The Center for Jewish Studies, in conjunction with the Department of Religiion and Classics, present the Bernstein Lecture series.

For decades historians have looked to the Sephardic Jews of early modern Europe as “the first modern Jews,” in the formulation of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi or to the Dutch Jerusalem as “a new beginning in Jewish history” in the words Salo W. Baron. In “Rabbis and Money in the Early Modern Sephardic Diaspora,” Yaacob Dweck supplements their work with a suggestion: rather than look at the Jews of the Sephardic Diaspora and see who were the most forward looking, those who were well-versed in European languages, who had been educated at European Universities, who would be the first to enter into what the historian Jacob Katz described as a “semi-neutral society,” Dweck looks at a group of men on the margins of this society, who were all, in one way or another, its strident critics. Dweck suggests that these figures have as much to say about life in the early modern Sephardic Diaspora as do those more forward-looking merchant patrons.

Yaacob Dweck is a Professor of History and the Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of The Scandal of Kabbalah: Leon Modena, Jewish Mysticism, Early Modern Venice (Princeton University Press, 2010) and Dissident Rabbi: The Life of Jacob Sasportas (Princeton University Press, 2019).

Parking passes will be available at the Elmwood Avenue entrance kiosk.