The Expulsion of the Jews: 1492 and After.

Gow, Andrew Colin

The heterogeneous papers published in this volume were read at the conference "The Expulsion of the Jews: 1492 and After," held at the University of California, Davis, on 1-4 April, 1991. That the editors' choice of articles does not fit the conference (and volume) title very well is no disaster: some of the best papers have little or nothing to do with the expulsion of Spanish Jewry in 1492. The result is an unusually broad collection that is European in scope.

This volume is part of a veritable flood of articles and books that accompanied the five-hundredth anniversary, in 1992, of the expulsion of Spanish Jewry. An unfortunate corollary of the attention lavished upon the end of Spanish - and eventually all Iberian - Jewry is the relative dearth of scholarship, especially in English, on the expulsions of Jews from cities and territories in the Holy Roman Empire - a chapter in Jewish and European history which is, arguably, just as important as the events of 1492 and after.

The editors' selection, therefore, of one paper on Jews in the Empire, by R. Po-Chia Hsia, is a step in the right direction. However, Hsia's paper ("Christian Ethnographies of Jews in Early Modern Germany") addresses cultural and ideological issues without touching on the underlying reality of expulsions. The raw, and often overlooked, fact that the majority of German Jews were expelled from German towns and territories between 1400 and 1600 does not figure in Hsia's treatment of Christian views and constructions of Jewish identity. The radically imbalanced power relationship he uncovers in the hostile ethnographic description of Jews by Christians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is, surely, the result of more than just traditional antisemitism.

John Edwards defies logic, common sense and statistical method in his attempt to recover the "lost women" not reflected in figures of accusations brought to the Inquisition in Soria between 1486 and 1502. Reading "'against the grain' of the crude figures" by arbitrarily multiplying by three the number of women accused of Judaizing and related heresies, Edwards attempts to rescue "female religiosity" from undeserved oblivion. However praiseworthy, even necessary, one may find the effort to uncover women's largely silenced experience in the medieval and early modern periods, applying arbitrary multipliers for the purpose of ex post facto quota-filling distorts the sources. Their admitted distortions of past reality cannot be bent straight, in any reliable way, by twisting and, ultimately, falsifying them.

Many of these papers tell fascinating tales. Renee Levine Melammed's superb recounting and analysis of a Castilian mid-wife's encounters with the Inquisition, Robert Garfield's unearthing of the vanished (or perhaps merely diluted?) Jewish community of Sao Tome Island, and Jerome Friedman's learned and wide-ranging study of the "religious alternatives" available to New Christians (which were illusory, in light of the racial antisemitism that replaced religious and ethnic antipathy) are great reading. That Friedman has made similar arguments elsewhere takes away none of the force of his analysis.

Other papers make important contributions to the literature on specific topics. James Force seeks to ground Newton's science in his strict, quasi-Judaic monotheism. Stephen Burnett opens up the controlled and contested world of Jewish printing in the Empire using the case of Hanau, one of only three centers of Jewish printing in the Empire between 1555 and 1650. Howard Adelman's comparative examination of customs and practice surrounding levirate marriage among Ashkenazic and Sephardic communities is not, as the topic might suggest, an arid study in religious law, but a careful analysis of Jewish marriage law in its social, economic, religious and personal contexts. Starting from Renaissance medal portraits ("graven images"!) of a number of wealthy and influential Jews, Raymond Waddington develops a vigorous and detailed reconstruction of their personal, dynastic and - most centrally - their religious identity. Zenon Gulden and Waldemar Kowalski furnish the only paper to explore the area most affected, after Iberia, by "1492 and after": boom-town sixteenth-century Poland. Their nuanced analysis (furnished with a useful map) of the border between tolerance and abomination suits both the volume and the geographic area.

However, there are some odd birds. Susanna Akerman's "The Gothic Kabbala" is a bricolage of commentary and recondite knowledge about cabbalistic, Rosicrucian and other apocalyptic and mystical directions, mainly in Scandinavia in the seventeenth century: a long way from 1492, or even from its aftermath. Arthur Williamson's weird but wonderful "A Pil for Pork-Eaters: Ethnic Identity, Apocalyptic Promise and the Strange Creation of the Judeo-Scots" is similarly removed from the aftermath of 1492, apart from a passing reference to Menasseh Ben-Israel and the campaign to readmit Jews to England in the 1640s. Williamson's article, which deserves more prominent billing, perhaps in a volume on the construction of ethnic identity - Hobsbawm and Ranger's The Invention of Tradition comes to mind - is original, lucid and entertaining. Scottish appropriation of Jewish customs and mentalities (e.g., aversion to pork, the national covenant with God) was a core strategy in the struggle to forge and maintain a national identity. Altogether, this is a useful volume that will be of value both in undergraduate teaching and to the specialist.

ANDREW COLIN GOW University of Alberta