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Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation

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  • Subtitle:  Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam
  • Author:  Miriam Bodian
  • Publisher:  Indiana University Press, 1999 – 219 pp.
  • LOC Permalink:  http://lccn.loc.gov/96048373
  • Availability:  in print – see publisher's website

Review

This book is a provocative attempt at reconstructing the identity politics of Western Sephardim, who understood themselves as comprising a special "Portuguese Nation."  Using seventeenth century Amsterdam as a case study, Bodian investigates how the operation of this important Sephardic center reveals Portuguese Jewish patterns of thought about themselves, their Ashkenazic coreligionists, and their brothers still living as conversos under Catholic suzerainty.

At once a communal history and an attempt to describe Sephardic consciousness, Bodian's contribution is valuable in two overlapping ways.  Readers looking for an engaging account of how Sephardim came to settle in Amsterdam and forge an international hub of Jewish life ex nihilo will find it here, including a critical examination of common myths about early Dutch reactions to the newcomers.  Simultaneously, those seeking to understand Western Sephardic worldviews and cultural assumptions will be treated to a sustained, concrete discussion of these themes at a level of detail that is unsurpassed in many other works on the subject.



Contents

Introduction
    1
Early Years in Amsterdam
  25
Working out a Modus Vivendi
  53
Iberian Memory and its Perpetuation
  76
The Rejudaizing of "the Nation"
  96
Maintaining "the Nation" in Exile
132
Conclusion
152
Personalia and abbreviations
163
Notes
169
Bibliography
203
Index
213