The Jews and the Reformation by Kenneth Austin

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Jews and the Reformation by Kenneth Austin David H. Price Kenneth Austin. The Jews and the Reformation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020. 288 pp. Providing substantially more than the title promises, Kenneth Austin’s The Jews and the Reformation surveys Christian theological and political reflection on Judaism, Jews, and Hebrew Scripture from the late fifteenth century to the end of the seventeenth century. This is a long and complex period, one that marks the nadir of Jewish fortunes in western Europe (before the Holocaust) as well as the significant, if uneven, improvement in the conditions for Jewish life in many places, a turning point that began in the final decades of the sixteenth century. The great value of this new book is its simultaneous focus on Catholic and Protestant writers and governments across central and western Europe; its impressive scope encompasses the Iberian expulsions, the inquisitions (especially in Spain, Portugal, and Rome), the humanist movement (especially the Jewish book controversy and Christian Hebraism), Luther and his movement, the radical Reformation, Reformed Protestantism (especially Calvin and the biblical scholar Immanuel Tremellius), and the Tridentine Catholic response to Judaism as well as the early history of the new Jewish communities in the United Provinces and in England during the Commonwealth. Austin, admirably, is reluctant to draw general conclusions as to which Christian denominations were more or less favorably disposed to supporting legal toleration. Nonetheless, his inclination to strike a “balanced” position occasionally results in apologetic tendencies. For example, he claims that “Portugal proved a much more hospitable home for Jews” (125), just one sentence before mentioning the traumatic bloodshed of the 1506 Lisbon massacre (which cost ca. 1,000 to [End Page 188] 4,000 Jewish lives), as if it were an inconvenient historical detail. There is also a reluctance to fully acknowledge the harshness of the end of Sicut Judeis (the medieval protection of Jewish rights under canon law) initiated by Paul IV, a transformation that ultimately resulted in censorship, expulsions, strict ghettoization, and expanding papal support for inquisitional persecution. Austin does not mention the horrifying execution of twenty-four Jewish Marranos in papal Ancona in 1556 (nor the emergence of substantial, but temporary, Jewish resistance to the papacy organized by Gracia Mendes Nasi). The overall analysis adopts Kenneth Stow’s valuable but one-sided position that papal policy changed in order to promote conversion to Christianity, and also the commonly expressed view that Jewish culture was able to thrive to a limited degree under ghettoization in Italy, at least for a while and especially in Venice. Austin sees considerable impact from Christian Hebrew studies. This is an exceedingly difficult innovation to assess because Christian Hebraists used their expertise variously to create benevolent portrayals of Judaism and also to construct anti-Jewish polemics, sometimes of great severity. One of the harshest and most substantial anti-Jewish books ever published—Johann Andreas Eisenmenger’s Entdecktes Judentum (1700; Judaism Uncovered)—goes unmentioned, even though the author was a major Calvinist Hebrew scholar and the text’s extreme hostility provoked intense theological and political controversy at the highest levels of power in the empire. Similarly, on the other side of the ledger, the strongly favorable and influential accounts of Judaism by the great Catholic biblical scholar Richard Simon (who also translated and promoted Leon Modena’s History of the Jewish Rituals) are not mentioned. In some cases, Austin’s optimistic portrayal of Christian Hebraism is not accurate. He claims, for instance, that Johannes Reuchlin, the founder of Christian Hebrew studies, “persuaded the emperor to reverse his position” (3) on the stunning policy initiative to confiscate and destroy all Hebrew books in the empire except the Bible. In fact, the emperor reversed his position under pressure from the Frankfurt Jewish community. Reuchlin’s defense of Jewish writings, which resulted in a heresy trial (he was convicted of being “impermissibly favorable to Jews”), galvanized Europe but ultimately contributed only modestly to a gradual shift in Maximilian’s policy of eradication of Jews back to a more traditional one of legal toleration in return for fiscal exploitation. The portrayal of imperial politics overall seems somewhat constrained. Austin does not comment on the...