JEWISH BODIES AND RENAISSANCE MELANCHOLY: CULTURE AND THE CITY IN ITALY AND THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE Eleazar Gutwirth Menina e moça me levaram de casa de minha mai para muito longe … Menina e moça, Ferrara 15531 this soul … when it descends to dwell in the nebulous realms—the lowly and dark body—… desires to say: would that I were in joy again as in the days of old (Ps. 43:4) … always circling in my sphere before the place where my tent was in the beginning … this is the advice: to see himself as a stranger in a strange land [till] he returns to his Lord who sent him to do his work … and near it is placed [the verse which says] as a sign (Prov. 27:8:) “like a bird that strays far from its nest is a man far from his home” … and this means the bird of the soul as the sages said in secret … for when the bird wanders from her nest, she desires to go back and moves to return. Meir Ibn Gabbai2 I In various genres of medieval and Renaissance writings, the concepts of body and soul were often paired with a third idea, namely that of exile.3 With medicine as the privileged area of discourse on the body, 1 Antonio Gallego Morell, Bernardim Ribeiro y su novela “Menina e moça” (Madrid: Bermejo, 1960) or Helder Macedo, Do significado oculto da Menina e moça (Lisbon: Moraes, 1977). 2 Avodat Ha-Kodesh (Jerusalem: Lewin-Epstein, 1973), Prologue. 3 Amongst numerous possible examples, see Randolph Starn, Contrary Common- wealth: The Theme of Exile in Medieval and Renaissance Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Angelo Bartlett Giamatti, Exile and Change in Renaissance Liter- 58 eleazar gutwirth Amatus Lusitanus’4 writing of the 1540s–1560s presents us, to be sure, with medical texts on the body. Nevertheless, he also provides us with a wealth of writings on subjects which are not usually thought to concern the body. Amatus Lusitanus’ concern with exile, his attention to—and views on—individuals who, like himself, are far from their lands, per- haps particularly from the Iberian Peninsula, may be found through- out his work. Such concerns could provide one type of coherence to Amatus’ life work which Carmoly—in the mid-nineteenth century and his followers after him—approached rather as a kind of miscellany of useful tidbits and lovely anecdotes. Our interest here is with the texts which disturb the facile oppositions not only between body and soul, but also between techne and mainstream cultural-intellectual history, and between the putative Orient and Occident in Renaissance Jewish his- tory. The Jews of Salonika were, as will be shown, a frequent concern of Amatus Lusitanus. The notion of a facile and hermetic dichotomy between them and the Renaissance Jews of Italy is not supported by the evidence adduced here. Nor is the putative dichotomy of body and soul particularly useful if we choose the field of concepts surrounding melancholy as the targets of our investigation. The dedication of the seventh volume of Amatus Lusitanus’ Centuriae is addressed to Gedella Yahia. and signed in Salonika in August 1561.5 That is to say that it appears to contain cases prior to that date and ature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); Christine Shaw, The Politics of Exile in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 4 As is well known, his name João Rodrigues de Castelo Branco is frequently rendered out of sequence, misspelt or misprinted. The dates are usually given as 1511– 1568. For his birth in Castelo Branco, his studies at Salamanca, his roots and routes in the 1530sand1540s (Antwerp, Ferrara, Ancona, Ragusa, Salonika, etc.), his public assertion that he had a Jewish brother, and other aspects of his thought, see Eleazar Gutwirth, “Amatus Lusitanus and the Locations of Sixteenth Century Cultures,” in Cultural Intermediaries: Jewish Intellectuals in Early Modern Italy, Jewish Culture and Contexts, ed. David Ruderman and Giuseppe Veltri (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 216–238 and the studies mentioned there. 5 I refer to volumes of the Centuriae first in Capital Roman numerals and then to the specific cure by number. The bibliography of the editions seems to be a subject which has not yet been exhausted. There are still apparently unrecorded items while others are recorded but were inaccessible to Friedenwald. Friedenwald’s bibliography of the Centuriae, beginning with the first edition of the first volume (Curationum medicinalium Centuria prima multiplici variaque rerum cognitione referta. Praefixa est eiusdem auctoris commentatio in qua docetur quomodo se medicus habere debeat in introitu ad aegrotantem simulque de crisi et diebus decretoriis iis qui artem medicam exercent et quotidie pro salute aegretorum in collegium descendunt longe utilissima.Florence,1551) up to the seventh (Venice, 1566) contains about 16 items. Jose Lopes Dias’ mentions about 19 editions of different volumes, formats, etc. See his “O Renascimento em Amato Lusitano e Garcia D’Orta,” Estudos Castelo Branco (1964):.