• Amsterdam's People of the Book
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Amsterdam's People of the Book

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The Spanish and Portuguese Jews of seventeenth-century Amsterdam cultivated a remarkable culture centred on the Bible. Amsterdam's People of the Book shows that this unique, Bible-centred culture r...
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  • 24 September 2020
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The Spanish and Portuguese Jews of seventeenth-century Amsterdam cultivated a remarkable culture centred on the Bible: school children studied the Bible systematically, while rabbinic literature was pushed to levels reached by few students; adults met in confraternities to study Scripture; and families listened to Scripture-based sermons in synagogue, and to help pass the long, cold winter nights of northwest Europe. The community's rabbis produced creative, and often unprecedented scholarship on the Jewish Bible as well as the New Testament. Amsterdam's People of the Book shows that this unique, Bible-centred culture resulted from the confluence of the Jewish community's Catholic and converso past with the Protestant world in which they came to live. Studying Amsterdam's Jews offers an early window into the prioritization of the Bible over rabbinic literature -- a trend that continues through modernity in western Europe. It allows us to see how Amsterdam's rabbis experimented with new historical methods for understanding the Bible, and how they grappled with doubts about the authority and truth of the Bible that were growing in the world around them. Amsterdam's People of the Book allows us to appreciate how Benedict Spinoza's ideas were in fact shaped by the approaches to reading the Bible in the community where he was born, raised, and educated. After all, as Spinoza himself remarked, before becoming Amsterdam's most famous heretic and one of Europe's leading philosophers and biblical critics, he was "steeped in the common beliefs about the Bible from childhood on."
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Price: £49.00
Pages: 330
Publisher: Hebrew Union College Press
Imprint: Hebrew Union College Press
Publication Date: 24 September 2020
ISBN: 9780878201884
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:

HISTORY / Modern / 17th Century, Social groups: religious groups and communities, RELIGION / History, RELIGION / Judaism / General, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Jewish Studies, HISTORY / Europe / General, History of religion, Judaism, European history
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Centering the Bible in Jewish and European Culture
1. Amsterdam's People of the Book: From Classrooms to Confraternities
Part I. The Educational Infrastructure: Officials, Schools, and Confraternities
Part II. Education and the Bible in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam
Part III. Adult Education in Early Modern Amsterdam: The Bible Beyond the Schools.
2. Centering the Bible in Jewish Theology: Salvation and Scripture
Part I. The Christian and Converse Prologue to Jewish Perspectives on Scripture
Part II. Scripture and Salvation: The Connection under Assault
Part III. Saul Levi Morteira and Jewish Salvation: Between the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible
3. "One of the Greatest Problems That There Is in Scripture": Menasseh ben Israel, Mathematics, and the Authority of the Bible.
Part I. Biblical Contradictions and Infallibility: Jewish and Christian Contexts
Part II. Old Miracles and the New Philosophy
Part III. The Challenges of Biblical Chronology
Part IV. One of the Greatest Problems That There Is in Scripture
4. Opening the Eyes of the Novas Reformados: Rabbi Saul Levi Morteira, Radical Christianity, and the Jewish Reclamation of Jesus, 1631-1660
Part I. Jewish Readers of Christian Bibles
Part II. From the Preguntas to the Tratado, 1631-1660
Part III. Medieval Precedents
Part IV. Morteira and the Socinians: The Discovery of Judaizing Christians
5 . Polemic and Scholarship in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam: Rabbi Saul Levi Morteira and the History of the New Testament.
Part I. Medieval Precedents
Part II. Jesus and the New Testament in a Rabbinic Context
Part III. The New Testament and Its Greco-Roman Context
Part IV. New Testament Origins
Epilogue: Jewish Biblical Studies in Amsterdam: Spinoza's Origins and the Horizon of Modernity
Bibliography
Index