Dr Yonatan Glazer-Eytan

I am a historian of early modern Spain and its empire, with particular interests in ethno-religious minorities, pre-modern crime and punishment, and the historical anthropology of Christianity.

I completed my BA and MA in History at Tel Aviv University, and earned a PhD in History from Johns Hopkins University. During my doctoral studies, I was a Researcher in the project “Conversion, Overlapping Religiosities, Polemics, Interaction: Early Modern Iberia and Beyond” (CORPI), funded by the European Research Council and based at the Institute of Languages and Cultures of the Mediterranean and the Near East of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC, Madrid). As part of my participation in this project I co-edited a book on forced conversion and a special journal issue on the topic of mixed marriage. 

I am currently completing a book manuscript tentatively titled Faith after Sacrilege: The Making of Spanish Catholicism in the Age of Confessional Conflict. This book explores how attitudes towards sacred objects came to define Spanish Catholic orthodoxy and loyalty in an era that witnessed the elimination of religious diversity within the Iberian Peninsula and the engagement in a series of conflicts with Muslims and Protestants across Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic. Drawing on extensive research in Inquisition and state archives, as well as on the examination of a variety of religious images and relics, the book studies the prosecution of desecration and irreverence, the shaping of public opinion by the circulation of pamphlets and celebration of urban spectacles of punishment, and the political significance of rituals evolving around profaned objects. It equally unearths the multiple acts of resistance and idiosyncratic religiosity of minorities, foreigners, and ordinary Spaniards, as well as the increasing commitment of religious and secular authorities to issues of evidence and due process. 

Other research projects include an analysis of inquisition trials of individuals pleading insanity; and a broader study of the relationship between forced labour and religious conversion. 

Research Interests

• Early Modern Iberia and the Iberian world
• Early modern Europe
• Mediterranean history
• Atlantic history
• Interreligious interactions
• Pre-modern crime and punishment
• Material and visual culture

Qualifications

• PhD in History, Johns Hopkins University
• MA in History, Johns Hopkins University
• MA in Early Modern History, Tel Aviv University
• BA in History, Tel Aviv University

Professional Affiliations

• Renaissance Society of America
• Association of Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies

Selected Publications

“Mixed Marriage, Conversion, and the Family: Norms and Realities in Premodern Iberia and the Wider Mediterranean,” a special issue edited by Yonatan Glazer-Eytan and Mercedes García-Arenal, Mediterranean Historical Review 35:1 (2020).

Forced Conversion in Christianity, Judaism and Islam: Coercion and Faith in Pre-modern Iberia and Beyond, Numen: Studies in the History of Religions 164, edited by Mercedes García-Arenal and Yonatan Glazer-Eytan (Leiden: Brill, 2019).

“The Spirit of the Letter: The Hebrew Inscription in Bartolomé Bermejo’s Piedat Revisited,” Medieval Encounters 24: 1-3 (2018): 79-115.