Silvera, Myriam

Senior Fellow: December 2021–February 2022

Research Project: In Search of a Subterranean Strand in “Marrano Heresy”: The Philological and Historical Questioning of the Bible

The focus of this project is the role that criticisms directed against the biblical text, construed as a source revealed by God, played in the formation of scepticism. It will trace the development of these criticisms among conversos and former conversos in the Jewish community of mid-seventeenth-century Amsterdam. The various voices challenging the authority of the Jewish Bible have different origins and advance different arguments, which are sometimes closely connected to one another. Some of them arose in the Iberian Peninsula within the Jewish milieu, others were born out of libertine literature, and still others were nurtured by the anti-Jewish Christian polemic. What comes to the fore in this last strand of anti-Jewish polemic is arguments pointing to different translations of the same words in different translations of the Bible into Latin or Spanish. This project will focus on early evidence for the various attacks on the Bible coming from the heterodox thinkers described, among others, by Saul Levi Morteira. It will then raise the question of whether in his early years, Spinoza shared, at least in part, the topics of biblical criticism that will be discussed.

Myriam Silvera is an adjunct professor at the Italian Rabbinical College and at Università di Roma Tor Vergata, Italy.