The social and cultural context seventeenthcentury Europe

CHAPTER 22
The social and cultural context: seventeenthcentury Europe
Elisheva Carlebach
INTRODUCTION
Decisive historical breaks from the past led to the gradual emergence of new political and
cultural forms in seventeenth-century Europe that would predominate through the
nineteenth century. By the end of the sixteenth century, the Catholic Church had lost the
exclusive hegemony it had enjoyed for so many centuries. Decades of religious wars
weakened confessional loyalties as European states changed denominations. Political
thinkers such as Jean Bodin and the jurist Hugo Grotius had begun to separate politics
from theology. Christian Hebraists asserted a need for Jews as teachers of the sacred texts
and a philo-semitic movement arose in some Protestant millenarian circles. States began
to adopt the principle of raison d’état, of which mercantilism was the economic
expression. European economic power began to shift from the Mediterranean basin
toward the north Atlantic states. In the seventeenth century, Jewish spokesmen such as
Menasseh ben Israel of Amsterdam and Simone Luzzatto of Venice could urge the
resettlement of Jews by appealing to the economic self-interest of states. The economic
success of the Protestant Netherlands, and later of England, led their rivals for economic
power to emulate their success by ameliorating their posture toward Jewish settlement.
RESETTLEMENT
These changes paved the way for princes and states, particularly of the new sea-based
powers, England and the Netherlands, to invite Jews to settle for the purposes of
developing their economies. By the seventeenth century, Jews, often crypto-Jews
(Marranos, see below) who initially concealed their true beliefs, had begun to resettle
Western Europe. These new Jewish settlements reversed the centuries-long medieval
process of expulsions of Jews which had emptied Western Europe of its Jewish
communities by the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.1
By the 1570s, Jews were readmitted to Bohemia, and greatly expanded
their settlements in other parts of Germany and Austria. German Jews who
had trickled into Metz were formally acknowledged by the French king in
1595. A nucleus of Portuguese crypto-Jews settled in Hamburg in the
1590s, to become the most important north European Jewish community
through the seventeenth century. The Italian city-states defied papal
The social and cultural context
527
preferences and encouraged settlement of more Jews in Venice, Livorno,
Pisa, Mantua, Ferrara, and other cities. Portuguese crypto-Jews settled in
Amsterdam in 1595. Their numbers greatly expanded in Bordeaux and
Bayonne, and later in central France. The petition by Menasseh ben Israel,
a Dutch rabbi, to Oliver Cromwell, to permit Jews to settle in England,
sparked a fierce controversy in 1655. While the Jews were not formally
admitted, they began to settle in London openly as Jews after that date.
Many of these settlements followed a similar process of consolidation:
they were granted first freedom from persecution and eventually, legal
status as professing Jews.
PATTERNS OF GOVERNANCE
As the medieval model of a society comprised of corporate entities gave way to stronger
centralized bureaucracies and absolute governments, the special status of the Jewish
communities became more anti-thetical to the principles of central government. Yet after
having admitted or retained a Jewish community which served their economic interests,
European governments were not yet willing to remove the social and economic barriers
to integration. In the end, Jewish communities maintained their distinctive framework,
with the governments retaining the right to curtail aspects of Jewish autonomy as it suited
them.
Most new communities, founded and populated by emigrants, consciously emulated
the medieval model of judicial and cultural autonomy in which the Jewish community,
the kehillah, functioned as a corporate entity.2 Like its medieval predecessors, the
constitutions of the communities granted power to elected boards of parnasim. These
were often a narrow and powerful oligarchy composed of the most wealthy and
influential members. While tension existed both within the leading class and between
classes, the system was remarkably effective in maintaining social control and a full
range of social services, and mediating between the Jewish community and the local and
central governments.
The medieval paradigm in which each city contained one kehillah which embraced all
the Jewish inhabitants of that locale was no longer valid by the seventeenth century. In
addition to containing at least one Sephardic and one Ashkenazic community, many were
further subdivided into additional kehillot based on city of origin. The Jewish population
of Venice was divided into three nations, the Ponentine, Levantine, and German. In
Rome, Italian, Spanish, Sicilian, and German congregations coexisted with varying
degrees of harmony. Geographic and cultural particularism, embodied by the existence of
parallel communities, contended with the impulse to consolidate. Portuguese Jews who
began arriving in Amsterdam in the last decade of the sixteenth century established three
separate congregations. In 1639, they had combined into one powerful kehillah whose
leaders wielded great power over its members, an authority ratified by the municipal
government. In 1703, the young congregation Sa‘ar Asama’im (Gates of Heaven) in
London issued a ban against establishment of additional Sephardic congregations.
History of Jewish philosophy
528
Older communities with venerable traditions, particularly those in Italian cities—
Venice was the pre-eminent exemplar—provided models for Jewish governance and
organization to newer communities that were established in the seventeenth century, such
as those in Amsterdam, London, and Hamburg. Marranos who fled Spain and Portugal
arrived in fits and spurts through the eighteenth century and were united with the
Sephardic communities.3 The encounter between the exiles sparked unprecedented
clashes over customs, liturgy, and educational ideals.
After 1648, refugees from Poland’s decades-long tumult, the “Protop,” initiated by the
Cossack rebellion, brought to the western Jewish communities Judaic erudition, books,
the Yiddish language, and a seemingly infinite neediness that strained the limited
financial resources of the communities. The new layers of refugees were greeted with
ambivalence. Ashkenazic kehillot soon came to outstrip their Sephardic counterparts in
Western Europe in population, but not in prestige and influence. An exception to this was
the rise of court Jews in central Europe, particularly during the Thirty Years War, 1618–
48, when both sides of the ostensibly religious conflict turned to Jewish financiers and
suppliers thereby creating a new class of courtiers. Many used their influence to become
advocates for Jewish causes, founders of new communities, and patrons of Jewish
learning.4
The medieval model in which communities had absolute authority to levy taxes
continued into the early modern period. Cherem, the ban of excommunication, along with
less potent variants, was one of the most powerful weapons of social control available to
communal leaders. From an expression of censure to total ostracism, the mere threat of
cherem generally kept deviance well checked. The power of cherem underpinned the
constitution of every Jewish community, and it was invoked for a variety of infractions.
While there had always been a delicate balance between lay and rabbinic power, in some
new communities lay leaders were so powerful that the traditional balance of powers was
decisively altered in their favor, a subtle prefiguration of the course of Jewish communal
leadership in modern times. With the passage of time, the frequent use of cherem to
resolve every dispute eroded its power; the loss of Jewish autonomy rendered it harmless.
Other means of control included the haskamah, approbation, required for all books
before they could be published. From the time of the earliest Hebrew books printed
during their authors’ lifetime, rabbinic haskamot were required, placed first at the end of
books and later after the title page. Ostensibly letters of recommendation to rabbinic
colleagues, they also served as declarations of copyright and, more importantly, as a
means of exercising Jewish self-censorship. In the seventeenth century, lay councils
attempted to assert exclusive authority over haskamot, provoking rabbinic opposition.
The autonomous kehillah administered the formal religious, social, and judicial
institutions necessary to the life of the community. Synagogues served the traditional
functions of worship and study. They often served as social centers where news and
information circulated together with official announcements. More important to the fabric
of daily life than the formal communal structures, for most seventeenth-century Jews,
was the network of overlapping voluntary societies, known as chevrot, which proliferated
in this period. These associations had religious, educational, charitable, or social goals,
such as study of holy texts, burial of the dead, dowering poor brides, or occupational
association. The chevrot formed a social infrastructure parallel to the communal
The social and cultural context
529
hierarchy—often cooperating with it, sometimes overlapping it, but completely
independent of it.5
The small size and large number of the fraternities, twenty members on
average, meant that every member could play an important role and that a
significant proportion of the Jewish population looked to these fraternities
for their primary social identity. Admittance to some chevrot was
restricted on the basis of wealth, family, and scholarship; in these,
membership was a coveted privilege; expulsion the equivalent of
excommunication. In other cases, the associations served as alternatives
for those who could not attain leadership positions within the communal
structure, often maintaining separate prayer groups with their own
scholarly leaders functioning as rabbi. The importance of these cells for
the social, spiritual, and intellectual lives of many seventeenth-century
Jews cannot be overestimated. Many of the most important unifying trends
in the Jewish world spread by means of the chevrot. The dissemination of
kabbalah, the maintenance of close links with the Holy Land, and efforts
to hasten the redemption, were achieved through the fraternities. As the
chevrot became sufficient sources of social consensus and spiritual
sustenance for their members, they contributed to the forces that eroded
central authority within the kehillah.
SPIRITUAL AND INTELLECTUAL CURRENTS
For the Jews who entered Western Europe to form new communities, social and
communal life could be modeled on the medieval forms, but their spiritual and
intellectual content could not simply revert to the medieval mode. The vague but
pervasive concept of “crisis of authority” that has been affixed to seventeenth-century
Europe is useful as a framework for understanding the disparate and often paradoxical
trends within seventeenth-century Western European Jewry.6 Few seventeenth-century
Jews were spared the pangs of dislocation that began with the Iberian expulsions, and
their attendant multiple migrations and forced conversions.7 The responses to these
ruptures from the past and loss of security can be grouped into two essential patterns.
Some idealized the institutions and values of the past and attempted to endow them with
centrality and authority. This impulse was nourished by turning inward to Jewish spiritual
and cultural traditions. The attempts to retrieve the worlds that were lost often led to
innovative adaptations of traditional forms. For others, the profound sense of exile and
alienation proved stronger than the pull of tradition. In this paradigm, Jews turned
outward to the larger society in social, economic, and intellectual configurations that
became pathways for breaking with the medieval model.
History of Jewish philosophy
530
MARRANISM
Jewish converts to Christianity and their descendants emerged from the Iberian Peninsula
and reverted to Judaism through the eighteenth century. Their contribution to the
religious, social, and economic complexion of newly reconstituted Jewish communities
was considerable. Those who emerged from the Marrano matrix carried with them or
developed in their new abodes a broad range of attitudes and beliefs. For some, the
sacrifices made to maintain a secret Judaism at risk of great peril led to a wholehearted
embrace of all things Jewish in their new communities. As the instances of the physicians
Isaac Cardoso and Isaac Orobio de Castro demonstrate, some even became zealous
polemicists for the Jewish faith.8 At the other end of the spectrum were Marranos whose
Jewish knowledge was so distorted and fragmentary that they could never become
reconciled to the version of Judaism that was practiced by their contemporaries; they
became outright skeptics, as the case of Uriel da Costa illustrates. Others fled persecution
or pursued economic opportunities and lived at the margins of Jewish commitment.
Marranos engendered reactions in the Jewish community, from great admiration for those
who became defenders of the Jewish faith to rejection and condemnation of those who
could not or would not adjust. The communities and their religious leaders strove to ease
the reintegration of the Marranos by providing them with schools, teachers, and literature
in their vernacular. Marranos contributed to every sphere of Jewish activity. Their ranks
included philosophers, messianists, physicians, kabbalists, and rabbis. Some were worldclass merchants, bankers, brokers, and diplomats whose entrepreneurial skills contributed
to the mercantilist goals of their respective states and helped modernize the global
economy with the development of capital, stock markets, and insurance. Their wealth and
status enabled many of these figures to play leading roles within the Jewish communities.
KABBALAH
Until the sixteenth century, study of kabbalah, Jewish mystical doctrines whose canonical
text was the Zohar (The Book of Splendor), had been the province of a small scholarly
elite. During the sixteenth century, new emphases and new impulses were introduced into
kabbalah in the circle of Isaac Luria in Safed. Toward the end of the sixteenth and the
early decades of the seventeenth centuries, the esoteric doctrines were more widely
disseminated. The Zohar was published in 1589, followed by other works. Kabbalistic
terminology began to appear in sermons and popular ethical literature so that its basic
vocabulary entered the public discourse. Among the most important concepts of Lurianic
Kabbalah were that of a cosmic cataclysm, shevirat ha-kelim (shattering of the vessels),
which occurred during creation when the divine essence overcame the vessels that were
intended to contain it. The scattered and intermingled kelippot, shards, symbolized gross
matter; the nitzotzot, sparks of divine matter. The most crucial element in the process is
that of tiqqun, repair and restoration, which would result in wordly redemption and
cosmic harmony in the divine spheres. Humanity played a decisive role in the process, as
each fulfillment of a religious obligation released the trapped sparks to return to their
The social and cultural context
531
source.9 Alongside the kabbalah there flourished, particularly in Italy, a sharply critical
anti-kabbalist school which denied the authenticity of kabbalah and decried its irrational
elements.10
THE SABBATIAN MESSIANIC MOVEMENT
Although centrally concerned with redemption, Lurianic kabbalah assigned no special
role to a messiah figure. In an age so concerned with ending the travails of exile, this void
would not last long. The messianic impulse in the post-exilic Sephardic world was
manifested in a variety of ways. In sixteenth-century Safed, an attempt to revive
semikhah, apostolic ordination of rabbis, as a prerequisite for the establishment of a
Sanhedrin, was one expression of the desire for an end to the fragmented condition of
Jewish authority. Many kabbalistic confraternities devoted their energies to programs of
study and works intended to hasten the redemption. Authors wrote consolatory works
announcing or implying that the redemption of Israel was imminent. Several messianic
movements ignited the hopes of the exile-weary Jews. The most notable in the sixteenth
century were the movements of Asher Lemlein in 1503 and David Reubeni and Solomon
Molkho in 1530.
In the seventeenth century, several factors contributed to the immense
scope and profound impact of the Sabbatai Zevi movement, which reached
its apogee in 1665–6. The continued persecution of conversos in Iberia,
the calamities which befell Polish Jewry after 1648, and an expectation of
the millennium in the Christian world converged to make the Sabbatian
messianic movement more widespread than any in medieval Jewish
history. This messianic movement transcended every boundary of
geography, class, and nationality. In her acclaimed memoir, Glückel of
Hameln recalled the excitement of the Sabbatai Zevi’s appearance:
Throughout the world Thy servants and children rent themselves with
repentance, prayer, and charity…. My good father-in-law left his home in
Hameln, abandoned his house and lands and all his goodly
furniture…sent…two enormous casks packed with linens and with peas,
beans, and dried meats, shredded prunes…all manner of food that would
keep. For the old man expected to sail any moment from Hamburg to the
Holy Land.11
Spinoza’s correspondent Henry Oldenberg reported the events to Spinoza and asked for
his impressions. “Everyone here is talking of a report that the Jews, after remaining
scattered for more than two thousand years are about to return to their country. Few here
believe it but many desire it.”12
The impact of the Sabbatian messianic movement was more profound than any of its
predecessors because its theologian and spokesman, Nathan Ashkenazi of Gaza,
translated all the activities of the messiah into the vocabulary of Lurianic kabbalah, which
History of Jewish philosophy
532
had by then been disseminated throughout the Diaspora. The dénouement of the
movement came in 1666, when Sabbatai converted to Islam under duress; he died ten
years later. While most Jews sadly resigned themselves to the failure of the movement,
some had been so profoundly convinced by their experience of a new era that they
refused to relinquish their faith even in the face of the messiah’s apostasy and death.
Sabbatianism endured as a heretical sect in many varieties for several centuries. At its
most extreme, Sabbatianism inspired its adherents to emulate the messiah’s apostasy. In
1683, a group known as the Donmeh converted to Islam; in 1753, the Frankists in Poland
converted to Catholicism. While some practiced ritual deviations from the normative
tradition, more moderate varieties of Sabbatianism flourished throughout Europe in secret
circles devoted to the study of Sabbatian kabbalah.
The Sabbatian movement, and the conflicts surrounding it, added to the
sense of crisis both within the rabbinate and within the Jewish
communities. After the failure of the movement, some Jews despaired and
converted or developed a skeptical attitude toward religion. Many
communities were driven by the suspicions that some members were
secret Sabbatians. The rabbinic careers of Jacob Sasportas, at the height of
the Sabbatian movement, Moses Hagiz and Chakham Zevi in the early
eighteenth century, and Jacob Emden in the mid eighteenth century were
energized by their zealous pursuit of Sabbatian adherents. Rabbinic
reputations, such as those of Nechemiah Hayon, Moses Chayim Luzzatto,
and Jonathan Eybeshuetz, were tainted by the suspicion that they harbored
Sabbatian beliefs.13 The lay leaders used their power to stifle any
discordant notes sounded within the Jewish community, regardless of
whether they were nourished by skeptical rationalism or zealous
messianism. The founding fathers of the young Jewish communities in
London, Amsterdam, and Hamburg were aware of the tenuous nature of
their foothold. Communal leaders believed that the newly granted
toleration by Christian society extended only to those who shared the
belief system of normative (rabbinic) Judaism. They felt a civic duty to
suppress any deviance that might reflect negatively on the ideological
wholesomeness of the Jewish community. Although many were
themselves victims or refugees from persecution, numerous parallels can
be found to demonstrate that refugees from intolerance are not necessarily
willing to extend the rights they have painfully gained to others. The rigid
standards of conformity and limits of toleration demanded by the Jewish
lay communal authorities of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were
conditioned by their own experience of persecution. Those who had
developed successful polemical mechanisms to parry the thrusts of their
mortal religious foes easily adapted them to internal polemical battles.
The social and cultural context
533
RABBINIC CULTURE
While the seventeenth century was a golden age of talmudic scholarship in Poland,
rabbinic emphasis in Western and central Europe reflected the compelling concerns of the
day. Scholars produced an abundance of responsa literature; every contemporary concern
was reflected within its pages. Leone Modena’s Responsa Ziqnei Yehudah reveals the
rich texture of Jewish life in an Italian ghetto, Zvi Ashkenazi’s Responsa Chakham Zvi,
Jacob Sasportas’ Ohel Jacob, and Yair Chayim Bachrach’s Chavot Ya’ir considered
definitions of heresy and heterodoxy, the Jewish status of Marranos, delineations of
rabbinic and communal authority, and the status of myriad disputed customs, among
others. Rabbis wrote significant polemics against Christianity, often intended to disabuse
former Marranos of Christian views, and many pedagogical manuals, aimed at the same
audience, to aid the process of integration into contemporary Jewish life.
SCIENCE
The influence of new scientific developments within the thought of Jewish intellectuals
was considerable. Marranos who had been educated as Christians in Iberia often brought
knowledge of the most recent scientific and philosophical trends when they entered the
Jewish community. Jewish authors considered every scientific subject from astronomy to
zoology. Jews from every corner of Europe were admitted to the University of Padua to
study medicine. Scientific, philosophical, and theological thought were not yet
completely distinct disciplines; Jewish physicians such as Isaac Cardoso, Elijah Montalto,
Samson Morpurgo were also religious polemicists and philosophers. Nowhere were the
paradoxes of a transitional age demonstrated more vividly than in the Italian ghetto,
where an indigenous Renaissance culture continued to exert its influence despite the
restrictions of the counter-Reformation.
NOTES
1 For an excellent summary of the expulsion and resettlement period,
see Israel 1991, pp. 5–69.
2 Baron 1942, pp. 208–82. On the historic contours of the kehillah’s
autonomy, see recently Stolzenberg and Myers 1992, pp. 636–42, and
the literature cited there.
3 On the integration of Marranos into the Jewish communities of
Western Europe, see the masterful study of Yerushalmi 1971, esp. pp.
1–50.
4 Stern 1985, pp. 38–59; 177–226.
5 Baron 1942, pp. 348–72; Rivlin 1991, pp. 11–160.
6 For an influential account of this crisis in European intellectual
history, see Hazard 1971, pp. 3–52; 119–97. On its application to
European Jewry, see, inter alia, Abramsky 1979, pp. 13–28.
History of Jewish philosophy
534
7 Baron 1967, pp. 236–83.
8 Yerushalmi 1971; Kaplan 1983.
9 Scholem 1987, pp. 135–44.
10 Idel 1987, pp. 137–200.
11 Glückel of Hameln 1978, pp. 46–7.
12 Spinoza 1951, p. 293.
13 On the aftermath of the Sabbatian movement, see Carlebach 1990.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Texts
Glückel of Hameln (1978) [1932] The Memoirs of Glückel of Hameln,
translated by M.Lowenthal (New York: Schocken).
Spinoza (1951) Correspondence, in Works of Spinoza, vol. 2, translated
and edited by R.H.M.Elwes (New York: Dover).
Studies
Abramsky, C. (1979) “The Crisis of Authority Within European Jewry in
the Eighteenth Century,” in Studies in Jewish Religious and Intellectual
History Presented to Alexander Altmann, edited by S.Stein and R.Loewe
(University, Al: Alabama University Press), pp. 13–28.
Baron, S. (1942) The Jewish Community, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: Jewish
Publication Society).
——(1967) A Social and Religious History of the Jews, vol. 11 (New
York and Philadephia: Columbia University Press and Jewish Publication
Society).
Carlebach, E. (1990) The Pursuit of Heresy: Rabbi Moses Hagiz and the
Sabbatian Controversies (New York: Columbia University Press).
Hazard, P. (1971) The European Mind, 1680–1715, translated by J.L.May
(New York: Meridian).
Idel, M. (1987) “Differing Conceptions of Kabbalah in the Early 17th
Century,” in Jewish Thought in the Seventeenth Century, edited by
I.Twersky (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press), pp. 137–200.
Israel, J. (1991) [1985] European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism:
1550–1750 (Oxford: Clarendon Press).
Kaplan, Y. (1983) From Christianity to Judaism (Jerusalem: Magnes).
The social and cultural context
535
Rivlin, B. (1991) Mutual Responsibility in the Italian Ghetto: Holy
Societies 1516–1789 [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes).
Scholem, G. (1987) [1974] Kabbalah (New York: Dorset).
Stern, S. (1985) [1950] The Court Jew: A Contribution to the History of
Absolutism in Europe (New Brunswick: Transaction).
Stolzenberg, N. and D.Myers (1992) “Community, Constitution, and
Culture: The Case of the Jewish Kehilah,” University of Michigan Journal
of Law Reform 25: 633–70.
Yerushalmi, Y. (1971) From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto: Isaac
Cardoso—A Study in Seventeenth-Century Marranism and Jewish
Apologetics (New York: Columbia University Press).