By Shlomo Berger Ha'aretz July 28, 2003

Were the Sephardi Jews of Amsterdam or the Jews of the German Enlightenment the first sign of the phenomenon of Jewish modernization?

The members of the Portuguese (i.e., Sephardi) nation in Amsterdam claimed that they lived - or at least aspired to live - according to the principal they called “bom judesmo” (”good and beautiful Judaism”). The Jew and his community were supposed to live

according to a code of behavior that would demonstrate and prove the superiority and beauty of Judaism. Everything that needed to be done should be done in a “cultured” way: Prayers, for example, should be said without shouting, and preferably accompanied by suitable music, well-executed. The observance of these values, which we would call bourgeois, expressed the mode of thinking of the members of the community and the way in which their Jewish lives were organized and run, and the difference between them and the Ashkenazim (Jews of non-Iberian European origin). The Sephardi Jews of Amsterdam saw themselves as the elite among the Jewish communities and understood their Judaism in the light of the concept of honor, which was a major axis of their lives.

The Sephardim of Amsterdam are “the new Jews,” as they are called in the title of this book by Yosef Kaplan, and indeed represent something different in the history of the Jewish communities of Europe. The innovation can be found in two characteristics: the return to Judaism of people who had been born, raised and educated as Christians, the majority of whom had never known another Jew in their previous lives, and the period of their return to Judaism. As they had not been familiar with Judaism before their return to the tradition of the fathers, these new Jews (whose origins were in the Iberian Peninsula) had to rely in part on Christian literature about Judaism as a basis for their renewed Judaism.

Of course this significantly influenced the way they understood Judaism. Moreover, although they had chosen to return to the bosom of rabbinical Judaism and devoted considerable resources to this, these Jews developed nostalgia for the Iberian culture they had left behind. They did not want to be Christians, but every item of Iberian culture they could isolate from the religion they had abandoned (sometimes not entirely successfully) became a part of their new Jewish culture. In this way they created for themselves forms of Judaism that are unknown in the Ashkenazi world.

Their return to Judaism and the formation of their particular Judaism occurred in an era of cultural changes in European culture. The 17th century was the century of the scientific revolution, the beginning of the age of secularization, the rise of the centralized state and of a change in the economic structures of Europe - all processes that would eventually lead in the next century to the appearance of the Enlightenment movement among the gentiles and the Jews. The articles in this book by a Jerusalemite scholar of the Sephardi diaspora in the early modern period deal with the ways the Sephardi community and its activities were formed, the changes that occurred in European society and their influence on the Sephardim in Amsterdam.

Christian pictures

Ten chapters of the book discuss a wide and interesting range of issues that have to do with the life of the Sephardi community in Amsterdam, Kaplan’s main field of research. Two further chapters deal with the Sephardim in London and Hamburg, and expand our knowledge of the Sephardi diaspora in Western Europe. The various articles cover a broad spectrum of areas in the history of ideas and social history, such as excommunication and its role (in Amsterdam and Hamburg), adultery, its social significance and the ways of dealing with the phenomenon, and the attitudes toward the followers of Shabtai Zvi and toward heretics and heresy at the beginning of the 18th century.

Other articles further expand our knowledge about the Sephardi community: reflections of the Sephardi Jews in Dutch art and a discussion of the painting of the Sephardi synagogue by Emanuel de Witte, the medical studies pursued by Sephardi students at the University of Leiden in the 17th century, the Sephardi attitude toward Ashkenazi immigrants from Eastern Europe and the Sephardi’s self-image and its influence on the community’s modes of action.

The opening article (”Tradition and Change: The Path to Modernism of Western Sephardi Judaism”), which is in my opinion one of the most important Kaplan has written, deals with a key question that occupies all the scholars of Judaism in the early modern period: To what extent were the Sephardim of Amsterdam modern, and were they (like other Sephardim and the Jews of Italy) the ones who signified the rise of the phenomenon of Jewish modernization, and not the Enlightenment movement that emerged in Germany in the second half of the 18th century? Indeed, the main argument of the article and the book is that a number of focal points of modernization must be identified in Jewish history and the German enlightenment is only one of them.

The uniqueness of the Dutch case lays in the conscious attempt by the new Jews to return to the bosom of rabbinical Judaism and, at the same time, their inability to free themselves from the influences of the Christian culture from which they had emerged and the European culture to which they wanted to belong, and which in one form or another left their marks on the modes of Jewish life they developed for themselves. As noted, these Jews had no knowledge at all of the rabbinical literature, and even when they did acquire this knowledge of literature and skills for studying and using it, they tended to interpret it according to Christian pictures of the world that had been engraved on their consciousness, and were were not at all rabbinical. Their openness to the Iberian and Dutch cultural world, and their desire to be an integral part of the European cultural elite, was unlike the tendency toward separatism in the Ashkenazi communities at that time.

Thus they created for themselves a tradition with a special coloration (”an invented tradition,” in Kaplan’s definition), which of course did not resemble the one that was familiar and accepted in the 17th century. This “strange” and interesting combination demonstrates, as Kaplan argues, “how simplistic it would be to see traditional and modern societies as dichotomous.”

The Judaism of the Sephardim in Amsterdam was not rebellious and revolutionary, but rather reflected the problematics that were at the basis of the establishment of the local community (”from new Christians to new Jews”), and the way the members of the community dealt with the challenges of the times - like the changes in the European society to which they wanted to belong. They were unwittingly modern, and with no clear intention to be so.

Reading this book is especially interesting because Kaplan is skilled in a broad spectrum of areas of historical research: from dealing with the isolated historical incident and exhibiting a profound familiarity with archival material, to dealing with theoretical issues. His knowledge in the area of the Jewish history and European history of the 17th and 18th centuries and the field of modern research on these periods is impressive, and therefore he can draw a picture of Jewish life in Amsterdam and base it on incidents combined with the appropriate intellectual analysis. The book is superbly edited, and the many illustrations that accompany the texts contribute to the understanding of the written material. In short, this is required reading for every reader who is interested in the history of the Sephardi communities in Western Europe and of course Dutch Jewry, and is worthy of being in the library of every educated reader.

Shlomo Berger is a lecturer in the Department of Hebrew, Aramaic and Jewish Studies at the International School for Humanities and Social Sciences in Amsterdam.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 28th, 2003 and is filed under history.