christian or perhaps a Christian-Jewish text. Instead of a total rejection of Jewish learning and writing, Frommann’s heavy use of the Jewish tradition in a Christian context is an attempt to reconnect Christianity and Judaism. The presentation discusses the following text: 1. A Gospel according to Luke the Evangelist that is taken from books known as the New Testament, copied from the Greek, to the holy tongue, and explained with a commentary, Part I, in the year 495 (1735) -- Evangelium Lucae pars prior ab erudito proselyto Henr. Christ. Imman. Frommanno Doct. Med. in linguam ebraeam transferri ac explicari curauit ediditque Io. Henr. Callenberg, Halle, 1735
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This presentation explores cultural connections between Jews and Christians in sixteenth-century Italy through the lens of medicine. I present and analyze two texts. The first (from 1587) is a letter from Girolamo Mercuriale, a Catholic, to Moses Alatino, a Jew. The second (from 1592) is an excerpt from a consilium sent by the Jewish physician David de' Pomi to Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino. It discusses the following texts: 1. Girolamo Mercuriale to Moses Alatino,"On a Uterine Tumor, Painful Urination, and Constipation, for a noble young Jewess, \[sent\] to the Jewish Physician Moses Alatino. Consultation #16" From: Hieronymi Mercurialis Foroliviensis Responsorum, et Consultationum Medicinalium Tomus Primus (Venice, 1587), fol. 43-44. 2. David de’ Pomi to Francesco Maria II, Duke of Urbino (Included in) Physicians' Consilia regarding the Illness of Francesco Maria II, Duke of Urbino. From Medicorum consilia in infirmitate francisci mariae II urbini ducis, an. 1592. \[Physicians' Consilia regarding the Illness of Francesco Maria II, Duke of Urbino\] Vatican, cor. Urb. 1468, 119r-134r.
This presentation attempts to analyse how Johannes Buxtorf the elder (1564-1629), long-time professor of Hebrew at Basel, ethnographer, lexicographer, and textual critic, read Jewish books by examining one passage from the Sefer ha-Hayyim written by Hayyim ben Bezalel (Cracow, 1593), which Buxtorf chose to integrate into his polemical critique of Jewish allegiance to the Talmud in this opening chapter of the Juden—Schul. Hayyim ben Bezalel, fated to remain second fiddle to his brother, the Maharal of Prague, had his own battles to fight against both Jews and Christians. In the selected passage, Hayyim ben Bezalel defends the Talmud as a unique possession of the Jews and suggests a reason for the apparently ‘bewildering Aggadot’. By close scrutiny of both texts we consider how and why Hayyim ben Bezalel’s plea for the Talmud engaged Buxtorf’s attention and influenced the development of his argument?