The Jewish community of Amsterdam

CHAPTER 23
The Jewish community of Amsterdam
Richard H.Popkin
The Jewish community of Amsterdam is usually portrayed as a rigid orthodox group
because of its excommunication of Spinoza. It was, however, a unique intellectual group
in modern Jewish history. Almost of all of its members were New Christians or
Marranos, raised as Christians in Spain, Portugal, southern France, Belgium, or Italy,
with little or no Jewish education. As the Netherlands gained its freedom from Spanish
rule at the beginning of the seventeenth century, some New Christians came to
Amsterdam and other Dutch cities. The supposed story of the founding of the Jewish
community is that a group of these refugees from Iberia were found holding a religious
service in the home of the Moroccan ambassador. The Dutch authorities were going to
arrest them as enemy Spanish Catholics. When it was made clear that they were also
victims of the Spanish enemy, and were Jews rather than Catholics, they were allowed to
stay. The Dutch authorities sought to figure out what status these Jews should have. At
the time there was no legal Jewish community in England, France, Spain, or Portugal. In
Germany and Italy, the Jewish communities were highly regulated and restricted usually
to ghettos. The legal expert Hugo Grotius was asked to formulate the conditions under
which Jews could live in the Netherlands. His response, though tolerant for its day, still
imposed many restrictions on Jewish activities, religious as well as social and economic.
No decision was made, but an informal agreement developed under which the Jews could
live freely in the Netherlands as long as they did not cause scandal to their Christian
neighbors, and as long as no members of the group became public charges.
As a result, the first free Jewish community in modern Europe came into being. It was
not confined to a ghetto, but existed without walls (until 1940 when Hitler sealed it off).
Rembrandt lived on Jooden-breestraat (Jewish Broad Street, a block from the Great
Synagogue). Jews could enter into the commercial world developing in Amsterdam, and
some soon became important merchants in the vast overseas trade that poured through
Amsterdam. The Jewish community was open to the outside world, and soon some Jews
were conferring with Christians about points of Jewish lore, and about Hebrew studies.
Many Christians attended services in the synagogue. The professor of Hebrew at
Cambridge, Hugh Broughton, described attending the synagogue in its early days, and
arguing there with members about the merits of Judaism and Christianity. Adam Boreel,
the leader of the Dutch Collegiants, a creedless Christian group that later took Spinoza in,
worked with leading rabbis on preparing an edition of the Mishnah in Hebrew with
points, and a Spanish translation of the text. He financed the model of Solomon’s Temple
that was exhibited in Rabbi Judah Leon’s garden next to the Synagogue. Pierre-Daniel
Huet, the future bishop of Avranches, visited Menasseh in 1652 and went with him to the
Synagogue. The Quaker Samuel Fisher attended services, and then discussed religious
matters with members for hours afterwards in their homes. Later on Gilbert Burnet, the
The Jewish community of Amsterdam
537
future bishop of Salisbury, studied Hebrew in the community, and attended services with
an interpreter. Knorr von Rosenroth around the same time acquired from a rabbi in the
community the collection of kabbalistic manuscripts that he translated in the Kabbala
Denudata of 1677–8.
It was the first Jewish community that was accepted by the non-Jewish world, and
allowed to defend its views publicly. It was able to interact with the Christian world in
terms of common philosophical ideas. (Apparently enough of its members knew Latin
and/or French to take part in current discussions.) The development of the Amsterdam
Jewish community in an emergent secular society helped pave the way for modern
pluralist, tolerant societies in Western Europe and America.
As the economic miracle of seventeenth-century Holland unfolded, more New
Christians migrated to the Netherlands where they could throw off their Christian
disguise and return to their ancestral faith. But many of them knew little of it. Hence,
almost from the beginning the community had to set up schools for the young and old to
prepare them for a Jewish life, and to give them a Jewish education. The most learned of
the early members had been trained in Christian universities, some of them even holding
theological degrees from those institutions.
Since there was no antecedent Jewish community to build upon, the Amsterdam one
was self-created. Originally it had a Sephardic rabbi from North Africa, who soon left
apparently because the congregation was so bizarre. A very early member was the very
learned Abraham Cohen Herrera, who had been raised in Florence, and knew pagan,
Christian, Jewish, and Arabic philosophy as well as the Lurianic kabbalah. He wrote a
textbook in logic for Spanish-speaking students, and his masterpiece, Puerto de Cielo, in
Amsterdam (the most philosophical interpretation of the kabbalah, which was published
in Hebrew translation in 1655, and influenced Spinoza, and in Latin in 1677, and
influenced Henry More, Isaac Newton, G.W.Leibniz, among others). Herrera lived in
Amsterdam until his death, and seems to have played little role in the development of the
community except that he passed on his immense kabbalistic learning to two young
rabbis, Menasseh ben Israel and Isaac Aboab de Fonseca.
By 1617 or 1618, two figures who became very important in the group arrived, Saul
Levi Morteira and Menasseh ben Israel. The former, who became the first chief rabbi,
was an Ashkenazi Jew from Venice, who had been taken to Paris by Elijah de Montalto,
the doctor of Queen Marie de Medici. Morteira was the doctor’s secretary at the Louvre
from 1610 to 1617. When Montalto died, Morteira transported his master’s body to
Ouderkerk near Amsterdam for burial since there was no legal functioning Jewish
cemetery in France. He stayed and became a rabbi-teacher for the community. In 1617 a
dissident member, David Farrar, who questioned various Jewish teachings, was causing
problems. Morteira was sent as part of a delegation to Venice to find out what to do about
the rebel. The delegation returned with the cherem statement to be used against Farrar,
and the exact same later used against Spinoza. (Excommunication became the means by
which the community regulated its members. Around 280 cases of excommunication are
recorded during the seventeenth century, most for failing to pay dues, or to keep marriage
contracts. Usually the excommunicatee apologized, was fined, and was reinstituted as a
member in good standing.)
Morteira, unlike most of the other members, knew Hebrew and had had some Jewish
training. In Paris he was involved with the Royal professor of Hebrew, Philip d’Aquin, a
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538
convert from Judaism. Recently around five hundred sermons in Hebrew by Morteira
have been discovered, which were written in Hebrew but no doubt delivered in
Portuguese, the language understood by the congregation. Morteira’s writings, which will
be discussed below, are in Portuguese, challenging Christian theological claims.
Menasseh was apparently born in Rochelle, France where his parents had fled from
the Portuguese Inquisition. He was raised in Lisbon thereafter, and turned up in
Amsterdam around 1618, and was quickly put to work as a teacher and a rabbi. He soon
became a Hebrew teacher for Christian scholars, the first printer of Hebrew books in the
Netherlands, and a renowned expositor of Jewish views. He wrote only one book in
Hebrew, the rest in Spanish, sometimes followed by Latin translations. He was regarded
as a great preacher. Christian scholars from various parts of Europe came to hear him,
and to consult with him about various theological matters. He became known as the
Jewish philosopher.
Menasseh and Isaac Aboab learned about Jewish mystical and kabbalistic thought
from Herrera, and from del Medigo who was in Amsterdam in the 1620s. Aboab became
the first rabbi in the Western hemisphere when he became the religious leader of the
Jewish community in Brazil. He was there for a dozen years, and then returned to
Amsterdam in 1654. With the support of one of the rich Jewish merchants, Abraham
Peyrara, he established a school for the study of Jewish mysticism.
Another early intellectual figure was a Portuguese cleric, Uriel da Costa, who fled
Portugal when the Inquisition was closing in on him. He had secretly reverted to Judaism
in Portugal, by studying the religion described in the Old Testament. When he arrived in
Amsterdam he found that the religion being practiced and taught there was very very
different from his own. He challenged some of the basic practices, and wrote a work
arguing that true ancient Judaism taught the mortality of the soul. His work was
condemned by the community and it was thought all copies had been destroyed. Recently
a copy has been found and is being prepared for publication. Da Costa was
excommunicated, and for several years wandered around Holland and northern Germany.
He finally asked for forgiveness, and after being whipped in the synagogue he was forced
to lie in the doorway while the entire congregation walked over him. On being
readmitted, he soon became contentious again, and before being expelled once more he
committed suicide. His tragic story appears in his autobiography, which was published
only in 1687 at least forty years after his death, printed by a Protestant, Philip van
Limborch, to show how bad the Jewish community was. Pierre Bayle’s article, “Acosta,”
based on this text, made Da Costa a famous martyr who has been seen as a precursor of
Spinoza.
Da Costa’s autobiography, Exemplar, indicates that he was a deist, perhaps one of the
first, and had become a critic of all institutional religions. He proclaimed that one should
not be a Jew or a Christian, but a man! His Examen has recently been published. The
article describing the work by Herman Salomon suggests he was a rationalist thinker
even before Descartes. But no matter how good or bad he may have been as a
philosopher in his discussion of the mortality of the soul, the influence of the work as far
as we can tell was nil since almost all of the copies were destroyed, and only a refutation
by Samuel da Silva (also very rare) has survived.
The Amsterdam community kept up central features of Iberian education in
philosophy and literature. Manuscripts in the Etz Chaim collection include courses in
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539
ethics and metaphysics corresponding to what was being taught in Spain and Portugal at
the time. There are two logic texts by Abraham Cohen Herrera, printed in Spanish before
his death in 1635. (The exact dates are not known.) One of these includes a chapter on
“method,” before Descartes’ Discours sur la méthode had appeared, in which Herrera
used the phrase “clear and distinct ideas.” Since only one copy is known, the work was
probably not influential at the time, but shows that Jewish thinkers were dealing with the
same problems as gentile philosophers in the Netherlands. Some of Menasseh ben
Israel’s works were written to explain the Jewish point of view on philosophicaltheological issues, to both Jewish and Christian audiences. Christian thinkers consulted
Menasseh by letter and in person in Amsterdam. He published all except one work in
Spanish or Latin. The one Hebrew work, Nishmat Chaim, contained a Latin summary in
many of the copies, and a dedication to the Holy Roman Emperor. Copies are in the
libraries of Queen Christina of Sweden and many important thinkers of the time.
The free situation of the Jewish community of Amsterdam allowed for open
discussion of many issues in terms of the intellectual background of its members. In the
1650s, there seems to have been an explosion of radical new ideas, of messianic and
mystical thought, and of intellectual rejection of Christianity and defenses of Judaism.
To begin with the radical views, they seem to have been brought to Amsterdam by Dr
Juan de Prado and Isaac La Peyrère. Prado was born around 1612. He studied for nine
years at the University of Alcalá, where he received degrees in medicine and theology.
(He was a classmate of Orobio de Castro in the theology school.) Prado left Spain before
the Inquisition could arrest him for secretly judaizing. He went in the entourage of a
Spanish bishop to Rome, and then escaped to Hamburg, where he met Queen Christina
immediately after her abdication, and greeted her, “Hail to the new Messiah. But who
would have expected it to be a woman?” He then moved to Amsterdam, where he and
young Baruch de Spinoza and one David Ribiera were all teaching elementary religious
classes, and apparently were making critical comments about the Bible. Prado wrote, but
did not publish, a work on why the law of nature takes precedence over the law of Moses.
Some of the criticism of the Bible seems to have come from the views expressed in
Isaac La Peyrère’s Men before Adam, which was published in Amsterdam in 1655 in
four different editions, and was soon condemned by the states of Holland, and refuted by
theologians all over Europe. La Peyrère was a New Christian from Bordeaux who was a
secretary to the Prince of Condé. In 1654 he showed the work (originally written in 1641)
to Queen Christina in Belgium, and she apparently offered to pay for having it printed in
Amsterdam. La Peyrère met Menasseh ben Israel when the latter came to call on the
former Queen. Then he carried his manuscript to Amsterdam and stayed there until the
book came out in the fall of 1655, dedicated to all the Jews and all the synagogues in the
world, “by one who wishes to be one of you.” The book challenges the authenticity of the
biblical text, the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, and the Bible’s claim to portray the
history of all humankind. La Peyrère claimed that there have been people in the world
from all eternity, living a nasty brutish life. God created Adam and the Jewish people to
save all humankind. The Bible is the history of the Jews, presented in somewhat garbled
form because all that has come down to us is a “heap of copie of copie.” The Jews were
elected through Adam, rejected when they did not accept Jesus, and now were about to be
recalled with the coming of the Jewish messiah.
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540
The many heresies in the book led to a great furore, condemnations everywhere, and
finally in late 1656 to the arrest of the author in Belgium, charged as a “heretic and a
Jew,” and to his formal recantation and apology to the Pope and his conversion to
Catholicism. In 1655 while the book was being printed Menasseh ran into La Peyrère in
Amsterdam and tried to arrange a public debate with him about his pre-Adamite theory.
In Menasseh’s list of works ready for publication which was appended to his last few
writings, there is a refutation of the pre-Adamite theory in Latin. Unfortunately the work
has not been located.
Apparently Prado, Ribiera, and Spinoza were charged with teaching false and heretical
views. Only the cases of Prado and Ribiera survive, and show that they were accused of
holding some of La Peyrère’s radical views about the Bible and about human history.
Spinoza owned the book and used it liberally in the Tractatus.
One of the rebels, Ribiera, left the community. Prado made a formal apology, and
Spinoza was excommunicated. Spinoza’s excommunication was probably a non-event as
far as the community was concerned. It came during a time of great involvement with
refugee problems, resettling thousands of Brazilian Jews, and dealing with thousands of
Russian Jews fleeing from the Swedish invasion of Poland. Spinoza had already left the
community, and the community’s elders were preoccupied with immediate events and
had no time for arguing about the Bible. The Spinoza case was never mentioned again in
the community records.
Prado continued advancing his deistical views in letters to rabbi Morteira. He was
formally excommunicated in 1658. In 1659 it is reported that he and Spinoza attended a
theological discussion group, where rabbi, priest, and pastor got together, and that Prado
and Spinoza advanced the view that God exists, but only philosophically. After this Prado
apparently moved to Belgium. His erstwhile classmate from Spain, Orobio de Castro,
wrote two answers to his views, and Prado’s son wrote a reply.
Counter to the rationalism and skepticism about religion that was developing, there
was also a growing mystical and kabbalistic current. Rabbi Isaac Aboab had returned
from Brazil in 1654. He and Abraham Peyrera set up a yeshivah for the study of mystical
texts. In 1655, Aboab published in Hebrew Abraham Cohen Herrera’s masterpiece,
Puerto del Cielo (which Spinoza read and used in the Ethics). Aboab also read out the
excommunication statement about Spinoza, probably just to a tiny audience.
Menasseh ben Israel offered a different kind of mysticism and messianism. In 1650 he
published his best-known work, The Hope of Israel, in Spanish, Latin, English, Hebrew,
and later in Dutch. The work set forth the Jewish view of the importance for messianic
expectation of the reappearance of the lost tribes of Israel. Menasseh took the account of
a Portuguese explorer in the Andes as evidence that at least part of a lost tribe had
appeared. (The English Millenarians immediately expanded this news into the claim that
the American Indians were Jews.) The book became a standard statement of the
contention that the End of Days was at hand. English Millenarians rushed to press for the
readmission of the Jews to England so that they could be converted as the penultimate
step before the onset of the Millennium, the Second Coming of Jesus and his thousandyear reign on earth. The Millenarians were convinced that the Jews would be converted
in 1655–6. A high-level delegation was sent to negotiate with Menasseh about the
conditions of the Jews’ return to England. The discussions dragged on until 1654 when
Menasseh met La Peyrère in Belgium, and read his early and very rare work, Du Rappel
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541
des Juifs of 1643. Menasseh returned to Amsterdam and excitedly told a gathering of
Protestant Millenarians that the coming of the messiah was imminent. This led to a work
by one of the Protestants, Good News for the Jews, dedicated to Menasseh, and
containing Menasseh’s evidence that the Jewish messiah would soon arrive. Menasseh
wrote his most mystical messianic work, Piedra gloriosa, interpreting Daniel’s dream
(illustrated by Rembrandt), and departed for England to present a petition to Cromwell.
Menasseh was convinced that the return of the Jews to England would fulfill the last
prophecy before the messiah’s appearance. In England, where he was from 1655 to 1657,
he met often with leading English thinkers such as Robert Boyle, Henry Oldenburg,
Ralph Cudworth, and Henry More, and discussed theological and philosophical topics
with them. He published one work in England (in English), De Vindicatio Judeorum,
answering charges made against the Jews and advancing a view he took over from La
Peyrère about how Jewish and Christian expectations could be reconciled. They agreed
basically on what was about to happen, and disagreed only about a historical question
concerning what happened in the early first century. Since what was about to happen was
all-important, the disagreement about the long past event could be overlooked.
Menasseh’s visit to England formally ended in failure, but informally it marked the
beginning of the Jews’ return to England. He returned to the Netherlands and died shortly
thereafter.
A leading Millenarian, Peter Serrarius, who was also a patron of Spinoza’s, met
frequently with kabbalistic thinkers at the Synagogue and worked on Gematria with
them, seeking to ascertain when the messiah would appear. As soon as news reached
Amsterdam about Sabbatai Zevi, Serrarius was publishing pamphlets in English and
Dutch telling everyone about the signs of the messianic age and that the king of the Jews
had arrived. Serrarius, as well as almost all of the Amsterdam Jewish community, became
followers of Sabbatai Zevi. Rabbi Aboab, by now chief rabbi, was a Sabbatian. The
wealthy merchant Abraham Peyrera published his religious philosophical work, La
Certeza del Camino, and then left for Palestine and set up a yeshivah in Hebron to teach
Sabbatai Zevi’s doctrines. Even the most rational thinker in the group, Orobio de Castro,
was at first a believer. Only rabbi Sasportas struggled against the wild enthusiasm. After
Sabbatai Zevi’s conversion to Islam, many, including Orobio, gave up their belief in him,
while others continued secretly being followers for the next decades.
The most philosophical member of the Amsterdam Jewish community, and the only
one within the community who seriously contributed to general philosophical discussion
of the time, was Isaac Orobio de Castro. He had been raised as a Christian in Spain, and
was part of a secret judaizing group, which retained some Jewish practices and strong
Jewish yearnings. He had studied medicine and theology, and became an important
doctor. After being arrested and tortured by the Inquisition, he escaped to France, where
he became professor of pharmacy at the University of Toulouse. He soon tired of being a
fake Christian and went to Amsterdam, circumcized himself, and joined the community
in the early 1660s. Like others raised in a Christian world, he had some difficulties in
reconciling Judaism with his previous ideas. In Amsterdam, the rabbi who replaced
Menasseh ben Israel, Moses d’Aguilar, a disciple of Saul Levi Morteira, was well versed
in both Jewish matters and in general philosophy. Orobio wrote out some of his
difficulties which Aguilar answered, especially concerning how to refute Pablo de Santa
Maria, the famous Spanish convert. Orobio started out in Amsterdam with practically no
History of Jewish philosophy
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Jewish learning. Aguilar supplied some of it, enabling Orobio to argue with Christian
theologians in the Lowlands. Orobio also quickly learned about the radical views of his
classmate Prado, and in 1663 sent him a lengthy answer, followed by two answers to
Prado’s answers, defending Judaism against the budding naturalism of Prado. Orobio also
wrote against a Belgian Lullist, Alonso de Zepeda, against various opponents of Judaism,
defending the Jewish interpretation of Isaiah 53 and the validity of the law of Moses.
Later on he wrote a very important apologetic answer to Christians who claimed that
Judaism had been superseded by Christianity, the Prevenciones divinas contra la vana
idolatria de las gentes. And Orobio wrote the only known answer to Spinoza by a
member of the Jewish community of Amsterdam, the Certamen Philosophicum,
Propugnatae Veritatis Divinae ac Naturalis, which was published and was included in
Fénélon’s collection of refutations of Spinoza. At the end of his life, he publicly debated
with Locke’s friend Philip van Limborch on the truth of the Christian religion. The
debate was published by van Limborch and was important in its day. Orobio used a wide
range of pagan, Christian, and Jewish sources in his writings. He was the best
philosopher in the community and the best at answering Christians of the time. He was
not a rationalist in the Maimonidean tradition. Rather he accepted strong limitations upon
human abilities to know ultimate truths, or to prove the existence of God, and saw the
need to accept certain fundamental beliefs on faith. His recent biographer, Yosef Kaplan,
has suggested that he may have adopted the fideistic skepticism of Montaigne and
Francisco Sanches when he was in Toulouse.
Orobio’s most significant work, the Prevenciones, is part of a genre of anti-Christian
polemics that developed in Amsterdam. Freed from immediate fear of persecution,
Jewish thinkers began circulating critical answers to Christianity and defenses of Judaism
in manuscript, sometimes elegant illuminated ones. (If they had been published this might
have constituted “scandal” and brought down the wrath of the political authorities.) The
earliest of these “clandestine” works in the Amsterdam collection is the Chizzuk Emunah
of the Lithuanian Karaite rabbi Isaac Troki. This strong rationalist defense of Judaism,
written probably in 1592, appealed to the Amsterdam group, since it used no rabbinical
material. Manuscripts of it exist in Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Dutch. It apparently
was still circulating well into the nineteenth century in Amsterdam. Next writings of Dr
Elijah Montalto in answer to Christians were presented in manuscript form. Montalto had
been Rabbi Morteira’s employer in Paris, and his body was brought from there to the
Netherlands for burial.
There are many different polemical works by various thinkers in the community, the
two most important being those of Morteira, Providencia de Dios con Israel, and Orobio,
who both sought to answer Christian claims about what was wrong with Judaism, and to
show that philosophical, scriptural, and historical evidence prove that God was on the
Jewish side. There are also dialogues and debates between Jews, Calvinists, and
Catholics.
On the flyleaf of Orobio’s holograph copy of Prevenciones the author explained that
he did not publish the work for fear of causing scandal, but he sent it to the Jesuits in
Brussels who liked it very much! We do not know the extent of the distribution of these
anti-Christian writings at the time. Some are mentioned by Christian authors. Others were
known but not obtainable. The diffusion of manuscripts all over Europe and in America
suggests that they were sent, or were taken, to Sephardic Jewish communities and even
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sent to Marrano groups in Spanish and Portuguese territories. The first general diffusion
occurred in 1715 when several of the manuscripts were included in an auction in The
Hague. Thereafter they are cited by English deists, by Voltaire, by Baron d’Holbach, and
other Enlightenment figures. A sales catalogue from 1811 reveals that there were still
many of these manuscripts in circulation. Until very recently only a little was published.
A German Christian orientalist had published Troki in the late seventeenth century in
Hebrew, and it and a toned-down version of Orobio were printed in English in the 1840s.
Recently Morteira’s text had been published in the original Portuguese.
By the end of the seventeenth century, most of the intellectual energy had been worn
out in Amsterdam. The community was established and did not feel the need to justify
itself or to answer its Christian neighbors. A few continuations of the polemics occurred,
but by and large the philosophical underpinnings of the journey back to Judaism had been
worked out, and most of the members of the community were now from Dutch families
rather than Iberian ones. The only major intellectual figure in the eighteenth century was
an economist, Isaac de Pinto, who started out as the secretary of the Dutch Academy of
Sciences. He gave two discourses there (in French rather than Spanish or Portuguese) on
science and religion. Nothing Jewish appears in these papers. De Pinto became a leading
figure in the Dutch West India Company. After its bankruptcy he left the Netherlands for
Paris where he came to know various leading Enlightenment figures. De Pinto wrote an
answer to Voltaire’s nasty views about Jews, in which he defended the status of
Sephardic Jewry but not the rest of the Jews. He came to know David Hume in Paris, and
wrote an answer to Hume’s economic views in his Treatise on Circulation and Credit,
which was one of the first works to explain and advocate capitalism. This work was read
by Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and many others. Lastly De Pinto became the leading
European defender of colonialism and opponent of the American Revolution. Although
he was the chair-man of the board of the synagogue, he seems to have been a thoroughly
secular figure who enjoyed the company of Diderot, Hume, and others.
The philosophy developed in the Amsterdam Jewish community has not been uniform,
nor has it had the lasting importance of the philosophy developed by one of its exmembers, Spinoza, who derived some of his ideas and issues from thinkers in the
community. He was even accused of plagiarizing from the kabbalists, and using the
geometrical method to hide his theft! Except for occasional items such as Da Costa’s
autobiography, Orobio’s answer to Spinoza, and De Pinto’s explanation of capitalism, the
works were not much known outside the Jewish community. Bits and pieces entered into
the mainstream of the Enlightenment as further reasons for attacking Christian beliefs and
practices.
The Amsterdam Jewish community was the first to confront modernity,
and it also helped to create it. The community saw the importance of
economic coexistence with its non-Jewish neighbors, tolerance, and
intellectual acceptance of them. (The community has been called one of
“reluctant cosmopolitans.”) The ambience created by the Amsterdam
Jewish community from the early seventeenth century to the late
Enlightenment has been forgotten because of major confrontations
between Jews and non-Jews that occurred during the French Revolution
and in the Germany of Moses Mendelssohn’s time, which directly led to
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544
the emancipatory world of nineteenth-century Europe. In fact the
Amsterdam Jewish community had to be dragged kicking and screaming
to accept the status of citizens in the French Revolutionary and
Napoleonic worlds.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Texts
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H.P. Salomon and I.Sassoon (Leiden: Brill).
Menasseh ben Israel (1987) The Hope of Israel, reprint of 1652 edition
with introduction and notes by H.Méchoulan and G.Nahon (Oxford:
Oxford University Press).
Salomon, H.P. (1988) Saul Levi Morteira en zijn Traktaat betreffende de
Waarheid van der wet van Mozes (Braga: Tipografia Barbosa & Xavier).
——(1990) “A Copy of Uriel da Costa’s Examen des tradicoes phariseas
located in the Royal Library of Copenhagen,” Studia Rosenthaliana
24:153–68.
Studies
Fuks, L. and R.Fuks-Mansfeld (1984) Hebrew Typography in the
Northern Netherlands, 1585–1815 (Leiden: Brill) [contains a catalogue of
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Israel, J. (1985) European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism 1550–1750
(Oxford: Clarendon Press).
Israel, J. and D.Katz (eds) (1990) Sceptics, Millenarians and Jews (Leiden:
Brill).
Kaplan, Y. (1989) From Christianity to Judaism: The Story of Isaac
Orobio de Castro (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Kaplan, Y., H.Méchoulan and R.Popkin (1989) Menasseh ben Israel and
his World (Leiden: Brill).
Méchoulan, H. (1991) Être Juif a Amsterdam au temps de Spinoza (Paris:
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Popkin, R.H. (1970) “Hume and Isaac de Pinto,” Texas Studies in
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——(1971) “The Historical Significance of Sephardic Judaism in the 17th
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——(1974) “Hume and Isaac de Pinto II. Five new letters,” in David
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——(1987) Isaac La Peyrère: His Life, his Times, his Influence (Leiden:
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——(1988) “Spinoza’s Earliest Philosophical Years, 1655–61,” Studia
Spinozana 4: 37–54.
——(1990) “Notes from the Underground,” New Republic 21 May: 35–
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Mouton).
——(1964) “Aux origines de la rupture Spinozienne: nouveaux
documents sur l’incroyance dans la communauté Judéo-Portugaise a
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Saperstein, M. (1991) “Saul Levi Morteira’s Treatise on the Immortality
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van den Berg, J. and E.G.E.van der Wall (1980) Jewish Christian
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