Using five basic texts written in early modern Europe between 1499 and 1627, Susanne Zepp examines the role of Jewish culture in the process of the development of modernity in Romanticism: "La Celestina", the "Dialoghi d'amore" by Leone Ebreo, the first picaresque novel in world literature "Lazarillo de Tormes", the "Essais" by Michel de Montaigne and João Pinto Delgado's poetic adaptations of the Bible. It presents the change in genres and the literary evidence of that time against the background of the history of the 16th century and shows how the emergence of early modern subject consciousness can also be explained from a literary perspective as a universalization of originally particular Jewish experiences.