Richard Popkin' Marrano Problem

“In 1958 my intellectual life took a new turn,” wrote Richard Popkin in the first part of his Intellectual Autobiography: Warts and All, a revealing and moving account of his intense life and his impressive and indefatigable academic activity. Because of the psychological pressure that he was under at that time in his work in the Philosophy Department of the University of Iowa, he suffered a severe breakdown, which affected him profoundly. He added: “When this reached a critical point, I suddenly had an overpowering religious experience.”

It is difficult to imagine that he suffered this breakdown, and a previous one in March 1957, just while he was immersed in the task of completing his book The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes, which was first published in 1960. Both personal crises resulted in an intensified identification with Judaism, but Popkin seems to have remembered only the one in the fall of 1958 when he wrote his autobiographical essay.2 In the difficult period when he was finishing his monumental study on the history of skepticism Popkin began to reflect increasingly on the Jewish origins of several of the first important skeptics of the early modern period: “I began to explore and consider […] why four early sceptics, Montaigne his cousin Francisco Sanchez, the Jesuit priest Juan Maldonado, and Pedro Valencia, all of Spanish background, and all descended from Jewish forced converts to Christianity, were the ones who made scepticism a living issue in the late sixteenth century.”