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Raymond B. Waddington and Arthur H. Williamson, editors. The Expulsion of the Jews: 1492 and After. Garland Studies in the Renaissance, Volume 2. New York: Garland Publishing, 1994. Pp. x + 296. Cloth, $48.oo.
In 1992 there were many conferences commemorating the expulsion of the Jews from Spain five hundred years earlier. The collection under review, selected from papers presented at a conference held at the University of California, Davis, in April 1992, is one of the most interesting, containing a wide range of articles (fifteen in all) dealing with history, philosophy, and religion in Spain and elsewhere in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The collection shows the impact on intellectual history of the dramatic collapse of Spanish Jewry, and the impact of Jewish and anti-Jewish ideas thereafter all over the European world. It seems to confirm what Pierre Mesnard said almost thirty years ago after I presented a paper on "The Spanish Inquisition and the Rise of Modern Philosophy" at the Renaissance Center in Tours, France, namely, that we now have to consider that it was not the developments in Constantinople in 1453 that transformed the European intellectual world, but rather the events in Iberia in 1492.
The catastrophe of the Spanish Jews and its effect on Jews throughout Europe led, as the editors say in their introduction, "to utterly unprecedented cultural interpenetrations that reshaped both judaism and the various Christianities which emerged in the sixteenth century. This interaction in turn led to profound and creative reflection, both Jewish and Christian, that shaped in important ways the intellectual and spiritual directions of early modern Europ" (1). Jewish ideas affected Christian intellectuals in France, Italy, Germany, and even Scotland and Sweden, which hardly...