The idiom of the Jewish apostasy in seventeenth-century Holland: the Bible of Ferrara and the revival of Sephardic Culture

This article presents a study on the conversion of the Portuguese New Christians to Judaism in Amsterdam as well as in Recife under the Dutch rule, during the first half of the seventeenth century. New Christians, which, due to their ambivalent identity amidst the Sephardic Judaism and Catholicism, were defined by the historian Yosef Kaplan as New Jews. Based on processes of the Inquisition of Lisbon against Portuguese Jews caught in Pernambuco´s war, the author analyzes the jewish rites reported by the prisoners, in particular the use of the Castilian language, or its variant, the ladino, in the synagogal daily prayers. The article sustains that this doctrinal method, conceived in the early seventeenth century by the Portuguese Jewry in Amsterdam, was an adaptation of the first translation of the Old Testament into Spanish – the Bible of Ferrara. Composed in the 1550s by the Portuguese Daniel Pinel and by the Spanish Jeronimo Vargas, both Sephardic exiles, in Italy, the ferraresca bible proves the decisive role of the traditional Sephardic culture, restored in the Mediterranean Diaspora – as the case of Ferrara shows – for the Iberian Judaism reconstruction in the Netherlands.