Amsterdam's People of the Book: Jewish Society and the Turn to Scripture in the Seventeenth Century by Benjamin E. Fisher (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Amsterdam's People of the Book: Jewish Society and the Turn to Scripture in the Seventeenth Century by Benjamin E. Fisher Miriam Bodian Benjamin E. Fisher. Amsterdam's People of the Book: Jewish Society and the Turn to Scripture in the Seventeenth Century. Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 2020. 330 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009421000234 This book elucidates how one aspect of the religious upheaval in early Enlightenment Europe—the humanist and Protestant inquiry into the text of the Bible—played out in the Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam. It first asks a question that is not in itself new: What accounts for this Jewish community's cultivation of a strikingly bibliocentric Jewish culture? Amsterdam's People of the Book considers the conventional explanation—namely, that the preference for the biblical over the postbiblical had its origins in generations of Iberian Judaizing; converso Judaizers, for lack of access to postbiblical Jewish texts, relied on Christian sources, particularly the Old Testament. Fisher acknowledges that this ingrained reliance on the Bible predisposed the Amsterdam émigrés to cultivate a biblically oriented religious discourse and educational system. But he is primarily interested in another factor, one with roots in the Dutch environment: the need to respond to new challenges presented by Protestant biblical scholarship that led members of the rabbinic elite to devote special attention to Hebrew Scripture. In particular, Fisher examines the approach to biblical texts adopted by two outstanding rabbis in the Amsterdam community, Menasseh ben Israel and Saul Levi Morteira. He argues that it was not only certain heterodox members of the community (most famously Uriel da Costa and Benedict Spinoza) who asked questions about the authenticity of the biblical text. Heretics and "orthodox" alike in the Dutch Portuguese Jewish orbit shared doubts and anxieties about the Bible's textual integrity. He thus departs from the tendency of scholars to differentiate sharply between those who were satisfied with the Amsterdam community's "return" to rabbinic Judaism and those who were not. He also challenges the common assumption that there existed a strict confessional divide between [End Page 457] rabbinic scholars and Calvinist theologians in their thinking about Scripture. He examines how both camps produced scholars with a historicist interest in Scripture and an intense concern with biblical contradictions. Moreover, Fisher seeks to show that the gulf between radical philosophers and learned traditionalists was not as deep as we commonly assume. The far greater preoccupation of scholars with radical thinkers, he suggests, has led us to lose sight of a broader, more conservative undercurrent of uncertainty about the Bible. It is in this more general climate of European doubt about sacred texts that Fisher places Menasseh ben Israel's defense of the integrity of the Hebrew Bible in his massive Conciliador (whose success Menasseh himself doubted). One of the reasons for the bibliocentrism of Amsterdam's Portuguese Jews, Fisher argues, was theological. A Protestant environment in which salvation was the goal reinforced the strong and lingering belief cultivated by these Jews in Iberia that the Hebrew Bible was the source of what one needed for "salvation." The Portuguese Jews' unusual focus on salvation, and their exceptional knowledge of the New Testament, were among the reasons that motivated Morteira to engage in a singularly granular critique of the Gospels. Fisher concludes that in his New Testament studies Morteira was influenced by the historicist biblical exegesis of Protestant scholars like Vossius, Scaliger, Grotius, and Selden; he speculates that Morteira may also have been inspired by the historicist perspective on the New Testament adopted by earlier rabbinic scholars (Profayt Duran and Shimon ben Zemaḥ Duran in particular) as well as by Leon de Modena. Fisher's analysis of the work of Saul Levi Morteira (a figure dealt with at greater length than any other in this book) addresses a serious lacuna in the history of Amsterdam's religious elite. Marc Saperstein, who has meticulously examined Morteira's sermons, did not similarly analyze the latter's Tratado da verdade da lei de Moisés (1659–1660), a demanding work that, as Fisher shows, is essential for fully understanding Morteira's intellectual trajectory. Although this lengthy treatise was published by H. P. Salomon...