This article adds another dimension to the debate whether Jewish modernity originated with the Haskalah in eighteenth-century Germany or among the Sephardic Jews living in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Noting that one element of modernity was rationalism, the author uses two commonly employed indices of rationalism (literacy and numeracy) to find that the most literate and numerate of Castile’s various socio-economic or ethnic groups were the Luso-conversos who settled in Castile in the seventeenth century—members of the Nação, the group at the center of the debate over Amsterdam’s contribution to Jewish modernity. Another aspect of modernity involves an awareness of chronological time. In this respect as well members of the Nação viewed their lives somewhat differently than did others. These traits, coupled with the well-documented skepticism and secularism of the group, point to marked quantifiable differences between the Sephardim and their Castilian and Portuguese contemporaries.
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Graizbord, Souls in Dispute, 176; see also François Soyer, “ ‘It is not possible to be both a Jew and a Christian’: Converso religious identity and the inquisitorial trial of Custodio Nunes (1604-5),” Mediterranean Historical Review 26 (2011): 81-97. Making the same point for an earlier period is Getchen D. Starr-LeBeau, In the Shadow of the Virgin: Inquisitors, Friars, and Conversos in Guadalupe, Spain (Princeton, 2003).
Robert C. Allen, “Progress and Poverty in Early Modern Europe,” The Economic History Review 56 (2003): 403-43.
D.A. Wagner, “When Literacy Isn’t Reading (and Vice Versa),” in Toward a New Understanding of Literacy, ed. M.E. Wrolstand and D.F. Fisher (New York, 1986), 319-31.
Nalle, “Literacy and Culture.” Women’s Literacy in Early Modern Spain and the New World, ed. Anne J. Cruz and Rosalie Hernández (Farnham, England, 2011). On Jewish women in Italy, see Howard Adelman, “The Literacy of Jewish Women in Early Modern Italy,” in Women’s Education in Early Modern Europe: A History, 1500 to 1800, ed. Barbara Whitehead (New York, 1999), 133-58. More generally, see Margaret W. Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France (Chicago, 2007).
Adelman, “The Literacy of Jewish Women in Early Modern Italy;” Tirtsah Levie Bernfeld, “Sephardi women in Holland’s Golden Age,” in Sephardi Family Life in the Early Modern Diaspora, ed. Julia R. Lieberman (Waltham, ma, 2011), 177-222; and Daniel M. Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam (London, 2000).
Adelman, “The Literacy of Jewish Women in Early Modern Italy,” 34.
Tine de Moor and Jan Luiten van Zanden, “ ‘Every Woman Counts’: A Gender-Analysis of Numeracy in the Low Countries during the Early Modern Period,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 41 (2010): 179-208.
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This article adds another dimension to the debate whether Jewish modernity originated with the Haskalah in eighteenth-century Germany or among the Sephardic Jews living in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Noting that one element of modernity was rationalism, the author uses two commonly employed indices of rationalism (literacy and numeracy) to find that the most literate and numerate of Castile’s various socio-economic or ethnic groups were the Luso-conversos who settled in Castile in the seventeenth century—members of the Nação, the group at the center of the debate over Amsterdam’s contribution to Jewish modernity. Another aspect of modernity involves an awareness of chronological time. In this respect as well members of the Nação viewed their lives somewhat differently than did others. These traits, coupled with the well-documented skepticism and secularism of the group, point to marked quantifiable differences between the Sephardim and their Castilian and Portuguese contemporaries.
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 358 | 79 | 1 |
Full Text Views | 195 | 2 | 0 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 89 | 6 | 0 |