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

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.