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Humanism and the Rabbinic Tradition in Italy and Beyond the Cahnman

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Humanism and the Rabbinic Tradition in Italy and Beyond the Cahnman EJJS 1.1_f17_204-211 3/20/07 9:08 PM Page 205 Humanism and the Rabbinic Tradition in Italy and Beyond The Gisella Levi Cahnman Open Seminar, New York, 28 November– 2 December 2005 The Cahnman Seminar was held in New York from November 28th to December 2nd, 2005 at the Center for Jewish History. It was organised by the Primo Levi Center for Italian Jewish Studies and made possible through the contributions of several institutions, in the particular the Cahnman Foundation. This Seminar in Italian Jewish Studies is part of a long-term plan of the New York branch of Centro Primo Levi <http://www.primolevicenter.org> to help establish an international infrastructure and clearing house for Italian Jewish Studies. The plan includes seminars, the creation of a digital library, graduate summer courses in Italy, and English publications of Italian Jewish classics and research literature. Each series is widely publicized in the academic world to help provide an ongoing source of information about Italian Jewish history, new findings, and research in progress. By establishing a solid service for all departments of Judaic and Italian Studies, History and Literature, Centro Primo Levi also seeks to offer a forum where scholars conducting research on primary sources in Italy can share findings, sources, and ideas. The spring seminar was held on May 2–4 and dedicated to the Judaic and Islamic sources of Dante Alighieri. The topic of the fall seminar is The Jews of Ancient Rome. The participants were specialists on different periods of Italian- Jewish intellectual history, from the ninth to the nineteenth century. The Seminar was opened by Alessandro Guetta, (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Paris), who spoke on “Kabbalah in the Age of Reason: Elijah Benamozegh.” Benamozegh (1823–1900) was a complex thinker, both philosopher and Kabbalist, “Western” and “Oriental.” His work, written in three languages (Hebrew, Italian, French), has been commented on in very different ways. The foun- dation of all the apparent contradictions of his work, exclusiveness and universalism, tradition and progress, rationalism and religion, is Kabbalah. Kabbalah is considered the true dogmatic Jewish tradition. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2007 EJJS 1.1 EJJS 1.1_f17_204-211 3/20/07 9:08 PM Page 206 206 conference reports Benamozegh’s avowed and ambitious intent was to reconstruct a comprehensive Jewish philosophical system which—according to him—would “re-establish with the most advanced human sciences the harmony that has been broken.” In reality, the outcome was a philosophical system similar to that of the Catholic thinker Vincenzo Gioberti. The Italian rabbi’s theology seems to fit entirely into a certain European cultural setting, while his conceptual sources—including some of his definitions—are almost always identifiably from Kabbalistic texts. Kabbalah is the core of his works and his thought, but Benamozegh does not develop a true systematic Kabbalistic conception. Rather his philosophical and theological thinking is nourished by Kabbalah. In doing so, he develops a tendency which was typically Italian: to study Kabbalah with a philosophical spirit. Yosef Ergas (1688–1730) and Moshe Óayyim Luzzatto, the greatest Italian Kabbalists of the 18th century, already felt the necessity to write dialogues between a Kabbalist and a rational thinker, which meant that Kabbalah should or at least could be understood through the method and the notions of philosophy. A century later, in a European culture dominated by idealistic philosophy and then by positivism, with religion dramati- cally losing ground among Christians as well as among Jews, Benamozegh’s Kabbalah had to draw from other sources than the Jewish Italian tradition and to cope with other intellectual attitudes. It was, as the title indicates, Kabbalah in the Age of Reason. Arthur Kiron, the Curator of Judaica Collections at the University of Pennsylvania and Adjunct Professor of History in the Department of History there, delivered a paper on “The Sephardic Jewish Theological Seminary of Sabato Morais.” The Italian-born Sabato Morais was the principal founder of the Jewish Theological Seminary ( JTS), established in New York City in 1886. It has often been claimed that the reorganized Jewish Theological Seminary of America ( JTSA), established in 1902 and headed by Solomon Schechter, was an organic intellectual and institutional continuation of the original JTS. However, these claims have not taken into account the Sephardic and Italian rabbinic humanist traditions which Morais articulated as the intellectual and educational core of the original Seminary. Morais’ outlook and the “Sephardic” seminary he founded are distinct from if not altogether discontinuous with the modern JTSA and the positive- historical intellectual roots of the Conservative movement of Judaism..
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