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鵻 169 鵼 Chapter 7 鵻 Historical Thinking, Critical Reading, and the Study of Classical Jewish Texts 鵼 T hough he has been characterized as “the last spokesman of the Jewish Middle Ages,”1 Abarbanel was also a man of the Renaissance in important respects, and no wonder: he grew up and spent most of his life in Portugal and Spain at a time when new intellectual winds were blowing, and he composed most of his works in Italy when the Renaissance was in full swing.2 Abarbanel’s movement within circles that reflected shifts in Iberian cultural allegiances (the Portuguese court, the Mendoza) as well as currents associated with the Italian Renaissance (magical ideas, notions of king Solomon as a Renaissance sage, Hermeticism, “the ancient theology”) has already been highlighted . It should hardly occasion surprise, then, that despite their predominantly medieval ambience, Abarbanel’s writings at times attest methods and sensibilities best explained in terms of his osmotic absorption of Renaissance trends. And inasmuch as signs of the transition from medieval traits to those of the Renaissance appear already in Abarbanel’s Iberian productions, these works must be seen as the earliest witnesses to Renaissance stimuli on Hebrew literature produced by a thinker whose intellectual formation took place beyond Italy’s borders. Though the Renaissance witnessed and often combined a welter of intellectual streams—Neoplatonism, Aristotelianism, Kabbalah, astrology, alchemy, numerology, magic, and more—the most important force to emerge during this self-proclaimed period of renewal was humanism, a classicizing literary and educational movement that transformed literature, art, and scholarship in Italy beginning in the fourteenth century and in other centers on the European continent and England relatively soon thereafter.3 At the heart of humanism was an abiding concern with the inheritance of the past. History was one of the studia humanitatis; humanists generally evinced enthusiasm for the classics, which they studied from a particularly literary point of view, and the production of classicized rhetoric was a principal humanist aim.4 Taken together, these 170 鵼 Isaac Abarbanel’s Stance Toward Tradition trends meant that during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the correction and interpretation of classical literary and historical texts was seen as a more urgent task than it had been regarded as for a millennium, save for a few medieval exceptions.5 Abarbanel’s interest in history was manifest not only in his concern for salvation history in his messianic works; it was, as has been noted, present as well, sometimes intensely so, in many a noneschatological context.6 While grounded in earlier medieval traditions, it dovetailed with emphases in humanist educational theory as well. Not only did humanists evince concern with the past; their endeavors were propelled by a sense of history and their critical reading of classical (and other) texts. Humanists venerated the classics in part because they read them in historical perspective—a perspective they established by, among other things, creating (or reviving) certain principles and tools of critical historical research.7 Humanist “historical thinking” took many forms, but its main features have been analyzed to include awareness of evidence, appreciation of temporal perspective , interest in causation, and a willingness to examine the past on its own terms.8 Similarly, humanist critical reading—one of many types of reading cultivated in the Renaissance—took diverse forms. Its main characteristics have been described as follows: [It] tends to look on texts as fontes rather than auctoritates. It is sensitive to anachronism. . . . It is essentially a comparative technique, discriminating among usages in different historical periods, attempting to reconstruct a true account of the past from variant historical accounts; its natural genre is the short study or monograph.9 The sharpened historical sense and innovative modes of reading that accompanied the humanists’ new intellectual concerns produced scholarly breakthroughs . For example, for the first time critical procedures were developed for the restoration of corrupted ancient texts. Such trailblazing modes of textual criticism were spurred in part by the spread of printing, but, at a deeper level, they reflected a new historical orientation according to which textual critics increasingly became attuned to the historicity of diction and style, the processes through which manuscripts were corrupted over time, and the need for knowledge of ancient and medieval history as a basis for making textual improvements .10 Applied to Scripture, humanist methods—especially philology, which incorporated modern notions of text criticism, literary analysis, and more—gave rise to far-reaching transformations.11 Thus, such scholars as Lorenza Valla and Desiderius Erasmus strove to establish the...

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