Jewish Manuscripts in the Early Modern Mediterranean: Between Piracy, Redemption, and the Spanish Inquisition

FAIN: FT-260121-18

Daniel Bernardo Hershenzon
University of Connecticut (Storrs, CT 06269-9000)

Research leading to publication of a book-length study of religious artifacts and piracy in the early modern western Mediterranean.

I am requesting the NEH Summer Stipend to conduct two months of research in the Bodleian Library (GB) and in the AHN and AGS (Spain) on the negotiations over the restitution of 3,000 Hebrew manuscripts, sent from Livorno to Algiers in the 1630’s, intercepted by Spanish pirates, and sent to the Inquisition’s dungeons. The story forms the 3rd chapter of a book project on religious artifacts—Korans, Bibles, prayer shawls, pictures of Christ and the Virgin, and relics—that as a byproduct of piracy and human trafficking circulated in the thousands in the early modern western Mediterranean, crossing religious boundaries. The project argues that during the 17th century such objects—captured, humiliated, redeemed—helped shape relations between Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the context of maritime piracy. Reconstructing their trajectories sheds new light on the experience of captivity and the practice of redemption, of people and objects.

Associated Products

“Objets captifs. Les artefacts catholiques en Méditerranée occidentale au début de l’époque modern” (Article)
Title: “Objets captifs. Les artefacts catholiques en Méditerranée occidentale au début de l’époque modern”
Author: Daniel Hershenzon
Abstract: Catholic artifacts—images and sculptures of Christ, the Virgin, and various saints, as well as rosaries, crucifixes, and liturgical objects—circulated in their thousands throughout the early modern western Mediterranean. This mobility was largely an indirect byproduct of privateering and human trafficking, which intertwined Spain’s Mediterranean territories, Morocco, and Ottoman Algiers. The disruptive moment of captivity set these otherwise disparate objects on common trajectories, making it interesting to study them as a category. The article argues that Catholic artifacts played surprising roles in the experience of Catholic captives, renegades, and their Muslim masters as well as in the economy of ransom that facilitated the rescue of captives. Against the design of their initial distributors, such objects provided captives, converts, and masters with unexpected affordances, and in so doing helped blur the religious boundary and created new entanglements between members of these groups and Catholic materiality. The argument is developed in three stages. First, the article claims that the surge in captivity following the Spanish-Ottoman truce of 1581 meant that more devotional objects were sent from Spain to Catholics held captive in the Maghrib. Second, it asserts that some of these artifacts ended up serving converts to Islam, while others were plundered by Algerian and Moroccan rulers. Third, the article contends that plunder and repurposing afforded captives the power to redeem an emblem of their God, provided Trinitarians and Mercedarians with opportunities to ransom objects and gain fame back home, and served Maghrebi rulers to secure religious privileges for their subjects enslaved in Spain. Focusing on their mobility demonstrates the degree to which Catholic objects continued to articulate and mediate social, political, and economic relations in the western Mediterranean over the long seventeenth century.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/annales-histoire-sciences-sociales/article/abs/objets-captifs-les-artefacts-catholiques-en-mediterranee-au-debut-de-lepoque-moderne/888A4D92F2F8F1ADF5AD3A7EB58B0322
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 76-2

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