Anti-Judaism

“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.”

Many of his tracts were written in German rather than in the Latin of the learned. These, combined with his efforts to translate the Bible into a language intelligible across the wide variety of dialects that stretched from the Netherlands to Poland, accelerated the birth of a modern German capable of serving as a language of culture.

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

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

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

But the search for a Roman reality behind the charges very much misses the point of these texts: they are the product of an ideology that represented the struggle against tyranny in terms of a struggle against the 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 royalists soon retook Toledo, and the bachelor was hanged in the public square. His treatise became a founding document of the Castilian ideology of “purity of blood,” hence of importance to anyone interested in the history of racial ideologies.