Shema as Memory Palace: A Medieval Hebrew Ars Memorativa

Leon Modena’s Lev ha-Aryeh (seventeenth-century Italy) has long been recognized as the first Hebrew treatise on mnemonics. This article points to an earlier source: gate 90 of Isaac Arama’s ‘Akedat Yits@hak. Arama not only describes the locative memory palace developed by Roman orators and popular throughout Latin Christendom. He contends that the original memory palace was given by God to the Israelites and consists in none other than the central prayers of Jewish liturgy, the Shema and ve-ahavta. On Arama’s reading, the Shema and ve-ahavta are designed as a sort of verbal memory palace to help store and recollect all the commandments. In addition to introducing Arama’s memory device and adaptation of classical ars memorativa into Hebrew, I show how Arama’s interest in memory reflects a departure from earlier trends in medieval Hebrew philosophical literature. Surveying Hebrew philosophical literature across Spain and southern France from the thirteenth through mid-fifteenth centuries, I argue that although Jewish authors conceptualized memory as a faculty and internal sense according to the framework of Aristotelian psychology, they did not seem to be especially interested in the subject of memory as compared with their Christian peers. I conclude by hypothesizing what may have precipitated renewed Jewish interest in memory in late fifteenth-century Spain.