the european renaissance and the new world 371
theocratic state he set up in Geneva in the 1540s, since Jews had been
expelled from the city in 1490. His enthusiasm for the law of the Old
Testament was to encourage among his followers and successors both a
devotion to Hebrew scholarship for understanding the Bible and an
increasing willingness to permit Jews also to turn to scripture for
enlightenment in their own way. Thus in Calvinist Holland, Jews were
permitted in 1619 to settle with full religious liberty provided they
behaved as a religious community like the Calvinists themselves and
believed, for instance, that ‘there is life after death in which good people
will receive their recompense and wicked people their punishment’. It is
likely that the punishment of Spinoza by the Jewish community of
Amsterdam for his attack on the divine origin of scripture (see below)
was prompted by concern as much for the reaction of local Calvinists as
for the threat to Jews themselves.^11
Some trends within Christianity, such as the millenarian impulse which
captivated much of Protestant Europe in the mid- seventeenth century,
had a direct influence on Jewish life, including, probably, Cromwell’s
enthusiasm for the return of the Jews to England in the 1650s, (see p.
363). More tenuous, but nonetheless real, was the impact of Christian
ideology on Jewish thought, but, as we shall see, it seems implausible to
imagine that the enthusiasm shown by followers of Sabbetai Zevi had no
connection at all to contemporary parallel movements in the Christian
world such as the millenarian expectations of the Fifth Monarchists in
England under Cromwell. The most direct influence of Christian ideas
was through conversos who imported the assumptions of their Iberian
Christian education when they reverted to Judaism: for the Jews of
Curaçao, for instance, ties of blood – the famiya – were the strongest
influence on their religious life throughout the history of the community.
Conversos were unusual Jews not least in that they had determined their
own religious identity. In many cases, they adjusted only with difficulty to
traditional Jewish practices such as the minutiae of the food laws, which
they found as hard to stomach as the Catholicism they had rejected, pre-
ferring to live secular lives or even to move back and forth between
Judaism and Christianity as it suited them for practical reasons.^12
The version of Judaism adopted by one such Portuguese converso in
Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, Uriel Acosta, went hopelessly
wrong. Born in Portugal in a Marrano (that is, crypto- Jewish) family,
Acosta became sceptical about Christian doctrines after reading the
Hebrew Bible and escaped to Amsterdam, only to find that the Judaism
to which he converted was not what he had expected. As he explained