Discovering Isaac Abravanel's Humanistic Rhetoric

Discovering Isaac Abravanel's Humanistic Rhetoric

The current approach to Abravanel's work is largely conditioned by its image in twentieth-century Jewish scholarship, an image that has emerged with the application to it of new historical critical methods. In creating new narratives about Abravanel's place in the history of Jewish medieval philosophy and among Jewish Iberian leaders, modern scholars have had to deal with Abravanel's own attempts at image-building within his writings and have mostly relied uncritically on his own autobiographical writings. The integration of Abravanel's life and work into these modern narratives has yielded an incomplete, even discordant picture that accords a large role to Abravanel's political biography and a smaller one to his monumental literary work. This imbalance has contributed to the difficulty encountered by modern Jewish scholarship in considering Abravanel's life and work harmoniously. This study is an attempt both to deconstruct this dissonant clash between Abravanel's autobiography and modern biographies and to propose an analysis of Abravanel's autobiographical rhetoric that reveals the integration and unity of the two aspects of his public life: finance and court politics, on one hand, and literary activism on the other.

The Evolution of Don Isaac Abravanel's Image in Twentieth-Century Jewish Studies

The past century of Abravanel studies may be may be divided into two periods. The first is the foundation of modern scholarship on Abravanel's writings until the 1980s. The two main emphases of this period were the elaboration of a modern biography of Isaac Abravanel and the cataloguing of the religious and philosophical doctrines woven throughout his writings. The major achievement of this initial phase, Netanyahu's monograph, Don Isaac Abravanel, Statesman and Philosopher (1953),¹ emphasized the contrast between Abravanel's fascinating political life and the relative backwardness of the philosophical and political content of his writings. The second period of Abravanel studies, which began in the mid-1980s, tends to reject the general categorization of Abravanel's work as it was established by the first generation of scholars and to propose instead specific analyses that connect elements of the Abravanelian corpus to the literary developments of its time. This new trend is reflected in Eric Lawee's recent monograph Isaac Abarbanel's Stance toward Tradition: Defense, Dissent, and Dialogue (2001),² which views Abravanel as a highly interesting transitional figure who transformed Jewish medieval literature from within by mixing it with humanistic elements.

The First Period

Jacob Guttmann's Die religionsphilosophischen Lehren des Isaak Abravanel,³ published in 1916, although by no means the first analysis of Abravanel's work,⁴ may be considered the first modern philological study of it. Guttmann's philological method relies on three principles: the definition of the historical and biographical framework in which Abravanel developed his literary work, the delimitation of the corpus, and the exposition of the cardinal philosophical and religious doctrines spread throughout his writings. These three principles indicate clearly Guttmann's philological goal, which was to present to an educated Jewish readership Abravanel's religious philosophy in its historical, philosophical, and religious context. Since Guttmann's aim was to present Abravanel's works in a modern scientific light, he devoted his study to academic topics and discussions while neglecting the original literary form of Abravanel's commentaries as "archaic." As indicated by its title, Guttman's work argued that the modern scholar had to go beyond the traditional literary form of Abravanel's works in order to reveal their essential content, a coherent set of philosophical and religious doctrines.

Guttmann's philological method was apparently intended to organize the eclectic content of Abravanel's commentaries into a thematic catalog. He viewed this content within the context of the central concerns of the early twentieth-century history of Jewish philosophy. A clear sign of this historically dated approach is Guttmann's focus on the doctrines of Maimonides, Gersonides, Crescas, Yehuda Halevi, and Arabic Aristotelian philosophy, to...