An Alternative Path to Modernity: The Sephardi Diaspora in Western Europe (review)

T H E J E W I S H QUA R T E R LY RE V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Winter 2004) 182–184 YOSEF KAPLAN. An Alternative Path to Modernity: The Sephardi Diaspora in Western Europe. Brill’s Series in Jewish Studies 28. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2000. Pp. ix Ⳮ 309. Yosef Kaplan is a master of the essay form. Over the past two decades he has published an extensive range of articles and book chapters on the early modern northwestern European Sephardic diaspora, concentrating in particular on the social and cultural history of the Amsterdam community . Taken as a whole, these studies undoubtedly constitute the most important and influential corpus of recent scholarly work on the early history of the Dutch Sephardim. However, until recently the cumulative argument and internal connections in Kaplan’s work have not been easy to trace, due to the appearance of his essays in a range of languages and scattered locations. This situation was first remedied by the publication of a collection of Kaplan’s key essays in Spanish (Barcelona, 1996), a modified translation of which has recently appeared in French (Les Nouveaux -Juifs d’Amsterdam, Paris, 1999). Finally, with the publication of An Alternative Path to Modernity, a similar resource is now available in English. Only one of the five essays included in Kaplan’s French and Spanish collections is printed again here. This lack of overlap testifies to the range and quality of Kaplan’s scholarship. What is more, this volume provides by far the broadest overview of Kaplan’s work. It incorporates twelve essays, one of which has not yet appeared elsewhere and three which have never before appeared in English. While the earliest essay included was first published in 1974, the majority of the chapters are drawn from Kaplan’s work over the past decade. Set alongside his earlier work, these essays offer a clear sense of Kaplan’s intellectual development as a historian . The earlier essays republished in this collection examine with lucidity and thoroughness empirically discrete topics such as the attitude of the Amsterdam Sephardic leadership to the Sabbatian movement, Ashkenazi migration to Amsterdam, and the early Sephardic student presence at the University of Leiden. These studies have been invaluable in expanding our knowledge of early Dutch Sephardic history, but their interpretive methods are essentially straightforward. This could not be said, however, for Kaplan’s later work, which is characterized by an increasingly ambitious and nuanced use of archival sources as a means for reconstructing the social and intellectual tensions of communal life. This approach is showcased in its most sustained use in Kaplan’s nu- KAPLAN, AN ALTERNATIVE PATH TO MODERNITY—SUTCLIFFE 183 merous essays on deviance and discipline, and particularly in his work on the distinctive use of the h .erem (decree of excommunication) in early modern Sephardic communities. A sequence of four essays draws together Kaplan’s key writings on this topic. The insights of his seminal piece on the social function of the h .erem in seventeenth-century Amsterdam are here amplified and reinforced by accompanying essays focusing on the changing use of the same disciplinary instrument in the eighteenth century, and on the distinct but broadly comparable patterns of community discipline in the Sephardic communities of London and Hamburg. The ‘‘boundaries of identity’’ of these communities, Kaplan argues, were extensively policed. Myriad forms of social, intellectual, economic, and sexual contact with non-Sephardim were condemned by the authorities and repeatedly punished by the imposition of the h .erem. However, these strictures were ultimately of little avail. In the eighteenth century, as the temptations of assimilation intensified and the authority of the Sephardic hierarchy waned, use of the h .erem was limited. Further, in Amsterdam at least, the h .erem was on poorer members of the community. The most stimulating chapters in this volume explore the dynamics of cultural contact between the Sephardim and their non-Jewish neighbors. An essay on the commissioning of Emanuel de Witte’s famous pictures of the Amsterdam Sephardic synagogue situates these paintings at the convergence of the curiosity of Dutch painters and the aesthetic tastes of prosperous Sephardic Jews in the late seventeenth...