Arguments Against the Christian Religion in Amsterdam by Saul Levi Morteira, Spinoza’s Rabbi by Gregory B. Kaplan (review)

Gregory Kaplan’s latest work presents an interesting conundrum for Hispanomedievalists: should we or should we not be concerned with the aftermath of the expulsion of Sephardic Jews from Spain in 1492? Arguments is a mid-seventeenth-century polemic which explores the various Jewish debates and arguments regarding Christianity as a Jewish heresy from the historical perspective of the Jewish diaspora one hundred and fifty years after the Alhambra decree. The Sephardic diaspora, still an ongoing phenomenon for many families, is a tragic saga that ripped families apart as individuals were forced to either conserve their religion and identity as Jews, leaving Spain, or to stay in the country and join the ranks of the conversos, ultimately betraying themselves and their beliefs in order to retain their homes and businesses. Pursued by the Spanish Inquisition, one of Levi Morteira’s characters openly expresses the bitterness of their exile, saying that “you should know that the reason we find ourselves here is that in Spain and Portugal there is a fury that is so cruel, tyrannical, impious, and unjust that it makes our motherland into a stepmother for us, so that far-off lands become our motherlands. This hard, bloodthirsty, and corrupt fury is the Inquisition, which is the cause of all the wrongs you’ve seen and heard” (90). The bitterness expressed by Levi Morteira’s character lies at the heart of the rabbi’s polemic arguments against the Christian faith.

Most Hispanomedievalists know only too well the heartbreaking history of the Sephardic Jews leading up to the expulsion, but since the diaspora’s history generally falls outside of their scope of study, which abruptly ends in 1499 with the publication of the Celestina, the Sephardic diaspora is usually studied by those historians and literary critics who specialize in the Early Modern period. The year 1499 as an end date for Hispanomedieval studies is artificial in this sense because Spain’s medieval period continues to develop for Sephardic Jews in both the peninsula and overseas. Though we would be reluctant to admit it, the sinister history of anti-Semitism undergirds Spain’s entire medieval period and signals the end of what some historians called convivencia, resulting in violence and murder spurred on by the inflammatory rhetoric and discourse of such Christian leaders as Ferrand Martínez and Vincent Ferrer, and culminating in the expulsion decree of 1492. The Jewish diaspora is the result of those anti-Semitic politics which inform Spain’s medieval period, and Kaplan’s book and his analysis of Morteira’s work suggest that the Hispanomedievalist should study the far-reaching outcomes of those royal policies and decrees.

This book is at once an act of literary archeology and a reclamation of Sephardic identity after the expulsion. In the decades following the Alhambra decree, the Sephardic diaspora fanned out over Europe with varying degrees of success and failure as Jews worked diligently to re-establish their identities and their religion, having been uprooted from the only place they had ever called home and thrust into an unwelcoming and unsympathetic world. Rabbi Saul Levi Morteira, a Sephardic Jew living in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, was trying to deal with the sticky issue of what to do with conversos, Christians who had also left Spain, fleeing the iron grip and persecution of the Spanish Inquisition, which had been established in 1478 in order to ensure religious orthodoxy in the peninsula. At the heart of Kaplan’s study is his translation of Morteira’s lively polemic Obstáculos y oposiciones contra la religión cristiana en Ámsterdam. Morteira worked to re-establish Jewish identity and re-Judaize displaced conversos who had also become a part of the diaspora under pressure from the Inquisition. The “converso problem,” as Kaplan suggests, was ongoing and pertinent to Morteira’s social milieu. According to the author, “from the perspective of Old Christians...