This book, the results of a conference held in Israel in 1985, brings together many new perspectives on the significance of Menasseh ben Israel's ideas, and their relation to Christian millenarian views of the time and Jewish kabbalistic and messianistic thought. Scholars from America, Europe and Israel, working on various aspects of 17th century philosophy and religion present here in 18 essays important new data and interpretations of the Jewish and Christian background, and of Menasseh's ideas and their relation to those of Jewish and Christian thinkers of the time. Thus, this volume...

How did Jews in the Netherlands view themselves and how were they viewed by others? This is the single theme around which the twenty-five essays in this volume, written by scholars from the Netherlands, Israel and other countries, revolve. The studies encompass a variety of topics and periods, from the beginning of the Jewish settlement in the Dutch Republic through the Shoah and its aftermath. They include examinations of the Sephardi Jews in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Jews in the periods of Emancipation and Enlightenment, social and cultural encounters between Jews...