Doubting the Divine in Early Modern Europe: The Revival of Momus, the Agnostic God. George McClure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. xiv + 268 pp. $99.99.
1790. Isaac Orobio de Castro is another instance—also a physician, he arrived in Amsterdam around the time Moreira passed away, and his Prevenciones divinas were to end up in the Baron d’Holbach’s Israel vengé of 1770. Second, another comparison can be made between Morteira’s Arguments and his sermons, published in 2005 by Marc Saperstein, or his voluminous Tradado da Verdade da Lei de Moisés of 1659–60, edited in 1988 by Herman Prins Salomon. Future research will have to establish how the Arguments should be situated not only against their seventeenth-century Jewish background, but also in the context of Morteira’s own religious and intellectual Werdegang. This is an edition and translation; it is not an attempt to deliver an intellectual biography of Morteira. Nevertheless, Kaplan’s rendering of the Amsterdam’s rabbi’s Arguments will turn out to be an invaluable source to anyone willing and able to write such a biography.