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Forced baptisms of Jews and Muslims had profound effects across Spanish society, leading famous intellectuals as well as ordinary men and women to rethink their sense of belonging to the Christian community and their forms of religiosity. Thus, in this book, early modern Iberia emerges as a laboratory of European-wide transformations.
Forced baptisms of Jews and Muslims had profound effects across Spanish society, leading famous intellectuals as well as ordinary men and women to rethink their sense of belonging to the Christian community and their forms of religiosity. Thus, in this book, early modern Iberia emerges as a laboratory of European-wide transformations.
Abstract
Around the turn of the 17th century, the Swedish antiquary and mystic Johannes Bureus (1568–1652) claimed to have discovered the primordial theology and science of his Scandinavian ancestors encoded in their system of writing, the runic alphabet, inspired in large part by earlier Christian interpretations of the Kabbalah. In the leadup to the Swedish intervention in the Thirty Years’ War, he viewed the discovery as the ecumenical solution to the confessional divisions that were rending Europe asunder. This article explores how Bureus’s simultaneously typical and idiosyncratic engagement with the Kabbalah originated, what functions it served in his broader antiquarian program, and how it evolved to adapt to the shifting contours of Protestant scholarship in the first half of the 17th century.
Abstract
MS Mich. 335 in the Bodleian library, from the 15th century, is a collection of philosophical works in Hebrew, predominantly concerned with logic. Among them is a short text entitled Treatise on the Four Inquiries, attributed to ‘Al-Muqammas.’ The present study shows that this treatise is in fact a Hebrew adaptation of the first chapter of Dāwūd al-Muqammaṣ’s Twenty Chapters, which was repurposed into a self-standing introduction to logic. This finding enhances the growing appreciation of Al-Muqammaṣ’s place in the history of Jewish philosophy, extending it to the field of logic. The study is accompanied by an edition of the Hebrew text with a parallel English translation.
Abstract
This article analyses an overlooked phenomenon in the history of Reformed Hebraism in the era of ‘high orthodoxy’ (c. 1640–1720), namely the increasing interest in Kabbalah as an ancient tradition of ‘mystical’ exegesis. It enquires into the reasons that propelled this interest, proposing that they are to be found in the attempt to elaborate an acceptable notion of an allegorical sense of Scripture that was current in antiquity, as well as in the insistence (which was of particular importance in anti-Remonstrant polemics) that the Trinity and the divinity of the Messiah were known to the ancient Jews through the Old Testament and its interpretation. Finally, the article shows how these ideas developed in the more specific context of Dutch Reformed theology, where Kabbalah was understood by some scholars (especially around the Groningen professor Jacob Alting) as evidence of the spiritual dimension inherent in the Mosaic covenant.
Abstract
This article investigates the images of paired scrolling patterns recurring in the design of Jewish ritual spaces and objects. It explores a facet of non-narrative visual expression within Jewish visual culture. The chronologically and geographically disconnected depictions of similar paired scrolled patterns on Jewish artifacts exemplify the process of creating and recreating symbolic meanings based on the mimetic qualities of an image. In their various renditions and contexts, volutes in their resemblance to growing plan