The “Marrano Conspiracy”: On Richard Popkin, Jewish Scepticism, and an Unknown Text on Zindīḳ by Pietro Pomponazzi

Richard H. Popkin’s research and scholarship did not explicitly focus on the role of Jewish philosophy and thought in the history of scepticism. One reason for this is undoubtedly that he could not understand Hebrew, but another, as Kaplan has shown, is his view of Judaism. The only exception to his disinterest emerges almost entirely from his letters: the topic of the Marranos, the Sephardic Jews who were compelled to convert to Christianity after 1492. Yet, this was not the case when Popkin began his research, as his scholarship and letters prove. At the root of his studies is the concept of crisis. In 1968, Joseph van Ess claimed that medieval Islamic scepticism was a product of crisis, specifically the crisis that arose when the three religions were in close contact with each other, when their cultural and religious messages were in focus and their own particular religious, philosophical, and religious truths seemed to be at stake. Van Ess was not the first to associate crisis and scepticism, but he adopted this paradigm for Islamic philosophy, a paradigm that Popkin had developed in the 1950s. Today, we know that medieval Islamic philosophy, the cross-pollination between the three monotheistic religions, the indirect and direct reception of ancient philosophy before the humanist and Renaissance periods, and internal Christian theological developments before, during, and after the Reformation, along with discussions about geography, ethnology, and science, all played a large role in the cognitive philosophy and thought of early modern Europe.