diversity and an emerging uniformity. Jewish communal leaders faced the
challenge of maintaining a sense of unity amid this tension between unifor-
mity and diversity.
A redefinition of the political and civic status of Jews, moreover, replaced
a preexisting balance between religion and statecraft either with a polity
that functioned independent of religion or with one that was completely
overwhelmed by religion. The former took the form of absolutism in central
Europe and liberalism in western Europe. The latter accompanied the
Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation in the world of
Christendom, and the triumph of less tolerant forms of Islam in Islamic
states that were beyond the authoritative reach of the Ottoman Empire. To
be sure, these new polities did not triumph everywhere. The most thriving
centers of world Jewry during the early modern period – the Jews of Poland
and the Ottoman Empire – were situated in states where the older balance
between throne, sword, and altar remained largely intact well into the eigh-
teenth century.
By the end of the seventeenth century, the expanding horizons and com-
plexity of Jewish life, through the emergence of compartmentalized and
non-rabbinic forms of Jewish identity, introduced a voluntary rather than
mandatory observance of Jewish law and affiliation with the Jewish commu-
nity, intensified communal cohesion through the subordination of the
rabbinate to lay leadership, brought challenges to rabbinic authority from
heretics and pietists, and created a religiously neutral society that blurred the
boundary between Jews and non-Jews, in which Jews and non-Jews could
interact freely.
The expulsion of Jews from Spain set this period of Jewish history in
motion. It marked not only the end of open Jewish life in western Europe
but also the end of one of the longest-lasting, most prosperous, and cultur-
ally most productive diasporas in Jewish history. The impact of this event
was felt first by Jews on the Iberian Peninsula, but eventually reverberated
elsewhere. Refugees from Spain, mainly Jewish but also conversos, fled first to
Portugal and then to western Europe, the Italian states, and especially to the
Ottoman Empire.
For many of these refugees, the expulsion had cosmic significance. Not sur-
prisingly, some Spanish Jews and conversosunderstood this event in messianic
terms. For some, such as the messianic pretender David Reuveni and his fol-
lower Solomon Molkho, it became the defining element in their identity. For
others, such as the rabbinic scholar and Kabbalist Don Isaac Abravanel, the
expulsion pointed to the imminent arrival of the messianic age.
In addition, some historians have argued that the expulsion from Spain led
to a reorientation in the study of Kabbalah, particularly among Spanish
Kabbalist refugees who settled in Safed in the Land of Israel during
the sixteenth century and eventually founded a new center of Kabbala
around the Kabbalist Isaac Luria. Lurianic Kabbala, as this new brand of
World Jewry in flux, 1492–1750 103