Amsterdam: a centre of religious Iberian polemics, rivalries, and encounters.Northern European cities, and particularly Amsterdam, were soon transformed in one of the most important centers of Iberian culture in the Early Modern period. Amsterdam in particular and the United Provinces in general, became a meeting place for Iberian economic, religious, and cultural networks. There, and from there, is possible to observe how Christian and Sephardic Jews initiated new relationships between them no longer as limited by the actions, and its consequences, of the Portuguese and Spanish Inquisitions.
Under the title of Amsterdam: a centre of religious Iberian polemics, rivalries, and encounters, we are searching for papers for 2012 that explore this broader subject from a wide variety of religious and cultural perspectives: the subject of the New Christians identities and the return to the Torah, the intellectual debates over religious subjects (e.g., Spinoza, Manasseh ben Israel, Isaac Abrabanel, Samuel Usque, António Vieira, John Dury, Uriel da Costa, etc.), the production of new books by the Sephardim printings (e.g., Siddurim and liturgical literature, rabbinic commentaries by Iberian rabbis, etc.) and the biblical post-expulsion Diaspora traditions (e.g. the Polyglot Bible of Amberes, the Bibles of Ferrara and Constantinople, etc.).