The Jewish Reception of Aristotle’s Poetics in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-century Provence: A Survey of the Arabic Sources

The last few years have seen a renewed interest in Aristotle’s logic in the Jewish tradition, giving a decisive impulse to the research on the Greek-into-Hebrew philosophical transmission in medieval and early modern times. The present article aims to contribute to the studies on Aristotelian logic in Hebrew by focusing on a less explored aspect, namely the reception of Aristotle’s Poetics in Jewish culture.

Studying Ibn Sīnā, Performing Abulafia in a Mid-Sixteenth-Century Prison: Emotional, Medical, and Mystical Bodies between Italy and Silesia

Historians often address knowledge transfer in two ways: as an extension and continuation of an established tradition, or as the tradition’s modification in an act of individual reception. This article explores the tension between the two approaches through a case study of Eliezer Eilburg. It traces the footsteps of a sixteenth-century German Jew and his study of the late medieval Hebrew medical and mystical literature composed in the wider Mediterranean. As it uncovers the cultural, political, and social processes shaping knowledge transfer between various Jewish cultures and geographies, the article highlights the receiver’s individual agency. Under the thickly described intellectual traditions, it is the receiver’s lived experience that allows historians to grasp the impact of knowledge on the lives of premodern people—the impact on their body and its relation to the world and to God. Building this argument, this article problematizes the relationship between theory and practice.

Jacob Ṣemaḥ, Humanist

Jacob Ṣemaḥ (ca. 1578–1667), an erudite physician-kabbalist, was raised amongst the conversos of Viana de Caminha in northwest Portugal. He fled the country in his mid-thirties to live openly as a Jew, arriving first in Salonica. Ṣemaḥ was responsible for the consolidation of the Lurianic literary corpus in the second third of the seventeenth century. His contribution, I argue, should be situated in the broader context of a scholarly curriculum vitae that began decades before his flight from Portugal, as Ṣemaḥ embraced Jewish life as a humanist. Coupled with his natural gifts and genius, Ṣemaḥ’s humanist education served him remarkably well in his new life. The interesting question is therefore not “how might he have learned Torah in Portugal” but “how did his Portuguese educational background affect—indeed, effect may be the more apt term—his Jewish scholarship?”

The Matrix of Understanding: Moses Zacuto’s Em la-Binah and Kabbalistic Works of Reference

The systematization of knowledge for educational practice entered a new era in the wake of Ramism. Innovative encyclopedic approaches and textbooks also surfaced in the field of Kabbalah. This article discusses Moses Zacuto’s approach to the kabbalistic genre of reference books and the impact of Lurianic Kabbalah. Against the backdrop of the reception of Ramist ideas and building upon the interaction between Kabbalah and logic in Abraham Cohen de Herrera’s Spanish books, two works in particular, which Zacuto left in an apparently unfinished state in manuscript form, are analyzed in this context: Em la-Binah and Remez ha-Romez. Both works differ from traditional reference books, and Em la-Binah in particular will be examined in order to answer the question of how Zacuto’s strategy for commonplace learning worked in a Lurianic textbook in progress.

Transmission and Transformation of Kabbalistic Knowledge in Italy at the End of the Fifteenth Century

The article looks at the transfer of knowledge between Judaism and Christianity in the Renaissance, a period characterized by the encounter of different cultures and belief systems. In particular, it will focus on the Christian Kabbalah, which channels various philosophical and sapiential traditions into a universal, and at the same time, plural vision of wisdom. This convergence of ideas resulted, on the one hand, in the elaboration of translations, adaptations, and vulgarization of Jewish texts and, on the other, in the development of new interpretations. This is a characteristic of the collected writings of Pierleone of Spoleto, which involved the transformative communication of Jewish translators and the creative reception of Christian humanists. Of these manuscripts, we will examine the annotations concerning the sefirot, which are an excellent example of the reinterpretation of Jewish thought through a typically humanistic perspective.

A Printed Primer of Kabbalistic Knowledge: Sha‘arei Orah in East-Central Europe

This article explores the printed editions of Joseph Gikatilla’s Sha‘arei Orah in the broader context of kabbalistic knowledge in early modern East-Central Europe. Following its first Italian editions, the book was reprinted several times. The Kraków 1600 edition with commentary by Matityah Delacrut presented Sha‘arei Orah as a kabbalistic lexicon and study aid. The Offenbach 1715 edition included additional notes that linked Sha‘arei Orah to the Safedian Kabbalah of Moses Cordovero and Isaac Luria. Finally, the several editions published in Żółkiew exemplify the diversification of Kabbalah in the contentious religious climate of eighteenth-century Eastern Europe. Each printing reflects a discrete historical context, yet Sha‘arei Orah was consistently seen as an introductory guide to Kabbalah. Threading together these unique moments reveals one trajectory of the history of Kabbalah, as printing brought esoteric texts to new generations of readers with new concerns and agendas.

The Characterization of Miṣwot and Conception of Halakhah in Rabbinic Non-Halakhic Literature

Scholarly discussion concerning rabbinic conceptions of the nature of halakhah—realist vs. nominalist—has for the most part focused on halakhic content and discourse. However, as Schremer has shown, non-halakhic passages may present conceptions that differ from those found in halakhic sources. Following Schremer’s suggested distinction, in this study I examine non-halakhic texts which use various metaphors or linguistic styles to characterize the miṣwot. In the cases I examine, I will demonstrate that the authors could have formulated their content in more than one way, and thus their choice of a particular linguistic style reflects their particular conception of the nature of the miṣwot. My suggestion is that non-halakhic sources that display both modes of thought, realist and nominalist views of Jewish law, offer more accurate reflections of the multifaceted conceptual world of the rabbis than do halakhic texts.

Struggling for Religion in Jewish Scientific Research—Max Wiener’s Critique on Hermann Cohen’s Notion of Religion

The article examines Max Wiener’s thoughts on the relation of Judaism and religion via his critique of his former teacher, Hermann Cohen. This focusses on the notion of religion developed by Cohen in the context of Jewish Scientific Research [Wissenschaft des Judentums]. It discusses Wiener’s thoughts on religion in order to exemplify the specific kind of struggle a non-Christian religious tradition might get into concerning the application of the notion of religion upon itself.