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The Geography of Conscience: A Seventeenth-Century Atlantic Jew and the Inquisition
The Journal of Modern History ( IF 0.833 ) Pub Date : 2017-06-01 , DOI: 10.1086/691522
Miriam Bodian

Although a discourse of “conscience”was ubiquitous in late medieval and early modern Europe, Jews largely ignored it. This was not a historical accident. The Jews of premodern Europe assimilated many elements of the societies in which they lived, linguistically, intellectually, and aesthetically. The process of acculturation, however, was always selective. This study deals with a change in Jewish receptiveness to the European discourse of “conscience”—a change that resulted from shifts in that discourse, on the one hand, and from a new mental conditioning and political awareness among Jews of one particular group, on the other. If this topic has been unexplored, it is probably because the protean conversation about conscience in early modern Europe had little to do with Jews (except, occasionally, in the abstract), while scholars have tended to begin the study of the Jews’ entry into the modern world with the late eighteenth century, when passions around the demands and claims of conscience had subsided, overtaken by a philosophical discourse of natural rights. Among scholars of Jewish history, Moses Mendelssohn is usually credited with making the first serious effort, in his 1783 work Jerusalem, to reconcile Jewish tradition with a principle of the inviolability of conscience—a task whose difficulty he recognized. Yet long before Mendelssohn, one population of European Jews—the Portuguese Jews of the Atlantic world—were coming to recognize the extraordinary value this concept possessed for articulating a defensive argument against persecution and religious coercion. It is true that scholars have recognized seventeenth-century Portuguese Jews as harbingers of modernity in the Jewish world, often focusing on the ideas of the few who openly challenged rabbinic authority. But there has been little recognition that even among Portuguese Jews who conformed to communal norms, tensions existed between traditional Jewish teaching and early Enlightenment ideas about freedom of conscience. Scholarly literature has not re-

中文翻译:

良心地理学:一个 17 世纪的大西洋犹太人和宗教裁判所

尽管“良心”的话语在中世纪晚期和现代早期的欧洲无处不在,但犹太人在很大程度上忽略了它。这不是历史事故。前现代欧洲的犹太人在语言、智力和审美上同化了他们所生活的社会的许多元素。然而,文化适应的过程总是有选择性的。这项研究涉及犹太人对欧洲“良心”话语的接受程度的变化——这一变化一方面源于该话语的转变,另一方面源于某一特定群体的犹太人新的心理条件和政治意识。另一个。如果这个话题没有被探索过,那可能是因为早期现代欧洲关于良心的多变的谈话与犹太人几乎没有关系(除了偶尔抽象的),而学者们倾向于从 18 世纪后期开始研究犹太人进入现代世界,当时围绕良心的要求和要求的热情已经消退,被自然权利的哲学话语所取代。在犹太历史学者中,通常认为摩西·门德尔松在他 1783 年的著作《耶路撒冷》中做出了第一次认真的努力,以协调犹太传统与良心不可侵犯的原则——他承认这项任务的困难。然而,早在门德尔松之前,一群欧洲犹太人——大西洋世界的葡萄牙犹太人——就开始认识到这一概念在阐明反对迫害和宗教胁迫的防御性论据方面具有非凡的价值。的确,学者们承认 17 世纪的葡萄牙犹太人是犹太世界现代性的先驱,他们经常关注少数公开挑战拉比权威的人的想法。但是几乎没有人认识到,即使在遵守公共规范的葡萄牙犹太人中,传统的犹太教义与早期启蒙运动关于良心自由的思想之间也存在紧张关系。学术文献没有重
更新日期:2017-06-01
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