Anti-Judaism

After all, Jews and their synagogue had long been the whipping boys of preachers and exegetes: “If hatred of Jews makes the Christian, then we are all plenty Christian,” as both Erasmus and Luther put it at much the same time.

“Spain is not pleasing,” wrote Europe’s leading intellectual, Desiderius Erasmus in 1517, because it is full of Jews.

“[To] call someone a Jew amounts to an instigation to work him over until he resembles the image.”

“I declare that neither pope nor bishop nor any other person has the right to impose a syllable of law upon a Christian man without his own consent.”

Writing in 1533, Rodrigo Manrique, himself the son of an inquisitor general, seems to have understood that the logic his father (and so many others) had championed, rather than freeing Spain from Judaism, had instead convicted vast areas of its thought and culture as Jewish. As he put it in a letter to his exiled friend, the humanist Luis Vives, in

It is true that the characters in the Merchant make greater claims to sympathy and humanity than those in its influential predecessor, Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta (ca. 1589), in which not only the title character, but Christian and Muslim protagonists as well, are cynical distillations of villainy. But these claims are just one symptom of a

It was in its Renaissance that western Europe achieved what the Middle Ages had at most dreamed of: a world free of Jews.

Communication and interpretation have long been associated with lending and obligation, as the etymology of those words themselves makes clear.33 In Shakespeare’s age, a number of prominent theorists understood every communicative act, regardless of whether it involved words, objects, or money, as a promise of meaning to others. Words are, to quote

The specifics of Freud’s reconstruction have not found much favor with Egyptologists, but his arguments about memory and history have been very influential. Freud suggested that, much like individuals who have suffered trauma, societies repress the memory of horrific events in their past because these are too painful to confront or document directl