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鵻 27 鵼 Chapter 2 鵻 Works and Traditions 鵼 T hough Abarbanel wrote most of his works in Italy, he passed the greater part of his life in Iberia. In describing the concentric circles within which his religious posture and scholarly interests developed, then, one must begin with what was formatively decisive: the celebrated HispanoJewish intellectual and literary tradition that received its earliest articulation in Muslim Spain about half a millennium before Abarbanel’s birth. In Muslim Spain (Andalusia), Jewish religious sensibilities and cultural aspirations were powerfully shaped by Muslim achievements in such areas as linguistic studies, poetry, and scriptural interpretation.1 Perhaps most notably, many Andalusian Jewish scholars, advancing the new initiatives of various Babylonian Geonim, carried on a running dialogue with ideas espoused in Greco-Arabic scientific and philosophic writings. While some, like Judah Halevi, sought to undermine the authority of newly ascendent Aristotelian teachings, others, like Moses Maimonides (a product of an Andalusian paideia even as he lived most of his life outside Iberia), embraced many of these teachings .2 With the invasion of Andalusia by the Berber Almohade tribe in 1148, Andalusian Jews were forced to transplant themselves. Some, like the family of Maimonides, chose to remain in the Islamic sphere. Most headed north, however , bringing their highly variegated and, to the Jews of Christian Europe, largely unprecedented modes of religious-literary creativity with them. Upon arrival, leading figures of this Spanish exile community, members of the ibn Tibbon and Kimhi families most influentially, interacted with scholars “immersed head and shoulders in traditional learning.”3 Out of this amalgam emerged new lines of intellectual-literary achievement that would trigger ample , and at times bitter, religious ferment in Christian Spain and beyond. It was to the ever expanding domain of reconquista Iberian Christendom that most Andalusian Jews migrated. There, over time, allegiances to the educational ideals of Andalusian Jewry largely dissipated. Still, elements of that which would come to mark the Sefardic tradition persisted through Spanish 28 鵼 Isaac Abarbanel’s Stance Toward Tradition Jewry’s dissolution in 1492. Thus it was that Arabic philosophic works and their Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew offshoots furnished the minds of Abarbanel and his Iberian contemporaries in a manner without parallel among scholars born into northern Europe’s more intellectually insular Ashkenazic communities . Two and one-half centuries after his death, Maimonides still dominated Jewish theological discourse in Abarbanel’s Iberia. With Andalusian Jewry’s demise, Jewish social and religio-intellectual realities in the polities comprised in Christian Iberia (Castile, Catalonia, Aragon, Portugal, Navarre) came to be shaped by challenges and stimuli arising from a Christian milieu. The thirteenth century saw a marked intensification in Christian missionary activity, especially as directed against Spanish Jews (and Muslims). These anti-Jewish polemical assaults were executed using some timeworn methods (e.g., citation of biblical texts said to bear witness to Christian truths) and some innovative ones. Most notable among the latter was invocation of rabbinic texts as witnesses to christological teachings, a practice largely refined by Jewish converts to Christianity eager to cure former coreligionists of their “purblind” ways.4 Though southern French and Italian writers produced anti-Christian polemical literature, it was Spain that supplied the largest share of Jewish respondents to the conversionary onslaught. HispanoJewish savants who put their responses down in writing include Isaac Polikar, Moses Hakohen of Tordesillas, Shem Tov ben Shaprut, Hasdai Crescas, Profet Duran, Joseph Albo, Simeon b. Zemah Duran and his son Solomon, Hayyim ibn Musa, and Joseph ibn Shem Tov.5 In composing three messianic works of a largely anti-Christian cast after 1492, Abarbanel joined a venerable IberoJewish tradition of defending the “despised religion” from Christian attack. Even as the volume and intensity of anti-Christian literature increased in the late Jewish Middle Ages, many southern European Jewish scholars became increasingly aware of trends within Christendom that they could admire. Evidence for this development comes first from southern France and Italy and only later from Spain. By the fifteenth century, however, a number of HispanoJewish writers and communal leaders were advocating emulation of various modes of Christian conduct for their own faith community (e.g., decorum in the house of prayer and attentiveness to the sermons delivered therein) and expressing appreciation for a number of Latin theological, philosophic, exegetical , and historiographic achievements.6 On the eve of the expulsion, studied cultivation of Latin (or “the language of the Christians” as Jewish writers of the day were wont to call it) was on the rise. Some Hispano-Jewish litterati...

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