Between Beggars and Professors: Jewish Converts at Early Modern Lutheran Universities

Journal article

Diemling, M. 2025. Between Beggars and Professors: Jewish Converts at Early Modern Lutheran Universities. Journal of Early Modern Christianity. 12 (1), pp. 53-80. https://doi.org/10.1515/jemc-2025-2003

Publication dates
Authors	Diemling, M.
Abstract	Converts from Judaism played an important role in the expansion of Christian Hebraism as teachers of Hebrew and Aramaic, mediators of Jewish scriptural interpretations and procurers of Jewish books. This article examines Lutheran universities as spaces for converts who were often self-fashioning themselves as former rabbis with expertise in Hebrew and Jewish learning. The controversies arising from attempts to secure a permanent post holder for the first chair in Hebrew at a German university at Wittenberg demonstrate the role that Hebrew played for an emerging Protestant self-understanding. The article also discusses the academic precarity of German converts, suggesting that they had not acquired the habitus of a Lutheran scholar as students because Jews were not permitted to study at German universities. Finally, once Christian Hebraism no longer depended on Jewish mediation, the main value of converts was their remaining loyal to the faith. Converts who reverted to Judaism were judged harshly by Christian society.
Keywords	Early Modern universities; Jewish converts; Christian Hebraism; Jewish-Christian relations
Year	2025
Journal	Journal of Early Modern Christianity
Journal citation	12 (1), pp. 53-80
Publisher	De Gruyter
ISSN	2196-6648
	2196-6656
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)	https://doi.org/10.1515/jemc-2025-2003
Official URL	https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/jemc-2025-2003/html
Online	22 May 2025
Print	28 Apr 2025
Publication process dates
Accepted	26 Nov 2024
Deposited	11 Dec 2024
Accepted author manuscript	File Access Level Restricted
Publisher's version	File Access Level Open
Output status	Published
Additional information	Publications router: Date 2025-05-22 of type 'publication_date' with format 'electronic' included in notification Publications router: Date 2025-04-01 of type 'cover-date' included in notification Publications router: Date 2025-04-28 of type 'ppub' included in notification Publications router: Date 2025-05-22 of type 'epub' included in notification
	Publications router: License for VOR version of this article: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 included in notification
License	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

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