Clandestine Classics: Isaac Orobio and the Polemical Genre among the Dutch Sephardim

Studies on the intellectual history of the Portuguese Jews in seventeenth-century Amsterdam sometimes compare the gentleness and open-mindedness of Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel (1604– 1657) with the militantly polemical spirit that distinguished Doctor Isaac Orobio (c. 1617– 1687) in order to juxtapose welcoming and reactionary Jewish attitudes towards modernity. Ralph Melnick unfolded a progressive narrative in which the harsh attacks upon Christianity that can be found at the beginning of the century in the Tratado of Dr. Elijah Montalto (1567– 1616) and later in the works of his disciple Rabbi Saul Levi Mortera (1596– 1660) “were slowly being replaced by a new approach” built on tolerance and mutual understanding, one exemplified by Ben Israel’s Conciliador in 1632.1 The Whiggish narrative of gradual “Jewish-Christian rapprochement” is edifying but chronologically unconvincing: both Mortera, who wrote most of his polemical works after Ben Israel, and Orobio, who only arrived in Amsterdam five years after the latter’s death, expressed themselves once again in the trigger-happy polemical style that Amsterdam Jews had allegedly forsaken. The progress narrative account is even less convincing due to the fact that the peak of Montalto’s literary success coincided with Orobio’s at the turn of the eighteenth century, when their clandestine opera omnia were manually copied by the dozens among the Amsterdam Jews. Shall we rather say, then, that the intellectual history of Jewish Amsterdam is permanently torn between the poles of Manassean brotherhood and Orobian xenophobia? This is what Jesué Pinharanda Gomes tried to suggest in a chapter of his History of Portuguese Philosophy, which was published in 2001. He classified Orobio in the school of “Zionist integralism” (integralismo sionista) and painted Amsterdam Jewish thought in black-and-white colours: “Menasseh and Orobio adhere to contrasting theories: an obstinate anti-Christian ideology on the side of Orobio, and a manifest sense of openness on the side of Menasseh, embracing the unity of Jewish heritage with all its differences, a heritage of which even the Church is considered to be a part.”2

This paper will question this binary scheme of exclusivism and tolerance by pointing to as imple fact that both Melnick and Pinharanda Gomess eem to have overlooked: the authorst hey tried to classify according to as chematic ideological juxtaposition wrote in different literaryg enres.B en Israel published books that weredestinedtowin an audience among various religious communities for asubtle theological compromise, whereas Montaltoa nd Orobio authored clandestine manuscripts that wered irected to Jews alone to immunise them against missionaries and make them feel proud of their faith. In sum, whoever pits the tolerant BenI srael against the dogmatic Orobio compares apples with oranges. If the former'se xtant work belongst ot he irenic genre and the latter'st ot he polemical one, then this choice of ageneric conventionisnot necessarilydue to some inherent psychological predilection of theirauthors' personalities but may, rather,reflect the expectations of their respective audiences, if not as election of texts made by posterity.
We have indeed some interesting clues indicating that the writingsthat are transmitted under the names of both authors represent onlyaone-sided fragment of their oeuvre. In my edition of the MarrakeshDialogues,ananonymous anti-Christian work originallyw ritten in 1583, Id iscovered that BenI srael himself seems to have been responsible for one of the manuscript editions that was meantt og ivet his Renaissance dialogue al inguistic and rhetorical facelift.³ It wast hus apparentlyM enasseh ben Israel who spicedthe alreadyextremelyprovocative text with further broadsides, calling Christianity "madness" and its believers "ignoramuses."⁴ Orobio, as Yosef Kaplan has shown, participatedinafrivolous poetic academyinAmsterdam, wherehe must have entertained himself and others in al iteraryr egister quite different from the theological polemics for which he would become famous.⁵ Let us now try to approach Orobio'splace in Jewish thought from the perspective of genre theory,w hich started in 1980 with Jacques Derrida'sa rticle "The Lawo f Genre"⁶ and led to the understanding of literary genres as open and historicallymoving structures that determine individual expressions while being determined by them. My reconstruction of these generic laws will considerably complicate the dogmatic phraseologyt hat Jews of different personalities and persuasions knew to use in seventeenth-century Amsterdam.

Conventions of Illegality
The genre of clandestine Hispano-Portuguese polemics against Christianityillustrated by Orobio should not have existed at all, accordingtothe principles that ruled the legal conditions of Portuguese Jews in Protestant seaports. The reception of these uncommon immigrantsa roused deepf ears that "blasphemy" and overt expressions of disbelief wereb eing broughti nto the Christian commonwealth. When the Hamburg Senate solicited opinions from three Lutheran faculties on the reception of Jews in 1611, the consultedt heologians called the magistrate to prohibit the public exercise of the Jewish religion in order to avoid complicity in their blasphemous utterances against Christ.⁷ The contracts between the Senate and the Jews in 1612 and 1617 followed this recommendation and included the prohibition against offending the dominant religion "in words or deeds."⁸ In Amsterdam,the eminent jurist Hugo Grotius drafted in 1615 as imilar charter that threatened with heavy fines anyp ossessoro fb ooksc ontaining "words of blasphemya nd defamation."⁹ But the Amsterdam municipality solvedt he problem in a different way. It did not ratify aformal charter that would have called for the public prosecution of secret Jewish blasphemers. In 1616,i tmade aconfidential agreement with the mahamad,i.e.the executive board of the local Sephardic community,holding said board responsible for restraining their fellow Jews from threetransgressions that risked subverting existing power hierarchies:first,receiving proselytes; second, speakingo rw riting (spreken ofte schrijven)a gainst the Christian faith;¹⁰ and third, having sexual relations with Christian women.
While Jewish proselytismr emained exceptional,¹¹ the twoo ther transgressions, polemics and sex, werem anifestlyt oo pleasant to be avoided. Against the prohibition of their own communal authorities, PortugueseJ ews of the seventeenth century produced an astonishingamount of texts that exalted their faith over that of the majority;Isaac Orobio wasthe championofthis literaryeffort.Under these circumstan- Clandestine Classics ces,a nti-Christian writing was not an expression of self-indulgent orthodoxy but a daring venture that exposed its author to incalculable risk. In 1677,after the Calvinist synod of Dordrecht decided to promote "friendlyc onversations" with learned Jews, the Amsterdam Jewish community board tried to keep its members from anyp articipation in such discussions, fearing they would stir up hate against the Jewish community in the Netherlands and might jeopardiseits very existence.¹² How suspicious the Jewish community authorities werei nt his respect is shown by Orobio when in 1665, he authored amanuscript against the esoteric thought of the medieval Franciscan friar Raymundus Lull. Since the Jewishcommunity board would not give him the permission to have this text printedi nA msterdam, he senti tt oAntwerp, wheret he Jesuits appreciatedit-even the Society of Jesus had greater sympathy for Jewish polemicst han the mahamad!¹³ This cautious self-censorship contributed to the distinct development of aspecific genre in earlym odern book history.H ispano-Portuguese texts attacking Christian dogma needed to be copied by hand;they had to be bound in separate volumes,hidden in private homes, circulated confidentiallyasaseparate bodyofliterary production, and consumed under peculiarcircumstances. We know from inscriptions on the coverleavesh ow these booksw erep roduced and circulated. Possessorsw ould lend them to other community members and let the borrower make acopyfor themselves, so that the tasks of scribe and reader mergedi no ne person. When readingt he note by which aredactor introduced his copyofacollection of Montalto'sworks: "in case youf ind anye rrors in my writing,dear reader and friend, Ih ope that youwill judiciouslycorrect them when youcopythis book,"¹⁴ one is remindedoftoday'sInternet communities whose members are simultaneouslyp roducers and consumers of their texts.A tone point in his Divine Warnings,Orobio cuts short aprolific argument due to his compassion for his readers,w ho had to be scribes at the same time: "this would need ab ig volume, and since it cannot be printed, it would be extremelyl aborious to make copies of it by the pen."¹⁵ Ac landestine writer of 1725,A braham Gómez Silveyra( 1656 -1741), alluded jokingly to the scribal chores his audience had to takeu pon themselves: "Look, Iw ould desire that these my manuscript books werei mprinted in the heart of the readers,s ot hat whoever wants to possess them would not have to take the painso fc opyingt hem."¹⁶ On the lastp ageo fa n- Quoted by Kaplan,From Christianity to Judaism,273: "pois são tão perniciosas edanosas anossa conservação fazendonos odiar por ellas das gentesa donde abitamos."  Meijer, "Remonstratie," 100;K aplan, From Christianity to Judaism,186 -187.  Ets Haim ms. 48 B3 ,p reface: "Si achareis algums erros no meu escrever,e spero,a m o lector,o s emmendaras con teu bon discurso em copiar este livro."  Orobio, Prevenciones divinas,part II, ch. 4, see Ets Haim ms. 48 D6 ,f ol. 125r,quoted by Kaplan, FromChristianity to Judaism,245: "… lo contrario ped[ir]ía un grande volumen, que no pudiendo ser impreso, sería muy diffisil reduzirlo ac opias por la pluma."  Ets Haim ms.48A22,fol. 1r: "Mira como estos mis librosManuscritos,los deseo en el corazón de los lectores impresos,p ara que no se molestee nt rasladar quien los quisieret ener." other volume of Montalto'sworks,there is anote thatshows how the text circulated in the Dutch Antilles: "The owner of this book herewith makes the vowt hat he will never lend it to anyk ind of person who will not first give him as ufficient pawn for the book.Curaçao,on1April, 1753.This book belongst oIshac Mendes de Solla and was written by Mr.J oseph Vasd aC osta."¹⁷ Mendes de Solla was wealthye nough to have his copy produced by ah ired scribe. Interestingly,h is bogeyman was not the Christian zealot who would denounce the blasphemous book,but rather the Jewish borrower who would forgett or eturn it to him.
Donors, scribes, owners, and borrowers formed ad ense medieval-style network of manuscript production and consumption. AnthonyCollins, in his Discourse on the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion of 1724,knew to report thatJewish anti-Christian treatises "go about Europe in manuscript," but he added that this borrowing and copying community was almost impenetrable for Christians. Concerning Rabbi Saul Levi Mortera's Providencia,h ew rites: [T]his workofhis is esteem'dbythe Jews to be the shrewdestbook they have against Christianity.They areforbid, under pain of excommunication, to lend it to anyChristian,for fear of drawing astorm upon themselvesfor producing such strongobjections against the Christian Religion. Wherefore no copies aret ob ep rocur'do fi tb ut by the greatest accidents.¹⁸ The manuscripts circulated almost exclusively in aJ ewishr eadership, but the high prices that Christians werereadyt opay for them made them lucrativemerchandise, and it seems that Amsterdam Jews did sometimes copy certain texts for the Gentile market.¹⁹ This clandestine library thus exerted an enduringf ascination on various groups:o ne arlym odern Jewishr eaders,o nc ontemporary Protestants who feared blasphemy, on free-thinkers of the radical enlightenment, on nineteenth-century bibliophiles, and, finally,o nh istorians like me, who started some thirty years agot o track down these texts in various libraries.

Historya nd Inventoryo ft he Genre
In 1988, Miguel Benítez published an inventory of 130 clandestine French manuscript works against Christianityt hat circulated, some of them in ah ost of copies,d uring Clandestine Classics the earlyE nlightenment period.²⁰ The same task is still to be accomplished for the Sephardic clandestiniana in European languages. Accordingt op rovisional results of my own research, there are todaya pproximately2 00 handwritten volumes totalling about seventy-five different texts by three dozen authors. More than three-quarters of the total are written in the Spanish language, most of the others in Portuguese, besides some exceptional pieces in Latin, Italian and Dutch. Geographically, nearly all of the texts werecomposed and copied in the Netherlands, with onlyafew items from Italy, France, Hamburg, or the Dutch possessions overseas. Today, the largest collection is thatofEts Haim in Amsterdam, with 64 volumes,²¹ and the second largest is at the State and University Library in Hamburg,with 17 volumes.²² There are five libraries thatp ossess between ten and fifteen volumes each, namelyt he Royal Library of TheH ague (14), the British Library in London and the Bodleian Library in Oxford (13 each), the University Library of Amsterdam (12), and the JewishT heological Seminary in New York (10). Smaller collections, manyo ft hem private, exist all over the world.
Chronologically, the first extant anti-Christian text written by aPortuguese Jewis the anonymous MarrakeshDialogues of 1583²³ and the last is Abraham GómezSilveyra's Silveyradas,t he seventh and last volume of which wasc omposed in 1738.²⁴ We possess, however,little direct testimonyfrom the first decades of the genre. The oldest dated manuscript known to me, now in possession of the Library Companyo f Philadelphia, is from 1652.²⁵ Dated colophons became more frequent when Iehuda Machabeu, aprofessional scribe, producedaseries of copies in 1662. Themost recent dated volume is from 1759.²⁶ Most of the extant copies wereproduced duringthe years 1680 -1715,thatis, the years of the "crisis of European consciousness," in the terms of Paul Hazard,²⁷ or the  Miguel Benítez, "Matériaux pour un inventaired es manuscrits philosophiques clandestins des XVII e et XVIII e siècles," Rivista di storia della Filosofia 43 (1988), 501-531. See also Benítez,L af ace cachée des Lumières: Recherches sur les manuscrits clandestinsd el ' âgec lassique (Paris: Universitas, 1996). "radical enlightenment," in the terms of Margaret Jacob and Jonathan Israel.²⁸ As we have alreadyseen, Jewish writing against Christianityw as interconnected in various ways with the critical interests of the time. The two clandestine literatures, one produced by Gentiles in French or Latin, the other by Jews in Iberian languages, present not onlyaparallel chronology,but also parallel features.J ewish anti-Christian writing,however,differs from its non-Jewishcounterpart insofar as it remains concerned with authorship and literaryglory,whereas Gentile free-thinkers consumed their disbelievingdiscourse in ahost of anonymous or pseudonymous pamphlets without developing the samet rend towards canonicity.
If we review the Jewisha uthors who had the most lasting success (countingt he extant manuscript volumes of theirworks), four of them clearlystand out.The most popularw riterw as our Isaac Orobio, of whom therea re seventy-seven extant volumes (sixty of which are in Spanish or Portuguese²⁹ and seventeen of which are in French translations). Almost equal to him in literary successwas Saul Levi Mortera, whose polemical works are conserved in sixty-one volumes.³⁰ The third place is due to Abraham Gómez Silveyra, whose writings are attested now in twenty-five folio volumes. With Elijah Montalto, author of eighteen extant volumes,³¹ these writers form a canonicalq uartet,a ll based in Amsterdam (except Montalto, who never visited the city but was buried there).
Various other works enjoyedas lightlym orel imited circulation; in these cases, however,the personality of the author was not as clearlypresent in the minds of the readers.A ne xample of this category is the MarrakeshD ialogues,which weret ransmitted in ten copies,a ll of them anonymous.³² The author decided not to entrust his name to the manuscript³³ and onlyb yr esearch into the text'sh istorical origins did Ih ypotheticallyi dentify him as one Estêvão Dias from Tavira.³⁴ Atreatise transmitted in eight manuscriptsu nder various titles had the opposite fate: signed by Isaac Naar (1631-after 1686) in its earlier copies,l aterc opyists anonymisedt his text.³⁵ Ac urious work titled Fortress of Judaism (Fortalezza dell'ebraismo), written in as trongly HispanicisedI talian by Abraham Guer de Cordoba, is known in seven manuscripts in the original languageand threeinaHebrew translation. Herea gain, onlyrecent research has shed light on the possiblebiographyofthe author,who may have been identical with Lorenzo Escudero, aproselyteofmorisco ancestry who had been an actor on the Spanish stage.³⁶ Rabbi Isaac Athias' translation of aH ebrew work, Strengthening of the Faith,b yI saac Troki, aL ithuanian Karaite scholar about whom the translator himself knew very little,³⁷ and ad ialogue set in Livorno, Danielillo,o rA nswerst ot he Christians,whose author remains unknown to this day, exist in four copies.³⁸ Athird group of texts are preserved onlyinsingle copies and apparentlyfailed to reach al argera udience.S omeo ft hem werea uthored by well-known scholars such as Rabbi Mosseh Refael d'Aguilar,whose polemicalw ritingsa re, however,o nlye xtant in his personal papers.³⁹ Finally, we know the titles of about tenw orks of which no copy survives. This loss is regrettable for the voluminous Propugnaculum Judaismi that the jurist Judah Lumbroso alias António Dias Pinto wrotei nL atin against Hugo Grotius' Trutho ft he ChristianR eligion,⁴⁰ and even more so for the Religious Theologian Opposing the Political Theologian (Theologo religioso contraoTheologo politico)that Jacob de Andrade Velosinhocomposed in Portuguese against Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise.⁴¹ Although the reception of anti-Christian literature among the Sephardim covered al arge rangeo fl iterary products, readers' attention concentrated on the four most reputed authors-Montalto, Mortera,O robio and Gómez Silveyra, in chronological order-whose peculiarh istory and style made them the object of ac elebration of genius not much different from the cult of vernacular literaryclassics duringthe baroque age. Daniel de Barrios stated that Montalto "wrotes om uch in defense of the Most HolyL aw that one could print not unimportant volumes from it; but whoever possesses them in manuscript appreciates them more than precious stones."⁴² In 1670,a na nonymous editor assembled am anuscript edition of Montalto'sc ollected writingsf rom three different clandestine texts in their original Portuguese.⁴³ One copy of this edition, now owned by the Hamburg State Library,i mitates the layout of ap rintede dition.⁴⁴ Af ew years later,i n1 679, Joseph and Semuel Israel Pereira brought togethert he threem ajor anti-Christian works of Isaac Orobio into am anuscript edition that became fundamental⁴⁵ and that is stilld ocumented in fourteen copies.Both of these "collected works" editions contain preliminary poems praising the author,a sw as customary in printed booksa tt he time.
From 1704,A braham Machorro produced am ore comprehensive edition of Orobio'sw ritings; al ater edition by DanielL opes Quiros, made in 1712,u ndertakesa n effort to bring together all the known texts by the author.Both editions are preserved in various manuscript copies,s ome of them containingdecorative drawingsa nd ornaments, not to mention the sumptuous leather bindinga nd gilding.T wo volumes even boast fanciful portraits of Orobio in watercolour paintingst hat imitate engravings.⁴⁶ Around 1725,A braham Gómez Silveyrao rganised as even-volume edition of his works under the title Silveyradas,t rying to become ac lassic of the clandestine genre by his ownefforts. He wassuccessful insofar as he inspired readers to produce impressively calligraphed copies of the entire multi-volume cycle. One deliciously decorated specimen at Yeshiva University has recentlyb een entirely digitised.⁴⁷ The material layout of the books itself bespeaks an attitude of admiration and veneration towards the authors who sometimes, as in Orobio'scase, underwent acanonisation process duringt heirl ifetime.

Internal Purposes
As anti-Christian polemics seem to have been ar elatively popularg enre among the Sephardim of the late seventeenth century,wes hould ask for the culturalm otivation, the social context,a nd the intellectual energy thatf uelled it.Wec annot just satisfy ourselvesw ith the reference to some dogmatic fury thath ad allegedlyseized Jews in general or Orobio in particular. What,then, motivated dozens of authors and readers to busy themselvesw ith writing,m anuallyc opyinga nd readingl ong,c landestine textst hat discussed exegetic detail in militant language? Yosef Kaplan gave three answers to these questions.⁴⁸ The founders of the Portuguese communities had suffered under the Inquisition and therefored eveloped an obsessive hostility towards their former religion. They had livedi na na tmosphere of secrecyf or generations and werei nn eed of defining clear doctrinal boundaries. Finally, once they had reachedt he freei ntellectual climate of the Netherlands, religious pluralism created doctrinal challenges inside and outside the Jewish community thatasked for adefence of one'sown religious persuasions. Herman Salomon, in contrast,supposed that Mortera also had an agenda of outreach; he directed himself directlytoChristian dissidents who had rejected the dogma of the Trinityand whom he hopedt oi nducet oa no bservanceo ft he Noahite Laws accordingt or abbinic Judaism.⁴⁹ Considering the simultaneous presenceofinternal and external addressees in these clandestine works,l et us now inquire whether producers and consumers werep art of an actual cross-religious intellectual dialogue or whether theirc ontroversiala ctivity was merelyap retext for an inward-lookings tabilisation of their own religious culture.
The prefaces of the clandestine works stronglys upport the latter alternative. They never address aC hristian adversary directlyb ut show that the author'si maginary audience is among Jews, or at least among NewChristian seekers for truth. Estêvão Dias, the author of the MarrakeshD ialogues,writesi nh is preface: "This is a pleasant reading for all those who strive for learning,k nowledge of the truth and the salvation of their souls. MayOur Lordshow them the truth!"⁵⁰ Isaac Athias titles his translation of the Hebrew Ḥizzuk Emunah: "Fortification of the faith ...the pillar that fortifies the afflicted hearts of the house of Israel in its exile, showing them the eternal salvation for which they hope,a sw ella st he darkness in which their adversaries live."⁵¹ What these texts intended to achievew as not as uccessful confrontation with Christianity. Rather,t hese textss ought to bolster the reader'ss elf-esteem through setting in motion amental process that was called by their authors the "fortification of the faith," ḥizzuk emunah in Troki'sHebrew.Mortera declares at the end of his list of 179o bjections against the New Testament: Ihaveundertaken all this workasawarningfor those of my nation whowere forcedtoabandon their ancestral law, which is confessed as divine in the entireworld, and whoconfess the Gospel under the cruel scepteroft he Inquisition, so that they maybetterk now how to distinguish between the truth and light they have abandoned and the things they werem ade to confess by force.⁵²  Kaplan, From Christianity to Judaism,3 62.  Salomon, Mortera,l xxxiv-lxxxv.  Wilke, TheM arrakeshD ialogues,2 03.  Ets Haim ms. 48 D5 ,t itle page;r eproduction in Weiser and Kaplan, Treasures,77.  Ets Haim ms.48C20,fol. 43v: "todo este trabajo emprendí para advertimientodeaquellosque de mi nación fueronf orzados ad ejar la ley de sus padresc onfesada por divina por todo el mundo y profesar la del Evangelio debajol ac ruel vara de la Inquisición, para que sepan mejor distingüir entrel av erdad yl uz que dejaron al oq ue le hicieron recibir forzadamente." The author of the Fortress of Judaism writesquite similarly: "Ihaveonlyw rittenthis in order to give consolation to our brethren, the dispersed anussim [forced apostates], who in many occasions must hearthe learned and sophistical reasons of our adversaries, so that they mayo pen theire yes, which the learned men of Edom try to obfuscate with their illusions."⁵³ Orobio no less explicitlyjustifies the aim he pursuesin one of his texts thatw as apparentlyw ritten for readers in Antwerp or France: These chapters concerning Isaiah 53 have been written at the request of anumber of individuals livingoutside Jewry,whomo thers strive to alienatefromt he fulfilment of the holyL aw … there areamongst them some who because of their own weakness flounder in confusion, and others, because of their ignorance,are deceived. Manythere arewho are moved by much good will and zeal for the holyL aw whowish to gettoknow the true interpretation, for the sake of their own spiritual peaceo fm ind and in order to have at their hand ar ejoinder to their opponents.⁵⁴ Melnick believed the polemicists' inflexible insistenceontheir religious truth to be a mark of "conservative" inadaption to Amsterdam'sp eaceful pluralistic society.⁵⁵ It seems to me that the exact oppositei st rue. In an urban society whereP ortuguese Jews, or "port Jews" in general, did not have al anguage, costume, and folklore of their own, community differencew as affirmed through doctrinal persuasions and symbolic self-fashioning,j ust as this was generallyt he casei nt he earlym odern trends towards confessionalisation. In the Netherlands, the polemics between Protestants and Catholics and between Gomarists and Arminians were inevitablyh andled as perpetual zero-sum conflicts in which sharplyp olemicalm utual condemnations could coexist with peaceful quotidian relations and even cooperationi n practical matters.⁵⁶ In 1645, Mortera similarlyu ttered his conviction that no confession of Jewishf aith could remain irenic and whoever affirms Judaism must deny Christianity, but aJ ew should onlym ake his theological standpoint public in situations of legitimate defencea nd political opportunity.
If yout hink about what it means that someone confesses his Jewishness and that he observes the divine lawinaccordance with the precepts that areincluded in it,then youwill also understand that he will consider everythingt hat is not his wayasbeingopposed to the truth that he confesses … He is free of blame if he finds himself in the necessity to defend himself by revealing the flaws of his adversary;and though we will not proclaim this,sincewedonot want to offend  Parma, ms.Palat.2336, fol. 183v: "solamentel'ho fattoper consolar a' nostri frattelli gli Anussim sparsi, che sono in più occasione per ascoltarestudiateesofistiche ragioni, contrarie delli contrarije aprirli gli occhi, che gli savii d'Edom procuranno cerrar con suoi ilussioni." Cf. Obadia 1:8KJV: "Shall Inot in that day, saith the LORD,evendestroy the wise men out of Edom, and understanding out of the mount of Esau?"  Ets Haim ms. 48 D1 6, prologue, quoted by Kaplan, From Christianity to Judaism,2 51.  Melnick, From Polemics to Apologetics,2 3.  FreyaS ierhuis, TheL iteratureo ft he ArminianC ontroversy: Religion, Politics and the Stage in the Dutch Republic (Oxford: OxfordU niversity Press,2 015), 20.

Clandestine Classics
those from whom we receive support and protection, our Sages were not obligedtoobservesimilar arrangements,and it would be ignorant to accuse them of the crime of saying such things.⁵⁷ Whatever political protection the Dutch Republic offered to its various religious communities, Mortera likened the debates between them to amurderous sea battle of all against all with powder-laden warships threatening each other.⁵⁸ Paradoxically, the clandestine anti-Christian polemics werei nf act as ign of culturali ntegration into aDutch society that followed the unwritten rules of nonviolent confessional competition.

Constructed Adversaries
There is ac urious tension between the internal homiletic finality of polemical writingsa nd the external cause that is always said to have provoked them. Most of our polemicists sincerelyacknowledge theirlack of Jewish training and authority and do not want to challenget he preeminenceo fr abbinical authoritiesi ni ntellectual matters.Intheir texts they find aneed to point to particularlyvicious external attacks in order to justify whyt hey engage in theological speculation. In the prologuet oh is Prevenciones,O robio admits that it is not his "profession" to explain the Bible, but some Carmelite monks had presented to him al earned argument to which the presence of ahigh-rankingnobleman had obliged him to respond; some friends,presum-ablyJ ewish,then encouraged him to put down his answer in writing,ahuge treatise being the result.⁵⁹ Besides having awkwardf eelingsa bout their interferencei nto a department of rabbinical competence, our authors seem to be committed to an ideal of religious truce that could onlyb eb roken if it was transgressed by Christian adversaries. In aprintedtranslation of Josephus' Contra Appion that he dedicated to Isaac Orobio in 1687, Joseph Semah Arias statest his lofty ideal: "we observe our religion without slanderingt he others, unless the latter provoke us by offending ours.

If youare foolish and stupid […]Iwill write against you, […]and if youare virtuous
[…], then Iwill write in your favour and in favour of all those who wish to approach the subject without interest,p assion, or envy."⁶⁰ Forgeneric reasons,any Portuguese-Jewish polemicaltext would present itself as an urgent defensivem anoeuvre against ac oncrete Christian missionary attack. This fiction is upheld in most treatises,and Orobio,inparticular,stresses the fact that all of his religious writingse mergedi napolemical context against an opponent, and that this opponent had always been the provoking party:t his was first the case of the Jewish deist Juan de Prado, who had sent position papers from Antwerp,t hen the Catholic mystic Alonso de Zepeda, then an unnamed Huguenot pastor,t hen the mentioned group of Carmelite monks, then the crypto-Spinozist JanBredenburg, and finallyt he Remonstrant theologian Philippus van Limborch. As we have seen, the relationship between the author and the offendero ften included ap restigious third party,t he presenceo fw hich made it impossible to ignoret he provocation. The author of the MarrakeshD ialogues thus evokes at riangular argument between an Augustine monk, the Portuguese ambassador,a nd himself; Montaltow rote against aD ominican friar in Venice who wasp rotected by an unnamedg entleman. The samec onstellation still legitimisesO robio's Prevenciones;i ti se venm aintained in the French adaptation Israël vengé.⁶¹ Abraham Gómez Silveyrawroteall his many volumes against one 1699 book in which the Huguenot preacher Isaac Jacquelot challenged Jewish rabbis publicly. Gómez Silveyra, however,noted in 1725 that Jacquelot had died in Berlin several years earlier without ever knowing about the huge Jewish refutation against his book. Gómez Silveyrahad never bothered to contact the pastor whom he had chosen as his primary adversary.⁶² One is reminded of Petrarch, who directed sonnets to his beloved Laurawithout caring about whether she read them or not,a nd even continued this practice long after her death. Sephardic polemics required the fantasy of the invasive monk or pastor just as Renaissance lovep oetry needed the literary fiction of ayoungladyinthe flesh to whom the poet allegedlydirected his literaryeffusions. It is thus understandable that authorssometimeschose to fight with Christian adversaries who wereneither living nor present on the book market.I n1 645M ortera defendedt he Talmud against the long-forgottenSixtus of Sienna,anapostatewho in his Bibliotheca sancta of 1566 had censured forty-nine rabbinic propositions. Again, Mortera'sw orki so s- Respuesta de Josepho contraApion Alexandrino,trad. Joseph Semah Arias (Amsterdam:David Tartas,1687), preface: "observamos nuestra Religion sin calumniar las estrañas,s ino quando nos provocan ultrajandol an uestra. Si eres necio ye stupido […]e scrivo contra ti, […]; ys ie resv irtuoso […], escrivo para tí, yp aral os que desinteresadamentem iran las cosas sin pasion, òi nvidia."  Orobio, Israël vengé, ou Exposition naturelle des prophéties hébraïques que les chrétiens appliquent àJésus, leur prétendu Messie, traduit sur le manuscrit par Henriquez,edited by Barond'Holbach. (London: n.p., 1770)1 90.  Ets Haim ms. 48 B17, fol. 131v: "Agoralei en la Gazeta hauia muertomyhombreYshac Jacquelot,y lo senti mucho, que le queria escrevir,ylo deseava comunicar." Clandestine Classics tensiblydesigned to thwart the attack of aChristian adversary,but in reality it seeks to relievet he doubts of fellow Jews.⁶³ In the second part of his Prevenciones,Orobio refutes the Scrutinium Scripturarum of SantaMaría, atext written in 1434 thatwas out of printfor almostacentury.All these polemics of the Amsterdam Jews dependedon the literary fiction of aChristian attack thatneeded to be thrown back, regardless of its actual threat.
Moreover,the Christian missionary was not always portrayed as he might actually exist in Dutch social reality but in away that allowed the literarytriumph over him to be most impressively staged. In the Danielillo dialogue, ayoung Italian Jewish boy wins out over several monks; in another text,A braham Gómez Silveyra, as elf-fashioned aggressive polemicist, confronts the learned pastor Jacquelot with onlyaBible and his humour: Con selos EsreM idot Quantos veos acerdotes Discipulos de Nembrot convenzeré aJ acquelot yaquantos hay Jacquelotes. With just shelosh-esrehm idot [the thirteen rabbinic modes of biblical interpretation] Ic an convincewhatever pastors Imeet of Nimrod'sdisciples,evenJacquelot and whatever Jacquelots are out there.⁶⁴ In spiteo ft he theatrical aggressiveness of these texts,they are in reality more interested in aJ ewishi ntrospective than in actual controversy.What they deal with obliquelya re the doubts that werec ommon among their readership, especiallya mong Jews who wereexposed to Christian propagandaand secular culture. The fundamental task of Orobio and his fellow writers was not to make Judaism as such triumph over Christianity but to reconcile tradition with the critical thought thatu nsettled the Portuguese Jewish community inside its Dutch environment.

Polemical Subgenres
The need to evokeaconcrete scenario featuring interreligious controversy mayhelp us to understand the personalised character of the Jewish polemical genre and the peculiarf unction of Orobio and the othert hree literary glories inside it.R egarding these canonised Jewish polemicists, it should be noticed thata ll of them assumed the role of exemplary "New Jews" and cultural intermediaries. Each one in adifferent waywas able to connect the Iberian background of theirreaders with the literary traditionsi nside as well as outside Judaism.  Salomon,Mortera,fol. 236r. Let me classify these authors in three types: rabbis, doctors,and poets. Saul Levi Mortera was acommunity rabbi of the Amsterdam congregation Beth Yahacob and a bilingual writerf luent in Hebrew and Portuguese. An Ashkenazi educated in aS ephardic religious school of Venice, he left an oeuvreo fH ebrew sermons⁶⁵ and Portuguesea nti-Christian texts that weret ranslated into Spanish after his death.
Among the doctors,the clear role model was Montalto, afamed physician in Lisbon, Paris, and Florence, who chose the life of ag hetto Jewi nV enice before being recalled with great honour by the French crowni ns pite of his apostasy.⁶⁶ Bilingual in Latin and Portuguese, he used the first languagefor his medicalworkand the latter for religious polemics, which werel ater translated into Spanish. Orobio, aphysician who grew up in Spain, repeatedlyc onfesses his ignorance of Hebrew and his lack of training in rabbinic exegesis; he read Latin and had ac ommand of literary Spanish, in which he wrote all of his texts, though he was presumably fluent in Portugueseaswell. An even more hybrid intellectual personality wasIsaac Naar,anacademic physician who had also studied the Talmud in Rabbi Mortera'sa cademy. As the first community rabbi with auniversity doctorate, he symbolises the culturalsynthesis that polemical writing seems to have necessitated. Born in Hamburg, Naar expressed himself in Portuguese and alsoc ould read Latina nd Hebrew.
Turning to the poets, the cultural background of Abraham Gómez Silveyraisstill more complex. He grew up in Spainand wrote in aliterarySpanish thatwas trained by the example of siglo de oro poetry.Hethen receivedaHebrew education at an Amsterdamo rphanage, though not to an extent thatw ould have allowed him to use it actively.⁶⁷ Later,Gómez Silveyral ived for al ong time in Antwerp and became fluent in French, so that he had gained at riple competence in Hispanic, rabbinic, and Enlightenment culture.
All six of these polemicists were thus brokers between Jewish, Christian, classical, and modernl earning on the one hand and their coreligionists' specific Iberian background on the otherh and. Thel ay authorsa mong them readilya cknowledged their lack of rabbinic qualification but compensatedf or it by their prestigious training inside the earlym odern academic environment.I ns um, the Jewishp olemicists applied ah ighd egree of intellectual specialisation when they communicated internal and even clandestine concerns not in their vernacular Portuguese but in the al- Clandestine Classics legedlymore international Spanish language, and their followers created personality cults around them duet ot heir particularl iterary grandeur.
Our clandestine classics thus became social and literarytypes representing specific cultural and interculturalp rofiles with their characteristic literaryf orms. Isaac Athias and Saul Levi Mortera, the rabbis who contributed to the polemical literature, use the medieval mode of polemicalexpression: they compiled inventories of exegetic arguments in the order of the biblical text.The doctors Montaltoand Orobio wrote theological treatises with ac oherent reasoning,d ividing theirw orks into chapters and utilising sophisticated rhetoric. Fore xample, Orobio defends Judaism in his Invective Epistle in arigidlysystematic progression, proceedinginfour steps from God to Scriptural revelation, the oral lawand finally the recent legal customs and rabbinical decisions.⁶⁸ Forms from vernacular literary tradition are frequentlyemployed among the lay authorso fp olemics.The MarrakeshD ialogues,whose author was apparentlyamerchant,writes in the Renaissance fashion of the dialogue, aform that was imitated by several authors in the first half of the seventeenth century.⁶⁹ Other laymen left prose narratives of their conversion stories,a nd gifted poets such as Antonio Enríquez Gómez and Abraham Gómez Silveyrae xpressed their anti-Christian argument in refined verse of the Spanish fashion. These laymen also use an abundant dose of humour,which is absent from the writingsofthe institutionalisedscholars. Rabbis,doctors,a nd poetsw eret hree intellectual typeso ft he Amsterdam community whose specific forms of polemicising werea dapted to their cultural profile.
Theological content,s ocial setting,a nd literary form are thus closelyl inked in the polemicalgenre. This observation might help forward the discussion of the question of literary innovation and originality that the historian has to ask when dealing with anti-Christian writings,amarkedlyanachronistic chapter of manuscript circulation in the earlymodernhistory of the book. Ihavebeen exchangingviews with Professor Daniel Lasker on the point,who in an article published in 2005 observed that the earlymodern Jewish argument with Christianity remained basicallytied to medieval conventions.⁷⁰ Iagree with Lasker that the varied exegetical,philosophical, and ethical reasonings of the anti-Christian texts have their precedents in the Middle Ages. However,i nt he writingso fO robio and his contemporaries, we find typically medievale xegetic thoughts put to work in European languages and new literary frameworks for apurpose that transcends the actual needs of propagandistic self-defence. The kind of answer we might give to the originality question hinges largely on the more or less rigid distinction that we make between content,form, and purpose.
Medieval Jewish polemics against Christianity served ap ractical aim, they suggested answers to Jews who confronted Christian proselytising. There wasn ol ack of such situations in the earlym odern period either,⁷¹ but they do not seem to be the primary motivation for our polemicists, who werem ore interested in engaging in virtual debates with half-fictional adversaries. In some cases, such as Isaac Naar'sdebate with the Bordeaux canon Jérôme Lopes in the mid-seventeenth century,o rO robio'sc ontroversy with his former friend Juan de Prado,t he debate is triggered by an adversary from inside the New Christian group who mayb ee ither a Catholic believer or afree-thinker.But,asarule, the texts thataffirm Judaism against monks or pastors are no less directed at internal doubts than those that attack freethoughti nt he Nation'so wn ranks.

SituationalS cepticism
Iwishtoconclude with theobservationthatinthe seventeenthcentury,the distinction between confessional exclusivism on the one hand and at olerant communicativer ationality on the other hand wast oalargee xtents ituational.R eligious propositions arenot orthodoxorsubversive per se;their meaningneeds to be understood in the socialfunction they receiveinachangingcultural context. Thereisfirst the choice of the audience and the generic frameworkt hat determines the more irenico rc ontroversial nature of religious thought; second, therei st he individual use of this genrem ade by ana uthori na ccordance with hiss pecific training andt he intellectual leadership role that he couldf ulfil within aJ ewishc ommunity marked by intercultural transfers andb oundary-crossings.T hird, we can suspect that even duringt he quarterc entury of Orobio'sl iteraryp roduction, the direction of hisa rgumentc hangedc onstantly, successively singling out free-thinkers,Churchdogmatists, Spinozists,and rationalist Protestants as the most threateningt argets of his writing. Orobio and the entireS ephardic genrea gainst Christianity reactedt oh istoricalc hange in af ar more nuanced wayt hat thenarrativeleading from polemicstotolerance mightsuggest.Finally,the meaningof Jewish anti-Christian criticism changesagain completely with itsadoption by non-Jews. When Orobio'scommentaryonIsaiah 53 became, in French translation, thefree-think- ers' treatise La divinité de Jésus-Christ détruite,h is rewrittenJ ewisha rgumenth ad acquired af ar more subversivef orce.
The rise and impact of Judeo-Portuguesepolemical literatureisparticularlyintriguingi nalong-termp erspective.Texts that had been composed in the seventeenth centurywiththe intention of provingthe exclusivecertaintyofone'sown religion,dissipatinga ll doubts, and explodingr ival conceptions of truth, would be usedi nt he eighteenth century in ordert op romote ap luralism and rivalry of doctrinals ystems that needed to be handledw ith the instrumentso fs ceptical epoché,w hich refers to thet rifold considerationt hatt he contradicting claims betweenw orldviewsc annotb e foughto ut to the end,t hats ustained disagreementi sp roductive,a nd that peace through mutual tolerationa nd recognitioni sp referablet oastruggle ford octrinal purity.⁷² Thes ociala nd cultural impact of ad etermined theologicala rgumentd id not change onlyi nt he shift from the middle ages towardthe earlymodern period:J ewish thoughtalsovividly reactedtothe steps that wouldleadfromthe cultural worldofthe Renaissance to that of theE nlightenment, from scepticism to dogmatisma nd back.