The Merton tradition and kinematics in late sixteenth nd early seventeenth-century Italy

Isaac de Pinto was an active financier, economist and homme de lettres. Descending from a Jewish family of Portuguese origin, he lived in Amsterdam, Paris and London. Throughout his life, he enjoyed close relationships and made regular contact with important figures of the European Enlightenment.

The main purpose of this article is to show that the concern with the Jewish problems, namely those relating to the difficult economic situation of the Portuguese nation in Amsterdam in the second half of the eighteenth century, is a key factor in explaining the ongoing moral and apologetic dialogues that Isaac de Pinto maintained separately with Voltaire and Diderot.     

Don Isaac Abravanel and Leonardo Bruni: A Literary and Philosophical Confrontation

Abstract

Don Isaac Abravanel (1437–1508) was one of the first Jewish thinkers to express republican positions, yet very little is known about his knowledge of humanistic republican conceptions. Had he read Leonardo Bruni’s republican writings? Had he even heard of them? In this essay I attempt to address this philological gap by comparing Abravanel’s republican commentary on 1 Samuel 8 with Bruni’s Laudatio florentinae Urbis, especially the motif of the plea to God to authorize a political regime. This comparison is particularly useful for illuminating their respective positions on republicanism, their shared interests and conceptions, as well as their divergent attitudes to their own political and historical environment. This divergence, I argue, sheds light on the early modern Christian and Jewish receptions of ancient republicanism.     

Walking a Fine Scientific Line: The Extraordinary Deeds of Dutch Neuroscientist C. U. Ariëns Kappers Before and During World War II

Dutch neuroscientist Cornelius Ubbo Ariëns Kappers is famous for pioneering neuroembryological work and for establishing the Amsterdam Central Institute for Brain Research. Less well known is his anthropological work, which ultimately played a role in saving Dutch Jews from deportation to their deaths during the Holocaust. Ariëns Kappers extensively campaigned against anti-Semitism and Nazi persecution during the 1930s. During World War II, he utilized his credentials to help create anthropological reports “proving” full-Jews were “actually” partial- or non-Jews to evade Nazi criteria, and at least 300 Jews were thus saved by Ariëns Kappers and colleagues. His earlier work demonstrating differences between Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jewish skull indices became the focus of an attempt to save hundreds of Dutch Portuguese Jews collectively from deportation. Ariëns Kappers and colleagues brilliantly understood how anthropology and neuroscience could be utilized to make a difference and to save lives during a tragic era.     

A minority looks at the mendicants: Isaac Nathan the Jew and Thomas Connecte the Carmelite

This article focuses on the Thomas Connecte affair: the case of the charismatic friar who swept large areas of western European society along in pietistic and religious enthusiasm, established a reformist movement in several Carmelite convents, preached against the corruption of the priesthood, and was ultimately burned as a heretic in Rome in 1433 by the order of Pope Eugenius IV. The Hebrew testimony by the Jew Isaac Nathan concerning a pietistic movement led by an anonymous friar, which appears as an Exemplum in Nathan’s book, Me’ametz Koach, is identified here as being an account of Connecte, thus shedding new light on the Connecte affair in addition to providing a perspective on the broader question of the cultural relations between Jews and Christians in the 15th century. The analysis contained in the Hebrew Exemplum points to a complicated image of the ‘other’, that is, of Christianity, an image composed of negative aspects—Connecte and his movement—and positive aspects, as represented by the Pope’s response to Connecte. Isaac Nathan’s antagonism towards Thomas Connecte is situated here within the context of his general attitude towards the mendicants, and his simultaneous position within the Jewish community and as a member of the western European high bourgeoisie.     

A mid-18th-century mikveh unearthed in the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam

Abstract

In 2006 archaeological research was conducted in the New Synagogue, part of Amsterdam's Ashkenazi Synagogue complex, built between 1671 and 1752, which now houses the Jewish Historical Museum. The most remarkable find was a mid-18th-century mikveh or ritual bath, used for ceremonial purification by immersion; such baths played a key role in Jewish life. The excavated example was well preserved and retained its water supply and heating system. Although it served in a specific Jewish ritual context, the structure followed the everyday construction principles of Amsterdam builders.     

Schweretheorie und Weltbild des Nikolaus von Kues: Zu ihrer vermeintlichen Modernität

Regarding his world view and his heaviness theory Nicolaus Cusanus is imputed to having used (at least to some extent) forebodings and anticipations of modern conceptions. In the dialog Idiota de staticis experimentis he imputed the quantitative points of view of modern physics programmatically. In contrast with this, this article will show that the quantitative point of view is proposed for an inapt object at least. Cusanus based his reflections on one hand on the Aristotelic theories of elements and their heaviness with ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ weight (only thus, assumed inconsistencies can be explained), on the other hand he wants to determine the essential, qualitative properties of the forma, while only their complete abstraction by reduction on the mass without properties should result in an object for comparative weighings — lately in different ways by René Descartes and Isaac Newton. The putative modernness of cusanian conceptions compared with Aristotle are based on the tradition of platonian and stoic modifications which sooner were compatible with christian ideas.     

Geography and tradition in the patriarchal narratives

Abstract

In connection with a survey of the geographical names found in the patriarchal naratives, it is the aim here to describe the tradition‐history of these narratives. The oldest stratum includes two local heroes belonging to the northern part of the country, Jacob and Joseph, and another two whose home should be sought in the south, Isaac and Abraham. At a later date, most of the traditions about Isaac were usurped by Abraham, and Isaac was reduced to a connecting link between Abraham and Jacob. Joseph is almost unknown, and the story of his sojourn in Egypt must be late. Jacob should originally be considered at home in Bethel and from here he develops (after 722 to become the heros eponymos of a far bigger territory. Jacob's journey to Haran should be understood as a legitimation of the relations between people living in exile in this place and the remaining population of Samaria, whereas he in the post‐exilic period becomes a “Judaean” hero as the son of Isaac The conflict between Jacob and Esau reflects the post‐exilic competition between Judah and Edom. The original home of Abraham is Hebron and the oldest traditions deal with his relationship to Lot. At a later date he usurps the traditions about Isaac, among them the story of the sojourn in Gerar and the sojourn of Israel in Egypt. He is presented as the forerunner of David, the hero of the Jerusalemite cult, and the first monotheistic believer in Yahweh, who initiated the cult on the Temple Mountain in Jerusalem. In the last stage of the development of this tradition, he becomes the link which connect the Primeval History and the patriarchal narratives when he is summoned from Ur of the Chaldees.     

Nationalism,Reform Judaism and the Hebrew Prayer Book

ABSTRACT. The Hebrew prayer book (siddur), the oldest of which dates from the ninth century, frequently expresses Jewish chosenness and hopes for the gathering of the exiles and the return to the Land of Israel. In nineteenth‐century German Reform prayer books, such references to Jewish nationalism were altered or eliminated. In an age of growing European nationalism, this attempt to ‘de‐nationalise’ Jewish identity was virtually unique. Responding to accusations that Jewish citizenship in the modern nation‐state was incompatible with Judaism, Reform rabbis, who were engaged in the struggle for Jewish emancipation, claimed that patriotic loyalty to the German fatherland must supersede Jewish national identity. This article discusses the offending nationalist content of the siddur and the historical context in which it was suppressed. It concludes that the German reformers, by drawing attention to the nationalist potential of traditional Judaism, indirectly prepared the way for the rise of Jewish nationalism in reaction to racial anti‐Semitism in the late nineteenth century.     

Memory,Identity and Aspiration: Early Modern Jewish Maps of the Promised Land

In the sixteenth century Jews began to produce maps showing the Exodus to the Promised Land. My aim in this article is to show that, through unique compositions of written biblical references and pictured symbolism (both Jewish and Christian), maps such as the Mantua map (1560s) and, a century later, the Amsterdam Haggadah [Passover] map (1695) were a means of constructing Jewish cultural memory and identity in the Diaspora and fostering aspiration for a second salvation through a return to Zion. I also explore the Jewish approach towards the biblical land as this was reflected in the maps.     

Between nation and land in Zionist teaching of Jewish history, 1920–1954

The article discusses the representation of Jewish history in the Zionist school system of the Yishuv and the early State of Israel (1920–1954). In the Yishuv period the history curriculum was centered on “shifting Jewish centers” in the spirit of historian Simon Dubnow, an approach that also integrated Jewish and non-Jewish history. From the 1930s, Ben Zion Dinur and the Teachers' Council of the Keren Kayemet le-Yisrael (Jewish National Fund) attempted to make the Land of Israel the central axis uniting Jewish history, a focus that downplayed non-Jewish history. Because of the opposition to this approach within the education system, this change, which Dinur regarded as essential for the integration of the new immigrants from the Muslim countries into Israeli society, was implemented only after he was appointed minister of education in the early 1950s.     

How Was Edmond Halley’s Map of Magnetic Declination (1701) Constructed?

Edmond Halley made two scientific voyages in the Atlantic Ocean as captain of the HMS Paramore between 1698 and 1700. Following these voyages he published the first map showing lines of equal magnetic declination in 1701. Halley did not reveal how he constructed the map, however, and it remains unknown. In this study, a construction procedure is hypothesized that uses mathematical tools that were available in his day, namely arithmetical averages and Isaac Newton’s method of divided difference for fitting a polynomial curve to data. To enable his map construction, a method is suggested whereby Halley could have created new data to augment the situations where insufficient data were collected.     

The first European representative of the South American family Xenopteraidae (Insecta: Megasecoptera) discovered in the Guadalupian of Lodève (France)

NEL, A., LAPEYRIE, J. & GARROUSTE, R. May 6 2019. The first European representative of the South American family Xenopteraidae (Insecta: Megasecoptera) discovered in the Guadalupian of Lodève (France). Alcheringa 43, 436–440. ISSN 0311-5518.

A new genus, Sinitshenkovae gen. nov., is described, comprising the Carboniferous species Sinitshenkovae hueneckeni (Pinto & Pinto de Ornellas, 1978 Pinto, I.D. & Pinto de Ornellas, L., 1978. Upper Carboniferous insects from Argentina. 1. Familia Diaphanopteridae (Megasecopteroidea). Pesquisas (Zoologiat) 10, 87–95. [Google Scholar]) comb. nov. from South America and new Guadalupian species S. gallica sp. nov. from France. These two species are attributed to the Paleozoic South American family Xenopteraidae, a previously monospecific family only containing Xenoptera riojaensis Pinto, 1986 Pinto, I.D., 1986. Carboniferous insects from Argentina. 3. Family Xenopteridae Pinto nov. fam. (Megasecoptera). Pesquisas (Zoologia) 18, 23–29. [Google Scholar]. Sinitshenkovae gallica sp. nov. is therefore the youngest representative of this family and the only record outside South America, which suggests that our current knowledge of the palaeobiogeography of Permian and Carboniferous insects remains incomplete.

André Nel [anel@mnhn.fr] and Romain Garrouste [garroust@mnhn.fr], Institut Systématique Evolution Biodiversité (ISYEB), Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, CNRS, Sorbonne Université, EPHE, 57 rue Cuvier, CP 50, 75005 Paris, France; Jean Lapeyrie [jean.lapeyrie@orange.fr], Corniche de Fontbonne, F-34700 Lodève, France.     

Karl Popper on Jewish Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism

This paper re-contextualizes Karl Popper's thought within the anti-nationalist cosmopolitan tradition of the Central European intelligentsia. It argues that, although Popper was brought up in an assimilated Jewish Viennese household, from the perspective of the Jewish Enlightenment or Haskalah tradition, he can be seen to be a modern day heterodox Maskil (scholar). Popper's ever present fear of anti-Semitism and his refusal to see Judaism as compatible with cosmopolitanism raise important questions as to the realisable limits of the cosmopolitan ideal. His inability to integrate an understanding of Jewishness in his cosmopolitan political ideal resulted in his strong opposition to Zionism and the state of Israel. By comparing Popper's positions with those of Hermann Cohen, another neo-Kantian philosopher, I argue that although their solutions fall short in certain respects, their arguments have continuing purchase in recent debates on cosmopolitanism and the problem of the integration of minority groups. In addition, the arguments of the Jewish Enlightenment thinkers offer important insights for the current debates on minority integration and xenophobia.     

‘Unfortunate Jews’ and urban ugliness: crafting a narrative of the 1391 assault on the jueria of Valencia

On 9 July 1391, a mob assaulted the Jewish quarter of Valencia, killing and forcibly converting its inhabitants. This attack, one of many across Spain that summer, is much debated as a turning point in medieval Jewish history, but little attention has been paid to the role of the urban government. This article shows how the city council of Valencia shaped its narrative of the assault to further its goals for urban reform. In 1391, the Valencian council was in the midst of a reform initiative informed by the principles of Christian urban planning in Francesc Eiximenis’ Regiment de la cosa pública. The jueria was seen as an impediment to reform. The council’s retelling of the 1391 attack shifted responsibility onto the Jews and the jueria itself, considered a block to public order in the city. This laid the groundwork for the council’s solution: the removal of the jueria from Valencia.     

Citizen Paul

In the Acts of the Apostles, Paul twice evokes his rights as a Roman citizen. When he crosses from the jurisdiction of the Jewish to that of the Roman court, Paul in effect completes his definitive mapping of Jewish law as a local affair whose peculiar practices must be subsumed and refigured by the universal order promised by the Messiah to all nations. Paul's real and epistolary journeys to Rome effect a symbolic translation westward of Jewish civic themes, linking the destiny of the Jews to the European political tradition. Yet Paul does so by evacuating the central mark of membership in Israel, namely the covenant of circumcision, of its continued validity. Rather than either salvaging Paul's universalism as the basis of modern democracy or critiquing his cultural politics, I use the concept of citizenship to begin calculating the consequences of Paul's multiple memberships in three distinct juridical orders: the Hellenistic city‐state, the nation of Israel, and the Roman Empire. My goal is not to re‐localize or de‐legitimate Paul's universalism in the name of individual cultures, but rather to recall the integral dream of universalism to its dialogue with diverse citizenship protocols, including Jewish ones, as well as to disclose the universal dimension of seemingly local civic rituals and routines.     

Being Crypto‐Jewish in Colonial Brazil (1500–1822): Brushing History against the Grain

This paper consists of two parts. In the first, I am going to review and synthesise the history of Jews — or rather various versions of Fuzzy Jews ¹ 1 The term “Fuzzy Jews,” introduced by Charles Meyers and myself in the Preface to our jointly edited Troubled Souls: Conversos, Crypto‐Jews and Other Confused Jewish Intellectuals from the Fourteenth through the Eighteenth Centuries (Hamilton: Outrigger, 2001); it refers to non‐regular sets and categorical anomalies. The term is further developed in my Masks in the Mirror: Marranism in Jewish Experience (New York: Peter Lang Verlag, 2005).
— who settled in Brazil during the time it was a Portuguese colony, including a brief period when part of the nation passed under Dutch control. This overview probably adds nothing new to the history of this topic, except insofar as it stresses the details necessary to develop the argument in the next section. The second part turns to a more difficult and in many ways speculative kind of history, that of the emotional and psychological experience of being a Jew — again in several versions of nominal Catholicism. Here is where I bring to bear insights from psychohistory and the history of mentalities in order to interrogate the sources in Inquisitional archives and archaeological studies in Brazil and elsewhere in South America.     

Evolving Ideas: J. B. d’Anville’s Maps of Southern Africa, 1725–1749

This article focuses on the changes made to the cartography of southern Africa between 1725 and 1749 by the French geographer Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville. The maps in question were produced in collaboration with the Portuguese ambassador Dom Luís da Cunha as part of d’Anville’s plan to demonstrate what lay between the Portuguese colonies of Angola in the west and Mozambique in the east and to establish a link across the continent. The maps he produced in the first two phases of his mapping of southern Africa (1725–1731) echoed the traditional horror vacui. The vast blank that appeared on his map of Afrique of 1749, however, has to be seen as d’Anville intended—the integration of empty space on a map with Enlightenment rationalization of geography.     

Becoming Cleopatra: the forgotten Zionism of Raphael Lemkin

The biography of Raphael Lemkin has emerged of late as a highly contested lieu de memoire in charged political debates in Europe, the United States and the Middle East about the meaning, past and present, of the Holocaust and genocide. At the same time, scholars have attempted to demythologize Lemkin by reinscribing his life into its pre-World War II Polish context. Yet thus far no one has identified the precise political activities and affiliations that shaped Lemkin’s concept of genocide. In this article, I show that Lemkin, far from being a Jewish Bundist, a Polish nationalist or an apolitical cosmopolitan, was an active member of the interwar Polish Zionist movement, from which he drew the ideas that inspired his idea of the crime of genocide. In the first part of this article, I use his published writings from the 1920s and 1930s in Hebrew, Yiddish and Polish to recover a rich Jewish political framework in which his concepts of barbarism and genocide first began to emerge. In the second section, I ask how this crucial dimension of Lemkin’s life and thought vanished from the historical record, and why it has yet to be recovered in spite of the boom in biographical scholarship. Finally, I suggest how the recovery of Lemkin’s Zionism helps to reframe the current political impasse in the historiography of Holocaust and genocide studies.     

Papal Power and Protection in the Shebet Yehudah

The sixteenth‐century Shebet Yehudah is an account of the persecutions of Jews in various countries and epochs, including their expulsion from Spain in the fifteenth century. It is not a medieval text and was written long after many of the events it describes. Yet although it cannot give us a contemporary medieval standpoint, it provides important insights into how later Jewish writers perceived Jewish–papal relations in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. Although the extent to which Jewish communities came into contact either with the papacy as an institution or the actions of individual popes varied immensely, it is through analysis of Hebrew works such as the Shebet Yehudah that we are able to piece together a certain understanding of Jewish ideas about the medieval papacy as an institution and the policies of individual popes. This article argues that Jews knew only too well that papal protection was not unlimited, but always carefully circumscribed in accordance with Christian theology. It is hoped that it will be a scholarly contribution to our growing understanding of Jewish ideas about the papacy's spiritual and temporal power and authority in the Later Middle Ages and how this impacted on Jewish communities throughout medieval Europe.     

CULTURAL RESOURCES AND ETHNIC ENTREPRENEURSHIP: A CASE STUDY OF THE PORTUGUESE REAL ESTATE INDUSTRY IN TORONTO

The Portuguese community in Toronto is to a large degree a self-sufficient one. Over the last four decades, they have constructed a thriving, complex community, setting up organizations, businesses and communication-information services in their own language. The purpose of this paper is to examine the Portuguese real estate industry in Toronto. The study will be focused on community resources such as networks of kinship/friendship and community ties, and how these resources contribute to the formation, maintenance, and success of Portuguese-owned real estate businesses. Data were obtained primarily from a questionnaire survey that was administered to Portuguese brokers (owners of real estate agencies) who were members of the Toronto Real Estate Board. Data collected from the questionnaire survey indicate that Portuguese real estate brokers rely to a large degree on their own community (‘ethnic’) resources — Portuguese friends, the media, and relatives — in starting and/or operating their current businesses. Within this context, Portuguese friends occupy a central role as an important source in providing business contacts. Real estate agencies owned by Portuguese brokers are community oriented. Portuguese customers, business location within/near to the community, and a good reputation with Portuguese clients and the community were noted by Portuguese brokers as the major factors contributing to the economic success of their businesses. Although relatively little research has been conducted in Canada on ethnic entrepreneurship, we can speculate that the main characteristic of the Portuguese real estate business — a heavy reliance on ‘community resources' in serving a geographically segregated co-ethnic market — is common among Southern Mediterranean immigrant groups in Canada. Further comparative studies in this area would enhance our understanding of the complexities of ethnic entrepreneurship. La communauté portugaise de Toronto est, en grande partie, auto-suffisante. Pendant les quatre dernières décennies, les Portugais ont construit une communauté complexe et prospère, démarrant des organisations, des entreprises et des services de communication et d'information dans leur propre langue. Le but de ce travail est d'examiner l'industrie immobilière portugaise à Toronto. L'étude sera plutôt concentrée sur les ressources communautaires telles qu'un réseau de parenté/amitié et des liens communautaires, et le procèdé par lequel ces ressources contribuent à la formation, au maintien et au succès de l'industrie immobilière des Portugais. Les données ont été obtenues surtout à partir d'un questionnaire/enquête distribué aux courtiers portugais (propriétaires d'agences immobilières), membres du Conseil Immobilier de Toronto. Les données recueillies grâce à l'enquête indiquent que les courtiers immobiliers portugais dépendent largement des ressources (?ethniques?) de leur propre communauté-des amis portugais, des médias, et des proches — pour démarrer et/ou diriger leurs entreprises. Dans ce contexte, les amis portugais occupent un rôle central en fournissant des contacts d'affaires. Les agences immobilières portugaises sont orientées vers la communauté portugaise. Les clients portugais, le local de l'entreprise, au sein de la communauté ou près d'elle, et une bonne réputation, ont été identifiés par les courtiers portugais comme les facteurs les plus importants, contribuant au succès économique de leurs entreprises. En dépit du fait que relativement peu de recherches ont été menées au Canada au sujet des entreprises ethniques, nous pouvons supposer que la caractéristique principale de l'entreprise immobilière portugaise — une grande dépendance des ?ressources communautaires?, en servant un marché co-ethnique géographiquement isolé — est commune chez les immigrants de la Meditérannée du Sud, au Canada. Notre compréhension de la complexité des entreprises ethniques serait améliorée par d'autres études comparatives sur ce sujet.