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Eschatology and Conversion in the Sperling Letters¹

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Eschatology and Conversion in the Sperling Letters¹ Alexander vander Haven Eschatologyand Conversion in the Sperling Letters¹ When conversion andeschatologyjoinedforces duringEurope’slong Reformation period, it was usually to underscorereligiously exclusivist claims. Eschatological expectations heightened the sense that those who adhered to the wrongbeliefs, did not follow the correct practices,and did not belong to God’ssole favored re- ligious community,should convert before it was toolate. Thus, eschatologies of this period, also known as the AgeofConversion, tended to ground demands for conversion in exclusivist terms.² This was the case for Christian communities in the Reformation, but it was alsocharacteristic of contemporary Jewish eschatol- ogies, which abandoned older traditions that had allowed for righteous Gentile ‘Sons of Noah’ to find salvation outside the Jewish community.Elisheva Carle- bach, among other scholars, portraysearlymodern eschatologies – Christian as well as Jewish – in these terms: Jews knew that if Christian expectationsmaterialized, their own millennial hopes would provevain;Christians understood that messianic redemption for the Jews would under- mine the foundation principles of the Christian religion. Each groupremained certain that their own prophetic vision of the endtime would ultimatelymaterialize. Each sought toassureits membersthat the signsofthe endtimeidentified by the other were fraudulent, products of deliberatedeception.³ The fact that religious rapprochement was generallyregarded in anegative light confirms this imageofChristians and Jews duringthe long Reformation. ALutheranwoodcarvingfrom the 1550s illustratesthis point.Its subject is the AugsburgInterim agreement,inwhich Emperor Charles Vmade important con- cessions to the Protestants. The carving depicts the Interim as one of three de- This researchhas been supported by the I-CORE Program of the Planningand BudgetingCom- mittee and The Israel ScienceFoundation (grantno. 1754/12),the European Research Council’s StartingGrant TCCECJ headed by Dr Pawel Maciejkoofthe HebrewUniversity of Jerusalem, and aResearch Fellowshipfromthe Department of Jewish History at Haifa University.Ithank also Mike Zuber and both anonymous reviewers for their useful comments. Forthe use of the term ‘AgeofConversion’,see Dieter Breuer, “Konversionen im konfessionell- en Zeitalter,” in Konversionen im Mittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit,eds.Friedrich Niewoh- ner and Fide Rädle (Hildesheim, 1999): 59–69. ElishevaCarlebach, “Jews,Christians,and the End time in EarlyModern Germany,” Jewish History 14:3 (2000): 331– 44,here 331. OpenAccess. ©2020 Aue-Ben-David et al., published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the CreativeCommons Attribution 4.0 International. https:// doi.org/10.1515/9783110664713-005 50 Alexander vander Haven monic characters (alongside the pope and the Turkish sultan) being trampledby amuscular risen Christ.Acaption beside the demon’shead reads, “Der Teuffel kumpt in einer gstalt eins Engels”–the devil comesinthe guise of an angel. Be- neath the angelic appearance of religious peace, suggests the print,ademonic actor lurks.The Savior’sreturn forebodes disaster for those who make religious concessions to the wrongreligions or denominations.⁴ The reactions of writers and artists to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which brought an end to the bloodyThirty Years War, demonstrate that such attitudes continued into the seventeenth century.What todayisupheld as an example of religious peace-makingwas portrayed at thattime by artists and authorsonboth sides in eschatological exclusivist terms,asthe victory of theirown denomina- tion.⁵ In this Christian eschatological exclusivism, converts and the phenomenon of conversion weregenerallytaken to signify that,with the end imminent,there was onlyone road to salvation. Manyofthe Christians who converted to Judaism in the Calvinist-dominated Dutch Republic maintained this attitude, and accepted thosecontemporary Jew- ish claims that salvation can onlybeattained through living fullyinthe Lawof Moses.⁶ Forinstance, while in Amsterdam visitingafellow German who had re- centlyconverted to Judaism, atraveler encountered another convert.This was a formerCatholic priest,now named Danielben Abraham, who expected the mes- siah to come in 1703.While the traveler was talking with his host,this Daniel ben Abraham: […]sat quiet for awhile, but finallytalked, saying: “Dear friends,ithappens now like it happened at the days of Noah, when the good and pious man was ridiculed, and he and his ark were mocked until the Flood, and those whohad mocked him beggedhewould take them in his ark, but in vain. Also the People of God have been laughed at with their hope and waitingfor the messiah, which manyfor certain to their own damage all toolatewill regret […].”⁷ Erasmus Alber,Also spricht Gott: Dis ist mein lieber Son an welchem ich wolgefallen hab Den SolltIhr Hören (s. l., n.p.: c. 1550). Foranoverview,see Hartmut Laufhütte, “Der gebändigteMars:Kriegsallegorie und Kriegs- verständnis im deutschen Schauspiel um 1648,” in Ares und Dionysos: Das Furchtbareund das Lächerliche in der europäischen Literatur,eds.Hans-JürgenHorn and Hartmut Laufhütte (Heidelberg: Winter, 1981): 121–35. Forsuch exclusivist Jewish views in the Dutch Republic see, for instance, the writings of the polemicist Isaac Orobio de CastrodescribedinYosef Kaplan, From ChristianitytoJudaism: The Story of Isaac Orobio de Castro(Oxfordand New York: Publishedfor The Littman Library by OxfordUniversity Press,1989), 353–59. “niedergesetzt und ihrenDiscours in der Stille fleißigzugehöret,endlich aber darein geredet und gesagt, geliebteFreunde, es gehet jetzo, wie zu den ZeitenNoae, da man den gutenfrom- Eschatology and Conversion in the Sperling Letters 51 Typical of the kind of wide-scope conversion narrative that relied on eschatolog- ical expectation, the aforementioned converted priest’scombination of promise (for the Jews)and threat (to the Christians),and expectation that the fortunes of the two religious communities would be reversed, mirrored as well as legitimized BenAbraham’sown religious change. Yet, not all earlymodern converts thoughtoftheir religious affiliation in ex- clusivist terms,oratleast did not expressthis exclusivism in practice. As recent studies of earlymodern interreligious relations such as thatofBenjamin Kaplan show,converts did not necessarilydemand their unconverted familymembers’ conversion or sever ties with relations who remained in their old faith.⁸ More- over,asisamplydemonstrated by the rich recent scholarship on Iberian New Christians, the religious self-perception of earlymodern converts was complex. To continue with the example of Iberian Jewish converts to Christianity, whereas older scholarshipassumed that Jewishconverts to Christianity either fullyem- braced their new religion or clandestinelyremained loyal to the religion they had publiclybeen forced to abandon, more recent scholarship such as that of David Graizbord has shown thatfor these converts, the “threshold” between the Jewishand Christian worlds was “at once aboundaryand acrossroads.”⁹ In other words, earlymodern converts were markers of religious difference and exclusivity as they embodied the possibility to dwell in two religious worlds simultaneously. Likewise, the demand for exclusive commitment in the face of an impend- ing separation of the wheat from the chaff was not endemic to the AgeofCon- version’seschatological expectations. Augustine Bader (c. 1495– 1530), Quirinus Kuhlmann (1651–1689), Menasseh ben Israel (1604–1657), and Oliger Paulli (1644–1714), for instance, offered another possibility,namely, that the Last men Mann wohl wirdverlacht,und mit seiner Arche verspottet haben, biß die Sünd-Fluth ein- gebrochen, da ihrer garviele die ihn zuvor verspottet,werden angeflehet haben, daß er sie doch auch zu sich in seine Arche nehmen mögte,aber vergeblich; Also ist das Volck GottesIsrael jetzo mit seiner Hoffnungund Warten des Messiae verlachet und verspottet,welches gewißlich aber viele mit ihrem Schaden allzuspäth dereinstens [b]ereuen werden;” Johann JacobSchudt, Jü di- sche Merckwürdigkeiten:vorstellend, was sich Denkwürdigesinden neuen Zeitenbey einigen Jahrhunderten mit den in alle 4Theile der Welt,sonderlich durch Teutschland zerstreuten Juden zugetragen. Sammt einer vollständigen Franckfurter Juden-Chronick, Darinnender zu Franckfurt am Mayn wohnenden Juden, voneinigen Jahr-Hunderten, biß auff unsereZeiten, MerckwürdigsteBegebenheiten enthalten, vol. 1(Frankfurt and Leipzig:s.n., 1714), 275–76. Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the PracticeofToleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge,MA: BelknapPress of HarvardUniversity Press, 2007), esp. 266–93. David L. Graizbord, Souls in Dispute: Converso Identities in Iberia and the Jewish Diaspora, 1580 –1700 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,2004), 2. 52 Alexander vander Haven Days called the believer to resolve inter-religious strife – albeit mostlywithout giving up at least one religious denomination in the role of adversary – rather than to unequivocallychoose sides. Put differently, earlymoderneschatology,al- though predominantlyexclusivist,also had the potential to bring different reli- gious groups together. The present article willexplore this side of earlymodernconversion and es- chatology by analyzingtwo extraordinary letters written in Amsterdam in 1682, and theirimmediate and broader religious Umwelt such as Bader,Kuhlmann, Menassehben Israel, and Paulli.¹⁰ The letters are found
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