This volume contains the proceedings of an international conference on Jewish Thought in the Seventeenth Century, held under the auspices of the Harvard Center for Jewish Studies. The wide-ranging papers focus on such central topics as Jewish law and society, rabbinic authority, the relation between Halakah and cognate disciplines, contemporary developments in Jewish philosophy and mysticism, major trends in polemical and apologetic literature and historical thought, the connection between Jewish thought and the general intellectual background. Like the previously-published Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century, this volume is also studded with original interpretations and novel insights. --

The first Jewish woman to leave her mark as a writer and intellectual, Sarra Copia Sulam (1600?–41) was doubly tainted in the eyes of early modern society by her religion and her gender. This remarkable woman, who until now has been relatively neglected by modern scholarship, was a unique figure in Italian cultural life, opening her home, in the Venetian ghetto, to Jews and Christians alike as a literary salon. For this bilingual edition, Don Harrán has collected all of Sulam’s previously scattered writings—letters, sonnets, a Manifesto—into a single volume. Harrán has also assembled all extant correspondence and poetry that was addressed to Sulam, as well as all known contemporary references to her, making them available to Anglophone readers for the first time. Featuring rich biographical and historical notes that place Sulam in her cultural context, this volume will provide readers with insight into the thought and creativity of a woman who dared to express herself in the male-dominated, overwhelmingly Catholic Venice of her time.

This book examines how Johannes Buxtorf's works helped to transform seventeenth-century Hebrew studies from the hobby of a few experts into a recognized academic discipline. The first two chapters examine Buxtorf's career as a professor of Hebrew and as an editor and censor of Jewish books in Basel. Successive chapters analyze his anti-Jewish polemical books, grammars and lexicons, and manuals for Hebrew composition and literature, including the first bibliography devoted to Jewish books. The final chapters treat his work in biblical studies, examining his contribution to Targum and Massorah studies, and his position on the age and doctrinal authority of the Hebrew vowel points. The chapters on anti-Jewish polemics and the vowel points will interest Jewish historians and Church historians.

The Spanish and Portuguese Jews of seventeenth-century Amsterdam cultivated a remarkable culture centered 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-centered 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."

According to a commonplace narrative, the rise of modern political thought in the West resulted from secularization—the exclusion of religious arguments from political discourse. But in this pathbreaking work, Eric Nelson argues that this familiar story is wrong. Instead, he contends, political thought in early-modern Europe became less, not more, secular with time, and it was the Christian encounter with Hebrew sources that provoked this radical transformation. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Christian scholars began to regard the Hebrew Bible as a political constitution designed by God for the children of Israel. Newly available rabbinic materials became authoritative guides to the institutions and practices of the perfect republic. This thinking resulted in a sweeping reorientation of political commitments. In the book’s central chapters, Nelson identifies three transformative claims introduced into European political theory by the Hebrew revival: the argument that republics are the only legitimate regimes; the idea that the state should coercively maintain an egalitarian distribution of property; and the belief that a godly republic would tolerate religious diversity. One major consequence of Nelson’s work is that the revolutionary politics of John Milton, James Harrington, and Thomas Hobbes appear in a brand-new light. Nelson demonstrates that central features of modern political thought emerged from an attempt to emulate a constitution designed by God. This paradox, a reminder that while we may live in a secular age, we owe our politics to an age of religious fervor, in turn illuminates fault lines in contemporary political discourse.

Provides a comprehensive overview of Jewish philosophy from the seventeenth century to the present day.

Arguably, no historical thinker has had as varied and fractious a reception within modern Judaism as Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza (1632-77), the seventeenth-century philosopher, pioneering biblical critic, and Jewish heretic from Amsterdam. Revered in many circles as the patron saint of secular Jewishness, he has also been branded as the worst traitor to the Jewish people in modern times. Jewish philosophy has cast Spinoza as marking a turning point between the old and the new, as a radicalizer of the medieval tradition and table setter for the modern. He has served as a perennial landmark and point of reference in the construction of modern Jewish identity. This volume brings together excerpts from central works in the Jewish response to Spinoza. True to the diversity of Spinoza's Jewish reception, it features a mix of genres, from philosophical criticism to historical fiction, from tributes to diary entries, providing the reader with a sense of the overall historical development of Spinoza's posthumous legacy.

This volume contains more than twenty essays in the history of modern philosophy and history of religion by R.H. Popkin. Several of the essays have not been published before. Thinkers discussed include Hobbes, Henry More, Pascal, Spinoza, Cudworth, Newton, Hume, Condorcet, and Moritz Schlick.

Leon (Judah Aryeh) Modena was a major intellectual figure of the early modern Italian Jewish community--a complex and intriguing personality who was famous among contemporary European Christians as well as Jews. Modena (1571-1648) produced an autobiography that documents in poignant detail the turbulent life of his family in the Jewish ghetto of Venice. The text of this work is well known to Jewish scholars but has never before been translated from the original Hebrew, except in brief excerpts. This complete translation, based on Modena's autograph manuscript, makes available in English a wealth of historical material about Jewish family life of the period, religion in daily life, the plague of 1630-1631, crime and punishment, the influence of kabbalistic mysticism, and a host of other subjects. The translator, Mark R. Cohen, and four other distinguished scholars add commentary that places the work in historical and literary context. Modena describes his fascination with the astrology and alchemy that were important parts of the Jewish and general culture of the seventeenth century. He also portrays his struggle against poverty and against compulsive gambling, which, cleverly punning on a biblical verse, he called the "sin of Judah." In addition, the book contains accounts of Modena's sorrow over his three sons: the death of the eldest from the poisonous fumes of his own alchemical laboratory, the brutal murder of the youngest, and the exile of the remaining son. The introductory essay by Mark R. Cohen and Theodore K. Rabb highlights the significance of the work for early modern Jewish and general European history. Howard E. Adelman presents an up-to-date biographical sketch of the author and points the way toward a new assessment of his place in Jewish history. Natalie Z. Davis places Modena's work in the context of European autobiography, both Christian and Jewish, and especially explores the implications of the Jewish status as outsider for the privileged exploration of the self. A set of historical notes, compiled by Howard Adelman and Benjamin C. I. Ravid, elucidates the text.

Geller is Irma Cameron Milstein Professor of Bible at Jewish Theological Seminary. Geller's attention to language and interest in applying the methods of literary analysis to the Hebrew Bible are reflected in his work throughout his career. He has addressed such topics as "The Dynamics of Parallel Verse" in Deuteronomy 32, the "Language of Imagery in Psalm 114," and the literary uses of "Cleft Sentences with Pleonastic Pronoun." Combining a historical orientation with deep exegeses of individual texts, he has focused on the contribution that the literary approach might make to the study of biblical religion. He has developed what he terms a "literary theology," in which, by examining the literary devices in the passage under consideration, he has been able to formulate emerging religious ideas that the ancient writers did not express in systematic treatises. His method is illustrated in his studies of texts that represent the major religious traditions of the Hebrew Bible; these studies have been collected in Sacred Enigmas, published in 1997. The essays in this volume were contributed by colleagues, friends, and students of Stephen A. Geller to mark the occasion of his 65th birthday. Contributors include: Tzvi Abusch, Marc Z. Brettler, Alan Cooper, Frank Moore Cross, Stephen Garfinkel, Edward L. Greenstein, Robert A. Harris, S. Tamar Kamionkowski, Kathryn F. Kravitz, Anne Lapidus Lerner, David Marcus, Yochanan Muffs, Benjamin Ravid, Michael Rosenbaum, Raymond P. Scheindlin, William M. Schniedewind, Diane M. Sharon, Benjamin D. Sommer.