Yosef Kaplan

POLITICAL CONCEPTS IN THE WORLD OF THE PORTUGUESE JEWS OF AMSTERDAM DURING THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: THE PROBLEM OF EXCLUSION AND THE BOUNDARIES OF SELF-IDENTITY

During the seventeenth century the Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam brought the heritage of Iberian culture with them into the bosom of Judaism. Spanish political literature, which, to a large degree, was moralistic in character, had a primarily educational and religious function, not only in Iberian society but also in the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish diaspora. Spains decline in the seventeenth century not only failed to weaken the sense of superiority, among several Spanish thinkers it actually strengthened faith in the mission of their homeland as the standard bearer of Catholic Christianity. Although the Spanish and Portuguese Jews in Western Europe did not officially depart from Jewish law, their collective consciousness included a group of people within the confines of their identity who, from a halakhic point of view, could not be viewed as Jews. At the same time they rejected Jews of other ethnic background from their collective self-definition. Keywords: Amsterdam; Catholic Christianity; Judaism; Portuguese Jews; Spain; Spanish diaspora

'The Great Eagle, the Pride of Jacob’. Joseph Hirsch Dünner in Dutch Jewish Memory Culture

Joseph Hirsch Dunner, born in Cracow 1833, had been the dominant Jewish religious leader in the nineteenth-century Netherlands, combining halakhic Orthodoxy with modern scientific methodologies. From 1865 he led the Dutch Israelite Seminary and educated several generations of Dutch rabbis, while from 1874 onwards he guided the largest community in the country, Amsterdam, as its chief rabbi. Studying Dunner and the ways in which he was remembered is studying Dutch Jewry. Already during his life, Dunner had become one of the main characters in a developing narrative on Dutch Jewish history. After his death, Dunner’s memory became part of a larger attempt by religious and administrative elites to ensure religious and cultural continuity between Dunner’s period and present times. The focus of this article, therefore, will not be the “historic Dunner,” but Dunner as bearer of symbolic meaning. To trace this “memorialized Dunner,” I collected pamphlets, newspaper reports, articles in journals, novels, archival material and the like in which Dunner figured sometimes prominently, other times only mentioned in passing, but not with any less significance. In the memory culture around Dunner I roughly distinguish three phases: the first phase was during his life, mainly around special anniversaries, but with the “Master” still present to eventually correct distortions of his image; the second phase started with his funeral in 1911 and continued until the start of the Second World War. As I will demonstrate, the war, and a bit later, the foundation of the State of Israel significantly changed Dunner’s memory with which a third phase started. In this paper I will concentrate on the last two phases and show how Dunner’s memory changed in the course of time, while continuing to foster a Dutch Jewish collective identity.

The Religious Cultures of Dutch Jewry

The Religious Cultures of Dutch Jewry presents a variety of religious belief and practice from the early modern period until today. Dutch Jewry was a meeting place of Jews of various origins and a microcosm of essential changes in Jewish history.

On the Burial of Spinoza’s Grandfather and Grandmother

Spinoza’s grandparents were Portuguese New Christians who continued living part of their time in Antwerp, even after coming to Amsterdam in 1605. They didn’t affiliate with any of the Sephardic congregations. When Henrique Garces, Spinoza’s grandfather, died in 1619, he was buried outside the fence of the cemetery, and circumcised after death. He was then given his Jewish name Baruch Senior. His wife wanted to be buried next to him, but the parnasim decided to bury her in another place. Spinoza must have heard about this story, and his contempt about the ceremony of circumcision, as expressed in his TTP , was probably influenced by his family experience.

Spanish Readings of Amsterdam’s Seventeenth-Century Sephardim

Edward Browne, the son of the physician and author, Sir Thomas Browne, visited the city of Amsterdam in the 1660s during his tour of various countries of Europe, and like other English travellers who arrived there, he was deeply impressed by the wealth of the Sephardic Jews and the splendour that enveloped them: ‘The Jews live more handsomly and splendidly here, than in any other place.’ Browne met several members of the community and made a point of mentioning their knowledge of various languages: ‘Some of them understand divers Languages. I saw one Moses di Pas, a Learned young Man, and Orobio, a Physician of Note.’ He also expressed an opinion about the conversion to Judaism of several of the people whom he met:

Amsterdam, The forbidden lands, and the dynamics of the Sephardi diaspora

The Western Sephardi Diaspora was established by New Christians from Spain and Portugal who abandoned Iberia in order to affiliate with Judaism. For many years Iberian marranos in partnership with Sephardi Jews played a central role in the commercial ties between the Iberian Peninsula and northwestern Europe in general, and the Dutch Republic in particular. Between 1609 and 1621, during the armistice between Spain and the Dutch Republic, Amsterdam and Rotterdam took the lead in commerce with the Iberian Peninsula. In the early 1640s many members of the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish Nation were encouraged to strengthen their economic ties to the Lusitanian kingdom. The political and economic ties between Spain and the Dutch Republic grew stronger, and the Jewish merchants exploited their experience to fortify their position within the new commercial order. Keywords: Amsterdam; Dutch Republic; Iberia; Judaism; Spain; Western Sephardi Diaspora

Jews and Judaism in the Hartlib Circle

This remark, apparently dating from early 1634, is one of the few comments about Jewish matters written by Samuel Hartlib in his Ephemerides during the 1630s. It is doubtful whether Hartlib had encountered real Jews by that time either in East Prussia, where the presence of Jews was negligible until the mid-seventeenth century, or in England, where Jews had been forbidden to live since they were driven out in 1290. However, he had no diffi culty in accepting statements of the kind made by Sir Thomas Roe. The repertory of images belonging to Hartlib and his circle regarding the Jews was nourished by stereotypes that had been deeply rooted in European consciousness since the Middle Ages and had become commonly accepted.2 Rumours about the bad odour of the Jews found their way into Christian European culture from the epigrams of Martial and the writings of Marcellinus, and as early as the sixth century Venantius Honorius Clementianus Fortunatus was able to tell about fi ve hundred Jews whose foul odour was removed by baptism: ‘Ablitur judaeus odor baptismate divo, Aspersusque sacro fi t gregis alter odor.’3 The information received by Hartlib in a letter sent to him from Rotterdam on 4 May 1645 regarding the ‘Experiment of making stinking water sweete,’ most likely referred in some way, perhaps indirectly, to this matter:

A GENERATION OF PROGRESS IN THE HISTORICAL STUDY OF DUTCH SEPHARDIC JEWRY

The study of Sephardic Jewry in Holland during the seventeenth century has known a remarkable awakening in the past generation. Scholars in various countries have arisen and made signal contributions to the study of the history of the Portuguese community in the Dutch Republic, particularly in Amsterdam, in its heyday. The subject of the Sephardic diaspora in Western Europe and in the New World, especially in the Portuguese Jewish center in the Dutch Republic, has begun to occupy a permanent place in the curriculum of the history departments of Israeli universities. The history of Portuguese Jewry in Holland is still being written, and the talents and energies shown in some of the doctoral dissertations now being produced guarantee that research in this fertile and vital area retains its vigor in the following generation as well. Keywords: Amsterdam; Dutch Republic; Holland; Portuguese community; Sephardic diaspora; Sephardic Jewry; Western Europe