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7. Judah Moscato's Sources and Hebrew Printing in The 7. JUDAH MOSCATO’S SOURCES AND HEBREW PRINTING IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY: A PRELIMINARY SURVEY Adam Shear In a project such as the one that produced this volume and the confe- rence out of which it grows, we pursue a deeper understanding of the particular mental framework and intellectual output of an individual figure; in doing so, we examine text in context, using the social, poli- tical, and even material conditions of the society in which our figure lives as the backdrop to our understanding of the extant “works” of the individual. At the same time, we pursue another goal in a dialectical relationship with the first: We also seek to use our study of the indi- vidual’s work as contributing more evidence for the reconstruction of the culture that surrounds our particular subject—context from text, if you will. Two modes of historical inquiry can thus be distinguished: the first, a focus on text that more or less treats context as backdrop. The second mode is one that works outward from text toward a defi- nition of some extra-textual aspect of the culture that produced (or later transmitted or preserved) that text. In practice, of course, the two modes are often practiced together or almost simultaneously within one historical project or publication. Indeed, “context” is the slippery concept here, as it can be applied both synchronically—to the society that produces the work—and diachronically within the framework of literary history or the history of ideas, in which the work is placed within a particular intellectual or literary trajectory. In my previous work on Judah Moscato and his commentary Qol Yehudah [QY], I was interested not only in elucidating Moscato’s work, but in placing it within both a synchronic context of sixteenth-century Italian Jewish intellectual culture and a diachronic context of the reception of Judah Halevi’s Book of the Kuzari, the subject of the com- mentary.1 In doing so, I argued that Moscato’s commentary reflected 1 Adam Shear, The Kuzari and the Shaping of Jewish Identity, 1167–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), esp. ch. 3, “The Kuzari in Renaissance Italy” and ch. 4, “Judah Moscato’s Project and the Making of an Authoritative Work”; and idem, “Judah Moscato’s Scholarly Self-Image and the Question of Jewish Humanism,” in 122 adam shear Renaissance Jewish intellectual trends, particularly in what I saw as a synthetic and synthesizing approach to medieval and classical Jewish authorities, and in his emphasis on Jewish knowledge and practice as paths to human perfection. I also suggested that Moscato viewed the Kuzari as a vehicle to offer a kind of encyclopedic presentation of a sixteenth-century Italian rabbinic humanist-kabbalistic-philosophical synthesis; and that the dissemination of this new “Renaissance Kuzari” affected the later reception of Halevi’s work. Here, I leave aside the long-term diachronic context of the recep- tion history of the Kuzari and turn toward Moscato’s more immediate context, his own intellectual and cultural world in the second half of the sixteenth century in northern Italy. But I am interested here not in an examination of the ideas in Moscato’s work as they reflect and/or shape this environment, but in using his work as a “native informant” about the ways in which Jewish scholars in this period related to text— what might be called the “book culture” of the sixteenth-century Jew- ish intellectual. Moscato certainly lived in a “book culture”: he had mastered a large number of texts and cites many books (sefarim) in his own writings. A careful study of the way he cites texts, however, and careful attention to the language of his citations reveals a multi-faceted approach to texts. On the one hand, printed books and manuscripts were part of his everyday scholarly toolkit. At the same time, however, he often seems to cite texts from memory. The border between quo- tation and paraphrase—one familiar to every scholar and student in our time—is not clearly defined. Moreover, clear distinctions between “work,” “book,” and “text” cannot always be made.2 Moscato may cite a literary composition associated with a particular author or col- lective of authors (Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah or “our sages” in the Talmud)—a “work” of literature.3 He may quote a particular “text” (an Cultural Intermediaries: Jewish Intellectuals in Early Modern Italy, ed. David Ruderman and Giuseppe Veltri (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 149–177. 2 In thinking about the differences between “work,” “text,” and “book,” I am influenced by Peter L. Shillenberg, “Text as Matter, Concept, and Action,” Studies in Bibliography 44 (1991): 31–82, esp. 38–47, and 81. The distinction between “work” and “text” was made by Roland Barthes (see Shillenberg, “Text,” 38 n. 8) but in a way that elides the distinction between the work as authorial composition and the material form (“book”). 3 Moscato usually names his sources, but not always. In this context, we can note the nineteenth-century debate over whether Moscato “plagiarized” from earlier unprinted commentaries on the Kuzari in QY. See Eliakim Carmoly, “Analecten. 8. Plagiate,” Israelitische Annalen 13 (1839): 101, and Samuel David Luzzatto’s response .
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