An Iberian Covenant: Mosaic Law and Theology of Exile in Menasseh ben Israel’s Thought

Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel was one of leading voices in the seventeenth-century Jewish world. Living in Amsterdam, he educated and instructed Iberian exiles and their descendants as they returned to Judaism. Focusing on Menasseh’s exhaustive study of scripture, Conciliador, this article analyzes Menasseh’s religious ideas in the context of the spiritual challenges of Amsterdam’s “Portuguese Nation.” I argue that Menasseh generated culturally attuned arguments that stressed the authority of Mosaic law to overwhelmingly individualistic and religiously doubtful former conversos who were long separated from the practice of Rabbinic Judaism. From this vantage point, Menasseh reinterpreted Jewish exile in the context of world history and defended the importance of God’s precepts by discussing longevity and the duration of life. Responding to Christian polemics, he offered positive meaning to his community’s experience of dislocation by adjusting the terms of God’s election to his present-day diasporic condition. Menasseh additionally used natural knowledge, that is, Hippocratic-Galenic medicine and astrology, to persuade former conversos of the practical advantages of Torah. He thus presented a community of Sephardic exiles with what I call in this article a diasporic covenant according to which the practice of Mosaic law made Jews virtuous individuals and prolonged their life, and he stressed that their acceptance among the nations guaranteed good fortune to the tolerant state where they had settled.