More than Homesickness: Minorities and the Transference of Goods in the Mediterranean (1492–1956), ed. José Alberto Tavim and Hugo Martins, Évora: Publicações do Cidehus, 2024, no. 4, p. 1-30.
During the war years of the mid-seventeenth century, Portuguese Jewish merchants in France undert... more During the war years of the mid-seventeenth century, Portuguese Jewish merchants in France undertook contraband business in Spain through a Castilian middleman, the poet Antonio Enríquez Gómez (c.1600–1663), a refugee from the Inquisition who had become an honoured member of the ‘Portuguese Nation’ in Rouen. When, in 1649, the Fronde rebellion in Normandy and a plague in Andalusia generated economic turmoil, Enríquez Gómez dropped out of the Jewish network and transferred his capital to Spain, thereby evading repayment of some substantial loans received from his business associates. While living as a rentier in Granada and Seville under the false name of Don Fernando de Zárate, the poet foiled the parallel efforts undertaken by the Inquisition and his creditors to hunt him down. But even though he also faced unexpected challenges in the form of predatory taxation imposed by King Philip IV, and an unreliable son-in-law administering his fortune from Madrid, he felt at leisure to write a vast oeuvre for the theatre, to collect religious paintings and to maintain a young concubine, while still providing for the economic needs of his wife, who had stayed abroad. This study reconstructs the financial arrangements that allowed this successful repatriate to reap the enormous sum of eighty thousand pesos from his capital transfers between two warring kingdoms. As I will conclude from this extraordinary but exemplary case, the ingenious plot developed its own momentum and dictated the twists of its author’s life, which after twelve years in disguise ended in a cell of the Seville Holy Office. The abundant Inquisitorial information on Enríquez Gómez’s business transactions is supplemented by information from notarial deeds discovered in Rouen.
Fidele Signaculum: Írások Szőnyi György Endre tiszteletére / Writings in Honour of György Endre Szőnyi, ed. Attila Kiss, Ágnes Matuska, and Róbert Péter, Szeged: Szegedi Tudományegyetem / University of Szeged, 2022, p. 1039-1060.
Hamsa: Journal of Judaic and Islamic Studies 8 (2022)
The present article reviews religious constructions of Jewish diaspora History in their long-term... more The present article reviews religious constructions of Jewish diaspora History in their long-term evolution and discusses a midrashic text that hints at a historical turning-point in the 12th century. In the Antiquity, gendered metaphors were most commonly used to characterize the troubled relations between God, the Land, and the people of Israel. Early medieval conceptions speculated about the cyclical repetition of deportation events and other calamities. That meant that that number rather than gender became the dominant organizing principle of the historical narrative in the later period. Since the medieval “Midrash of the Ten Exiles” expresses this new numerology most straightforwardly, the redactional history and literary context of this short text is the focus of this study.
Entangled Confessionalizations? Dialogic Perspectives on the Politics of Piety and Community-Building in the Ottoman Empire, 15th–18th Centuries, ed. Tijana Krstić and Derin Terzioğlu, Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2022, pp. 255-283.
In the Huguenot refugee community in The Netherlands, known as a hotbed of the early Enlightenmen... more In the Huguenot refugee community in The Netherlands, known as a hotbed of the early Enlightenment, literary interest in Judaism was ubiquitous, yet actual Dutch Jews were relegated to a marginal position in the exchange of ideas. It is this paradoxical experience of cultural participation and social exclusion that a major unpublished source allows to depict. The ex-converso Abraham Gómez Silveyra (1651-1741), a merchant endowed with rabbinic education and proficiency in French, composed eight manuscript volumes of theological reflections in Spanish literary prose and poetry. This huge clandestine series, which survives in three copies, shows the author's insatiable curiosity for Christian thought. While rebutting Isaac Jacquelot's missionary activity, he fraternizes with Pierre Jurieu's millenarianism, Jacques Basnage's historiography, and Pierre Bayle's plea for religious freedom. Gómez Silveyra, however, being painfully aware of his voicelessness in the public sphere, enacts Bayle's utopian project as a closed performance for a Jewish audience.
The Jewish Quarterly Review 111.3 (2021), pp. 444–469.
In the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions, the search for a symbolic Jewish presence in the urban ... more In the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions, the search for a symbolic Jewish presence in the urban centers of Central Europe led to the emergence of a monumental synagogue architecture in the Moorish revival style. This new architectural convention experienced a sudden breakthrough in April and May 1854, when it was adopted almost simultaneously in the plans for three major synagogues to be built in Leipzig, Vienna, and Pest. In this article, I will demonstrate that the social and aesthetic agendas of the three community leaderships were interconnected and that they must be understood in the context of the international political events transpiring at the time. In the spring of 1854, Europe witnessed the military and propagandistic run-up to the Crimean War. In the spirit of liberal patriotism, Hungarian Jews identified with the Ottomans against the Czarist Empire and saw the contemporary Islamic-Christian alliance as a globalizing extension of the emancipation process.
This article studies the Hungarian Jewish Congress of 1868–1869 from a European perspective. Duri... more This article studies the Hungarian Jewish Congress of 1868–1869 from a European perspective. During the run-up to the Congress, the Jewish press discussed intensely the organizational models found in Jewish history, in modern Jewries abroad, as well as in the minority churches of Hungary. Central European Jews challenged the success narrative that had come to be associated with the Napoleonic Sanhedrin and the central administration of French Jewry. Comparison with other religious unification attempts can teach us about the expectations that were projected onto the effort to control the Hungarian Jewish pluralization processes with the devices of parliamentary democracy.
According to JCH policies, there is a 18 months embargo period on uploading articles to open platforms such as academia.edu, but the author may share the text with colleagues in private (wilkec@ceu.edu).
Cadernos de Estudos Sefarditas 19 (December 2018): 11-28.
This article focuses on the New Christian community that existed in Tavira, the major Algarvian c... more This article focuses on the New Christian community that existed in Tavira, the major Algarvian city of the mid-sixteenth century. Its trade networks connected it to the French, English, and Flemish seaports, as well as to the Moroccan Sephardim. Knowledge about non-Catholic religions reached the Taviran New Christians from both ends of their trade route; and their beliefs and practices evidence a complex culture, including crypto-Jewish rituals, clandestine Bible readings, messianic expectations aroused by the Protestant Reformation, the infiltration of Moroccan Jewish traditions, and calls for Church reform among local Old Christians. Testimony from the Lisbon Inquisition, which destroyed this community in 1563-1567, is completed by the "Marrakesh Dialogues," a polemical Jewish work written in Spanish by Estêvão Dias, a Taviran exile in Antwerp. These new sources will help to place this local community in its larger European and African framework.
Polemical Encounters: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in Iberia and Beyond, ed. Mercedes García-Arenal and Gerard Wiegers, University Park: Penn State University Press, 2019, pp. 357-376.
During the years that led to the Hungarian Jewish schism of 1869, Orthodoxy reigned relatively un... more During the years that led to the Hungarian Jewish schism of 1869, Orthodoxy reigned relatively unchallenged in communities of long standing or East European immigration, while Neology spread in the recently founded urban synagogues. Only the steadily growing community of Pest, Hungary’s economic capital, presented an appropriate testing-ground for religious forces that tried to withstand the progressive cleavage. My paper will focus on the exceptional moment after 1859, when Chief Rabbi Wolf Meisel (1815-1867), a Bohemian compatriot of Zacharias Frankel, formulated in his short-lived journal "Der Carmel" a popular midstream ideology that was largely independent from the Breslau-style „Science of Judaism.” Jointly attacked by the Orthodox party as well as by Leopold Löw’s progressive journal Ben-Chananja, Meisel’s religious position was undermined by the rise of Hungarian nationalism and the more successfully mediatized Magyarization eff orts of the Neologs. My paper will ask for the ideological and social characteristics of Rabbi Meisel’s failed peace movement, the controversy it aroused, and its long-term repercussions on Hungarian Jewish modernism.
Lux in Tenebris: The Visual and the Symbolic in Western Esotericism, ed. by Peter J. Forshaw (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 179-205.
In a humorous chapter of his Historiettes, GédéonTallemant des Réaux has saved from oblivion
an e... more In a humorous chapter of his Historiettes, GédéonTallemant des Réaux has saved from oblivion an excentric relative, the mathematician and religious visionary Paul Yvon, lord of Laleu (c.1570-1646). A Calvinist merchant and magistrate of La Rochelle, Yvon claimed to have discovered, by a divine revelation he experienced in 1614, the squaring of the circle and a new Judeo-Christian religion based on scientific intuition. He dedicated a large number of printed pamphlets to his mathematical theorems and, having moved to Paris after his conversion to Catholicism in 1628, insistently tried to convince Mersenne, Descartes and other contemporaries of their veracity. A coherence between geometrical proof and Kabbalistic myth in his publications is suggested mainly by way of copper engravings that illustrate some of them. Complex geometric diagrams are here explained by short formula in Hebrew and a few figurative symbols, among which the snake, the sun, and the vagina are particularly recurrent, alluding to cosmological and Christological mysteries of which Yvon believed himself to be the prophet. Yvon's main historic interest resides in his pushing to the extreme the fascination with Jewish esotericism that characterized the early stages of the scientific revolution and that earned him among his contemporaries the reputation of being not only a madman, but also a Judaizer.
More than Homesickness: Minorities and the Transference of Goods in the Mediterranean (1492–1956), ed. José Alberto Tavim and Hugo Martins, Évora: Publicações do Cidehus, 2024, no. 4, p. 1-30.
During the war years of the mid-seventeenth century, Portuguese Jewish merchants in France undert... more During the war years of the mid-seventeenth century, Portuguese Jewish merchants in France undertook contraband business in Spain through a Castilian middleman, the poet Antonio Enríquez Gómez (c.1600–1663), a refugee from the Inquisition who had become an honoured member of the ‘Portuguese Nation’ in Rouen. When, in 1649, the Fronde rebellion in Normandy and a plague in Andalusia generated economic turmoil, Enríquez Gómez dropped out of the Jewish network and transferred his capital to Spain, thereby evading repayment of some substantial loans received from his business associates. While living as a rentier in Granada and Seville under the false name of Don Fernando de Zárate, the poet foiled the parallel efforts undertaken by the Inquisition and his creditors to hunt him down. But even though he also faced unexpected challenges in the form of predatory taxation imposed by King Philip IV, and an unreliable son-in-law administering his fortune from Madrid, he felt at leisure to write a vast oeuvre for the theatre, to collect religious paintings and to maintain a young concubine, while still providing for the economic needs of his wife, who had stayed abroad. This study reconstructs the financial arrangements that allowed this successful repatriate to reap the enormous sum of eighty thousand pesos from his capital transfers between two warring kingdoms. As I will conclude from this extraordinary but exemplary case, the ingenious plot developed its own momentum and dictated the twists of its author’s life, which after twelve years in disguise ended in a cell of the Seville Holy Office. The abundant Inquisitorial information on Enríquez Gómez’s business transactions is supplemented by information from notarial deeds discovered in Rouen.
Fidele Signaculum: Írások Szőnyi György Endre tiszteletére / Writings in Honour of György Endre Szőnyi, ed. Attila Kiss, Ágnes Matuska, and Róbert Péter, Szeged: Szegedi Tudományegyetem / University of Szeged, 2022, p. 1039-1060.
Hamsa: Journal of Judaic and Islamic Studies 8 (2022)
The present article reviews religious constructions of Jewish diaspora History in their long-term... more The present article reviews religious constructions of Jewish diaspora History in their long-term evolution and discusses a midrashic text that hints at a historical turning-point in the 12th century. In the Antiquity, gendered metaphors were most commonly used to characterize the troubled relations between God, the Land, and the people of Israel. Early medieval conceptions speculated about the cyclical repetition of deportation events and other calamities. That meant that that number rather than gender became the dominant organizing principle of the historical narrative in the later period. Since the medieval “Midrash of the Ten Exiles” expresses this new numerology most straightforwardly, the redactional history and literary context of this short text is the focus of this study.
Entangled Confessionalizations? Dialogic Perspectives on the Politics of Piety and Community-Building in the Ottoman Empire, 15th–18th Centuries, ed. Tijana Krstić and Derin Terzioğlu, Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2022, pp. 255-283.
In the Huguenot refugee community in The Netherlands, known as a hotbed of the early Enlightenmen... more In the Huguenot refugee community in The Netherlands, known as a hotbed of the early Enlightenment, literary interest in Judaism was ubiquitous, yet actual Dutch Jews were relegated to a marginal position in the exchange of ideas. It is this paradoxical experience of cultural participation and social exclusion that a major unpublished source allows to depict. The ex-converso Abraham Gómez Silveyra (1651-1741), a merchant endowed with rabbinic education and proficiency in French, composed eight manuscript volumes of theological reflections in Spanish literary prose and poetry. This huge clandestine series, which survives in three copies, shows the author's insatiable curiosity for Christian thought. While rebutting Isaac Jacquelot's missionary activity, he fraternizes with Pierre Jurieu's millenarianism, Jacques Basnage's historiography, and Pierre Bayle's plea for religious freedom. Gómez Silveyra, however, being painfully aware of his voicelessness in the public sphere, enacts Bayle's utopian project as a closed performance for a Jewish audience.
The Jewish Quarterly Review 111.3 (2021), pp. 444–469.
In the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions, the search for a symbolic Jewish presence in the urban ... more In the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions, the search for a symbolic Jewish presence in the urban centers of Central Europe led to the emergence of a monumental synagogue architecture in the Moorish revival style. This new architectural convention experienced a sudden breakthrough in April and May 1854, when it was adopted almost simultaneously in the plans for three major synagogues to be built in Leipzig, Vienna, and Pest. In this article, I will demonstrate that the social and aesthetic agendas of the three community leaderships were interconnected and that they must be understood in the context of the international political events transpiring at the time. In the spring of 1854, Europe witnessed the military and propagandistic run-up to the Crimean War. In the spirit of liberal patriotism, Hungarian Jews identified with the Ottomans against the Czarist Empire and saw the contemporary Islamic-Christian alliance as a globalizing extension of the emancipation process.
This article studies the Hungarian Jewish Congress of 1868–1869 from a European perspective. Duri... more This article studies the Hungarian Jewish Congress of 1868–1869 from a European perspective. During the run-up to the Congress, the Jewish press discussed intensely the organizational models found in Jewish history, in modern Jewries abroad, as well as in the minority churches of Hungary. Central European Jews challenged the success narrative that had come to be associated with the Napoleonic Sanhedrin and the central administration of French Jewry. Comparison with other religious unification attempts can teach us about the expectations that were projected onto the effort to control the Hungarian Jewish pluralization processes with the devices of parliamentary democracy.
According to JCH policies, there is a 18 months embargo period on uploading articles to open platforms such as academia.edu, but the author may share the text with colleagues in private (wilkec@ceu.edu).
Cadernos de Estudos Sefarditas 19 (December 2018): 11-28.
This article focuses on the New Christian community that existed in Tavira, the major Algarvian c... more This article focuses on the New Christian community that existed in Tavira, the major Algarvian city of the mid-sixteenth century. Its trade networks connected it to the French, English, and Flemish seaports, as well as to the Moroccan Sephardim. Knowledge about non-Catholic religions reached the Taviran New Christians from both ends of their trade route; and their beliefs and practices evidence a complex culture, including crypto-Jewish rituals, clandestine Bible readings, messianic expectations aroused by the Protestant Reformation, the infiltration of Moroccan Jewish traditions, and calls for Church reform among local Old Christians. Testimony from the Lisbon Inquisition, which destroyed this community in 1563-1567, is completed by the "Marrakesh Dialogues," a polemical Jewish work written in Spanish by Estêvão Dias, a Taviran exile in Antwerp. These new sources will help to place this local community in its larger European and African framework.
Polemical Encounters: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in Iberia and Beyond, ed. Mercedes García-Arenal and Gerard Wiegers, University Park: Penn State University Press, 2019, pp. 357-376.
During the years that led to the Hungarian Jewish schism of 1869, Orthodoxy reigned relatively un... more During the years that led to the Hungarian Jewish schism of 1869, Orthodoxy reigned relatively unchallenged in communities of long standing or East European immigration, while Neology spread in the recently founded urban synagogues. Only the steadily growing community of Pest, Hungary’s economic capital, presented an appropriate testing-ground for religious forces that tried to withstand the progressive cleavage. My paper will focus on the exceptional moment after 1859, when Chief Rabbi Wolf Meisel (1815-1867), a Bohemian compatriot of Zacharias Frankel, formulated in his short-lived journal "Der Carmel" a popular midstream ideology that was largely independent from the Breslau-style „Science of Judaism.” Jointly attacked by the Orthodox party as well as by Leopold Löw’s progressive journal Ben-Chananja, Meisel’s religious position was undermined by the rise of Hungarian nationalism and the more successfully mediatized Magyarization eff orts of the Neologs. My paper will ask for the ideological and social characteristics of Rabbi Meisel’s failed peace movement, the controversy it aroused, and its long-term repercussions on Hungarian Jewish modernism.
Lux in Tenebris: The Visual and the Symbolic in Western Esotericism, ed. by Peter J. Forshaw (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 179-205.
In a humorous chapter of his Historiettes, GédéonTallemant des Réaux has saved from oblivion
an e... more In a humorous chapter of his Historiettes, GédéonTallemant des Réaux has saved from oblivion an excentric relative, the mathematician and religious visionary Paul Yvon, lord of Laleu (c.1570-1646). A Calvinist merchant and magistrate of La Rochelle, Yvon claimed to have discovered, by a divine revelation he experienced in 1614, the squaring of the circle and a new Judeo-Christian religion based on scientific intuition. He dedicated a large number of printed pamphlets to his mathematical theorems and, having moved to Paris after his conversion to Catholicism in 1628, insistently tried to convince Mersenne, Descartes and other contemporaries of their veracity. A coherence between geometrical proof and Kabbalistic myth in his publications is suggested mainly by way of copper engravings that illustrate some of them. Complex geometric diagrams are here explained by short formula in Hebrew and a few figurative symbols, among which the snake, the sun, and the vagina are particularly recurrent, alluding to cosmological and Christological mysteries of which Yvon believed himself to be the prophet. Yvon's main historic interest resides in his pushing to the extreme the fascination with Jewish esotericism that characterized the early stages of the scientific revolution and that earned him among his contemporaries the reputation of being not only a madman, but also a Judaizer.
This conference, organized by Claude Stuczynski (Bar-Ilan University) and David Graizbord (Univer... more This conference, organized by Claude Stuczynski (Bar-Ilan University) and David Graizbord (University of Arizona), will focus on the multi-disciplinary study of how and why New Christians (Iberian Jewish converts to Christianity and their Christian descendants) and New Jews (Christians who adopted normative Judaism, mostly in the Western Sephardi Diaspora) perceived their own identities. The conference will specifically explore Jewish and Christian identities and identity as a whole.
Religion has served to legitimize political power, but it has also been a basis for resistance ag... more Religion has served to legitimize political power, but it has also been a basis for resistance against order and authority. Be it the Maccabean revolt, Gandhi's practice of non-violence resistance, contemporary neo-pagan religions, or the counter-system movements portrayed by Mark Juergensmeyer in his 2001 book Terror in the Mind of God, religious beliefs have motivated people to reject social order that they deem as unjust, and possibly rise against it. Even in today’s secularized societies, religion has served as the ground for social movements and manifestations addressing pressing socio-economic threats such as climate change, social inequality, authoritarian governments and minority discrimination. These observations have encouraged new trends in scholarly debate, especially regarding the emergence of alternative religious ideas and rituals in modern societies. How have old and new religious convictions legitimized various resistance movements among different communities? Which causes have influenced violent mobilizations against established social order, non-violent struggle, or the establishment of alternative community frameworks? What can these movements and ideas tell us about the role that religion plays today both in secularized and nonsecularized societies? The conference presents studies on the conceptualization, management and instrumentalization of religious ideas and beliefs in regard to past and contemporary resistance movements. See https://religion.ceu.edu/crs-elte-muni-phd-conference-ROAR-2020
Artillery, bureaucracy, silver coinage, and a sense of religious mission were some of the factors... more Artillery, bureaucracy, silver coinage, and a sense of religious mission were some of the factors that allowed a handful of early modern imperial dynasties, that is, the Ming Chinese, Mughals, Safavids, Ottomans, the Austrian and Spanish Habsburgs, and the Aviz dynasty of Portugal, to hold sway over much of the inhabited world. The globalized study of governance and social organization in these early modern empires has enhanced our knowledge concerning the symbolism of power, its embodiment in charismatic figures, and its mediation in societies of ethnic, linguistic and religious plurality. The conference planned by CEU’s Center for Religious Studies will explore a largely overlooked factor of empire-building: the political and social impact of mystical spirituality, piety, and ritual. In a global comparative approach that has few precedents so far, we intend to study the structural parallels and differences between mystical movements of this imperial age, be they Buddhist, Catholic, Shi'ite or Sunnite, including related manifestations within Jewish, Lutheran, or Christian Orthodox minority communities. The intimate alliance between imperial dynasties and mystical sects extended to political alliances as well as patterns of social organization. Networks of Sufi brotherhoods and Christian contemplative orders fulfilled an important function as vehicles of administration, symbolic legitimation, social cohesion, and cultural exchange. Their political aspects should be analyzed both from the outside, by retracing institutions of piety within the context of empire, and from within, by identifying patterns of imperial rule in mystical systems of thought. The politics of piety provided an imperial glue, as it were, that seemed to have responded to spiritual needs of subjects who confronted an invasive administration and a mysterious distance of the center of power. At the same time, mystical movements served as a potential channel of discontent. Comparative research on the world-wide manifestations of mysticism in the imperial practice and performance of power seems promising for several reasons. By adopting a global perspective, it will be possible to highlight the appeal that mystical spirituality had within the different religious traditions of the period; we will also be able to point to historical contacts and transmission lines of a direct or indirect character. We will finally be in a situation to discuss whether these religious and political developments fit into a common historical narrative. Whatever the answer to this question will be, we claim that the elaboration of global perspectives, terminologies and research agendas is a goal worth of being pursued in its own right. The conference will thus be part of approaches in historiography that aim at overcoming old epistemological boundaries between the study of the Orient and that of the West.
Spaces and bodies carry religious meanings. In history as well as in contemporary society, territ... more Spaces and bodies carry religious meanings. In history as well as in contemporary society, territories are organized through religious markers, creating hierarchies of sanctity or oppositions between spaces that are appropriated or unappropriated through religious symbolism. Borders between groups have been understood as religious in nature and expressed in normative terms, such as the sacred and the profane. Not only countries, states, cities, neighborhoods, national and ethnic groups, but even our own bodies are canvasses on which religious meanings can be painted through items of clothing or ritual. Conversely, spatial and corporeal representation underpins patterns of religious belonging and imagination. Such orders of space have been subject to constant negotiation and redefinition, both by those involved in religion-based distinctions and differentiations in their everyday lives and by the scholars analyzing the spatial aspects of religion. What is the consequence of giving a religious meaning to a physical space or a physical representation to a religious idea? Can religion only serve the purpose of separation and distinction, or is it equally employed for the blurring, mixing, or negation of differences between groups or between individuals and their environment? What justifications have been used in order to legitimize the existence of religiously framed differentiations and border-making? The conference invites contributions on the conceptualization, interpretation, management or instrumentalization of religion with regard to space, geographical or personal.
El 19 de marzo 2013 se cumplen 350 años de la muerte del poeta, dramaturgo y escritor Antonio Enr... more El 19 de marzo 2013 se cumplen 350 años de la muerte del poeta, dramaturgo y escritor Antonio Enríquez Gómez, que está entre los más destacados contemporáneos de Lope de Vega, Calderón y Quevedo. Sus obras se imprimen y leen hoy en las colecciones de clásicos. Pero este autor, nacido en Cuenca y fallecido en un calabozo de la Inquisición de Sevilla, también ofrece un interés más allá del propiamente literario. Como judeoconverso perseguido en España y exilado en Francia, Enríquez Gómez vaciló entre el cristianismo, el judaísmo y una fe racional que anuncia el espíritu de las Luces. Antonio Enríquez Gómez personifica toda la complejidad del Siglo de Oro español, marcado por sus minorías y sus intercambios europeos. Su obra se ha estudiado intensamente desde las letras hispánicas, la historia judía, el pensamiento político-religioso y la historia social. Consideramos que es el momento de dedicarle un coloquio internacional y favorecer así el diálogo entre interpretaciones dispares que se han formulado en torno a su personalidad emblemática.
The article proposes a political reading of the clandestine manuscript "Dialogues in Naarden," wr... more The article proposes a political reading of the clandestine manuscript "Dialogues in Naarden," written by João (Moseh) Pinto Delgado after taking refuge from Rouen to Amsterdam in 1634. This dialogue, which includes several poems written among the crypto-Jews of France, uses penisular models of symbolic geography and political satire to express the memories and aspirations that distinguished the "Nation portugaise" in the 17th century.
Juden und Krieg in der Frühen Neuzeit: Akteure - Erfahrungen - Strukturwandel, ed. Martha Keil, Peter Rauscher und Sabine Ullmann, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2022, pp. 255-269.
Israel Jacobson (1768-1828): Studien zu Leben, Werk und Wirkung, ed. Cord-Friedrich Berghahn, Mirko Przystawik, Katrin Keßler and Ulrich Knufinke, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2022, pp. 101-129.
Die Reform der rabbinischen Autorität, die sich im napoleonischen Machtbereich während der Jahre ... more Die Reform der rabbinischen Autorität, die sich im napoleonischen Machtbereich während der Jahre 1806-1813 vollzog, führt dieser Vortrag auf einen deutsch-französischen Gedankenaustausch zurück, in dem der maßgebliche Beitrag des braunschweigischen Hoffaktors Israel Jacobson hervorsticht. Jacobson sah die bürgerliche Gleichberechtigung der Juden stets zusammen mit einer religiösen Modernisierung, gestützt auf einen kirchenähnlichen Zentralrat unter staatlicher Aufsicht. Eine Reihe von Institutionen hat er mit diesen Vorgaben erstmals durchdacht und verwirklicht. Er war es, der Napoleon 1806 die Einberufung eines rabbinischen Hohen Rates vorschlug, der im Folgejahr als "Grand Sanhédrin" tatsächlich in Paris tagte. Jacobson war Verfechter einer jüdischen Konsistorialordnung, die 1808 im Kaiserreich Frankreich und im Königreich Westphalen ins Leben trat. Nachhaltigen Einfluss entfaltete er als westphälischer Konsistorialpräsident durch seine unkonventionelle Besetzung der Rabbinate und seinen Entwurf moderner Bildungsanstalten: Er eröffnete 1810 in Kassel das erste Rabbinerseminar der Geschichte. Zeitgenössische Druckschriften und Archivquellen zeigen Jacobson in einer dreifachen Rolle als jüdischer Interessenvertreter, politischer Denker und administrativer Praktiker. Sein Eintreten in den politischen Kontroversen dreier Monarchien erweist, dass sein Staatskirchentum sich mit der historischen Realität des Rabbinats durchaus zu arrangieren wusste.
This article surveys three centuries of rabbinic culture in Schnaittach (Central Franconia) on th... more This article surveys three centuries of rabbinic culture in Schnaittach (Central Franconia) on the basis of unexplored Hebrew sources. Located in an enclave within the Nuremberg territory, the Schnaittach rabbinate served four rural communities and variously exerted jurisdiction over large areas of Franco-nia, Upper Palatinate, and Bavaria. As a provincial authority, the rabbinate was oriented toward the political centers in Amberg, Munich, and Vienna, as well as toward the Jewish hubs of Fürth and Frankfurt. The rabbis of Schnaittach produced literary works in the fields of responsa and homiletics that this study con-textualizes within a multilevel network of social relations. Early modern rabbis interacted with local tribunals, Christian theologians, Jewish fellow scholars, and migrant students while guiding rural Jews in their daily lives. Several documents show how they mediated, jointly with their wives, in issues of marital sexuality and cared for the female space that was the ritual bath.
Aucun manuscrit de la littérature clandestine des juifs portugais n'eut autant de traductions que... more Aucun manuscrit de la littérature clandestine des juifs portugais n'eut autant de traductions que les "Questions d'un prêtre de Rouen" de Saül Levi Mortera, rabbin d'Amsterdam. Cet article étudie l'histoire de ce texte au cours d'un siècle. Adressé vers 1631en portugais à un prêtre catholique, il fut traduit et imprimé par des sociniens en latin et en néerlandais, tandis que les juifs le lisaient dans une traduction espagnole, puis dans de nouvelles versions en portugais, néerlandais et anglais.
Caminos de leche y miel: Jubilee Volume in Honor of Michael Studemund-Halévy, Volume I: History and Culture, edited by Harm den Boer, Anna Menny, and Carsten L. Wilke, Barcelona: Tirocinio, 2018, pp. 275-297.
Entre judaïsme et christianisme: Les conversions en Europe, de l’époque moderne à l’apparition de l’antisémitisme politique, ed. Paola Ferruta, Martin Dumont et Daniel Tollet, Paris, Louvain, Bristol: Peeters, 2017, pp. 25-50.
This article focuses on the reception of modern philosophy, theology, and literature by one of th... more This article focuses on the reception of modern philosophy, theology, and literature by one of the foremost Hasidic exegetes, Meyer-Leibush Weisser, better known as "Malbim" (1809-1879). Though a staunchly traditionalist author, Malbim adopts an explicitly innovative approach in his commentary on the Song of Songs that he published in 1857 during his tenure as a rabbi of Kempen in the Prussian province of Posen. He rejects both the Midrashic and the Enlightenment understanding of the biblical book and interprets it as a psychological allegory staging the human soul (symbolized by the Shulamite) in the dilemma between God (her beloved shepherd) and instinct (King Solomon). While this interpretation of the Song of Songs as a moralizing, three-character drama is derived from Protestant theology, Malbim's theory of the soul blends the models of Plato, Aristotle, and Kant. However surprising they may be, these borrowings from non-Jewish sources should not be overestimated. Malbim obtained them indirectly from Haskalah literature and incorporated them organically into his Kabbalistic system, while his main ideological antagonist remains Elijahu ben Zalman, the Gaon of Vilna. The “Songs of the Soul" thus presents an example of the subtle intercultural, diachronic, and pluralist dimensions inherent even in the Orthodox version of Jewish thought.
Ludwig August Frankl (1810-1894), eine jüdische Biographie zwischen Okzident und Orient, ed. Louise Hecht, Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau, 2016, pp. 221-240.
Samuel Usque, Consolation aux tribulations d'Israël (1553). Traduction de Lúcia Liba Mucznik, introduction de Yosef H. Yerushalmi, annotation de Carsten L. Wilke, Paris: Chandeigne, 2014, pp. 123-135.
Rabbins et savants au village: L'étude des traditions populaires juives XIXe-XXe siècles, eds. Jean Baumgarten and Céline Trautmann-Waller, Paris: CNRS Editions, 2014, pp. 77-98.
The Song of Songs, a lyric cycle of love scenes without a narrative plot, has often been consider... more The Song of Songs, a lyric cycle of love scenes without a narrative plot, has often been considered as the Bible’s most beautiful and enigmatic book. The present study questions the still dominant exegetical convention that merges all of the Song’s voices into the dialogue of a single couple, its composite heroine Shulamit being a projection screen for norms of womanhood. An alternative socio-spatial reading, starting with the Hebrew text’s strophic patterns and its references to historical realia, explores the poem’s artful alternation between courtly, urban, rural, and pastoral scenes with their distinct characters. The literary construction of social difference juxtaposes class-specific patterns of consumption, mobility, emotion, power structures, and gender relations. This new image of the cycle as a detailed poetic frieze of ancient society eventually leads to a precise hypothesis concerning its literary and religious context in the Hellenistic age, as well as its geographical origins in the multiethnic borderland east of the Jordan. In a Jewish echo of anthropological skepticism, the poem emphasizes the plurality and relativity of the human condition while praising the communicative powers of pleasure, fantasy, and multifarious Eros.
Al prolífico dramaturgo, poeta y satírico Antonio Enríquez Gómez (ca. 1600-1663) se le conoce hoy... more Al prolífico dramaturgo, poeta y satírico Antonio Enríquez Gómez (ca. 1600-1663) se le conoce hoy como un heterodoxo clandestino. Perseguido como judaizante por la Inquisición, fue en su exilio francés un audaz defensor de la libertad de conciencia. Más allá de una compleja y discutida biografía, en una obra que reclama una lectura atenta, este poeta y prosista se mueve entre la necesidad de dirigirse a públicos distintos, la de incorporarse al canon hispánico y la búsqueda del éxito en España.
In sixteenth-century Marrakesh, a Flemish merchant converts to Judaism and takes his Catholic bro... more In sixteenth-century Marrakesh, a Flemish merchant converts to Judaism and takes his Catholic brother on a subversive reading of the Gospels and an exploration of the Jewish faith. Their vivid Spanish dialogue, composed by an anonym in 1583, has until now escaped scholarly attention in spite of its success in anti-Christian clandestine literature until the Enlightenment. Based on all nine available manuscripts, this critical edition rediscovers a pioneering work of Jewish self-expression in European languages. The introductory study identifies the author, Estêvão Dias, locates him in insurgent Antwerp at the beginning of the Western Sephardi diaspora, and describes his hybrid culture shaped by the Iberian Renaissance, Portuguese crypto-Judaism, Mediterranean Jewish learning, Protestant theology, and European diplomacy in Africa.
Portugal tem um olhar único sobre a história judaica. No imaginário nacional, o judaísmo pertence... more Portugal tem um olhar único sobre a história judaica. No imaginário nacional, o judaísmo pertence não apenas à sua tradição cultural, mas também à sua genealogia. Na época medieval, os monarcas portugueses garantiram aos judeus mais protecção e segurança do que qualquer outro país europeu. A entrada de Portugal na era moderna fez-se, porém, no decurso de um processo de «cristianização» violenta de toda a sua vasta comunidade judaica, e os descendentes desta, quando não puderam, ou quiseram, sobreviver como judeus no exílio, misturaram-se em grande número ao resto da população. Os que se exilaram e vieram a fundar, ou desenvolver, dezenas das mais dinâmicas comunidades judaicas do mundo moderno, nem por isso deixaram de reivindicar além-fronteiras a identidade contraditória de «judeus do desterro de Portugal». Há mais de um século que esta história complexa e absolutamente singular apaixona estudiosos dos mais variados ramos do saber, dentro e fora de Portugal. E se hoje os aspectos parcelares de dois milénios de civilização judeo-portuguesa estão amplamente estudados, são também dos mais mal resumidos, o que explica que sejam tão mal conhecidos fora dos círculos especializados. A presente síntese vem colmatar essa lacuna.
Der Landauer Rabbiner Elias Grünebaum wurde zu seiner Studie über die gemeinsame jüdisch-christli... more Der Landauer Rabbiner Elias Grünebaum wurde zu seiner Studie über die gemeinsame jüdisch-christliche Vergangenheit durch das deutsch-jüdische Projekt einer pluralistischen Gesellschaft angeregt. In der systematischen kirchlichen Verunglimpfung des Judentums als gewissenlose Zeremonial religion liegt für ihn die Wurzel aller Vorurteile gegenüber den Juden. Im Einspruch gegen das Pharisäerbild theologischer Lehrbücher beschreibt Grünebaum die Entfaltung universalethischer Prinzipien im biblischen und antiken Judentum sowie ihren prägenden Einfluss auf die Lehre Jesu. Daraus entsteht eine Genealogie der Moral, die den gleichberechtigten Anteil beider Religionen an den Werten Europas einfordert. Die im Kaiserreich aufgeflammte judenfeindliche Agitation veranlasste Grünebaum zu einer stark erweiterten Neuauflage seiner "Sittenlehre". Das Werk, dessen Textgeschichte die Edition transparent macht, bezeugt und kommentiert jene Dekade, in der christliche Talmudfeinde der Rassenideologie den Boden bereiteten.
Den Rabbinern kommt in der jüdischen Tradition die maßgebliche religionsgesetzliche Autorität und... more Den Rabbinern kommt in der jüdischen Tradition die maßgebliche religionsgesetzliche Autorität und zugleich eine besondere symbolische Bedeutung zu. Als individuelle Leitfiguren lenken sie die Geschicke ihrer Gemeinden und verkörpern deren kulturelles Ideal. Das Biographische Handbuch der Rabbiner ermöglicht erstmals ein Gesamtbild des Berufsstands im deutschsprachigen Judentum der Moderne.
Die Artikel zu den einzelnen Rabbinern sind alphabetisch geordnet und enthalten möglichst vollständige Daten zu ihrer Herkunft, Ausbildung, Laufbahn, Familie und religiösen Position. Jeder Eintrag ist mit einer Bibliographie versehen, die sowohl Primär- als auch Sekundärliteratur verzeichnet. Teil 1 behandelt eine Phase tiefgreifenden Umbruchs, in der die religiösen Strömungen des modernen Judentums ihren Ursprung nahmen. Die 1.952 biographischen Einträge werden durch eine institutionsgeschichtliche Einleitung, ein Ortsregister und eine Übersichtskarte ergänzt. (Rückentext)
Noch zur Aufklärungszeit blühte ein vielgestaltiges rabbinisches Hochschulwesen in den deutschen ... more Noch zur Aufklärungszeit blühte ein vielgestaltiges rabbinisches Hochschulwesen in den deutschen Staaten. Ihren besonderen, jahrhundertealten Bildungsidealen verpflichtet, musste sich diese talmudische Gelehrtenrepublik der ihr nun abverlangten Anpassung an die herrschende idealistische Theologie verweigern. Ein Wahnsinniger nur oder ein Genie, so urteilte 1808 einer ihrer wenigen christlichen Verteidiger, könnte zugleich "morgenländische und abendländische Philosophie studieren, den Talmud und den Kant, den Fichte wie den Schelling". An den unvereinbaren Ansprüchen von Staatspolitikern, Religionsreformern und Traditionalisten scheiterten die Projekte zu "zeitgemäßen" Ausbildungsstätten. So mussten die jüdischen Studentenkreise der Romantik und des Vormärz jene für unmöglich gehaltene Synthese aus dem disparaten Erbe ihrer talmudischen und akademischen Mentoren selbst entwickeln und erproben. Die Entstehung der rivalisierenden Modelle moderner rabbinischer Wissenschaft, die diese institutions- und ideengeschichtliche Studie verfolgt, beginnt inmitten der alten Talmudhochschulen und führt durch ein beispielloses kulturelles Laboratorium zu den Anfängen des Jüdisch-Theologischen Seminars, das 1854 in Breslau gegründet wurde.
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Die "Marranen" des 17. Jahrhunderts sind sprichwörtlich geworden als erste Opfer einer modernen I... more Die "Marranen" des 17. Jahrhunderts sind sprichwörtlich geworden als erste Opfer einer modernen Identitätskrise. Indes soll hier aufgezeigt werden, daß eine Gruppe portugiesischer Inquisitionsflüchtlinge die doppelte religiöse Zugehörigkeit bewußt anstrebte und zu einer wirtschaftlichen und gesellschaftlichen Strategie verfeinerte. Nach bisher unerschlossenem Archivmaterial beleuchtet diese Studie den rätselhaften Grenzfall eines spanischen Dramatikers, der im französischen Exil zeitweilig als Jude lebte. Mit seinen zahlreichen fingierten Existenzen veranschaulicht dieser professionelle Hochstapler und erklärte Moralist, wie sehr auf dem frühneuzeitlichen Welttheater die Herstellung von Persönlichkeit aus ihrer Verstellung erwuchs.
EL ANAQUEL: LIBROS DE FILOSOFÍA JUDÍA, CON PABLO DREIZIK – El libro que os recomendamos nos sitúa... more EL ANAQUEL: LIBROS DE FILOSOFÍA JUDÍA, CON PABLO DREIZIK – El libro que os recomendamos nos sitúa en el Marrakech del siglo XVI, un comerciante flamenco se convierte al judaísmo y lleva a su hermano católico a una lectura subversiva de los Evangelios y a una exploración de la fe judía. Su vívido diálogo en español, compuesto por un anónimo en 1583, ha escapado hasta ahora a la atención de los eruditos a pesar de su éxito en la literatura clandestina anticristiana hasta la Ilustración. Basada en los nueve manuscritos disponibles, esta edición crítica redescubre un trabajo pionero de autoexpresión judía en idiomas europeos. El estudio introductorio identifica al autor, Estêvão Dias, lo ubica en la Amberes insurgente al comienzo de la diáspora sefardí occidental y describe su cultura híbrida moldeada por el Renacimiento ibérico, el criptojudaísmo portugués, el saber judío mediterráneo, la teología protestante y la diplomacia europea. en África.
According to the Hebrew Bible, the Song of Songs is the ‘greatest of all songs’. For Carsten Wilk... more According to the Hebrew Bible, the Song of Songs is the ‘greatest of all songs’. For Carsten Wilke, who has studied the adaptive power of Jewish faith and culture across time and space, the Song is akin to Greek idylls of the third century BCE. In his 2015 book, Farewell to Shulamit, he argues that the lovers in the Song of Songs aren't just one couple, nor is the Song a mish-mash of assorted poetic fragments. It is of a piece, and it portrays a variety of loves, in a variety of spaces, from palace to pasture.
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According to JCH policies, there is a 18 months embargo period on uploading articles to open platforms such as academia.edu, but the author may share the text with colleagues in private (wilkec@ceu.edu).
an excentric relative, the mathematician and religious visionary Paul Yvon, lord of Laleu
(c.1570-1646). A Calvinist merchant and magistrate of La Rochelle, Yvon claimed to have discovered,
by a divine revelation he experienced in 1614, the squaring of the circle and a new Judeo-Christian
religion based on scientific intuition. He dedicated a large number of printed pamphlets to his
mathematical theorems and, having moved to Paris after his conversion to Catholicism in 1628,
insistently tried to convince Mersenne, Descartes and other contemporaries of their veracity. A
coherence between geometrical proof and Kabbalistic myth in his publications is suggested mainly by
way of copper engravings that illustrate some of them. Complex geometric diagrams are here explained
by short formula in Hebrew and a few figurative symbols, among which the snake, the sun, and the
vagina are particularly recurrent, alluding to cosmological and Christological mysteries of which Yvon believed himself to be the prophet. Yvon's main historic interest resides in his pushing to the extreme
the fascination with Jewish esotericism that characterized the early stages of the scientific revolution
and that earned him among his contemporaries the reputation of being not only a madman, but also a
Judaizer.
According to JCH policies, there is a 18 months embargo period on uploading articles to open platforms such as academia.edu, but the author may share the text with colleagues in private (wilkec@ceu.edu).
an excentric relative, the mathematician and religious visionary Paul Yvon, lord of Laleu
(c.1570-1646). A Calvinist merchant and magistrate of La Rochelle, Yvon claimed to have discovered,
by a divine revelation he experienced in 1614, the squaring of the circle and a new Judeo-Christian
religion based on scientific intuition. He dedicated a large number of printed pamphlets to his
mathematical theorems and, having moved to Paris after his conversion to Catholicism in 1628,
insistently tried to convince Mersenne, Descartes and other contemporaries of their veracity. A
coherence between geometrical proof and Kabbalistic myth in his publications is suggested mainly by
way of copper engravings that illustrate some of them. Complex geometric diagrams are here explained
by short formula in Hebrew and a few figurative symbols, among which the snake, the sun, and the
vagina are particularly recurrent, alluding to cosmological and Christological mysteries of which Yvon believed himself to be the prophet. Yvon's main historic interest resides in his pushing to the extreme
the fascination with Jewish esotericism that characterized the early stages of the scientific revolution
and that earned him among his contemporaries the reputation of being not only a madman, but also a
Judaizer.
See https://religion.ceu.edu/crs-elte-muni-phd-conference-ROAR-2020
The intimate alliance between imperial dynasties and mystical sects extended to political alliances as well as patterns of social organization. Networks of Sufi brotherhoods and Christian contemplative orders fulfilled an important function as vehicles of administration, symbolic legitimation, social cohesion, and cultural exchange. Their political aspects should be analyzed both from the outside, by retracing institutions of piety within the context of empire, and from within, by identifying patterns of imperial rule in mystical systems of thought. The politics of piety provided an imperial glue, as it were, that seemed to have responded to spiritual needs of subjects who confronted an invasive administration and a mysterious distance of the center of power. At the same time, mystical movements served as a potential channel of discontent.
Comparative research on the world-wide manifestations of mysticism in the imperial practice and performance of power seems promising for several reasons. By adopting a global perspective, it will be possible to highlight the appeal that mystical spirituality had within the different religious traditions of the period; we will also be able to point to historical contacts and transmission lines of a direct or indirect character. We will finally be in a situation to discuss whether these religious and political developments fit into a common historical narrative. Whatever the answer to this question will be, we claim that the elaboration of global perspectives, terminologies and research agendas is a goal worth of being pursued in its own right. The conference will thus be part of approaches in historiography that aim at overcoming old epistemological boundaries between the study of the Orient and that of the West.
Die Artikel zu den einzelnen Rabbinern sind alphabetisch geordnet und enthalten möglichst vollständige Daten zu ihrer Herkunft, Ausbildung, Laufbahn, Familie und religiösen Position. Jeder Eintrag ist mit einer Bibliographie versehen, die sowohl Primär- als auch Sekundärliteratur verzeichnet. Teil 1 behandelt eine Phase tiefgreifenden Umbruchs, in der die religiösen Strömungen des modernen Judentums ihren Ursprung nahmen. Die 1.952 biographischen Einträge werden durch eine institutionsgeschichtliche Einleitung, ein Ortsregister und eine Übersichtskarte ergänzt. (Rückentext)
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