DOCSLIB.ORG

Allison P. Coudert

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Allison P. Coudert MULSOW_f6-70-121 10/23/03 1:44 PM Page 88 88 ALLISON P. COUDERT The widespread incidents of conversions and reconversions dur- ing the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were clearly a result of the fragmentation of Christianity in the wake of the Reformation. The Reformation encouraged conversion in another way as well, by making it more possible for those Jews who had been forcibly con- verted to Christianity or who had professed to accept it while con- tinuing to adhere to Judaism in secret (the so-called Marranos) to revert to the faith of their ancestors. As many historians have pointed out, the very fact of religious schism and the resulting religious plu- ralism, together with the conversion and reconversions of both Christians and Jews, created a situation in which doctrinal purity was undermined and skepticism, if not outright atheism, flourished. In this climate, ecumenism could flourish as well. This was clearly the case in Sulzbach. As I have argued elsewhere, Sulzbach was perhaps the only place where true philosemitism flourished, for here Jews were accepted as Jews, not simply as possible converts.44 Conversion was not an issue among the Kabbalists at Sulzbach because they firmly believed that the Kabbalah provided the means for uniting every kind of Christian with every kind of Jew, Moslem, and Pagan in a single, universal religion. I would suggest that it was in this atmosphere that Späth gained the positive attitude towards Jews that eventually led to his conversion. Christian August’s policy towards the Jews was highly unusual for a ruler of the time. Not only did he encourage the immi- gration of Jews into the Sulzbach territories, but he protected the Jews who came and never made his protection a means of extor- tion, as did so many other Christian rulers. The Christian Hebraist Johann Christoph Wagenseil gives a glowing picture of Christian August’s relations with his Jewish subjects. From his account one can clearly see that Christian August’s approach was unusual enough to rate special mention, especially because of his dismissal of the charge of ritual murder as an outright lie and his threat to punish any sub- ject who spread such rumors: In this context we especially need to mention that the illustrious Prince Christian August of Pfaltz-Sulzbach, etc. has perfectly learned the sacred 44 “The Kabbala Denudata:Converting Jews or Seducing Christians?” In Christian- Jews and Jewish-Christians, eds. Richard H. Popkin and Gordon M. Weiner (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994). Copyright © 2004. Brill. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or Copyright © applicable copyright law. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/10/2017 8:42 AM via EASTERN KENTUCKY UNIV AN: 132905 ; Mulsow, Martin, Popkin, Richard Henry.; Secret Conversions to Judaism in Early Modern Europe Account: s8356098 MULSOW_f6-70-121 10/23/03 1:44 PM Page 89 JUDAIZING IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 89 Hebrew language together with all the Jewish secrets, even the Cabbala, and that he delighted in such studies daily. Also after the rumor started for the second time in his territory, in 1682 and 1692, that the Jews had hanged Christian children, a rumor which was investigated and found to be totally false, he also had official proclamations nailed up everywhere to the effect that his subjects and inhabitants were strictly admonished under pain of mandatory corporal punishment not to believe this aforementioned vain fiction and lying rumor, much less to spread it further or to command or allow their children, servants or tenants to speak of it, let alone to verbally attack a Jew or ask, or allow, someone to attack a Jew because of these rumors. Whoever wishes to consider these important events bad, of minor importance, and unworthy should consider the words said by the wisest king of the Jews (Proverbs xxi:1): “The heart of a king and prince is in the hands of the Lord. Like a stream, he directs it where he will.”45 The fact that so many Christians continued to believe Jews capable of murdering innocent children was an important factor in Späth’s conversion to Judaism. The volumes of the Kabbala denudata were published in 1677, 1678 and 1684. Späth did not officially convert to Judaism until 1696. It is therefore impossible to argue that Späth’s experiences in Sulzbach were directly responsible for his later conversion. In fact, from the letter he wrote to van Helmont after his conversion, it is clear that 45 J.C. Wagenseil, Benachrichtigungen wegen einiger die Judenschafft angehende wichtigen Sachen. Erste Theil worinnen 1. Die Hoffnung der Erlösung Israelis oder klarer Beweiß der grossen und wie es scheinet/allgemach herannahenden Juden-Bekehrung/sammt vorgreifflichen Gedancken/wie solche nechst Verheißung Göttlicher Hülffe/zu befordern. 2. Wiederlegung der Unwarheit daß die Juden zu ihrer Bedürfniß Christen-Blut haben müssen. 3. Anzeigung/wie leicht es dahin zu bringen/daß die Juden forthin abstehen müssen/die Christen mit Wuchern und Schinden zu plagen (Leipzig, 1705), 32–33: “Hieher gehöret absonderlich/daß der Durchlauchtigste Fürst Christianus Augustus von Pfaltz-Sulzbach etc. die heilige Hebräische Sprach/sammt allen der Jüden Geheimnüßen/auch so gar der Cabbala, vollkommen erlernet/und mit solchen Studien sich täglich ergetzet. Er hat auch/nach- dem in seinem Land zum zweyten mahl/als 1682 und 1692 der Ruf auskommen/als wenn die Juden Christen-Kinder aufgehangen hätten/nach genau untersuchter und Grund-falsch befundener Sache allenthalben öffentliche Mandata anschlagen lassen/durch welche Dero Hochfürstliche Durchl. Landes-Unterthanen und Ingesessenen bey unausbleiblicher Leibes-Straffe ernstlich geboten worden/den eitel erdichteten und lügenhafften Ausstreuen keinen Glauben beyzumessen/vielweniger aber davon weiter Ausbreitung zu thun/noch ihren Kindern und gebrodeten Leuten/oder Hintersassen davon zu reden/geschweig einen Juden deswegen anzufechten oder fürzuwerffen heissen oder gestatten. Wer wolte diese hohe Begebnisen für schlecht/ger- ing und nicht würdig achten/daß ihnen beygeschrieben werde/was der weisseste König [p. 33] unter den Juden Prov. xxi. i. gesagt: Des Königs (und Fürsten) Hertz ist in der Hand des Herrn/wie Wasser-Bäche/und er neigets wohin er will.” Copyright © 2004. Brill. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or Copyright © applicable copyright law. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/10/2017 8:42 AM via EASTERN KENTUCKY UNIV AN: 132905 ; Mulsow, Martin, Popkin, Richard Henry.; Secret Conversions to Judaism in Early Modern Europe Account: s8356098 MULSOW_f6-70-121 10/23/03 1:44 PM Page 90 90 ALLISON P. COUDERT while he was in Sulzbach and under the influence of van Helmont and Knorr von Rosenroth, he continued to believe that their kind of kabbalistic Christianity was the true religion. But as I have argued elsewhere, the kabbalistic convictions of the three people primarily responsible for the publication of the Kabbala denudata, Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, Francis Mercury van Helmont, and Christian August, undermined such basic Christian beliefs as the Trinity, the eternity of Hell, and even the notion that Jesus was the coequal and coeter- nal son of God. Thus the ecumenism and positive attitude toward Jews that Späth found in Sulzbach, together with the tendency of the Christian Kabbalists there to attenuate Christian doctrine by either explaining it allegorically or dismissing it altogether further undermined Späth’s Christian convictions. Spener certainly believed this to have been the case. He singled out van Helmont as respon- sible for Späth’s conversion on the grounds that he had made Späth’s belief in Christianity “lukewarm.”46 Späth eventually came to the conclusion that if Christians disagreed so fundamentally among them- selves and if Christian Kabbalists appropriated Jewish philosophy for their own purposes while discarding Christian fundamentals, perhaps the real kernel of truth lay in the Judaism, from which Christianity arose. Herman van der Hardt suggested that this was indeed Späth’s reasoning when he described him as concluding after a long inter- nal battle that, “everything is uncertain except this: God is certainly one.”47 The other instrumental factor in Späth’s conversion was his utter revulsion at the way Christians treated Jews and his sudden real- ization that the “suffering servant” in Isaiah, chapter 53 referred to the Jewish people as a whole. Schudt describes this decisive moment, which occurred in Amsterdam. He was out walking when a picture of Jesus covered with wounds and boils fell out of his pocket and onto the pavement. A Jew walking nearby picked the picture up and remarked, “That is Israel, the man of sorrows.”48 Späth abruptly realized that just as the Jews had suffered for the sins of the gen- 46 P.J. Spener, Consilia et judicia theologica latina, III: 430. 47 Van er Hardt made this observation in a conversation he had with Stolle. See G.E. Guhrauer, “Beiträge zur Kenntneiss des 17. u. 18. Jahrhunderts aus den handschriflichen Aufzeichungen Gottlieb Stolle’s”, in: Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Geschichte 7 (1847), 403. 48 Schudt, Merkwürdigkeiten, IV, 200. Copyright © 2004. Brill. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or Copyright © applicable copyright law. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/10/2017 8:42 AM via EASTERN KENTUCKY UNIV AN: 132905 ; Mulsow, Martin, Popkin, Richard Henry.; Secret Conversions to Judaism in Early Modern Europe Account: s8356098 MULSOW_f6-70-121 10/23/03 1:44 PM Page 115 JUDAIZING IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 115 Finsternüß in ein heilsam Licht. Er selbst, [89] nicht ein ander Person, Character, Qualitaet oder Glantz, oderwie es Nahmen haben mag.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Jews and Jewishness in the Dance World an International Research Conference at Arizona State University
    September –October 2018 Jews and Jewishness in the Dance World an international research conference at Arizona State University celebrating and examining the impact of Jews and the Jewish experience on the dance field and broader communities | 1 Jews and Jewishness in the Dance World welcome Dear Conference Participant: On behalf of the organizing committee, I would like to warmly welcome you to Jews and Jewishness in the Dance World, an international conference at Arizona State University (ASU). Organized by the Center for Jewish Studies and the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at ASU, the conference and related events celebrate the substantial contribution of Jews to the world of dance as choreographers, dancers, dance educators, scholars and theorists. The conference also critically reflects on how dance expresses the complex, variegated Jewish historical experience as well as on the social and cultural role of dance in Jewish communities all over the world. This international and interdisciplinary conference is truly unique, bridging dance performance, scholarship, education and therapy. The event convenes over 100 dance practitioners and scholars from across the world, representing a wide variety of dance styles, disciplines and religious orientations. Two years in the making, it showcases the pioneering work on Judaism and the arts undertaken by the Center for Jewish Studies led by Dr. Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Regents’ Professor of History and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies. The impetus was the hiring of the world-renowned Jewish choreographer, Liz Lerman, by the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, and my own ongoing scholarship at the intersection of dance and Jewish studies, within the School of Film, Dance and Theatre.
    [Show full text]
  • The Yemenite Dance Materials of Saralevi-Tanai
    Jewish Folklore and Ethnology ReviewJ Vol. 20J Dance isl THE YEMENITE DANCE MATERIALS OF SARALEVI-TANAI ish on Thy to Giora Manor go : of y ••• Nobody, even she herself, can be sure what age folkloric traditional patterns in many variations in lath shereallyis. This is not because of the usual vanity her choreography. of grand ladies of the dance, who think they can Only when Sara became a student at the cheattime but succeed only in making the life of LevinskyTeachers Seminar in Tel Aviv in her late be dance historians difficult. The true date of birth teens, did she go to visit the Yemenite quarter, an for perhaps the most important Israeli Kerem Hatrymanim. There she heard and saw my Ir it. choreographer of the last fifty years is unknown. Yemenite song and dancing and encountered the SaraLevi-Tanai was born in Jerusalem sometime ion, rich artistic heritage of her ancestors. As she has before the First World War to parents who had often said, " I knew Dostoyevski and Shakespeare come from Yemen in the 1880s. They moved to long before reading the poems of the great Jerusalemduring the era of the Ottoman reign and Yemenite poet Shalom Shabazi ... " under the Turks there were no official birth In order to fully understand her work and its certificates.When Sara was about four years old, relation to ancient Yemenite folk traditions, it is her mother and siblings died in an epidemic, necessary to deal with several important points, probably of cholera. Her father, who had severe including the contrast in her own background alcoholproblems, abandoned his daughter to her between her Western and her Yemenite ancestry; own fate.
    [Show full text]
  • Download.Php?Fileid=1707&Type=File&Round=148500147
    UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Choreographing Livability: Dance Epistemes in the Kibbutz and in the Israel Defense Forces Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/13b9m6nj Author Melpignano, Melissa Publication Date 2019 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Choreographing Livability: Dance Epistemes in the Kibbutz and in the Israel Defense Forces A dissertation completed in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Culture and Performance By Melissa Melpignano 2019 © Copyright by Melissa Melpignano 2019 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Choreographing Livability: Dance Epistemes in the Kibbutz and in the Israel Defense Forces by Melissa Melpignano Doctor of Philosophy in Culture and Performance University of California, Los Angeles, 2019 Professor Susan Leigh Foster, Chair Choreographing Livability: Dance Epistemes in the Kibbutz and in the Israel Defense Forces traces the historical articulation of dance as a source of knowledge-formation in Israeli culture through two emblematic sites of performance, between the 1940s and the 2000s. It also proposes a theoretical intervention through the elaboration of the framework of livability, through which I explore the life-stakes and the political investment entailed in dancing within the specific context of Israel, in relation to its larger ideological tensions and political shifts. My investigation across sites of performance
    [Show full text]
  • Reproductionssupplied by EDRS Are Thebest That Can Be Made
    DOCUMENT RESUME ./ ED 218,195 : ' SO 014.145 . 1 ,.. , . AUTHOR . Fallon; Bennis J., Ed.; Mblbers, Mary Jane,,,Ed. TITLE, %. Focus on Dance X: Religion and Dance. INSTITUTION American Alliance for Health, ,PhysicalEducation, * Recreation, and Dance, Washiligten,.1).C. National, Dance Association. PUB -DATE 82, NOTE 89p.; Photographs may not reproduce clearly. AVAILABLE FROM American Alliance forHealth, 'Physical Education, Recreation and 'Dance, 1900 Association" Drive,Reston, -VA22091 (Stock Number 243 \27026; $9.95). EDRS PRICE MFO1 Plus Postage. PC .Not Available from EDRS. DESCRFPTORS American Indian Culture; Catholics; *glance,Essays; History; Jews;.*Re1igion IDENTIFIERS, Baptists; Mormons ABSTRACT and nd danceare thefoci' ofthe essays in this . publication. There are four major,Pectionsto the volume. The first section provides an overview of-the history ofdance and religion. The first 'essay provides an histoeical reviewup to the Middle Ages and describes dance as p "catalyst for religion"during this era. Other essayi discuss dance,and.the Catholic churchduring the Middle AgeP0 describe the gradualacceptance of dance, particularly sacred dance, up%to the'present time, and examine danceamong the Plains - Indians of Ameriqt. The second section, 'Danctand Organized Neligions,"\gontainsessays. that examine the role of dance in selected reliious denominations, incldding theMormons, Southern'. Baptilits, and Jewish denominations.Thethird section discusses the, use of dance as spiritual expression and as prayer. For example,one essay describes dance as a spiritual experience with elements of movement, form,, rhythm, and meaning. oane authorhutorously examines his return to organized reljogion througha physically toned and tuned body. The fourth section ekamines"Dance in Places of Worship." For example, one essay discusses.howas the'dancer's training goes on, the ,danier becomes aware of the perfection of God'screation.
    [Show full text]
  • Yemenite Jewish Cultureand Dance: Popular Myths and Indigenous Activities in the Israel Context
    YEMENITE JEWISH CULTUREAND DANCE: POPULAR MYTHS AND INDIGENOUS ACTIVITIES IN THE ISRAEL CONTEXT by Shalom Staub Of a11 the dance traditions arnong the world's Jewish European Jewish irnmigrants to Palestine during that period communities, few can clairn the popular attention and sought neither to preserve their old country ways nor adopt status associated with Yemenite dance. Movements simi1ar the cultura1 forms of the host majority (cf. Even-Zohar to or based on those once done in the hundreds of sma1l 1981: 5). Instead, they sought to break the stereotypes of towns and vi11ages scattered throughout the southern the European diaspora experience and create a new Jewish Arabian mountains have found their way to many new identity. As Itarnar Even-Zohar notes, contexts. The "Yemenite step", the "da'aseh", is part of ifested for contraposingתthe basic vocabulary among dancers at Israeli folk dance Among the numerous ways m a sessions on severa1 continents, as well as on stage. Yemenite " new Hebrew" to "old Dispora Jew" were the transition to dance is performed by dozens of ensembles, professional physical labor ... ; self-defense and the concomitant use of and arnateur, Yemenite and non-Yemenite, Israeli and arms; the supplanting of the old, "contemptible" Diaspora American. language, Yiddish, with a new tongue, colloquial Hebrew ... - adopting the Sepharadic rather than the Ashkenazic pronoun- ciation; discarding traditional Jewish dress and adopting Yemenite Jewish history cannot provide a full explanation other fashions (such as the Bedouin-Circassian); dropping for why this sma11 aspect of Yemenite folklife has assumed East-European family names and assuming Hebrew names such tremendous importance for so many people.
    [Show full text]