Isaac Orobio

The Jewish Argument with Dogma and Doubt

Carsten Wilke

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783110575613
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110577266
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

In this volume, six historians explore new approaches to Isaac Orobio de Castro (1617–1687), an Amsterdam physician who was the most widely-read among the early modern defenders of Judaism against Christian proselytizing. He was also the major author who rebutted Benedict Spinoza's Freethought from inside his own Sephardic community. Reflecting on the developments in early modern studies that have appeared since the publication of Yosef Kaplan's seminal monograph in 1982, the authors revisit Orobio's intellectual personality with a focus on transcultural processes, clandestine book culture, philosophical rhetoric, and literary reception. Born in Portugal to Christian parents of Jewish ancestry, Orobio left behind a brilliant career as a court physician in Spain and France when he publicly embraced Judaism. With academic erudition, he translated Jewish religious positions into the eclectic philosophy of the day, using both rationalist and sceptic arguments. His work leaked out into the non-Jewish world and armed Enlightenment philosophers for their attacks on Christianity, showing the impact of Jewish criticism on the early modern quest for philosophical certainty and religious pluralism.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Isaac Orobio, the Sceptic Dogmatiser
• “From Christianity to Judaism” Revisited: Some Critical Remarks More than Thirty Years after its Publication
• Orobio Contra Prado: A Trans-European Controversy
• Clandestine Classics: Isaac Orobio and the Polemical Genre among the Dutch Sephardim
• Isaac Orobio de Castro as a Writer: The Importance of Literary Style in the “Divine Warnings against the Vain Idolatry of the Gentiles”
• From Apologetics to Polemics: Isaac Orobio’s Defences of Judaism and their Uses in the French Enlightenment
• Reading Orobio in Nineteenth-Century England: The Missionary Alexander McCaul’s “Israel Avenged”
• Bibliography: Studies and Editions of Isaac Orobio de Castro
• Index