Charles V as Last World Emperor and Jewish Hero

Abstract

Charles V, king of Spain and emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, ruled over vast regions of central and western Europe and the Americas for much of the first half of the sixteenth century. This concentration of power, together with the emperor’s claim to universal monarchy, polarized his contemporaries’ views of him. Pro- and anti-imperial rhetoric and historiography abound, casting Charles V as hero or villain, protagonist or antagonist, depending on the author’s religious, dynastic, or national affiliations, political thinking, and pragmatic interests. While scholars have discussed competing Catholic, Protestant, and Muslim perspectives toward this emperor, Jewish views have not previously been analyzed. This article illuminates how sixteenth-century Jews evaluated Charles V as their own hero. It explores how Jewish witnesses of Charles’s reign perceived the Catholic emperor and his politics of crusade and church reform, contextualizing their reactions within Jewish messianic thought, on the one hand, and political realism, on the other. The article demonstrates that selected contemporaneous sources in Hebrew depict Charles V as a shared hero for European Jews and Christians. Jewish historiographical and prophetic writings from that time drew on the Christian apocalyptic notion of the “Last World Emperor,” adopting widespread Christian tendencies to identify Charles V as the glorious universal monarch who would reign at the culmination of human history as a quasi-messianic figure. Applying Amos Funkenstein’s and David Biale’s approach of counterhistory to these Jewish sources reveals the entangled history of a heroic image that was common to early modern Jews and Christians, albeit ideologically contested.