Menasseh ben Israel’s Thesouro dos Dinim: Reeducating the New Jews

Abstract

Menasseh ben Israel, one of the Amsterdam Jewish community’s most prominent seventeenth-century members, was a prolific author who published many books on a wide variety of subjects and in many different languages. The present article presents a comprehensive analysis of his halakhic manual Thesouro dos Dinim, written in Portuguese. Since this manual was inspired by other halakhic texts, modern scholarship has treated it as one of his less original works and very few studies make any reference to it. However, a systematic investigation of this text provides important insight into his intellectual world, including the religious and cultural positions he adopted, in what was a unique community, largely comprised of former Iberian conversos who returned to normative Judaism in the western Sephardic Diaspora. This study places the Thesouro dos Dinim in its particular historical context and elucidates various aspects of its didactic character. In contrast to its sources, and in particular to the Shulḥan ‘Arukh, Menasseh ben Israel’s manual facilitated the education of the community’s new members by including not only legal details but also additional explanations of the law’s motives, origins, and connections to both the biblical and the rabbinic traditions.