From Philosophy to Kabbalah: Yeḥiyel Nissim of Pisa and the Critique of Aristotelianism
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ItalIan Jewry In the early Modern era essays in Intellectual history Perspectives in Jewish Intellectual life Series Editor: Giuseppe Veltri (University of Hamburg) ItalIan Jewry In the early Modern era essays in Intellectual history alessandro Guetta Boston 2014 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: A catalog record for this book as available from the Library of Congress. Copyright © 2014 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved Effective November 16, 2016, this book will be subject to a CC-BY-NC license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. Other than as provided by these licenses, no part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or displayed by any electronic or mechanical means without permission from the publisher or as permitted by law. ISBN 978-1-61811-208-8 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-61811-209-5 (electronic) Cover design by Ivan Grave Published by Academic Studies Press in 2014 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com Contents Acknowledgments .......................................6 Introduction ............................................8 1: From Philosophy to Kabbalah: Yeḥiyel Nissim of Pisa and the Critique of Aristotelianism ....12 2: Can Fundamentalism be Modern? The Case of Avraham Portaleone, the Repentant Scientist .....30 3: Allegorical Space and Geometrical Space: Representations of the Temple of Jerusalem in the Works of Italian Jewish Authors ..............................62 4: The Myth of Politics in the Jewish Communities of the Italian City-States ...............................78 5: A Link to Humanity: Judaism as Nation and Universal Religion .................92 6: The Italian and Latin Works of Lazzaro da Viterbo, Sixteenth-Century Jewish Humanist ....................105 7: Leone Modena’s Magen we-ḥerev as an Anti-Catholic Apologia ..........................134 8: The Immortality of the Soul and Opening Up to the Christian World ..................153 9: Kabbalah and Rationalism in the Works of Mosheh Ḥayyim Luzzatto and some Kabbalists of his time ........................185 Notes ...............................................227 Index ...............................................289 Acknowledgments The chapters of this book were originally published separately as articles. They have all been modified and updated, in some cases translated from French and Italian. Chapter 1: “Religious Life and Jewish Erudition in Pisa: Yehiel Nissim da Pisa and the Crisis of Aristotelianism.” In Cultural Intermediaries, Jewish Intellectuals in Early Modern Italy, edited by David B. Ruderman and Giuseppe Veltri, 86-108. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Chapter 2: “Avraham Portaleone: From Science to Mysticism.” In Jewish Studies at the turn of the Twentieth Century. Proceedings of the 6th European Association for Jewish Studies Congress, edited by J. Targarona Borràs et A. Sàenz-Badillos, 40-47. Leiden: Brill, 1999. “Avraham Portaleone, le sci- entifique repenti. Science et religion chez un savant juif entre le 16ème et le17ème siècle.” In Torah et science: perspectives historiques et théoriques. Études offertes à Charles Touati, edited by G. Freudenthal, J.-P. Rothschild, G. Dahan, 213-227. Peeters: Louvain-Paris, 2001. “Can Fundamentalism be modern? The Case of Avraham Portaleone (1542-1612).” In Acculturation and Its Discontents: The Jews of Italy from Early to Modern Times, edited by N. Meyers and M. Ciavolella, 99-118. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Chapter 3: “Le Temple de Jérusalem, de l’allégorie à la représentation réaliste chez les auteurs juifs italiens.” In Le noyau et l’écorce. Les arts de l’allégorie XVe - XVIIe siècles, edited by Colette Nativel, 135-148. Paris: Collections d’histoire de l’art de l’Académie de France à Rome, 2009. Chapter 4: “Le mythe du politique chez les Juifs dans l’Italie des Cités.” In Politik und Religion im Judentum, Romania Judaica Band 4, edited by Cristoph Miething, 119-131. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1999. Chapter 5: “Ebraismo come nazione e come religione universale: Forme del pensiero ebraico in Italia tra ‘500 e ‘700.” Italia 19 (2009): 23-42. Chapter 6: “Le opere italiane e latine di Lazzaro da Viterbo, ebreo umani- sta del XVI secolo.” In Gacobbe e l’angelo, edited by Irene Kajon et al., 31-69. Roma: 2012. 6 Acknowledgments Chapter 7: “Leone Modena’s Magen wa-Herev as an Anti-Catholic Apologia.” Jewish Studies Quarterly 7 (2000): 296-318. Chapter 8: “The Immortality of the Soul and Opening up to the Christian World: A Chapter in Early-Modern Jewish-Italian Literature.” In Hebraic Aspects of the Renaissance: Sources and Encounters, edited by I. Zinguer et al., 80-115. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2011. Chapter 9: “Qabbalah e razionalismo nell’opera di Moshe Hayyim Luzzatto.” In Ramhal. Pensiero ebraico e kabbalah tra Padova ed Eretz Israel, edited by G. Luzzatto Voghera and M. Perani, 39-86. Esedra: Padua, 2010. 7 Introduction Research does not always proceed according to a predetermined plan. In some cases, the opposite is true: only when a work is completed can we observe its fundamental inspiration, which was implicit from the start. The essays presented in this book demonstrate the latter: the coherence of the col- lected pieces—the common elements that connect them—was visible only post factum. Only in collecting some of the articles I wrote between 1998 and 2012 was I able to see clearly the common elements in theoretical approach and conclusions which, when viewed as a whole, reveal a rather uniform result. The motivations that drive the scholar to choose a certain field of re- search, a specific subject within that field, and the way that subject will be approached are difficult to pin down, perhaps even mysterious. But within that choice itself lies a large measure of the results: in the sciences, or at least in the human sciences, the answers one finds are guided largely by the ques- tions one asks. My field of research is the intellectual history of Italian Judaism. Though this choice obviously stems from my own experiences and cultural training, my choice of eras is the result of an attraction that is difficult to explain, whose motivations are probably found in that murky area between emotion and intellect, or in the inputs from emotion to the intellect, guiding its choices. The period covered in this book is called “Modern” in the French and Italian historiographical traditions and “Early Modern” in Anglophone coun- tries. It ranges from the the Renaissance at its height in the first decades of the sixteenth century to the first half of the eighteenth century, on the threshold of the Enlightenment. According to the classical scansion of Jewish history, this period is called the “Age of the Ghetto”—long considered by historians, from the nineteenth century until the revision of a few decades ago, as an era when the repressive policies of the Catholic Church caused Italian Jewish communities to fold in on themselves, an era of intellectual obscurantism and demographic decline. However, scholars like Baruch Sermoneta and Robert Bonfil1 (and many others in their wake) have shown that exchange with non-Jewish society be- came more intense in the Age of the Ghetto, and that some of the intellectual 8 Introduction forms that developed in the Jewish world were completely analogous to those in the Christian world. The era of emancipation, situated in the second half of the eighteenth century, was actually preceded by a series of appar- ently contradictory processes. Though, on the one hand, philosophical and scientific rationalism spread among Catholic and Jewish intellectuals, this period also saw the diffusion of an opposite attitude: a religious devotion that in the Catholic world inspired the values of the Counter-Reformation and that in the Jewish world took the form of Kabbalah. The history of these two hundred years is, at its base, the history of tension and dialectic between these two positions. It was an age marked by contrasts, paradoxes, and extremely significant personal crises. Authors who denounced the inadequacy of medieval sci- ence, which was founded on fossilized and superseded knowledge, became devoted penitents and adherents to religious tradition; the most intransigent kabbalists recognized the obscurity of their doctrine in the form in which it had been handed down, and tried to adapt it to the rationalism of contempo- rary science. Hebrew prose and poetry were transformed, while at the same time literary translations into Italian multiplied, and the use of Italian (the “national” and “modern” language) became increasingly frequent under the pen of many Jewish authors. In sum, it was a time when many of the elements of the era of emancipa- tion were being prepared, yet the richness of Jewish culture, its intellectual forms and its linguistic expression, was maintained; in other words, a time before the rapid abandonment of culture that resulted from the integration of a small minority into a much more populous society, leading to so-called “assimilation.” However, the common traits of this period became clear to me only in collecting and combining these essays—and perhaps even in the drafting of these present lines, which must serve as a general and unifying introduction. A similar observation can be made regarding the topics and authors that I chose to study. It is not always easy for researchers to remember their first encounters with an author or a work, and the considerations (in that