The Marrakesh Dialogues: Retrieving a Spanish Jewish Classic and a 16th-Century Theology of Conversion

This public lecture is held in the framework of the Faculty Research Seminar.

In this lecture, Carsten Wilke will present an early modern polemic against Christianity, the subject of a forthcoming study and critical edition in its Spanish original (Leiden, Brill, 2013). The Marrakesh Dialogues tell of the wanderings of two Flemish brothers through North Africa: one has become a proselyte of Judaism, while the other, a staunch Catholic, tracks him to his new home in the Jewish ghetto of Marrakesh. They embark upon an antagonistic yet fraternal debate on religious truth, church oppression, secret messages in texts, social honor, male happiness, and the end of history. The text, anonymous and clandestine, is conserved in ten manuscripts, generally attributed by scholars to a time around 1700. New documents and critical text restitution, however, surprisingly reveal that this is a Renaissance work, written in 1581-1583 by a certain Estêvão Dias, a Portuguese returned to the faith of his Jewish ancestors. One of the earliest Jewish religious authors who wrote in a standard European language, Dias modernizes Judaism by presenting it not as a tradition, but as a militant doctrine. To his audience of former Christians, he offers a praise of the rebellious apostate and a Jewish version of Reformation-age "conversion theology". The talk will outline the context, originality and impact of this forgotten Jewish classic and tell the story of its rediscovery.

Carsten Wilke is Associate Professor of Jewish Thought and Culture at CEU (History Department, Medieval Studies Department & Nationalism Studies Program). While his publications on the intellectual and cultural history of European Jewry largely focus on Jewish religious modernization in the nineteenth century, he has also continuously researched its precedents in early modern Iberian Jewry. His Histoire des juifs portugais (Paris: Chandeigne, 2007) won the French Jewish Book Award. Alongside his edition of the Marrakesh Dialogues, he is now working on the other Portuguese Jewish classic of the sixteenth century, the Consolation for the Tribulations of Israel (1553) by Samuel Usque.