Born 300 years ago, the legendary libertine had a utilitarian relationship to faithAccording to Margarethe Weissenstein, the Vienna-born Jewish author of The Power of the Charlatan, Casanova — who was born 300 years ago in 1725 — was an itinerant charlatan who manipulated credulous nobles and other moneyed clients through 18th century Europe with promises about numerology, supposedly derived from the Kabbalah. Historian Pawel Maciejko notes that Casanova studied some Hebrew, encountered European Jews although sometimes unhappily, and at age 16 defended a doctoral dissertation on the subject Whether the Hebrews can build new synagogues. He was also an aspiring...