368 A History of Judaism
attitude to established traditions. But others were more successful in
infusing aspects of the Renaissance into the intellectual outlook of Ital-
ian Jews. In 1587, less than ten years after de’ Rossi’s death and at the
height of controversy over his writings, Judah b. Joseph Moscato,
already for nearly twenty years the official preacher in the synagogues
of the community in Mantua where de’ Rossi had lived and published
his book, was nominated chief rabbi to the community.
Moscato’s Nefutsot Yehudah, a series of fifty- two sermons preached
in Mantua and published in Venice in 1589, revealed a religious teacher
fully devoted to the aesthetics of Renaissance rhetoric, and in his Kol
Yehudah (1594), a commentary on Judah Halevi’s Kuzari, Moscato was
an advocate both of medieval Neoplatonists and, more controversially,
of Philo. Like de’ Rossi, Moscato cited Pico della Mirandola with
approval:
First of all God emanated forth a created intellect as an effect, unitary and
perfect; he endowed it with the patterns of all things ... In the emanation
of this effect not only did God create all things but he created them in the
most perfect manner. This intellect has been called by the Platonists and
other ancient philosophers ‘God’s son’, as is recorded by the sage Pico
della Mirandola in a short essay that he wrote on the heavenly and divine
love.The ‘God’s son’ to which Moscato refers is the Logos which Philo pos-
tulated as the link between man and the divine. This combination of
modern learning with the Jewish medieval philosophical tradition, with
occasional references to Italian phrases and contemporary ideas about
music and astronomy, a mystical tinge provided by frequent quotations
(often unattributed) from the Zohar, and an overall focus on pleasing
his audience through the aesthetic qualities of his sermon (both in con-
tent and in oral delivery), established among Italian Jews the notion
that a homily should be a work of art.^8
Moscato’s sermons are known to have attracted a non- Jewish audi-
ence, and it is possible that he preached in Italian as well as Hebrew. It
is certain that in the following century the maverick Venetian preacher
Leone Modena composed in Italian with the same facility as he wrote in
Hebrew, and that he maintained close connections with a wide circle of
Christian scholars, publishing, among other works, an account of Jew-
ish customs (Historia de’ riti Ebraici ) for the English ambassador in
Venice to present to King James I. According to Leone Modena’s auto-
biography, among the numerous occupations on which he relied for an