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Power and Knowledge in the Seventeenth-Century Portuguese Rabbinate

Sun, December 14, 11:15am to 12:45pm, Hilton Baltimore, Holiday 3

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

The Jewish community of Amsterdam was constituted at the beginning of the seventeenth century by Portuguese and Spanish former-conversos returning to Judaism. The founding of a yesiba for advanced rabbinic education in such a community was a bold if not incongruous decision. Having learned something of the origins of Ets Haim in our first session, this panel is dedicated to the way that training and life in the yesiba related to issues in the larger community it served. We begin with a continuation of the discussion of the yesiba’s curriculum, focusing on the study of Latin and “non-Jewish” subjects. This was material that was seldom if ever taught within other yeshivot before the end of the nineteenth century but was important to the Amsterdam Sephardim. We then investigate the nature of the rabbinate itself in seventeenth century Amsterdam to consider what it meant to be trained, ordained, or employed as a rabbi in that milieu. Finally, we focus on a controversy that occurred in the yesiba when the brilliant but rigid North African scholar, Hakham Jacob Sasportas, encountered attitudes among the former-converso students which he considered inappropriate to the respect of teachers. The overall concept of these papers is to see the close and complex relationship between the yesiba, its rabbis, and the Amsterdam community during its first century.

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