Religious co-production in the early modern western Sephardic diaspora: The case of Joseph López’s 'El Mantenedor'

• In Event: Sephardic & European Jewry & Their Legacies

Abstract

This talk will examine the phenomenon of Jewish-Christian religious co-production in ‘El Mantenedor’ (‘The Maintainer’), a lengthy polemical work in Spanish authored between 1708 and 1737 by Joseph López, a member of Amsterdam's (Sephardic) Portuguese community. ‘El Mantenedor’ extensively critiques atheism, deism, and Epicureanism – philosophies that López regarded as among the most pernicious and formidable adversaries ever confronted by Judaism. Yet, as will be shown, despite being authored by a normative Jew for a normative Jewish audience, much of ‘El Mantenedor’ relies on substantial but uncredited appropriations of Christian sources, in particular theological works composed in Inquisitional Iberia. In a remarkable move, López sought to Judaize these sources by purging them of any traces of Christianity, thereby integrating them into a grand Jewish polemic against rationalist unbelief, religious skepticism, and other heterodox ideas that had long been endemic to the Western Sephardic diaspora – ideas that were accentuated by the crisis of legitimation produced by Spinoza’s thought, and more generally, by the movement that would come to be called ‘the Enlightenment.’ In light of what he saw as an unprecedented intellectual attack on normative Judaism, López considered it his duty to heed the rabbinic admonition to ‘know how to respond to the Epicurean [sic]’; in doing so, he employed the best intellectual resources at his disposal, even if, at times, it meant replicating Aquinas’ arguments as interpreted by Catholic theologians from Spain’s Golden Age and passing them off as his own. López’s ‘El Mantenedor’ thus provides us with a notable case of religious co-production that sheds light on the crucial, yet understudied, influence of Christian thought on the Sephardic communities founded by former Iberian Conversos in early modern Western Europe.

Author

• Benny Bar-Lavi, Providence College