Bart Wallet (ed.)

The Early Modern Rabbis of Amsterdam: Urban Dynamics, Communal Tensions, and Diasporic Entanglement

Studia Rosenthaliana. Volume 2025, 51-1/2

In the early modern period Amsterdam developed into the largest Jewish urban centre in Europe. Its rabbis had to navigate the intersections of urban dynamics, communal tensions, and diasporic entanglements. This book considers the individuals who made up the rabbinate of Amsterdam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the particular challenges (and successes) they had in building and preserving Jewish communities in the Dutch Republic. These rabbis faced formidable new challenges to their authority, unlike what their medieval predecessors encountered. Among these were building a religiously, intellectually, socially, and economically thriving community on the banks of the Amstel while integrating immigrants from the Iberian Peninsula and Central and Eastern Europe; the reintegration of former conversos into normative Judaism; the greater separation of administrative and religious leadership, with lay leaders taking over communal responsibilities and prerogatives formerly held by rabbis; new organization of rabbinic training; and changes in titles. The early modern rabbi was thus quite distinct not only from his medieval predecessors, but also from his modern successors, and Amsterdam was one site where the institution of the rabbinate found its rearticulation.

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Editor

Bart Wallet

Bart Wallet is professor of early modern and modern Jewish history at the University of Amsterdam. He is co-editor-in-chief of Studia Rosenthaliana: Journal of the History, Culture and Heritage of the Jews in the Netherlands and editor of the European Journal of Jewish Studies.

Title: The Early Modern Rabbis of Amsterdam: Urban Dynamics, Communal Tensions, and Diasporic Entanglement
Subtitle: Studia Rosenthaliana. Volume 2025, 51-1/2
Editor: Bart Wallet
Price: € 29,99
ISBN: 9789048576029
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 192
Language: English
Publication date: 30 - 06 - 2026
Dimensions: 15.6 x 23.4 cm
Categories: History; Jewish Studies; Religion and Theology
Discipline: Geschiedenis

Table of Contents

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1. Introduction to the special issue: The Early Modern Rabbis of Amsterdam: Urban Dynamics, Communal Tensions, and Diasporic Entanglements - Bart Wallet
2. Christian Hebraism and Jewish Responses. A Comparison between Menasseh ben Israel, Saul Levi Morteira, Isaac Aboab da Fonseca, and Raphael Moshe de Aguilar - Sina Rauschenbach
3. Menasseh ben Israel (and Maimonides) on Human Freedom -Steven Nadler
4. Isaac Aboab da Fonseca: Leadership between the Spinozist and Sabbatian Storms - Moisés Orfali
5. The Committee of Six: What a Little-Known Regulation Reveals about Rabbinic Opposition to Communal Authority - Anne O. Albert
6. Creating an Urban Rabbinate: The Dynamics of the Early Rabbinate of the Ashkenazi Community in Amsterdam - Bart Wallet
7. Western Sephardic Prayer Books and an Evolving Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam - David Sclar
8. ‘No Person Shall Act Against the Resolutions of the Ma’amad.’ Dynamics of Printing in the Amsterdam Sephardic Congregation in the Seventeenth Century - Heide Warncke
9. Shadows of Support. Women and Religious Leadership of the Portuguese Jewish Community in Early Modern Amsterdam - Tirtsah Levie Bernfeld
10. Hakham Solomon Ayllon: Amsterdam’s Sabbatean Rabbi, 1700-1728 - Matt Goldish
Book reviews:
11. Mirjam Knotter, Gary Schwartz, eds. Rembrandt Seen Through Jewish Eyes: The Artist’s Meaning to Jews from His Time to Ours - Thijs Weststeijn
12. Ian Buruma, Spinoza. Freedom’s Messiah - Jonathan Israel