Community Of Amsterdam Research Articles

Amsterdam au temps de Spinoza. Argent et liberté, and: Être juif à Amsterdam au temps de Spinoza (review)

BOOK REVIEWS ~37 tions prior to his move to Oxford in the mid-165os, and most scholars have concentrated on the thought of the "mature Boyle"--the Boyle who was the leading member of the Royal Society after its formation in the early 166os. Further, almost nothing has been known about the sources of Boyle's thought. By publishing and so excellently annotating The Early Essays and Ethics of Robert Boyle Harwood has done much to alleviate these lacunae. I have checked random passages in Harwood's edition against the original manuscripts and have detected no errors in Harwood's edition. In fact, the deterioration of the manuscripts in many places has made Harwood's accurate transcription a Herculean task. JAN WOJCIK Auburn University Henry M~cholan. Amsterdam au temps de Spinoza. Argent et libertY. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, x99o. Pp. z77- FF 16o. Henry Mtchoulan. l~treJuif d Amsterdam au tempsde Spinoza. Paris: Michel Albin, 199L Pp. 184. NP. These two books by a leading historian of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews are exceedingly helpful in presenting the background world in which many early modern thinkers developed their ideas. Although both books have Spinoza in the rifle, a good deal of the content, especially of the first volume, is equally relevant to Descartes, Locke, and others who lived or sojourned in Amsterdam. Much mythology has grown up about the economic, political, religious, and social conditions in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century which is supposed to help us understand the early modern philosophers. And much has been learned in the last thirty to forty years about the actua/history of the Jewish community of Amsterdam and about Spinoza himself which is ignored in the histories of philosophy that persist in just repeating eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts. Therefore it is very good to have Mtchoulan's fine, not overly technical, accounts of both the overall world of Amsterdam, and the particular world of the Amsterdam Jews, to counteract and maybe even replace the old and tired myths. Amsterdam became inordinately rich and cosmopolitan in the seventeenth century . It attracted people of many cultures and many religious persuasions to participate in its economic miracle. It became the center of international trade, especially the colonial trade, the center of European banking, and the center of publishing for all of Europe. Mtchoulan shows that seventeenth-century Amsterdam, basically run by oligarchy , felt a constant strain between its desire for money and its desire for liberty. Attempts to enforce some kind of religious uniformity clashed with money-making activities. So, not because of any great tolerant philosophy, the Calvinist leaders of Amsterdam came to terms with Catholics, Jews, and even Socinians, and with a few exceptions the city fathers allowed the publication of all sorts of materials, since printing and publishing were also major money-making activities. It is in this milieu, with its 138 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 31:1 JANUARY 1993 ups and downs of freedom, repression, the quest for gain, and the fear of losses, that the early modern philosophers and scientists were able to flourish. Mtchoulan's most recent work, P,tre Juif a Amsterdam au temps de Spinoza, provides much-needed correctives to the usual picture of the world Spinoza came from and reacted to. The book is not a full scholarly treatment of Amsterdam Jewry in the seventeenth century, but rather a picture, based on the best present scholarship, written for the general public. The usual story is mostly based upon the earliest biography of Spinoza by Colerus, plus German romantic accounts. Literature from Gebhardt's essay on Spinoza and the Marranos published in the 192os to the post-war writings by I. S. Rtvah, Mtchoulan, G. Nahon, Y. Kaplan, H. P. Salomon, myself, and others, have greatly enriched our understanding of what the Jewish community of the time was and was not. It was not a traditional Jewish community, studying medieval texts and cut off from the general society. It was a community formed almost entirely by people of Jewish origin who had been raised as Catholics in Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, and Belgium. Many had personally suffered Inquisition persecution, and fled to...

From Christianity to Judaism: The Story of Isaac Orobio de Castro (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 301 Yosef Kaplan. From Christianity toJudaism: The Story of Isaac Orobiode Castro.Translated by Raphael Loewe. Oxford: Littman Library, Oxford University Press, 1989. Pp. xvi + 53 I. Cloth, $45.oo. Orobio de Castro, 1617-1687, was the most philosophically acute member of the Jewish community of Amsterdam. He had been trained in medicine and Catholic theology in Spain, taught at the medical faculty at the University of Toulouse, and then joined the Jewish community in Amsterdam in 166o, became an eminent physician in The Netherlands, and a defender of Judaism against Catholics and Protestants, and against the rebel, Spinoza. Orobio made a spiritual journey from Christianity to Judaism , fully aware of the intellectual difficulties and issues involved. He used the tools of his Spanish scholastic heritage, his knowledge of current scientific, philosophical, and theological thought, to buttress his final faith. Unlike Spinoza, who was born a Jew in the fairly tolerant world of Amsterdam, Orobio was born a Catholic, and remained one for about forty years, until persecuted by the Inquisition, and then found his way to his version of the faith of his ancestors. Some of his work was influential for a century or more, until he slipped into oblivion. Yosef Kaplan, Professor of Jewish History at Hebrew University, has devoted many years of excellent scholarship, mainly in The Netherlands, in the archives of the Jewish community, to unearthing what can be known about Orobio's career and his intellectual biography. The results of his researches first appeared in Hebrew in 198~, and have now been made accessible to the general scholarly world by this English translation. (The work will appear soon in French translation as well.) The first four chapters give a superb picture of the intellectual and spiritual life of a Marrano, a member of a group of people of Jewish ancestry in Iberia, forced to live as Christians, and constandy hounded by the Inquisition. Kaplan has found much to indicate what this kind of life was like, and how it was carried on. Orobio, originally from a Portuguese New Christian family that moved into southern Spain, became a successful medical doctor, and leader of a small crypto-Jewish group. Kaplan is able to piece together the really minimal Jewish practice that he and his friends and relatives carried on, the support system they developed to protect each other, and the way this finally fell apart when several of them were arrested and tortured by the Inquisition. Orobio found kindred souls, including his classmate, Dr. Juan de Prado, who later became involved with the, young Spinoza. The Inquisition's inventory of Orobio's property provides an interesting window into what the Marranos' life was like. Marranos like Orobio and Prado, consciously committed to a truncated Judaism that was mainly an internal spiritual religion rather than a set of outward practices, stayed in Spain as long as possible, with occasional rest and recreation trips to Marrano communities in southern France or Italy. They only left Spain when the situation was impossible, when it became evident they would be killed if they stayed. Prado moved to Hamburg and Amsterdam in 1654-55 and joined the Jewish communities there. Orobio went first to southern France, and became a professor of pharmacy at the University of Toulouse. Kaplan makes the interesting suggestion that 302 ,JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 30:2 APRIL 1992 he was influenced there by the fideism of the New Christian sceptic, Francisco Sanches, Montaigne's cousin. Orobio tired of living as an ostensible Christian, and so moved to Amsterdam where he could join the Jewish community. He circumcised himself, changed his first name from "Bathazaar" to "Isaac," and quickly became a major intellectual figure in the Jewish world there. We mainly know of the Jewish community of the time through Spinoza's very bad relations with them, and his negative statements about them. Kaplan allows us to see a quite different vision of the group through the eyes of the two doctors, Prado and Orobio. Prado arrived in 1655 with many doubts about Judaism, and about religion in general. He was not shy about raising these, and became a cause c~l~bre. He...

Introduction of lymphadenopathy associated virus or human T lymphotropic virus (LAV/HTLV-III) into the male homosexual community in Amsterdam.

To establish when lymphadenopathy associated virus or human T lymphotropic virus (LAV/HTLV-III) was introduced into the Netherlands, we studied a cohort of homosexual men who participated in a hepatitis B vaccine efficacy study between 1980 and 1982. On entry into the study (November 1980 to December 1981) five (0.7%) out of 685 participants were found to have antibodies to LAV/HTLV-III, and during follow up 15 seroconversions were detected among the 680 who had been seronegative initially (end point attack rate 3%). LAV/HTLV-III was not transmitted by the heat inactivated hepatitis B virus (HBV) vaccine used. Anal sexual contact and antibodies to cytomegalovirus (CMV) were found to correlate with seropositivity or seroconversion for LAV/HTLV-III. Six out of 15 men who seroconverted reported a mononucleosis like illness, but three of them had other concurrent virus infections. To date, only one of the 20 seropositive men has developed the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), three years after his seroconversion. This study shows that the introduction of LAV/HTLV-III into the Dutch male homosexual community took place at the end of the 1970s, a few years before the first case of AIDS in a native Dutchman.

Musical Life and Traditions of the Portuguese Jewish Community of Amsterdam in the 18th CenturyAdlerIsrael Musical Life and Traditions of the Portuguese Jewish Community of Amsterdam in the 18th Century Yuval Monograph Series 1Magnes PressJerusalemOxford University PressLondon, 1974, 140, £2. 45

Musical Life and Traditions of the Portuguese Jewish Community of Amsterdam in the 18th CenturyAdlerIsrael <i>Musical Life and Traditions of the Portuguese Jewish Community of Amsterdam in the 18th Century</i> Yuval Monograph Series 1Magnes PressJerusalemOxford University PressLondon, 1974, 140, £2. 45

The biological and chemical effect of a central discharge of sewage into the “Buiten IJ” near Amsterdam

Since 1913 the community of Amsterdam has been discharging a part of its sewage via a conduit under pressure into an area of water which is situated east of the city . This area of water called 'Buiten IJ', is part of the present IJsselmeer (the former Zuiderzee) . It has two connections, one via sluices ('Oranjesluizen') with the 'Afgesloten IJ' and one via a pumping unit with the canals in the city . The sewer pipe has a length of more than 5 km and is joining at the mixed sewerage inside the town . The discharged sewage comes mainly from domestic sources ; it contains very little industrial water. During rainfall the waste from the streets is also drained off. The mixture of waste materials is discharged unpurified into the Buiten IJ . The dam carrying the sewage pipe line divides the Buiten IJ into a northern and southern part. This topographic situation has not been altered since the construction in 1910 . On the other hand, after 1932 there was a change in the composition of the Buiten Ii water . In this year the Zuiderzee was separated from the Waddenzee by an enclosing dike . After the closing of the dike, the area of water was renamed the IJsselmeer .