Presenter: Sarah Shindelman (Spanish)
Mentor: David Wacks
Oral Presentation
Panel B: “Cultural Expressions” Oak Room
Concurrent Session 2: 10:30-11:45am
Facilitator: Lou Vijayakar
The project presents a critical translation of a seventeenth-century Jewish apologetic. The author of the apology, Isaac Cardoso, emigrated from Catholic Spain to the Verona Ghetto in order to convert to his ancestral religion, Judaism. His work, the “Excelencias,” represents the culmination of his spiritual and physical journey to identify his place in society, and he wrote the “Excelencias” to help other conversos like him make the difficult transition from Christianity to Judaism. As an apology, the work attempts to explain Judaism from a Jew’s point of view to non- Jews, namely Christians. The project consists of an introduction giving a short biography of Cardoso, an analysis of the “Excelencias,” a comparison to three other prominent Jewish apologists of the seventeenth century, and a comparison between the Verona ghetto and the Jewish community in Amsterdam (where the text was printed), afterwards follows a translation with supplementary footnotes of the first two chapters of the “Excelencias:” ‘A People Chosen by God’ and ‘One People.’