Cultural Intermediaries: Jewish Intellectuals in Early Modern Italy ed. by David B. Ruderman, Giuseppe Veltri, and Hebraica Veritas? Christian Hebraists and the Study of Judaism in Early Modern Europe ed. by Allison P. Coudert, Jeffrey S. Shoulson (review)

REVIEWS 214 gious debates and gender constructions. Coletti’s scholarship is a significant contribution to our knowledge of late medieval and early Tudor English religious culture. Her insights into England on the eve of the Reformation illustrate an existent tension between mystical spirituality and sacramental spirituality of the church as well as a counter discourse to the dominant conceptualization of femininity and its association with sexuality and sinfulness. STACY NISPEROS, California State University, Fullerton Cultural Intermediaries: Jewish Intellectuals in Early Modern Italy, ed. David B. Ruderman and Giuseppe Veltri (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2004) 304 pp.; Hebraica Veritas? Christian Hebraists and the Study of Judaism in Early Modern Europe, ed. Allison P. Coudert and Jeffrey S. Shoulson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2004) x + 327 pp. The study of Jewish-Christian interactions in early modern Europe has yielded a great deal of solid scholarship in recent years, in a way that happily contributes to a host of disciplines without falling into too many clichés or relying on gross simplifications. Such scholarship has been successful in breaking apart stereotypes about the interactions between both communities based on a facile historiography favoring sweeping generalizations and binary oppositions. Two new collections of scholarly essays published by the University of Pennsylvania Press as part of the Jewish Culture and Contexts series continue this trend by bringing together European, American, and Israeli scholars whose work contributes to the increased understanding of this time period. The first, Cultural Intermediaries: Jewish Intellectuals in Early Modern Italy focuses, as its title states, on those thinkers whose lives and work were shaped by the Renaissance milieu in the cultural centers of the Italian Peninsula . David B. Ruderman, and editor of the series, co-edits the collection with Giuseppe Veltri. (Ruderman also edited Essential Papers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy [1992]). The book’s twelve essays focus on profiles of individual protagonists of Jewish scholarship during the Renaissance rather than on broad historical currents. Veltri, the co-editor, for example, examines the emblematic figure of Yehuda Abravanel, better known as Leone Ebreo. Often considered the emblem of the harmonization of Jewish and Christian Neoplatonism, Veltri argues that he was a solidly Jewish philosopher who was misunderstood by his gentile readership. Simply put, “Leone’s philosophy of Judaism was too “pale” to be noticed by a contemporary Christian audience” (60). The emerging humanist practice of historiography trained on catastrophic events such as the fall of Constantinople intrigued Jewish scholars at the same time that it seemed to challenge a view of history as guided by a divine hand. Martin Jacobs points to the “ambiguities in Joseph ha-Kohen’s historical writings ” as “an expression of the ambivalent status of a Jewish intellectual who, thanks to the invention of the printing press, had access to new sources of information , but who lived under quite different social conditions from those of the well-known humanist historians” (78). Eleazar Gutwirth shows how the advent of printing not only provided access to new sources of information, but also to new approaches to the text itself. REVIEWS 215 Amatus Lusitanus (João Rodrigues de Castelo) employed emerging practices such as “evaluating translations and differentiating them from originals, constantly questioning translations (word by word)” to contribute to a new notion of the fixity of the text (235). Moshel Idel, whose essays appear in both volumes being reviewed, investigates the kabbalistic culture that grew up in the Galilean community of Safed and its assimilation by and effect on Italian kabbalists, who, “like Pico before them … were not so much original thinkers, but rather played a synthetic role, bringing together divergent forms of knowledge” (261). One might ask in what way were Jewish intellectuals cultural intermediaries in early modern Europe? At the end of his introduction, David B. Ruderman addresses the issue: “In the Middle Ages, the Jewish intellectual was a primary mediator between Islamic and Christian culture” (13). Clearly this was not the case in the early modern period. Rather, the judgment that emerges from this volume is that Jews were intermediaries between their own traditions and the nascent historicism and philological interest linked with humanism. Yet in the following assertion Ruderman shows...