Das Zeitalter des Geheimnisses: Juden, Christen und die Ökonomie des Geheimen (1400–1800) by Daniel Jütte (review)

In this revised dissertation, Daniel Jütte provides an impressive study of an emerging theme that allows him to explore a broad range of intriguing and important issues in the history of early modern Jewry and early modern society more generally. Focusing on the meaning, function, and dissemination of what he terms the economy of secrets, Jütte offers well-crafted insights into Jewish economic and cultural history at the same time that he provides new conceptual frameworks for understanding interactions between Jews and Christians. Jütte’s theme is particularly significant as Jews were often seen to possess and utilize secrets (endowing them with perceived negative qualities as well as a certain degree of power). Indeed, the early modern concern with Judaizing, the phenomenon of crypto-Judaism, and the perception by early modern Christians that Hebrew was a secret language—one that made kabbalah and other Jewish intellectual and practical systems appear simultaneously foreign and magical—fit well into the conceptual structure outlined by Jütte.

Jütte pays particular attention to early modern economics, politics, and technology, allowing him to engage more traditional themes such as state formation, the court, and growing interest in arcane knowledge, as well as more recently developed topics such as early modern categories of knowledge, communication, and the development of the concept of the “public.” The volume includes a rigorous review of scholarship on the theme of secrecy and evinces a deep familiarity with an impressive array of studies and themes in early modern history.

Jütte places the notion of secrecy in its philosophical and theological context, but he is careful to maintain focus on the practical implications of secrecy (with attention to the economic and political uses of secrets). In reviewing the various facets of secrecy in early modern society, Jütte quite naturally begins with an overview of alchemy, an activity that occupied Christians as well as Jews. Here Jütte covers the basic ground by reviewing some of the central figures that have been discussed in the secondary literature. He next turns to medical arcana, examining various salves and cosmetics and, more menacingly, accusations of Jews concocting poisons for a variety of purposes. Jütte also gives ample space to discussions of cryptography, espionage, and the procurement of information, as well as the development of and traffic in technology (for both civil and military purposes). In the latter category he presents an intriguing range of Jewish personalities involved with weapons and other military technology. Jews, like other early modern people, were also involved in what appear to us today to be more fanciful engagement, speculating and trafficking in magical potions and products. Logically, Jütte next turns to Jewish involvement with and perceived mastery of magical arts and sorcery, the quintessential secrets. In discussing the economic dimension of the arcane, Jütte profitably examines the world of the political court, paying particular attention to alchemy and the related activities of metallurgy and currency production as well as financial reform in the nascent states.

In his extensive fifth chapter, which covers some 140 pages, Jütte turns to the little-studied but intriguing figure of Abramo Colorni (1544–1599), fashioned to some extent by himself and his contemporaries as a professor of secrets (legitimated for some by his Jewish background). Jütte reconstructs an extensive biography, reviewing along the way Colorni’s intellectual development and migrations before serving as an engineer at the court in Ferrara. Known particularly for his work on weapons, Colorni was a mechanical expert with technical know-how, and for Jütte a classical representative of an individual expert in the economy of secrets. He reflects for Jütte the fine lines separating science and magic, astrology and palmistry, mathematics and mysticism, and practice and theory in the early modern world. Colorni was familiar with Christian theology, and his own work was received far beyond...