A Paradigm in Isaac Abravanel's Encounter with Renaissance Culture Cedric Cohen Skalli One of the Majo

Fortune and Providence: A Paradigm in Isaac Abravanel’s Encounter With Renaissance Culture

Cedric Cohen Skalli

One of the major problems in addressing the question of the humanistic aspects of Isaac Abravanel’s literary work1 is to elucidate the intellec- tual paradigms that both allowed him to connect himself to humanistic discourse and constituted the framework of an understanding of himself as a financier, leader, and writer. Recent and less recent scholarship has revealed clear humanistic trends in Abravanel’s work and life, including the use of classical literature, humanistic rhetorical conceptions, ancient and contemporary history, astrology, magic, and kabbalah, but also repub- lican ideas and humanistic models of leadership.2 Still, much work needs to be done to get a clearer idea of his involvement in Renaissance culture and his assimilation of it. In other words, the question is less whether

1 On the life and work of Don Isaac Abravanel (1437–1508), see E. Lawee, Isaac Abar- banel’s Stance Toward Tradition (Albany 2001); A. F. Borodowski, Isaac Abravanel on Mir- acles, Creation, Prophecy, and Evil: The Tension Between Medieval Jewish Philosophy and Biblical Studies (New York 2003); B. Netanyahu, Don Isaac Abravanel: Statesman and Phi- losopher (Philadelphia 1953). 2 M. Idel, “Kabbalah and Prisca Theologia in Rabbi Isaac and Yehuda Abravanel’s Writ- ings” (Hebrew), The Philosophy of Leone Ebreo: Four Lectures, M. Dorman and Z. Levi (eds.) (Haifa 1985), pp. 73–112; R. Ben-Shalom, “The Image of Christian Culture in the Historical Consciousness of the Jews of Twelfth to Fifteenth Century Spain and Provence” (Hebrew), Ph.D. dissertation, Tel Aviv University, 1996; R. Ben-Shalom, “Myth and Classical Mythol- ogy in the Historical Consciousness of Medieval Spanish Jewry,” Zion 66 (2001), pp. 451–494 [Hebrew]; E. Gutwirth, “Don Ishaq Abravanel and Vernacular Humanism in Fifteenth- Century Iberia,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 60 (1998), pp. 641–671; id., “Con- solatio: Don Ishaq Abravanel and the Classical Tradition,” Medievalia et Humanistica 27 (2000), pp. 79–98; A. Ravitzky, “Kings and Laws in Late Medieval Jewish Thought: Nissim Gerona vs. Isaac Abravanel,” in Scholars and Scholarship, the Interaction Between Judaism and Other Cultures, L. Landman (ed.) (New York 1990), pp. 67–90; C. Cohen Skalli, The Humanistic Rhetoric of Don Isaac Abravanel: Rhetoric, History and Tradition in Abravanel’s Letters and Introductions, Ph.D. dissertation, Tel Aviv University, 2005; id., “Discovering Isaac Abravanel’s Humanistic Rhetoric,” Jewish Quarterly Review 97 (2007), pp. 67–99; id., “Authorship in the Age of Early Jewish Print: Ma’ayanei ha-Yeshua and the First Printed Edition in Ferrara 1551,” in Tradition, Heterodoxy and Religious Culture: Judaism and Chris- tianity in the Early Modern Period, C. Goodblatt and H. Kreisel (eds.) (Beer Sheva 2006), pp. 185–201; id., “Yitshaq Abravanel’s First Edition (Constantinople 1505): Rhetorical Con- tent and Editorial Background,” Hispania Judaica 5 (2007), pp. 153–176. 14 cedric cohen skalli

Abravanel borrowed humanistic conceptions in his Hebrew and Jewish work, than in which way and in which framework. I would like to present in this paper what seems to me one of the central avenues of Abravanel’s assimilation of humanism. I rely in this paper on the work of Angel Gomez Moreno, Pedro Catedra, and Jeremy Lawrence, who convincingly established the existence of a 15th-century Iberian humanism different in many of its features from 14th- and 15th-century Italian humanism.3 Isaac Abravanel lived in the Iberian Peninsula—first in Portugal and then in Castile—until the Expulsion of 1492, when he fled to Italy. There he lived first in Naples, then in the Venetian cities of Corfu and Monopoly, and finally in Venice itself (which was uncommon for a Jew at the time) until his death in 1508. Hence Abravanel experienced both Iberian and Italian humanism dur- ing his life. But his knowledge of Italian humanism predates his Italian period; it began in Portugal, where he was in regular commercial and literary contact with people in Tuscany, as we know from his letters to Yehiel da Pisa and other commercial documents.4 We may add that the literary success of Isaac Abravanel’s firstborn son, Yehudah—author of the Dia- loghi d’amore—is a clear testimony of the integration of Don Isaac and his sons into Italian Renaissance humanism and culture. The following pages will present what seems to me the central conceptual paradigm of Abravanel’s work: the tension between fortune and divine providence. It is important to stress that this conceptual duality is also a

3 A. Gomez Moreno, Epaña y la Italia de los humanistas (Madrid 1994); G. Pontón, Cor- respondencias, Los orígenes del arte epistolar en España (Madrid 2002); P. Catedra, “Una epistola ‘consolatoria’ attribuida al Tostado,” Atalya III (1992), pp. 165–176; id., “Prospec- cion sobre el género consolatorio en el siglo XV,” in Letters and Society in Fifteenth-Century Spain, A.D. Deyermond and J. Lawrance (eds.) (Oxford 1993), pp. 1–16; id., “Creación y lectura: sobre el genero consolatorio en el siglo XV,” in Studies on Medieval Spanish Litera- ture in Honor of Charles F. Fraker, M. Vaquero and A.D. Deyermond (eds.) (Madison, 1995), pp. 35–61; id., “Modos de consolar por carta,” in Actas del VI Congreso Internacional de la Asociación Hispánica de Literatura Medieval, J.M. Lucía Megías (ed.) (Alcalá de Henares 1997), pp. 469–487; J. Lawrance, “Nuevos lectores y nuevos generos: apuntes y observa- ciones sobre la epistolografia en el primer rinacimento español,” in Literatura en la Época del Emperador (Salamanca 1988), pp. 81–99; id., “The Spread of Lay Literacy in Late Medi- eval Castile,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies LXII (1985), pp. 79–94; id., “Nuño de Guzmán and Early Spanish Humanisam: Some Reconsiderations,” Medium Aevum 51 (1982), pp. 55–85; id., “Humanism in the Iberian Peninsula,” in The Impact of Humanism on Western Europe, A. Goodman and A. MacKay (eds.) (London, 1990); id., “On Fifteenth-Century Spanish Vernacular Humanism,” in Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Honour of Robert Brian Tate, I. Michael and R.A. Cardwell (eds.) (Oxford 1986), pp. 63–79. 4 On this question, see C. Cohen Skalli, Isaac Abravanel: Letters (Berlin and New York 2007).