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 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 in 1988, Fisher is the first to explore it in depth. In the Tratado, Morteira undertook a detailed evaluation of Calvin's theology, quoting extensively from Calvin's Institutes. He also offered his interpretation of the appearance in his time of the antitrinitarian Socinians, whom he referred to as novos reformados, and whom he saw as taking serious steps toward Judaism. While Fisher admits that there is more to be done with this work, he has examined and contextualized it, researched its sources, and demonstrated its unique importance.
Amsterdam's People of the Book does, however, suffer from some shortcomings. Overall, one would wish for a more sustained and integrated argument. The book's focus is narrower than the title might suggest. Menasseh and Morteira are the only Amsterdam rabbinic scholars it deals with in depth, and the author does not place their innovative thought in the wider context of rabbinic opinion in the community. (They were by no means representative.) Surprisingly, Fisher does not mention the fact that Morteira (who signed his name “Mortera”) was not a converso or ex-converso: his father was an Italian Jew and his mother was Ashkenazi. Moreover, especially in a book that deals with the reasons for the Portuguese Jews’ bibliocentrism, it would have been helpful to note that while Uriel da Costa claimed he was ignorant of postbiblical Judaism before he came to the Netherlands, this claim, as I. S. Révah has shown, was disingenuous.
Nonspecialist readers in particular might have benefited from discussion of another factor that, along with those that Fisher enumerates, contributed to the bibliocentric character of the rabbinic culture of the Dutch Sephardim. These profoundly Europeanized Jews, many of them rationalistic and cosmopolitan in their outlook and concerned about their image in Christian society, found it difficult to embrace wholeheartedly the rabbinic culture of their time. The Talmud—with its unsystematic structure, associative style, intricate legal reasoning, and concern with “unspiritual” matters—did not resonate with their sensibilities. The Hebrew Bible, in contrast, was a text revered by “everyone” and integral to the brilliant European culture these Jews cultivated. (Moreover, they could be proud to be identified with the biblical Israelites with whom Calvinist Netherlanders, unlike Iberian Catholics, also identified.) Surely it was not because communal leaders prioritized Bible studies that the Dutch Sephardim were so often dismissive of rabbinic law, as Fisher maintains, but rather the other way around.
Overall, this is a stimulating and original book. Fisher has excavated a vein of seventeenth-century thought that crossed theological and ideological boundaries in previously unexplored ways. “For the Portuguese Jews of seventeenth-century Amsterdam,” he writes, “the Bible became a fundamentally early modern text” (25): it was now subjected to kinds of scrutiny, by traditionalists as well as radicals, that represented a significant break with the past.
