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Kabbalah in Italy, 1280-1510: a Survey

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Kabbalah in Italy, 1280-1510: a Survey KABBALAH in ITALY 1280–1510 A Survey MOSHE IDEL new haven & london CONTENTS Preface ix Introduction 1 1. Kabbalah: Introductory Remarks 19 2. Abraham Abulafia and Ecstatic Kabbalah 30 3. Abraham Abulafia’s Activity in Italy 40 4. Ecstatic Kabbalah as an Experiential Lore 52 ·V· Contents 5. Abraham Abulafia’s Hermeneutics 64 6. Eschatological Themes and Divine Names in Abulafia’s Kabbalah 77 7. Abraham Abulafia and R. Menahem ben Benjamin: Thirteenth-Century Kabbalistic and Ashkenazi Manuscripts in Italy 89 8. R. Menahem ben Benjamin Recanati 106 9. Menahem Recanati as a Theosophical-Theurgical Kabbalist 117 10. Menahem Recanati’s Hermeneutics 128 11. Ecstatic Kabbalah from the Fourteenth through Mid-Fifteenth Centuries 139 12. The Kabbalistic-Philosophical-Magical Exchanges in Italy 154 13. Prisca Theologia: R. Isaac Abravanel, Leone Ebreo, and R. Elijah Hayyim of Genazzano 164 14. R. Yohanan ben Yitzhaq Alemanno 177 15. Jewish Mystical Thought in Lorenzo il Magnifico’s Florence 192 16. Other Mystical and Magical Literatures in Renaissance Florence 202 17. Spanish Kabbalists in Italy after the Expulsion 212 18. Two Diverging Types of Kabbalah in Late-Fifteenth-Century Italy 219 19. Jewish Kabbalah in Christian Garb 227 20. Anthropoids from the Middle Ages to Renaissance Italy 236 21. Astromagical Pneumatic Anthropoids from Medieval Spain to Renaissance Italy 269 22. The Trajectory of Eastern Kabbalah and Its Reverberations in Italy 287 Concluding Remarks 293 ·vi· Contents Appendix 1. The Angel Named Righteous: From R. ’Amittai of Oria to Erfurt and Rome 315 Appendix 2. The Infant Experiment: On the Search for the First Language in Italy 324 Appendix 3. R. Yohanan Alemanno’s Study Program 340 Appendix 4. Magic Temples and Cities in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Mas‘udi, Ibn Zarza, Alemanno 344 Notes 349 Bibliography 467 Index of Manuscripts 477 Index of Titles 480 Index of Names 486 ·vii· PREFACE The following survey of Kabbalah in Italy was inspired by a series of lectures I delivered at the opening of the Avraham Goldstein-Goren Center of Jewish Studies at the Università degli Studi in Milan in the winter of 1998. It is my great pleasure to thank the late Mr. Avraham Goldstein-Goren for initiating these lectures, for caring about their publication, and for providing this lecturer with generous hospitality. The English manuscript of the lectures was translated into Italian by Professor Fabrizio Lelli some years ago. This volume incorporates revisions to the original material and the addition of some new chapters, taking into consideration salient recent scholarship. My own survey of Jewish thought in Italy has inevitably benefited much from earlier pioneering work by many scholars, including the late Professors Isaac ·IX· Preface Barzilay, Umberto Cassuto, Efraim Gottlieb, Adolph Jellinek, David Kaufmann, Cecil Roth, Gershom Scholem, Moses Schulvass, Joseph B. (Giuseppe) Sermoneta, Israel M. Ta-Shma, and Chaim Wirszubski; as well as Menahem Ben Sasson, Robert Bonfil, Giulio Busi, Saverio Campanini, Don Harran, Alessandro Gueta, Fabrizio Lelli, Arthur Leslie, Avraham Melammed, Mauro Perani, David Ruderman, Aviezer Ravitzky, Shlomo Simonsohn, and Hava Tirosh-Samuelson. All have contributed considerable knowledge, perspective, and insight about the vast speculative literature produced by Italian Jewry. Yet notwithstanding the great effort already invested, no detailed study of kabbalistic literature in Italy is available. This volume represents a first attempt to survey the main writings and ideas appearing in kabbalistic books and manuscripts composed in Italy and Sicily between 1280 and 1510. These temporal parameters reflect, first, Abraham Abulafia’s arrival in Italy for the second time in 1279 and the beginning of his kabbalistic literary activity there, while 1510 represents the end of the literary activities of the generation of Italian and Spanish Jews who were contemporaries of the Florentine intellectuals Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola and the arrival in Italy of the Kabbalists who were refugees from Spain. The three main Kabbalists to be analyzed below are R. Abraham Abulafia, R. Menahem Recanati, and R. Yohanan Alemanno. Each was a prolific writer who originated a vision of Kabbalah that was to a great extent new and influential, at least insofar as Italian Jewish culture was concerned. Abulafia’s ecstatic Kabbalah was clearly novel as an articulated kabbalistic system; Recanati articu- lated a form of theosophical-theurgical Kabbalah previously unknown in Italy; and Yohanan Alemanno’s astromagical interpretation of Kabbalah was likewise almost unknown on Italian soil. These three thinkers, who also represent three major models in Jewish Kabbalah, are seminal figures not only in the history of Kabbalah in Italy but also in the history of Kabbalah in general. The bulk of the present survey evolved from numerous detailed articles and monographs I dedicated to these figures, as well as to additional kabbalistic writings in Italy. In the following pages I have attempted to treat these topics and authors from a more integrated perspective, comparing them to one other, and the various brands of Italian Kabbalah to those found in Spain and Byzantium. Though the book grew from a series of publications in various languages over the past twenty-five years, I have reworked the material and integrated it in more comprehensive schemes, taking into consideration processes dealing with the development of Kabbalah as a whole. My discussions with friends and scholars over the years about topics dealt with in this volume have been extremely helpful, and I shall mention here especially Professors Robert Bonfil, Brian Copenhaven, Fabrizio Lelli, David Ruderman, and Stéphane Toussaint, and, last ·x· Preface but not least, the late Professors Ioan P. Culianu, Joseph B. Sermoneta, and Chaim Wirszubski. The basic methodological approaches that informed the following discussions are drawn from a variety of methodologies, especially the historical-philological one, which puts great emphasis upon the study of manuscripts and their historical filiation, as well as on the need to read texts in their conceptual framework. This is the reason why I treated the different Kabbalists in different chapters. However, from the conceptual point of view I am closer to the Warburg school and its reverberations in the study of the Renaissance, especially the emphasis put upon magic and astrology. I hope I learned much from the writings of Daniel P. Walker, Edgar Wind, Frances A. Yates, and their followers. The parallel developments in scholarship in Italy, as represented especially by the studies of Eugenio Garin and Paola Zambelli and more recently by Franco Bacchelli and Stéphane Toussaint, were indispensable for some of the conclusions drawn below. Many thanks are due to Ann Hawthorne’s rigorous editing of the English- language manuscript; her queries were sometimes a challenge but contributed much to the clarity of the exposition. ·xi· INTRODUCTION 1. A Survey of Kabbalah This book is the first comprehensive effort to survey the main stages of the development of Kabbalah in Italy, from its inception in the last decades of the thirteenth century until approximately 1510. My main focus is the works written in the Italian peninsula that both their authors and others conceived as being Kabbalah. Since an overall definition of Kabbalah—as of Italy in the Middle Ages—is filled with problems, like any attempt to define vast corpora such as philosophy, science, poetry, or magic, I prefer to use these two criteria of internal and external perception to delimit the relevant material, in itself highly diverse, covered in my analysis.1 ·1· Introduction This book is therefore not a history of Jewish culture or even of Jewish thought in Italy in this period but a much more specific enterprise. Although I will neces- sarily touch upon other forms of Jewish mysticism, such as the Heikhalot litera- ture, that were known in the peninsula, and upon mystical aspects of Jewish philosophy that developed there, this survey focuses upon the variety of literatures that inspired Kabbalah in Italy, such as the Jewish classical traditions and medi- eval philosophy, magic, and astrology, and upon the affinities between kabbalistic phenomena and parallel or similar ones in Italian culture. I deliberately use the term “survey” rather than “history.” In my opinion, one single history is not possible for such a complex phenomenon as Kabbalah; rather, it comprises a wide variety of histories. We already have histories of certain ideas and concepts that developed over centuries in accordance with changes and variations upon themes such as the righteous, tzaddiq, and the Shekhinah, the feminine description of deity;2 the constellation of ideas related to the Golem;3 and the avatars of the chain of being in Jewish mysticism.4 There are also histories of each of the main schools or models as they developed in various centers and literatures. So, for example, a history of ecstatic Kabbalah must cover not only Italy but also Byzantium and Jerusalem, as well as Safedian Kabbalah, Sabbateanism, eighteenth-century Hasidism and its opponents, and recent developments in the printing of Abulafia’s writings and their study by a variety of audiences. There are also histories of Kabbalah in a specific city, such as Venice or Florence, which are more concerned with what was written in a particular place or is extant there though written elsewhere; in these the importance of the local culture prevails over a broader picture of literary genres or conceptual structures of this mystical lore. Biographies of individual Kabbalists and histories of specific kabbalistic manu- scripts or libraries also contribute to a fuller picture of this lore. Kabbalah can also be seen as part of a history of religion as well as reflecting a mentality embedded in a specific culture and thus studied as cultural history. None of these histories should be neglected, and their findings should be integrated as much as possible. However, after all is said, it is the content of these literatures rather than their material manifestations in manuscripts or books that remains most important.
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