Reckoning with One’s Life: Numeracy, Life Course, and Signs of Modernity among the Conversos of Early Modern Castile

Abstract

This article adds another dimension to the debate whether Jewish modernity originated with the Haskalah in eighteenth-century Germany or among the Sephardic Jews living in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Noting that one element of modernity was rationalism, the author uses two commonly employed indices of rationalism (literacy and numeracy) to find that the most literate and numerate of Castile’s various socio-economic or ethnic groups were the Luso-conversos who settled in Castile in the seventeenth century—members of the Nação, the group at the center of the debate over Amsterdam’s contribution to Jewish modernity. Another aspect of modernity involves an awareness of chronological time. In this respect as well members of the Nação viewed their lives somewhat differently than did others. These traits, coupled with the well-documented skepticism and secularism of the group, point to marked quantifiable differences between the Sephardim and their Castilian and Portuguese contemporaries.