Isaac Abarbanel's Stance Toward Tradition: Defense, Dissent, and Dialogue

Notes

鵻 217 鵼 鵻 Notes 鵼 Introduction 1. For the coinage, see Bernard McGinn, Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 149–52. 2. See (including for the quoted formulation) McGinn, Visions, 149–52. For apocalypticism associated with the voyages of Columbus, see Alain Milhou, Colón y su mentalidad mesiánica en el ambiente franciscanista español (Valladolid: Seminario americanista de la Universidad de Valladolid, 1983); Pauline Moffitt Watts, “Prophecy and Discovery: On the Spiritual Origins of Christopher Columbus’s ‘Enterprise of the Indies,’” American Historical Review 90 (1985): 73–102. 3. During the revival of interest in Hebraic literature in the Renaissance and centuries following, Abarbanel’s works were translated into Latin and studied by Christian Hebraists such as Constantijn l’Empereur van Oppijck, Johann Buxtorf the younger, Sebastian Schmid, Johann Benedict Carpzov, and Richard Simon as much as those of any other postrabbinic Hebrew writer. The little written about Abarbanel’s Nachleben concerns his fate in Latin literature. See Abravanel, 251–54; Frank E. Manuel, The Broken Staff: Judaism Through Christian Eyes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), in the index under “Abravanel, Isaac”; Solomon Gaon, “Don Isaac Abravanel and the Christian Scholars,” The American Sephardi 6 (1973): 17–21. The fullest account of Christian interest in Abarbanel through the early eighteenth century is Johannes Henricus Majus, “Vita Don Isaaci Abrabanelis,” in Mashmia‘ yeshu‘ah (Frankfurt am Main: Io. Maximilian A Sande, 1711), 20–34. 4. Representative is the discussion in Gregorio Ruiz, Don Isaac Abrabanel y su commentario al libro de Amos (Madrid: Universidad Pontificia Comillas Madrid, 1984), xlvii– xlix, under the heading “Su gran defecto: la prolijidad.” For medieval and modern references , see ibid., cxx nn. 451–56. For historical contextualization of this side of Abarbanel’s literary inheritance, see my “Isaac Abarbanel’s Intellectual Achievement and Literary Legacy in Modern Scholarship: A Retrospective and Opportunity,” in Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature III, ed. Isadore Twersky and Jay M. Harris (Cambridge: Harvard University Center for Jewish Studies, 2000), 225. 5. For this term and its implications, see the passage in Roger Chartier’s “Le monde comme représentation,” as translated in Histories: French Constructions of the Past, ed. Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt (New York: New Press, 1995), 555–56. 218 鵼 Notes to Pages 4–6 6. David Grene, Greek Political Theory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1950), v. 7. Frank Talmage, “Keep Your Sons from Scripture: The Bible in Medieval Jewish Scholarship and Spirituality,” in Understanding Scripture: Explorations of Jewish and Christian Traditions of Interpretation, ed. Clemens Thoma and Michael Wyschogrod (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 63. 8. A wide-ranging exploration is Edward Shils, Tradition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981). A recent essayistic reflection pitched toward contemporary concerns is David Gross, The Past in Ruins: Tradition and the Critique of Modernity (Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, 1992). See also János Kristóf Nyı́ri, “‘Tradition’ and Related Terms: A Semantic Survey,” in his Tradition and Individuality: Essays (Dordrecht , The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992), 61–74. 9. Shils, Tradition, 213–310, 328–30; Gross, Past in Ruins, 7. 10. For a summary of these academic trends through the mid-1980s, see Marilyn Robinson Waldman, “Tradition as a Modality of Change: Islamic Examples,” History of Religions 25 (1986): 318–27. 11. A recent volume that reflects this reality is Jack Wertheimer, ed., The Uses of Tradition: Jewish Continuity in the Modern Era (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1992). For an assessment of the impact of Katz’s study, see Bernard Cooperman ’s essay in his translation of it ([New York: New York University Press, 1993], 237– 53). 12. The quoted phrase is Walter Jackson Bate’s in The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1970), 4. Note Robert Brody’s recent observation (The Geonim of Babylonia and the Shaping of Medieval Jewish Culture [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998], 248) that “the yoke of tradition lay more heavily on Se‘adyah [Gaon]’s shoulders than on those of Maimonides.” 13. Marc Saperstein, Decoding the Rabbis: A Thirteenth-Century Commentary on the Aggadah (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 208 and, in greater detail, JeanChristophe Attias, “L’Âme et la clef: De l’introduction comme genre littéraire dans la production exégètique du judaı̈sme médiéval,” in Entrer en Matière (Paris: Cerf, 1998), 350–55. 14. For the first citation...