Vanitas with a Jewish Voice: Ethical Literature among Dutch Sephardim and French Crypto-Jews of the 1660s

The revival of ethical literature in the age of Baltasar Gracián is paralleled by the almost simultaneous emergence of similar writings among the Sephardim of Amsterdam, epitomized by the works of Abraham Pereyra, La certeza del camino (1666) and Espejo de la vanidad del mundo (1671). Deeply inspired by Spanish Catholic mystics, Pereyra`s work has been contextualized within the Marranos` ambivalent endeavor of deriving a Jewish spirituality from Christian sources (J. A. van Praag), the fight against Machiavellian and Spinozan freethought (H. Méchoulan), and the Sabbatean religious fervor of the same years (H. den Boer). My lecture will point to an additional aspect of this Iberian-language tradition of Jewish ethics by highlighting its French and "Marrano" origins. Two unpublished treatises that emanate from the semi-clandestine Jewish circles of Bordeaux, Abraham de Oliveira`s Celo del Temor de Dios (1661) and Alonso Romero`s Imaginación postrímera del hombre (1666), show that meditations on the tragic sense of human life were used as a literary code that could satisfy Jewish as well as Catholic readers. Tested in the French classical age, the cross-confessional convertibility of the vanitas discourse reveals that baroque ascetical writing was not necessarily a manifestation of sectarian bigotry. On the contrary, the celebration of gloomy religious emotion could become a subtle means of placing Portuguese Jews on the cultural map of seventeenth-century Europe.