The Hebrew Bible in Fifteenth-Century Spain Études Sur Le Judaïsme Médiéval

The Hebrew Bible in Fifteenth-Century Spain Études sur le Judaïsme Médiéval Fondées par Georges Vajda Dirigées par Paul B. Fenton TOME LIV The titles published in this series are listed at www.brill.nl/ejm The Hebrew Bible in Fifteenth-Century Spain Exegesis, Literature, Philosophy, and the Arts Edited by Jonathan Decter and Arturo Prats LEIDEN • bostoN 2012 This project has been made possible by the project Inteleg: The Intellectual and Material Legacies of Late Medieval Sephardic Judaism (principal investigator Esperanza Alfonso, CSIC), funded by the European Research Council. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Hebrew Bible in fifteenth-century Spain : exegesis, literature, philosophy, and the arts / edited by Jonathan Decter and Arturo Prats. p. cm. — (Études sur le judaïsme médiéval ; t. 54) Proceedings of a conference held in Oct. 2008 in Madrid, Spain. Includes index. ISBN 978-90-04-23248-8 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-23249-5 (e-book) 1. Bible. O.T.—Influence—Congresses. 2. Spain—Civilization—711–1516—Congresses. 3. Spain—Civilization—Jewish influences—Congresses. 4. Portugal—Civilization— To 1500—Congresses. 5. Iberian peninsula—Religion—Congresses. I. Decter, Jonathan P., 1971– II. Prats Oliván, Arturo. BS538.7.H43 2012 221.0946’09024—dc23 2012013367 ISSN 0169 815X ISBN 978 90 04 23248 8 (hardback) ISBN 978 90 04 23249 5 (e-book) Copyright 2012 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper. CONTENTS Introduction ........................................................................................ 1 I. LITERATURE AND ART Weeping Over Rachel’s Tomb: Literary Reelaborations of a Midrashic Motif in Medieval and Early Modern Spain .......... 13 Luis M. Girón-Negrón The First Murder: Picturing Polemic c. 1391 ............................... 41 Tom Nickson Sephardic Illuminated Bibles: Jewish Patrons and Fifteenth-Century Christian Ateliers ......................................... 61 Andreina Contessa II. JEWISH EXEGESIS Abarbanel’s Exegetical Subversion of Maimonides’ ʿAqedah: Transforming a Knight of Intellectual Virtue into a Knight of Existential Faith ........................................................................ 75 James A. Diamond “From My Flesh I Envision God”: Shem Ṭov Ibn Shaprut’ṣ Exegesis of Job 19:25–27 .............................................................. 101 Libby Garshowitz Messianic Interpretation of the Song of Songs in Late-Medieval Iberia ................................................................................................ 117 Maud Kozodoy vi contents III. CONVERSION AND THE USES OF BIBLICAL EXEGESIS Pro-Converso Apologetics and Biblical Exegesis .......................... 151 Claude B. Stuczynski A Father’s Bequest: Augustinian Typology and Personal Testimony in the Conversion Narrative of Solomon Halevi/ Pablo de Santa María .................................................................... 177 Ryan Szpiech IV. LITURGY AND TRANSLATION The Liturgy of Portuguese Conversos ............................................ 201 Asher Salah The Relationship between Ladino Liturgical Texts and Spanish Bibles ................................................................................ 223 Ora (Rodrigue) Schwarzwald Translation and the Invention of Renaissance Jewish Culture: The Case of Judah Messer Leon and Judah Abravanel .......... 245 Aaron W. Hughes Index .................................................................................................... 267 Appendix: Illustrations ..................................................................... 277 INTRODUCTION The present volume is one piece of a multi-year international research project: Inteleg: The Intellectual and Material Legacies of Late Medieval Sephardic Judaism (principal investigator Esperanza Alfonso, CSIC), which takes as its object of study Iberian Jewish culture between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. In particular, the cross-cultural and inter-disciplinary scope of the project takes the Hebrew Bible as its point of focus in that the sacred text intersected with virtually all aspects of late medieval Sephardic culture: its languages of expression, its material and artistic production, and its intellectual output in literary, philosophical, exegetic, scientific, and polemical spheres. Issues in the reading of the Bible were prominent in internal Jewish debates over such subjects as leadership, theology, and conversion, were piv- otal in inter-religious debates, and played a central role in the fashion- ing of Christian theology and identity. The articles included in this volume grew out of an international conference, which was held at the Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales (CCHS) of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) in Madrid in October, 2009. The purpose of the conference was to investigate the relationship between the Bible and the cultural production of Iberian societies during the fifteenth century. We were interested in exploring the centrality of the Bible as a cultural referent for Christian and Jewish societies during this turbulent and transform- ative century. In order to explore how the Bible served as a focal point for the evolution of the Jewish tradition and the encounters, both posi- tive and negative, between Jews and Christians, we brought together scholars of Hebrew and vernacular literature, exegesis, philosophy, polemics, and art history. Papers addressed the ways in which textual and visual works that invoke the Bible refract social reality and the ways in which discourse surrounding the Bible participated in and created that reality. As the fruit of this first conference, which set the stage for subsequent work of the project, this volume brings together articles on subjects over a diverse spectrum (including messianic Jewish interpre- tations of the Song of Songs, polemical elements of texts and images, 2 introduction the liturgy of the conversos, translation, the conversion narrative of a prominent Jewish convert to Christianity, etc.) and employs a broad range of methodological approaches (from classical philology to Derridian analysis). The unifying elements of the volume are twofold: all of the articles present instantiations of the Hebrew Bible’s deployment in textual and visual forms and share a focus on a specific period, the fifteenth century. Although several articles at least touch on preceding and subsequent periods (which is natural given that the designation of a century is somewhat arbitrary),1 they all shed light on the years between the anti-Jewish riots that swept through the Iberian Peninsula in 1391 and the mass Expulsion of Spanish Jewry in 1492. Our purpose in high- lighting this period is not to portray late medieval Iberian Jewry as moribund or spiraling downward toward an ineluctable and bitter end, nor is it to uncover the causes of the Expulsion itself. Rather, the selec- tion of this period is simply to emphasize that there was something unique about the post-1391 environment owed to the radical remaking of Iberia’s social makeup in the wake of mass conversion and that this reorganization had an impact on, and was affected by, the range of works that touch upon the Hebrew Bible. The volume engages the dia- lectic between the ways in which events informed biblical readings and how exegetic strategies (pre-figuration, literality, allegory, etc.) opened up ways of presenting, and hence remaking, society and history. At the broadest levels, the fifteenth century saw great changes in the Iberian political framework due to the increased centralization of government and the amassing of power by a new nobility that often tried to limit the influence of Jews and conversos. The experience of the illustrious Jewish courtier and intellectual Don Isaac Abravanel (who 1 The tendency of the scholarly community to divide and isolate the Late Middle Ages from preceding periods and from the beginning of the Modern period which came after it is now an outdated historiographic framework or chronological classifi- cation. The term “Late Middle Ages” remains an expedient category for the dating of historical events, but it does not reflect the existence of a self-explanatory “closed historical period”. Several processes can be glimpsed for the first time in the fifteenth century, such as the birth of national identities in the European Mediterranean regions, or the appearance of technologies and discoveries that changed the face of the world such as the printing press, or the discovery of America and the subsequent opening of new trade routes. Yet these phenomena cannot be explained solely within the chronological framework of the fifteenth century; neither can they be circumscribed to only one region of the Mediterranean. Hence the present volume does not adhere strictly to the

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