Translation and the Invention of Renaissance Jewish Culture

© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978 90 04 23248 8

The Hebrew Bible in

Fifteenth-Century Spain

Exegesis, Literature, Philosophy, and the Arts

Edited by

Jonathan Decter and Arturo Prats

LEIDEN • BOSTON2012


CONTENTS

Introduction ........................................................................................ 1

I. LITERATURE AND ART

Weeping Over Rachel’s Tomb: Literary Reelaborations of a Midrashic Motif in Medieval and Early Modern Spain .......... 13Luis M. Girón-Negrón

The First Murder: Picturing Polemic c. 1391 ............................... 41Tom Nickson

Sephardic Illuminated Bibles: Jewish Patrons and Fifteenth-Century Christian Ateliers ......................................... 61Andreina Contessa

II. JEWISH EXEGESIS

Abarbanel’s Exegetical Subversion of Maimonides’ ʿAqedah: Transforming a Knight of Intellectual Virtue into a Knight of Existential Faith ........................................................................ 75James A. Diamond

“From My Flesh I Envision God”: Shem Tov Ibn Shaprut’s Exegesis of Job 19:25–27 .............................................................. 101Libby Garshowitz

Messianic Interpretation of the Song of Songs in Late-Medieval Iberia ................................................................................................ 117Maud Kozodoy

vi contents


III. CONVERSION AND THE USES OF BIBLICAL EXEGESIS

Pro-Converso Apologetics and Biblical Exegesis .......................... 151Claude B. Stuczynski

A Father’s Bequest: Augustinian Typology and Personal Testimony in the Conversion Narrative of Solomon Halevi/ Pablo de Santa María .................................................................... 177Ryan Szpiech

IV. LITURGY AND TRANSLATION

The Liturgy of Portuguese Conversos ............................................ 201Asher Salah

The Relationship between Ladino Liturgical Texts and Spanish Bibles ................................................................................ 223Ora (Rodrigue) Schwarzwald

Translation and the Invention of Renaissance Jewish Culture: The Case of Judah Messer Leon and Judah Abravanel .......... 245Aaron W. Hughes

Index .................................................................................................... 267

Appendix: Illustrations ..................................................................... 277


TRANSLATION AND THE INVENTION OF RENAISSANCE JEWISH CULTURE: THE CASE OF JUDAH MESSER LEON

AND JUDAH ABRAVANEL1

Aaron W. Hughes

Introduction

The history of Jewish philosophy—indeed, the history of Judaism—is a series of engagements with the biblical narrative. Because these engagements take place in distinct historical contexts, various literary and aesthetic expectations govern them. The Bible is simultaneously read and translated, imagined and invented, by each generation’s gaze. Biblical translation, whether literally into a new vernacular or con-ceptually into a different idiom, seeks to make the old language “old” again; or, framed from a somewhat different angle, to make the new language “old.” Since any innovation must be seen to emerge naturally from the biblical text, Bible translations reveal to us something of the struggles over assimilation, integration, and separation that constantly confronted Jews as minorities. The translative act becomes one of the primary causal factors or agents that facilitate and power the struggle for a perceived core of Jewish identity that can, paradoxically, be read into and subsequently teased out of the biblical fabric.

To explore this dialectic between old and new, tradition and inno-vation, this essay focuses on two important fifteenth-century figures, Judah Messer Leon (ca. 1420–ca. 1498) and his younger contemporary Judah Abravanel (ca. 1465–after 1521), also known as Leone Hebreo. These two individuals were responsible for translating the biblical nar-rative into Renaissance categories and vice versa.2 Caught between bib-lical tradition and the intellectual currents of fifteenth century Italy,

1 An earlier version of this paper was given at the Center for Medieval and Renais-sance Studies at UCLA. I would like to thank those in attendance for their comments, especially Moshe Idel, Arthur M. Lesley, and Brian Copenhaver.

2 Jakob Burckhardt first coined the term “Renaissance” (Rinascimento) in his The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1867). It is, like any term imposed retroac-tively on a period, extremely problematic and potentially misleading. Accordingly, it is necessary to exercise caution when using this and cognate terms (e.g., “Humanism”).

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these two individuals—in their very different ways—sought to reconcile or integrate these two worldviews through the act of translation, which enabled them both to find hidden within the biblical narrative the best that contemporaneous non-Jewish literary and aesthetic achievements had to offer. Moreover, the Bible’s divine authorship permitted them both to make the further claim that such achievements existed most pristinely and most beautifully in Judaism. This apologetical argument ultimately aided the invention of what we now call “Renaissance Jew-ish culture.”3

Translation and the Reclamation of a Birthright

The multiplicity of languages, to use the words of Derrida, “exhibits an incompletion, the impossibility of finishing, of totalizing, of saturat-ing, of completing something on the order of edification, architectural construction, system and architectonics.”4 Because of this multiplic-ity, there is a need for translation: to build nexuses between cul-tures, between languages, between texts, between ideas, and between peoples.

Prior to Saadya Gaon (ca. 882–942), when the superiority of Juda-ism was discussed, it tended to be done on theological grounds. With Saadya, however, literary and aesthetic dimensions begin to feature highly in such claims.5 If the Torah is the font of all wisdom, according to Saadya, then its language must both anticipate and surpass those (non-Jewish) canons used to define literary elegance.6 The perceived

See, for example, the corrective in Christopher Celenza, The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin’s Legacy (Baltimore, MD, 2004).

3 For historiographical overviews of the topic, see David B. Ruderman, “Italian Renaissance and Jewish Thought,” in Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy, edited by Albert Rabil, Jr., vol. 1 (Philadelphia, 1988), 382–433; Hava Tirosh-Rothschild, “Jewish Culture in Renaissance Italy: A Methodological Survey,” Italia 9, 1–2 (1990): 63–96.

4 Jacques Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel,” trans. by Joseph F. Graham, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. 1, edited by Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stan-ford, CA, 2007), 191.

5 See my “Precursorship and the Forgetting of History: Franz Rosenzweig and Saadya Gaon on the Memory of Translation,” in New Directions in Jewish Philosophy, edited by Aaron W. Hughes and Elliot R. Wolfson (Bloomington, IN, 2010), 52–84, esp. 70–77.

6 This trope of the purity of the Hebrew language is articulated well in the Hebrew introduction to his Egron, where he writes, for example, that:

the case of judah messer leon and judah abravanel 247


eternality of the Torah’s language and the elegance of its mode of expression signaled the superiority of Jewish culture, the desire to make Jewish texts conform to non-Jewish standards, and the eventual active Jewish participation in these standards. The natural outcome of this activity is that the Bible was now analyzable using the same critical tools and models used to explore any other piece of literature regard-less of provenance or authorship.7 Invested in the translative enter-prise was the attempt to make the Bible a part of and as something superior to the great works of literature produced in the cultures in which Jews found themselves.8

Certainly, on one level at least, the reasons behind this translative project are easy enough to understand: the Bible had to be made to conform to philosophy, also referred to as “foreign” wisdom, and vice versa, if Jews were to engage in its practice. However, this desire to posit conformity does not necessarily prepare us for the ingenious ways that many Jewish philosophers argued that philosophy—of

We did not speak the language [of our neighbors]Or worship their gods.From Sinai our God spoke to us the words of purityIn the mouth of His servant, Moses, a man of God.He spoke laws and judgments [huqim u-mishpatim]From atop Mt. Horeb.For generations we lived in the land of our heritage[Our language] used by our kingsHeard in the songs of the Levites and in the hymn of priestsSpoken by our prophets, defining their vision.

See his ha-Egron: Kitâb usûl al shʿîr al-ʿibrânî, critical edition with introduction and commentary by Nehemya Allony (Jerusalem, 1969), Hebrew introduction, 157. On the relationship between the Hebrew and Arabic introductions, see Rina Drory, Mod-els and Contexts: Arabic Literature and Its Impact on Medieval Jewish Culture (Leiden, 2000), 178–190.

7 See my The Invention of Jewish Culture: Bible, Philosophy, and the Art of Transla-tion (Bloomington, IN, 2010), esp. 68–92.

8 In stating this I disagree with Jonathan Sheehan, who writes that “The Bible has not always been understood, read, appreciated, and venerated as a piece of Western ‘culture.’ [. . .] if for no other reason that this ideal of the Bible and this ideal of culture were invented at a particular time, in a particular place, and for particular reasons.” See his The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton, 2005), x. I do not disagree with Sheehan’s notion that the term “culture” is an invented one and that the various ways that the Bible has been imagined is bound up with this construction. However, I would certainly point out, as indeed I shall throughout this study, that this did not originate in the Enlightenment period. On the contrary, the translation of the Bible has always been defined by what is seen to be constitutive of “culture” in any particular time, be it Arabophone, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Modern, and Postmodern.

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any variety: Platonic, Aristotelian, Alfarabian, Averroist, Scholastic, Humanist, Kantian, post-Kantian—existed deep within the biblical narrative and that it accordingly only needed to be unlocked. The Bible, when read across the longue durée of Jewish philosophical writ-ing, has been perceived to contain within itself, in potentia, all of the intellectual, literary, and aesthetic standards of the larger cultures in which Jews found themselves. A question we could ask ourselves is: What does this mean for the formation of Jewish cultures? If the Bible, according to these elite philosophers, can only be made sense of using the standards of non-Jews, if biblical language and categories can only be glimpsed through the veil of other languages and cultures, what, if anything, defines Jewish culture at any particular historical or geographical moment? How is the “Jewish” created (or invented) and untangled from the “non-Jewish,” and vice versa, in the quest for some sort of illusive or always just-out-of-reach authenticity.

The perceived superiority of the biblical narrative—understood as embodying all literary graces and rhetorical elegance—was, as I have suggested, rediscovered and recalibrated by each philosopher’s gaze. And each gaze, not surprisingly, was defined by the aesthetic and artistic contexts in which each philosopher lived: ancient Alex-andria; medieval Baghdad or Cordoba; Renaissance Rome; Weimar Berlin—to name but a few. The translation of the Bible accordingly became intertwined with the act—part political, part ideological, and part apologetic—of uncovering an ancient literary tradition that was paradoxically always a modern claim predetermined by contempora-neous aesthetic standards.

Instead of focusing on the philological mechanisms of translation, my concern is with how translation invests in itself the creation of numer-ous cultural, political, literary, and religious identities. Translation was an activity or process that opened the Bible up to other cultures. How-ever, rather than simply facilitating border crossings between cultures, translation—I suggest—actually impedes such movement owing to its ability to articulate a category called the “Judaic” that, paradoxically, can only be defined and subsequently differentiated using the language and categories of the so-called “non-Judaic.”9

9 Or, perhaps to rephrase this in the language of Robert Bonfil: “The task that I set for myself was to show how it is possible to read the history of the Jews of the Renais-sance in a modern perspective—that of the complex question of the definition of an identity in the context of a nascent awareness of the Self as organically interrelated



Jewish Philosophy in Italy on the Eve of Modernity

Let me now move from the theoretical to the particular and provide a historical overview of the two thinkers who are the subjects of this study, Judah Messer Leon and Judah Abravanel. In histories of Jew-ish philosophy, the fifteenth century is generally regarded as a time of transition from the so-called medieval to the so-called modern period.10 As in the earlier Arabophone world, Jewish elites throughout the Mediterranean continued to study philosophy and its cognates, including the liberal arts and natural sciences. Jewish philosophers, for the most part, still employed the theoretical framework of Aristo-telianism, although they were more engaged in polemics—with both Christianity and Jewish critics of philosophy—than their predecessors, and increasingly they began, as non-Jews did, to study the corpus of Plato.11

On account of the specific needs of the Italian economy and the almost constant state of warfare among the various city-states, there existed a general tolerance of Jewish moneylenders by popes, princes, and republican governments.12 Despite their marginal status, based as it was on short-term residential permits (condotte), many of these moneylenders thrived financially and began to model themselves and their tastes on paradigms supplied by the Italian nobility.13 In so doing, they cultivated a Hebrew and Jewish version of the Renaissance man, the so-called uomo universalis, what they now hebraicized as the hakham kolel.14

with the Other, without for all that becoming confused with the Other, and still less annihilated by it.” See his Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy, trans. by A. Oldcorn (Berke-ley, 1994), 286.

10 See, for example, Colette Sirat, A History of Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages (Cambridge and Paris, 1990), 345–350.

11 An excellent overview of the period may be found in Hava Tirosh-Rothschild, “Jewish Philosophy on the Eve of Modernity,” in History of Jewish Philosophy, edited by Daniel H. Frank and Oliver Leaman (London and New York, 1997), 499–573. Much of this paragraph and the following one rely on her overview.

12 For a social history of Italian Jewries in this period, see Bonfil, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy.

13 It is also important to be aware of Robert Bonfil’s caveat that we need to ask our-selves, among other things, just how liberal or tolerant the “Renaissance” was to Jews. See, for example, his “The Historian’s Perception of the Jew in the Italian Renaissance: Toward a Reappraisal,” Revue des Études Juives 143 (1984): 59–82.

14 See, for example, Hava Tirosh-Rothschild, Between Worlds: The Life and Times of Rabbi David ben Judah Messer Leon (Albany, NY, 1991), 11–33. For further study on the educational curriculum of these individuals, see David B. Ruderman, The World of

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Many wealthy Jews became patrons of rabbinic scholars, belletrists, philosophers, and poets. They educated their children using traditional models of learning such as Torah and gemara, in addition to the scho-lastic curriculum of the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy), including the emphasis on eloquent speech in both Latin and Italian.15 Although imitating the manners and curriculum of non-Jews, many of these elite Jews were either aware or made to be aware of their “otherness.” Rather than whole-heartedly adopt the “Renaissance” lifestyle, they adapted its literary, aesthetic, and cultural norms.

The flipside of this interest in non-Jewish intellectual currents was a profound sense of pride in the Jewish past that, in many ways, seems to have been aided by the perceived antiquity of the Kabbalah.16 The deep mystical currents of this tradition, it will be recalled, were cur-rently in vogue among Christian thinkers who employed Jews to teach them its secret doctrines.17 This produced a certain apologetic tenor among Jewish thinkers who used the antiquity of Judaism to articulate a position of Jewish superiority over the literary and aesthetic products of non-Jewish culture. Whereas Christians, including the intellectual luminaries of fifteenth century Italy, copied the findings of earlier cul-tures—such as the Greeks, Romans, and even the Jews—Jews, so the argument went, possessed all wisdom in their Torah and, as a result, had little or no need for other cultures. However, the great paradox of this argument is that non-Jewish categories were used as the criteria for this judgment and, as a result, had to be read into the Bible as a way to show its ostensible superiority. We get a glimpse at this herme-neutic in the words of Abraham ben Mordechai Farissol, one of the earliest Jewish thinkers to begin framing Judaism and Jewish ideas in the categories of the Renaissance and vice versa:

And if, in these times, because of our sins, we are exiled from our land, behold only to us God spoke and showed us his natural and supernatu-ral portents and signs in Egypt, and also at our wondrous station on Mount Sinai, He crowned us in the perfect Torah—including all the

a Renaissance Jew: The Life and Thought of Abraham ben Mordechai Farissol (Cincin-nati, 1981), 21–32.

15 Tirosh-Rothschild, Between Worlds, 44–51.16 See Ruderman, The World of a Renaissance Jew, 76–77.17 See the insightful study in Chaim Wirszubski, Pico dell Mirandola’s Encounter

with Jewish Mysticism (Cambridge, MA, 1989).



natural, speculative, divine, legal, and political wisdom from which all the world drank . . .18

For Farissol, the Torah represents all perfection in this world. And the Jews, as the sole recipients of the Torah, possess unique access to its teachings. However, simultaneous with the Jewish possession of the Torah is the propensity for sin and the current state of exile. This dis-crepancy—for Farissol, for Messer Leon, for Judah Abravanel, indeed for pretty much every other Jewish thinker of the Renaissance—gave way to the argument that the aesthetic products of the Renaissance lie hidden in the biblical text and must be brought to the surface by first reading non-Jewish texts. As if to atone for their sins, in other words, these non-Jewish texts now appear to be superior to the Torah.

It is important not to overlook the tensions inherent to this type of argument, an argument that is omnipresent in much Jewish apologet-ics throughout the ages. I refer, in particular, to this sense of pride in the Torah and the ancient traditions associated with the Kabbalah on the one hand, coupled with the acknowledged accomplishments of the various non-Jewish cultures in which Jews found themselves and their perceived lack in Jewish cultures.19 Does this mean that Jewish elites thought of themselves as inferior to non-Jewish elites? On the most obvious level, probably not. However, on other levels, I wish to suggest that the complex intersection between Jewish and non-Jewish ideas and cultures produced if not an outright sense of inferiority then at least a set of tensions, of which the apologetics described below functioned as an outlet.

In order to explore these repercussions in greater detail, I focus on two individuals who were surprisingly at home in the various intel-lectual and aesthetic trajectories associated with fifteenth-century Italy and were instrumental in defining something that we today signify as

18 Quoted in Ruderman, The World of a Renaissance Jew, 76–77.19 When I first presented a version of this paper, Moshe Idel took me to task for

my claim that Jewish thinkers had a sense of inferiority to non-Jewish thought. He argued that, in possession of the Kabbalah, Jewish thinkers always thought themselves superior. I am still not convinced by this argument. Obviously we cannot get into the minds of these thinkers; however, the fact that—as I trust will become clear in this paper—the fifteenth century thinkers that I examine here constantly needed to defend Judaism and to do so using the intellectual categories produced by non-Jews reveals a real sense of tension, if not inferiority. Moreover, I think one could make the claim, alluded to in the present discussion if not worked out fully, that this tension was what facilitated and subsequently enabled these thinkers to construct Kabbalah as superior to anything produced by non-Jews.

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“Renaissance Jewish culture,” realizing, of course, that all three of the terms in quotations are highly unstable. Judah Messer Leon and Judah Abravanel represent among two of the earliest responses of Jews to the intellectual culture of the Renaissance. Whereas the former wrote in Hebrew, the latter did so in Italian. Whereas the latter resented Kab-balah as inferior to Aristotelianism,20 the latter regarded Kabbalah as an authentic expression of Judaism and sought to reconcile it with the teachings of Aristotle. Finally, whereas the former wrote for Jews, the latter cast his net much wider and wrote, it seems, for a predominantly non-Jewish audience.

Despite these differences, however, both had a similar goal: to show points of contact between fifteenth-century, non-Jewish, intellectual trends and the Bible’s antiquity. This contact was both precipitated by the desire on the part of both individuals to project onto and then subsequently discover deep within the biblical narrative many of the themes, tropes, and categories that they felt defined Renaissance cul-ture. However, they both argued that these themes and categories existed within the Bible in a more pure, ancient, and pristine fashion.

We could also make the point that both Messer Leon and Judah Abravanel make the same case, but for different audiences. Since he wrote in Hebrew, Messer Leon’s goal was to convince Jews that the intellectual culture of the Renaissance was not to be feared but was, in fact, their birthright. And since he wrote also presumably in Ital-ian, Judah Abravanel makes the same case, albeit for non-Jews and, perhaps because of this, more subtly.

If Judah Messer Leon is interested in showing, point-by-point, the minute connections between biblical terms and fifteenth century rhe-torical categories (e.g., metaphor as ha-hityahasut), Abravanel is unin-terested in demonstrating how Judaism and Jewish sources must be so interpreted. Perhaps this is because someone like Judah Messer Leon is first required to develop the groundwork or frames of reference neces-sary for subsequent thinkers, such as Judah Abravanel, to engage in a more creative or synthetic enterprise.

20 Tirosh-Rothschild, Between Worlds, 40–45.



Judah Messer Leon

Judah ben Yehiel Messer Leon (ca. 1420–ca. 1498) was born in Mon-tecchio Maggiore, now in the Italian province in Vicenza, located in the Veneto region of northeastern Italy. We know, however, very little about his life and career.21 He travelled around a great deal and we do know that he found himself in some of the major centers of Renaissance culture, including Padua, Venice, Bologna, and Naples. By 1454 he had been ordained as a rabbi and functioned as the head of a yeshiva in Ancona. This yeshiva is significant because in it stu-dents were trained in traditional Jewish matters in addition to secular sciences necessary for higher study in the humanities, philosophy, and medicine. Many of his works—Libnat ha-Sappir (“The Pavement of Sapphire), Miklal Yofi (“The Perfection of Beauty”), and Nofet Sufim (“The Honeycomb’s Flow”)—functioned as textbooks designed for the use of students in his academy and these books were all calibrated to show the series of intersections between Renaissance and Jewish cul-tures. We also know that as Messer Leon moved around Italy, he took his yeshiva or academy with him.

Messer Leon was also an accomplished physician and seems to have taught the discipline at the University of Padua. In 1469, to quote Rab-inowitz, “the emperor bestowed upon him what must surely rank as the most extraordinary writ of privilege ever accorded to an individual Jewish academician: not only a double doctorate, in medicine and the liberal arts, but also the right to confer such doctorates upon other Jews of proved and demonstrated worthiness.”22 We also know that Messer Leon wrote other works, particularly commentaries, on the works of Aristotle. Moreover, he was highly critical of the writings of Gersonides and even put the latter’s commentary on the Torah under a ban.

21 The best biographical account of Messer Leon can be found in the introductory matter to his The Book of the Honeycomb’s Flow (Sefer Nopheth Suphim), a critical edition and translation by Isaac Rabinowitz (Ithaca, NY, 1983), esp. xvii–xxxi.

22 Ibid., xxv. We do know, for example, that he awarded at least two such degrees, to Yohanan Alemanno, himself a relatively well-known thinker and philosopher, and Benedict of Parma. On the former, see Arthur M. Lesley, “The Song of Solomon’s Ascents by Yohanan Alemanno: Love and Human Perfection According to a Jewish Colleague of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola,” (PhD diss., University of California, 1976).

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Messer Leon is usually referred to as a hakham kolel, the Hebrew equivalent of a uomo universalis. He was a rabbi, teacher, physician, philosopher, and more generally a scholar who was widely regarded as excelling in both so-called “secular” and “religious” topics—realizing, of course, that these terms most likely did not mean in the fifteenth century what they mean today. Perhaps more than anyone, Messer Leon sought to translate the Bible, and thus Judaism, using the intel-lectual categories of the fifteenth century.

Around 1480, Messer Leon—along with his academy—settled in Naples, then under the largely tolerant rule of Ferdinand II. It was to Naples that the Abravanel family moved following the decree of expul-sion in 1492. Both the Abravanels and the Messer Leons remained in Naples until the French took over in 1495. The goal of this essay is not to dwell on the relationship between Judah Messer Leon and his academy to the newly arrived Judah Abravanel—a relationship that, as far as I can tell is understudied on account of the paucity of evidence, but a relationship that must have existed, if only informally.

For Judah Messer Leon, the radical differences between the cultures of fifteenth century Italy and that of traditional Judaism—one trying to break with the authority of the past, the other firmly grounded in it; one stressing the virtues of the uomo universalis, the other appar-ently critical of such virtues—existed only on the surface. Once one penetrated the depths of the Bible, the conceptual differences between these two cultures shattered.

One of Judah Messer Leon’s most important works—Sefer Nofet Sufim or “The Book of the Honeycomb’s Flow”—represents one of the earliest attempts to show a set of correspondences between rheto-ric and the Hebrew Bible. Although written in Hebrew, the work sets as its goal the translation of Hebrew terms into Renaissance categories and, by extension, the “discovery” of a “Renaissance” literary tradi-tion within or behind the Bible. This results in what I want to call the beginnings of the invention of a Renaissance Jewish literary tradition. Messer Leon writes, for example:

Every science [kol hokhmah], every rationally apprehended truth that any treatise may contain, is present in our holy Torah and in the books of those who speak by the Holy Spirit [ba-ruah ha-qodesh], present, that is, for those who thoroughly understand the subjects involved, and for whom the Lord has enlightened the eyes . . . In the days of proph-ecy, indeed in the months of old, when out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God shined forth, we used to know from the Holy Torah all the



sciences and truths of reason, including all that were humanly attained, for everything is already latent therein, or plainly stated. What other peoples possessed of these sciences and truths was, by comparison with us, very little . . .23

Reminiscent of the tenth-century Saadya Gaon’s truncated history of the Hebrew language in the introduction to his Egron—another work seeking to “translate” the Bible, albeit into Arabic—Messer Leon next turns his attention to the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E and the subsequent exile.24 Like Saadya, he pairs destruction and exile with forgetting. For in exile, which he locates as the end result of Israel’s transgressions and iniquities, Jews slowly lost their scientific and artis-tic birthright. He continues:

Thus the matter has come to be in reverse [ha-ʿinyan bi-hofekh]; for if, after we have come to know all the sciences, or some part of them, we study the words of the Torah, then the eyes of our understanding open up to the fact that the sciences are included in the Torah’s words, and we wonder how we could have failed to realize this from the Torah itself to begin with. Such has frequently been our own experience, especially in the science of Rhetoric [hokhmat ha-halisah]. For when I examined the words of the Torah in the way now common among most people, I had no idea that the science of Rhetoric or any part of it was included therein. But once I had studied and investigated Rhetoric, searched for her as for hidden treasures out of the treatises written by men of nations other than our own, and afterwards came back to see what is said about it in the Torah and the Holy Scriptures, then the eyes of my understanding were opened, and I saw that it was the Torah which was the giver . . .25

The goal of Messer Leon is to reconnect individuals to the Bible. The way he—like so many of the Jewish philosophers, Judah Abravanel included—chooses to do this however is by appeals to external lit-erature as opposed to internal modes of reading. Paradoxically, but perhaps not surprisingly, Jewish superiority is defined and articulated by means of non-Jewish contexts.

Messer Leon is not interested in translating the entire biblical nar-rative into a contemporaneous literary vernacular. His concern is to

23 Messer Leon, Sefer Nofet Sufim, 143.24 See my comments in The Invention of Jewish Identity: Bible, Philosophy, and the

Art of Translation (Bloomington, IN, 2010), 32–39.25 Messer Leon, Sefer Nofet Sufim, 145.

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show points of contact between the Bible and fifteenth-century intel-lectual currents, especially the latter’s use of the classical rhetorical tradition as developed by the likes of Cicero and Quintillian. One of Messer Leon’s most original contributions to this is his substitution of examples taken from the Bible for those taken from Latin authors in non-Jewish Renaissance treatises devoted to the topic.26 Messer Leon’s interest is in the conceptual translation of select words and phrases and thereby the illumination of the Bible’s anticipation of and confor-mity to classical rhetoric.

But surely this is an apologetical program. Implicit in this argu-ment is the divine status of the Bible and thus the superiority of Juda-ism. Although it possesses all of the literary and aesthetic features of the larger intellectual culture in which Jews found themselves, it does so latently and, by extension, more purely and eternally. The biblical narrative in many ways functions as a palimpsest, upon which was inscribed any number of types and kinds of cultural writings.

Messer Leon implies that if in the biblical period all sciences natu-rally flowed from the Torah’s wellsprings, in his own time “the mat-ter has come to be in reverse.” One must consequently read these sciences amongst the other nations and only then come back to the Torah to find them. For him, the biblical narrative—at least when read properly—could connect elite Jews to Renaissance culture because in it was Renaissance culture, only in a better version.

Messer Leon demonstrates the beauty of the biblical narrative by both situating it against a larger literary and rhetorical backdrop, and by going so far as to say that in the Bible one encounters both the origins and most forceful expressions of these themes. Implicit in his argument is that it is in this reconstituted biblical narrative that one truly and authentically encounters not simply the Jewish response to non-Jewish literature, but the most beautiful expressions of non-Jewish ideas and, by extension, of Judaism. An invented or imagined Jewish culture that exhibits all of the characteristics and qualities that defined what he, and others, considered true culture to be.

26 Robert Bonfil, “The Book of the Honeycomb’s Flow by Judah Messer Leon: The Rhetorical Dimension of Jewish Humanism in Fifteenth Century Italy,” Jewish His-tory 6, 1–2 (1992): 24.



Judah Messer Leon’s desire is to discover or uncover the rhetorical currents flowing deep within the Hebrew Bible. In the opening of the fourth section of Nofet Sufim, for example, he writes:

In the course of the preceding treatment of the subjects with which the present work is concerned, we entered their villages . . . and their encamp-ments, and searched out the inner chamber of the pronouncements made by both ancient and more recent rhetoricians [divrei ha-melisa ha-qedumim ve-ha-hadashim] . . . For most of what we shall say herein, we shall draw upon Book IV of the [New] Rhetoric by Tully, and upon the account given by the Philosopher in Book III of his Rhetoric. The illus-trations [ha-meshalim] I have taken from our holy and beautiful house, from the words of prophecy and the divinely inspired narratives that sit first in the kingdom of agreeableness and elegance, that are sweeter than honey, that cannot be gotten for gold . . .27

Judah Messer Leon here clearly states his goal of illumining the rhetor-ical dimension of the Bible. If classical motifs and themes can be dis-covered in the biblical narrative—which predates the likes of Cicero, Tully, and Quintillian—then Messer Leon, according to his own agenda, will have succeeded in demonstrating that these motifs first existed in the Bible. The language of the above passage confirms this. Using the words of Genesis 25:16 (“their villages . . . and their encamp-ments”), he describes the need to read works on rhetoric composed by non-Jews and to enter their “inner chamber” (2Kings 9:2). Yet as the closing lines reveal, these features “sit first in the kingdom” (Esther 1:4) of the Bible. Even though he must ultimately go to non-Jewish texts to discover the defining elements and the important features of rhetoric and thus of Judaism, he then perceives these definitions and features to sit most beautifully in the Bible. For it is there that these features reside most purely, most pristinely, and, to use language that conjures up the translation project of Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber centuries later, most archaically.28

Following the chapter wherein the aforementioned quotation is located, the reader encounters eighty-two chapters, all of which reveal in intricate detail the numerous rhetorical terms, concepts and tropes, their definitions, including examples of how they are used within the biblical narrative. For example, concerning the trope of metaphor (ha-hityahasut), Messer Leon writes:

27 Messer Leon, Sefer Nofet Sufim, 417.28 See my The Invention of Jewish Culture, 22–32.

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Metaphor is diction in which certain words are taken as parables and in a transferred sense, because some resemblance obtains between the literal and transferred meanings which allows this appropriately to be done. For example “The wilderness and the parched land will be glad; and the desert will rejoice, and blossom as the rose” [Is 35:1]. Gladness is properly attributable only to humans, but appears here through resem-blance; for the bringing forth of the flowers is indicative of great good in the case of a desert and parched land, just as gladness is an indication of man’s good . . . The aim in using metaphor is sometimes conciseness [ha-qisur]. . . . Sometimes the aim is decency of language [neqiyut ha-lashon] . . . Sometimes the intention is to magnify a matter. . . . Sometimes it is meant to minimize . . . And sometimes its sole purpose is elegance: “That put darkness for light and light for darkness, that put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter” [Is 5:20]. This figure should be fashioned with understanding and awareness, in such a way that the resemblance will not seem bizarre.29

This passage is significant for several reasons. First is that Hebrew does not literally possess a word for “metaphor”; for this Judah must use the Hebrew term that connotes “relation,” “relationship” or “ascription.” Secondly, despite the non-existence of a Hebrew technical term he implies that the actual concept possesses a rich history in the biblical narrative, something that the chapter goes on to recount in intricate detail. Thirdly, the small gap that opens between the Hebrew term and the concept ultimately gives way in the Nofet Sufim to a chasm between biblical rhetoric and all other forms of (non-Jewish) rhetoric. This chasm exists because, unlike classical and renaissance rhetoric that are the product of human hands, the biblical narrative reveals its divine literary and rhetorical artistry. As Messer Leon himself claims “the statutes and ordinances of Rhetoric that are included within the Holy Scriptures, and all of the like that all the other nations possess, the difference is so striking that to compare them is like comparing the hyssop in the wall with the cedar of Lebanon.”30

Despite Messer Leon’s attempt to reorient Jewish intellectual life in Italy, he met with only limited success. Moreover, despite his ban on the commentary of Gersonides, the latter’s influence increased, most likely owing to the influx of Spanish and Provençal immigrants.31 More-over many of his students—including the aforementioned Yohanan

29 Messer Leon, Sefer Nofet Sufim, 511–513.30 Messer Leon, Sefer Nofet Sufim, 145.31 Tirosh-Rothschild, “Jewish Philosophy on the Eve of Modernity,” 515.



Alemanno and even his own son David ben Judah—were not as inter-ested in Aristotelianism and began to gravitate towards Platonism and the Kabbalah. It is these subject matters that would also attract the attention of Judah Abravanel, to whom I now turn.

Judah Abravanel

An examination of Judah Messer Leon’s attempt to read fifteenth-cen-tury intellectual culture into the Bible and vice versa inevitably leads us to the enigmatic Judah Abravanel (ca. 1465–after 1521). Born in Lisbon, Abravanel was the firstborn of Don Isaac Abravanel (1437–1508), himself a highly-connected financier and diplomat, in addi-tion to being an important biblical commentator and philosopher.32 Despite the conservative tendencies in the thought of his father, Don Isaac insured that his children received educations that included both Jewish and non-Jewish subjects.33

By profession, Judah was a doctor, one who had a very good reputa-tion and who served the royal court. After the edict of expulsion had been issued, Ferdinand and Isabel requested that he remain in Spain. Like many of those Jews who refused to convert, Judah and his imme-diate family, including his father, made their way to Naples. There, Ferdinand II of Aragon, the king of Naples, warmly welcomed the Abravanel family, owing to its many contacts in international trade. In 1495, however, the French took control of Naples, and Judah was again forced to flee, first to Genoa, then to Barletta, and subsequently to Venice. It seems that he also traveled around Tuscany, and there is some debate as to whether or not he actually met the famous Floren-tine humanist, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (it seems unlikely that he did). In 1501, after the defeat of the French in Naples, he was invited back to be the personal physician of the Viceroy of Naples, Fernández de Córdoba. Among all of these peregrinations, Judah found the time to write (but not publish) his magnum opus, the Dialoghi d’amore.34

32 More generally, see Eric Lawee, Isaac Abarbanel’s Stance Toward Tradition: Defense, Dissent, Dialogue (Albany, NY, 2001), 9–26.

33 For an examination of the typical education curriculum of an elite Jew at this time, see Moshe Idel, “The Study Program of R. Yohanan Alemmano” (Hebrew), Tar-biz 48 (1979), 303–30.

34 Mariano Lenzi published the Dialoghi in 1535 in Rome after Abravanel’s death. On the debates about the original language of the work, see the insightful article by

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Other than these basic facts, we know very little of the life of Judah Abravanel.35

Abravanel is part of a larger trend among Jewish authors in the fif-teenth- and sixteenth-centuries who increasingly resorted to Romance vernaculars in order to attract a Jewish audience (including conversos and ex-conversos), which no longer understood Hebrew. Judah Abra-vanel becomes an important transitional thinker in the encounter between Judaism and the Italian Renaissance. Whereas his father, Don Isaac, and even his older contemporary, Judah Messer Leon, could still adapt humanistic themes to their Hebrew writings, which were still primarily in conversation with medieval thought, increasingly in Judah’s generation the only way to engage in a full-scale examination of the universal tendencies associated with Renaissance was to write in the vernacular.

Even the very genre of the Dialoghi, that of the trattato d’amore (“treatise on love”), was the product of the Italian vernacular of the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries. When, for example, Judah discusses the concept of love as a universal or cosmic principle he draws upon, as will be clearer below, a particular vocabulary and set of concepts that only make sense when contextualized within this already existing discourse.36

Despite Abravanel’s embrace of larger Italian literary and aesthetic trends, he also seems to have had an uneasy relationship to the larger culture in which he found himself. This uneasiness does not so much appear in his Italian magnum opus as it does in his moving autobio-graphical Hebrew poem entitled Telunah ʿal ha-zeman (“A Complaint Against Time”) that he seems to have composed in the year 1503, after he wrote his universalist Dialoghi. In this poem he laments the fate of his first-born son who was kidnapped by his enemies in Portugal and converted to Christianity. He writes, for example:

Barbara Garvin, “The Language of Leone Ebreo’s Dialoghi d’Amore,” Italia 13–15 (2001): 181–210.

35 This brief biographical description relies on my “Judah Abrabanel” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, online at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abrabanel/index.html#note-4.

36 For a good analysis of where and how Judah’s work fits into the Renaissance genre of the trattato d’amore (“treatise on love”), see John Charles Nelson, Renais-sance Theory of Love: The Context of Giordano Bruno’s Eroici furori (New York, 1958), 67–162.



For you, my son, my heart is thirsting, burning;In you I quell my hunger and my thirst.My splendid skills are yours by right, my knowledge,And the science that has gotten fame for me.Some of it my mentor, my own father bequeathed to me—A scholar’s scholar he.The rest I gained by struggling on my own, subduing wisdomWith my bow and sword, plumbing it with my mind.Christian scholars are grasshoppers next to me;I’ve seen their college—they’ve no one who can best me in the duel of words.37

In this poem, Abravanel expresses his complete lack of respect for “Christian scholars” and their universities. The bitterness that he exhib-its towards these individuals would certainly seem to belie his Dialoghi, a work designed to show the points of correspondence between Juda-ism and the Renaissance. However, the bitterness of the poem may well manifest itself in the Dialoghi as apologetics, the desire to show to as large an audience as possible that Judaism and the Jewish people are all superior to the best that “Christian scholars” can produce.38

When read on this level, the Dialoghi begins to reveal an apologeti-cal intent, one no less so than what we witness in Judah Messer Leon’s Sefer Nofet Sufim. In a relatively well-known example, Judah Abravanel discusses the “androgyne” in Book Three of the Dialoghi d’Amore. In explaining the origins of Love, Philo recounts Aristophanes’ version of the myth as recounted in Plato’s Symposium. After Sophia insists that there must be great philosophical import to the myth because the great Plato himself composed it, Philo counters with the claim that Plato did not in fact create this myth, but actually stole it from the Bible. He claims:

The fable comes from a tradition that was referred by an author more ancient than the Greeks, that is, the sacred history of Moses concerning the creation of the first parents, Adam and Eve.39

Sophia replies that she had “never heard that Moses [had] made this into a fable.” To which Philo retorts:

37 The translation comes from Raymond P. Scheindlin, “Judah Abravanel to His Son,” Judaism 41 (1992): 198.

38 This is my argument in The Art of Dialogue in Jewish Philosophy (Bloomington, IN, 2008), 132–37.

39 Leone Ebreo, Dialogues of Love, ed. and trans. by Damian Bacich and Rossella Pescatori (Toronto, 2009), 274.

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He did not tell this as a fable with such specific details, but he declared the substance of the fable in a succinct way; and it was from him that Plato took his fable, amplifying and adorning it after the manner of Greek oratory, thus creating a disordered and confused version of the Hebrew material.40

Here Philo/Abravanel takes us back to a recurring trope in the history of Jewish philosophy, that of the Greek theft of ideas that were origi-nally Hebrew. But note the difference with Messer Leon: Whereas the latter had implied that the relative simplicity of the Bible conformed to Renaissance categories, Abravanel argues that simplicity of the bib-lical narrative is better than anything that Greeks and, by extension, fifteenth-century Italians, could create. Indeed, Abravanel’s argument is even more apologetical than Messer Leon’s (perhaps because it was written in Italian?). First, he makes the simplicity of the biblical nar-rative conform to “foreign” categories or aesthetic standards. Then, paradoxically, he holds this reconfigured biblical account up, with its newly invented or imagined categories and standards, and puts it in counterpoint with texts that are now perceived to be “disordered and confused” plagiarisms.

Another example occurs in the second dialogue—“On the Univer-sality of Love”—where Philo again explains to Sophia a biblical myth that is “more ancient, learned, and wiser” than that found among the ancients.41 In this passage, Philo uses the biblical myth of creation to spiritualize the Greek myth of Latona’s birth of Apollo and Diana on the Island of Delos, an Island, according to the myth that does not touch the ocean floor. According to Philo:

Moses writes that when God was creating the higher, heavenly world and the lower, terrestrial world and breathed his divine spirit upon the waters of the abyss, He produced light. This is what the fable of Latona’s delivery means. She is the heavenly substance with whom Jupiter was in love. He impregnated her with the luminous bodies, mainly the sun and the moon, because Juno resisted.42

In this passage, Abravanel interprets Juno not as the jealous wife who seeks to punish her philandering husband, but as the sphere of the elements in a state of confusion. As in the previous example, he again

40 Ibid., 275.41 Ibid., 130.42 Ibid., 130.



tries to show that Greek myth—the raw material that Renaissance thinkers, the so-called “Christian scholars,” use to fashion their own ideas—is derivative of the Hebrew Bible and, by extension, Jews and Judaism. In so doing, Abravanel engages in a clever hermeneutic. He has emphasized the Bible’s conformity with non-Jewish science and then used this reconfiguration of the Bible to re-inform ancient myth. To use the words of Sophia at the end of the passage:

I very much like this allegory and its conformity with the creation nar-rated in the Holy Scripture of Moses and the continuation of the work throughout six consecutive days. It is truly admirable that it is possible to conceal such great and lofty things beneath the veil of Jupiter’s carnal loves.43

In these above examples, Abravanel is quick to point out not only the intersection of the Greek and biblical stories, but the superiority of the latter on account of their antiquity and purity. Near the end of the Dialoghi, Sophia, the female character, asks Philo whether he prefers the Platonic or the Aristotelian account of the origin of Beauty. Philo responds:

Because I follow Moses on theological wisdom, I feel closer to the [Pla-tonic] theory, for it is truly Mosaic theology. Plato, because he had greater notions of this ancient wisdom than Aristotle, followed it. Aristotle, who penetrated less deeply into abstract things, and unlike Plato did not have the testimony of our ancient theologians, denied that hidden territory, which he could not see . . . Because Plato learned from the ancients in Egypt, he could sense further [than Aristotle] even if he was not able to see the hidden principle of supreme wisdom or first beauty . . . Although Plato was for so many years Aristotle’s teacher, he learned from better teachers than Aristotle, because Plato studied with our ancient fathers.44

Whereas the previous two examples had implied that the elaborate Greek myths existed in a more refined and subtle manner in the bib-lical narrative, the present example makes explicit that the biblical text is the actual origin of Greek ideas. Reproducing the well-known trope that Plato studied with the prophets of ancient Israel,45 Philo here argues that Plato’s teaching, which tends to coincide more closely with biblical teaching, does so because Plato actually learned it from

43 Ibid., 131.44 Ibid., 325 (my italics).45 The classic study of this trope may be found in Norman Roth “The ‘Theft of

Philosophy’ by the Greeks from the Jews,” Classical Folio 32 (1978): 52–67.

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the Jews. It is not the case that the Platonic account of Beauty closely resembles the biblical one. On the contrary, as Sophia herself remarks in response to Philo’s argument: “the Platonic is the Mosaic.”46

Whereas Judah Messer Leon had argued that the Bible, when read properly, bests any non-Jewish work of rhetoric, Judah Abravanel uncovers a full-blown “Mosaic theology” in the Bible. This theology, in many ways indistinct from that produced by the likes of his non-Jewish contemporaries, differs only in terms of its grounding in Jewish sources and that it is the birthright of Jews. The only reason that non-Jews have it is because they copied from them.

Translation and the Theft of Hebraic Ideas

Translation, as witnessed above, was fundamentally apologetical. Embedded in the transfer of meaning from one language to another—the movement across the horizon of one cultural field to the plain of another—is change. Whether because the old language is ostensibly “dead” or because of a perceived sense of inferiority there exists the often implicit realization that one must adopt and adapt to the osten-sible attainments of new cultural parameters. One must convince both one’s coreligionists and those who are not that one’s own tradition possesses all the intellectual richness and aesthetic elegance of the host, at least when properly calibrated.

However this calibration is not as obvious as first appears. Certainly on one level it permitted Jews to argue that all of the intellectual and literary innovations associated with ancient Greece, Muslim Spain, the Renaissance or the Weimar Republic were essentially a series of thefts from Hebraic-Biblical culture.47 This is grounded in the minority need for legitimation—especially in terms of its cultural productions, its worldview, its way of life—in the face of the cultural and aesthetic achievements of a majority. Yet in making this statement I do not want to fall into the trap of ascribing essential features to Judaism and/or the various larger cultures with which it intersected. Indeed,

46 Ebreo, Dialoghi d’Amore, 326.47 See my “A Case of Twelfth-Century Plagiarism: Abraham ibn Ezra’s Hay ben

Meqitz and Avicenna’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan,” Journal of Jewish Studies 55, 2 (2004): 306–31.



perhaps it was these intersections, indeed fluidity, between Jewish and non-Jewish cultures that permitted such easy exchange.

It is in the accusations of Gentile theft that the production of Jewish and Hebraic translative activity begins to appear. By claiming that the Jews were, at some originary and mythic point in the distant past, in full possession of all wisdom owing to God’s perfection and the gift of the Torah is not only a sign of religio-ethnic pride, but also permits the “re-absorption” of this wisdom back into Judaism. If science or rhetoric was part of every Jew’s birthright—even if long forgotten—this nonetheless still justified active participation in these activities. The trope of theft became an important literary site where various Jew-ish identities could be both performed and contested.

The accusation that Gentiles stole from Jews however was not sim-ply a passive response to a perceived aesthetic and scientific imbal-ance. Rather this charge facilitated the active participation of Jews in these activities. If it could be argued that science, rhetoric or aesthet-ics represented autochthonous expressions that originally sprouted on Jewish soil then they could with minor conceptual and terminological difficulties be grafted back into this now barren soil and subsequently cultivated. Of central concern in this process was the re-translation of these sciences into more familiar (i.e., Jewish or Hebraic) idioms. The semantic field onto which they had to be grafted was the biblical narrative that now became the uniquely Jewish possession to rival all claims to superiority put forth by other cultures or groups.

Translation played a formative role in this activity by both articulat-ing and facilitating counterpoints between what was Jewish and what was not and between what the Torah literally said and how it was to be read or interpreted. This translative activity was ultimately responsible for taking the antiquity of the received text and, while making it new, simultaneously retaining its hoary antiquity. The paradox however was that this antiquity was always conceived of along modern lines. These constructions maintained the familiar themes of the past in the strangely familiar cadences and rhythms of the present.

Conclusions

Translation, broadly conceived, is an understudied process in the study of Jewish philosophy. Certainly there is a general and widespread rec-ognition of its ability to absorb and domesticate the ideas of everyone

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from Aristotle to Kant. Historically, in other words, we know quite a lot about translation. Yet relatively little work has been devoted to the meta-historical processes, the imaginaire, that made such pro-cesses possible. Why translate? What motivations—whether historical or philosophical—make this possible? The translative act is what sig-nals Judaism’s originary encounter with non-Jewish ideas. It defines Judaism as it opens it up; creates boundaries precisely as it dismantles them. Certainly translation is about finding old words or coining new ones to make up for the lacunae brought about by the encounter with the strange and the foreign. Yet, just as importantly if not more so, translation refits and recalibrates Judaism’s conceptual apparatus to absorb the new on the level of ideas. The result is nothing short of the redefinition or invention, the constant and continuous redefinition or invention, of Judaism. The new becomes old and the old new.

Translation and the Invention of Renaissance Jewish Culture

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