Bodies Outside the Law: Syphilis, Deviance, and Jewish Literary Resistance in the Early Modern World

About the Lecture: 

In the Early Modern period, syphilis was cast as a New World scourge carried by Indigenous peoples, marking them as spiritually corrupt and physiologically contaminating. By the nineteenth century, racial science reframed these earlier exclusions by branding syphilis a “Jewish disease,” pathologizing Jewish populations as threats to the emerging statistical norm and adding this condition to long-standing medical accusations rooted in medieval anti-Jewish discourse. Across these periods, syphilis functioned as a dehumanizing tool through which marginalization and oppression were biologically and scientifically constructed, casting the diseased body outside the boundaries of the human. This paper foregrounds a lesser-known and explicitly counter-hegemonic interpretation of syphilis that challenged these logics of deviation. It focuses on the seventeenth-century Jewish poet Abraham Gómez Silveira, a member of Amsterdam’s Sephardic community of Iberian exiles. In his polemical poetry, Gómez Silveira deploys syphilis through blasphemous mockery, inverting the traditions that framed Indigenous peoples as demonic and Jewish bodies as biologically immoral. His work exposes the ideological violence underpinning medicalized notions of deviance and reclaims disease as a site of literary resistance.

About the Speaker: 

I earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Universidad Complutense of Madrid (2017), specializing in the reception of Neoplatonism in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Sephardic authors, and later completed a Ph.D. in Spanish at Purdue University (2021) with a focus on Golden Age literature and Jewish Studies. I am currently an Associate Faculty member in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese Studies at the University of Minnesota. My research centers on Judeo-Hispanic literature, with particular attention to the border-crossing identities of exiled Jewish-Hispanic authors and extends comparatively to contemporary writers who revisit Golden Age motifs to explore questions of identity, exile, and cultural belonging, tracing transcultural exchanges across periods.