for Advanced Studies
Workshop Isaac Orobio
25 February 2016
Workshop “Isaac Orobio: The Jewish Argument with Dogma and Doubt” (Convenor: Prof. Dr. Carsten Wilke, Central European University Budapest)
Isaac Orobio: The Jewish Argument with Dogma and Doubt
The Amsterdam physician Isaac Orobio de Castro (c.1617-1687) is renowned as the sharpest pen among the early modern defenders of Judaism against Christian proselytizing. His Spanish clandestine polemics, copied and collected among the Sephardim, did not fail to leak out into the non-Jewish world and arm the most radical Enlightenment philosophers for their attacks on Christianity. Voltaire found this Jewish author "profound, yet never obscure, a man of refined literary taste, of a pleasant wit and impeccable manners." Orobio's polemical writings owe much of their quality to his transcultural experience. Born as Baltasar Alvares in Bragança (Portugal) to Christian parents of Jewish ancestry, he achieved a brilliant career as a court physician and university professor in Spain and France, but broke with bis double life when he publicly became a Jew. With solid academic erudition and skilled baroque rhetoric, Orobio translated Jewish religious positions into the philosophical language of the day. This Jewish apologist constantly fought in two directions - against Christian dogma and Spinozist doubt. The workshop will assess the impact of Jewish criticism on the early modern quest for philosophical certainty and religious pluralism.
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PROGRAMME
09:15 - 10:15 GUIDED VISIT at the State and University Library of Hamburg
Polemical Manuscripts of the Portuguese Jews
Hans-Walter Stork (Hamburg State and University Library)
10:30 - 11:00 OPENING ADDRESS
Luisa Pais Lowe (Consul General of Portugal in Hamburg)
WELCOMING REMARKS
Giuseppe Veltri (Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies, Hamburg)
11:00 - 13:00 SESSION 1
Chair: Michael Studemund-Halevy (Institute for the History of the German Jews, Hamburg)
"From Christianity to Judaism" Revisited: Some Critical Remarks after Forty Years of its First Publication
Yosef Kaplan (Hebrew University Jerusalem)
The Literary Profile of Isaac Orobio de Castro
Hann den Boer (University of Basel)
14:00- 16:00 SESSION 2
Chair: Paolo Luca Bernardini (Universita degli Studi dell'Insubria)
Clandestine Classics: Isaac Orobio's Polemical Works and the Generic Traditions
of Sephardi Anti-Christian Literature
Carsten Wilke (Central European University Budapest)
From Apologetics to Polemics: Isaac Orobio's Defences of Judaism and their Use in the French Enlightenment
Adam Sutcliffe (King's College London)
16:30- 18:30 SESSION 3
Chair: Sina Rauschenbach (University of Potsdam)
Reading Orobio in Nineteenth Century England: The Missionary Alexander McCaul's "Israel Avenged"
David Ruderman (University of Pennsylvania)
DISCUSSION: Isaac Orobio's Place in Early Modem Thought
Convenor: Prof. Dr. Carsten Wilke, Central European University Budapest