Yaacob Dweck is Professor of History and the Program in Judaic Studies and 2020-2021 Old Dominion Research Professor in the Humanities Council.
In the third of the 2020-2021 Old Dominion Series, Dweck reconstructs the profile of someone who has never been the subject of historical study. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a new character emerged in the Sephardic Diaspora: the rabbinic reactionary. He, and he was always a he, was immensely learned, often peripatetic, frequently acerbic, and deeply disgruntled.
It is this gap between the reality of Jewish life and his ideals—a past that he imagines that never was, a present that falls hopelessly short of his ruthless judgement, and a future that cannot ever hope to fulfill his imagined Jewish utopia—that enables a historian working with a number of books, a few images and some archival sources to trace his emergence.
