This book, an English translation of Das Zeitalter des Geheimnisses: Juden, Christen, und die Oekonomie des Geheimen (1400–1800), published by Vadenhoeck & Ruprecht in 2011, is a bold and original work. It contrasts our modern world, in which secrecy is seen “as a form of antisocial or suspicious behavior” (vii) to the early modern period, in which people “relished secrets” because they considered “true and important knowledge to be secret by definition” (viii). The “economy of secrets,” in Jütte's view, served as a theater for vibrant Jewish-Christian “two-way interactions” (256). As Jews played a conspicuous role as professors of secrets, they perpetuated a form of intellectual and cultural capital that ran contrary to the emergence of a modern, open, scientific society. In other words, Jews' activities as engineers, magicians, and alchemists loosen our entrenched narratives about the “intellectual ‘paradigm shift' that supposedly characterized the Scientific Revolution” (17).
Behind this daring argument is a more subtle claim: one may use the history of European Jewry to arrive at broader insights about European history. As the author puts it, he strives to “proceed from Jewish history to a general praxeology of secrecy in the premodern era” (8). The Age of Secrecy is divided into six thematic chapters. An introductory essay explains what secrets meant to premodern Europeans. Chapter 2 lays out the various professions of those Jütte terms “masters of the arcane.” The next two chapters (3 and 4) treat, respectively, magic and economic activity. Chapter 5, the strongest in the book, concerns Abramo Colorni, a sixteenth-century Renaissance man if there ever were one. The sixth and final chapter offers historiographical conclusions and reflects on the passage from early modernity to modernity.
Chapter 5, on “Abramo Colorni, Professor of Secrets,” is the most original and provocative in this book. It is also, at 107 pages, its heftiest. Colorni was “an engineer, mathematician, chiromancer, cryptographer, alchemist, inventor, magus and merchant—to name just a few of his professions” (117). This Italian Jew was so highly regarded by his Christian contemporaries as to be praised by the poet Alessandro Tassoni (130), and immortalized by “his clerical friend” Tomasso Garzoni in the second (1587) edition of his enormously popular Piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo (146). Apparently Colorni was so charismatic that his first audience with Rudolf II in Prague—where he spent nine years at Rudolf's court—lasted, to the astonishment of the emperor's courtiers, three hours (165). Based on extensive archival research conducted in Germany and Italy, Jütte identifies a “golden thread” running through Colorni's life story: his expertise in the economy of secrets (137). The chapter is valuable in showing how Jews were actively involved in intellectual life and scientific innovation outside the framework of the university. Colorni, as Jütte points out, could have earned a degree. But for someone as multitalented and intellectually restless as he was, it is not clear what a doctorate would have accomplished for him.
Jütte has an axe to grind with the field of early modern Jewish history, and brandishes it. He notes that his study of Colorni “eludes well-worn narratives and clichéd dichotomies such as ‘integration' versus ‘exclusion.'” He plangently notes that Colorni was no “forerunner” of the Jewish Enlightenment, nor did he attempt to “reform, much less leave behind, the Jewish world” (116). These points are well taken. Sadly, they constitute a caricature of a field that is considerably more fertile than Jütte lets on.
One of the premises on which Jütte's argument rests is that there was a “premodern Jewish economy of secrets,” one “whose economic significance cannot be underestimated” (2). However, it is unclear to what extent any of the activities Jütte describes with such care and in such detail is particularly Jewish. Jütte himself notes regarding magic that “the motives behind early modern Jews' fascination” with it were “on the whole no different from those of Christians” (85). He even asks regarding the Jewish production of explosives “was there really a specific Jewish know-how in this field?” (189), and goes on to state that “Jewish know-how was not distinguishable from that of Christians” (190) and that “the idea that Jews had special competence in saltpeter and gunpowder manufacture was clearly exaggerated” (190). Jewish “competence” or “know-how” was more a matter of perception than reality. In fact we are told as much: “no social group was credited with greater talents in the economy of secrets than were Jews” (32). Similarly, “Christians credited Jews with a special talent for cryptography” (60). The notion that these Jewish “masters of the arcane” were particularly gifted seems to derive from Christian discourse, which was occasionally anti-Jewish, often deprecatory, and always generalizing.
One example of the author's treatment of the Jewish economy of secrets is particularly apposite. Jütte notes that “alchemy flourished among Jews in Italy more than in any other country” (43). One might ask how, if at all, did Jewish alchemy differ from that practiced by Christians? Jütte might have gone about exploring this by taking a text and mining it for its Jewish content. Opportunities abound. For instance, the first example Jütte provides of an Italian-Jewish alchemical work (43) is the Mantuan physician Abraham Portaleone's Latin dialogue on the medicinal properties of gold: De auro dialoghi tres (Venice, 1584). This text has been thoroughly studied by Gianfranco Miletto, who found interesting evidence of Portaleone's Jewish preoccupations (see Glauben und Wissen im Zeitalter der Reformation [Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004], 233–55).
When Jütte does probe for Jewish content in the works of these Jewish professors of secrets, his efforts sometimes fall flat. For example, analyzing Colorni's Scotographia, a work on cryptography, Jütte points out that Colorni illustrated “his own method using allusive verses from the Hebrew Bible, and especially Solomon's proverbs,” and notes that this “deserves attention” (183). Surely the Bible and Solomon's proverbs are part of a common European patrimony and not evidence of any particularly Jewish preoccupation. Jütte claims that he has approached the early modern economy of secrets from a “Jewish perspective.” Apart from the fact that many of his protagonists were Jews, it is not clear how relevant their religion was to their work, nor how “Jewish” is the perspective Jütte takes.
These reservations aside, there are many noble achievements in this book. It is thoroughly researched, based on primary and secondary sources in half a dozen languages, written with energy, and packed with vibrant anecdotes of fascinating Jewish figures who exist on the margins, or completely off the pages, of Jewish history. Beyond this Jütte issues important corrections to accepted narratives going back to the nineteenth-century Wissenschaft des Judentums. Those scholars were obsessed with Jewish “contributions,” insisting, for example, that “Jews' importance for the emergence of modern science was undisputable” (225). More specifically, just as German-Jewish scholars denied premodern Jewish interest in Kabbalah, they also disparaged Jewish alchemical activity. But, Jütte wisely notes, premodern Jews were greatly attracted to alchemy for many reasons, among them that it served as a “language of mediation” in early modern Europe (35, 164). Jütte's mission is praiseworthy: to acknowledge and rehabilitate facets of the historical Jewish experience that have been expunged from the record.
Jütte excels in one final area. He identifies and undermines the fallacy according to which Jews' activities are notable only when they contribute to the forward march of European progress. He remarks “the Christian idea of a New Science … cannot be the only yardstick for interpreting all manifestations of Jewish activity in natural science” (231–2). Indeed. Jewish professors of secrets who lived in an age of secrecy deserve a fair hearing, too.
