Christliche und jüdische Minderheitengemeinden im Vergleich. Calvinistische Exulanten und westliche Diaspora der Sephardim im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert

Abstract

After decades of intensive research in early modern religious migration of Christian dissenters we are well informed about its origins, its geographical and numerical dimension, and the social, economic and cultural profile. Equally well covered are its economic, social, religious, cultural and political influences on the different European host societies. The same counts for the structure and functioning of the ecclesiastical and communal institutions of the respective stranger settlements, the culture and everyday life of the communities and their individual members, their families and neighbourhoods. There is also ample research carried out on the Jewish migration from the Iberian Peninsula with its apogee around 1600 and during the first half of the 17th century. Despite the coincidence in time and causation and several obvious similarities, both movements are rarely discussed together. Even research on the Jewish and Christian settlements within the same city, as for instance Hamburg, is often done separately without realizing that both minorities did not only experience similar pressures by the majority and its political or ecclesiastical government, but did also often act in similar ways – with regard to the organization of their interior life as well as the handling of their relations with the majority. In contrast to such an isolated view, the article argues in chapters I and II, that the Jewish and Christian migration of the 16th and 17th should be interpreted as two branches of the confessional type of early modern long distant migration. This can be shown by tracing their origins in the pressures of catholic confessionalization in their respective home countries, Spain and Portugal on the one, and France and the Netherlands on the other hand, and by highlighting the key role which religion played during their migration, for the organization of their minority life and for in their social and cultural identity in general. For a more detailed comparison, the following chapters focus on the Dutch Calvinist and the Iberian Sephardic Refuge, based on research done by the author on the Calvinist and by the Israeli Historian Yosef Kaplan on the Sephardic migration and settlements respectively – with regard to their economic and social profile (III, a), the organization of their congregations and religious life (III, b), the logistic of their migration and settlement (III, c), to the predominant meaning of control and discipline in religious as well as in secular matters (III, d). The analysis results in three theses on the long term impact of the Calvinist and Jewish confessional migration, which are at the same time suggestions for further research: the participation of the Jews in the early modern fundamental process of confessionalization (IV, a), the significance of a dialectic of traditionalism and progress in the long-term consequences for economy, society and culture (IV, b), and the meaning of the experience of Refuge and of the symbolic “peregrine”-representation among the Calvinists and its consequence for a change in Christian understanding of Jews.