[Michtavim blog] Barukh Dayan Ha-Emet: Prof. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi passed away earlier today in New York

I read Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's book From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto, Isaac Cardoso, A Study in Seventeenth-Century Marranism and Jewish Apologetics back when it appeared in 1971. It may have established Yerushalmi as a Jewish historian, but I remember that it was frustrating in its old-fashioned exceptionalist view of Jewish history.

I will have to go back to reread it, but as I remember, Yerushalmi discusses the equation Cristãos-novos (New Christians) with homens de negócios (businessmen) but never quite fully analyzes the interrelationship of business, finance, imperialism, marranism, 16th/17th century economic developments, Jewish social networking, and Sabbatianism.

Yerushalmi did not provide enough information to determine definitively whether Cardoso decided to return to Judaism in Italy from genuine religious conviction or perhaps more plausibly from considerations of quality of life.

In other words Cardoso may simply have preferred to be a well-compensated big fish in a small pond than to be part of the large crowd surrounding the Spanish court, whose policies toward Christian descendants of Iberian Jews were often problematic to say the least.

Yerushalmi's book and scholarship are deficient overall because of his refusal to look seriously or fully at the Spanish imperial context, in which the distinction between New and Old Christians was only part of a larger categorization system that distinguished criollos from peninsulares and that created extremely baroque racial categories of blood among whites, native Americans, and Africans within the Spanish Empire.

Barukh Dayan Ha-Emet: Prof. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi passed away earlier today in New York

It is with deep sadness that I share with you the news of the passing of Prof. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi. Two of his leading students, Profs. Elisheva Carlebach and David N. Myers, have shared some thoughts on Prof. Yerushalmi, which I have reproduced in the post-script below, in memory of their mentor.

Specifically related to Prof. Yerushalmi, among the chapters included in Elisheva Carlebach, John M. Efron, and David N. Myers, eds., Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (London and Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1998), see John M. Efron, "Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi: The Teacher," 453-455; and David N. Myers, "Of Marranos and Memory: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and the Writing of Jewish History," 1-21.

[Click here to read the entire article.]

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