distract themselves from the troubles and the sorrows with poetry of lust and
books of ancient wars that never took place.”^70 The comment underscores
Farissol’s scientific approach to geographic facts. Historian David Ruderman
has shown that Farissol was well educated in the recent scientific and geo-
graphic discoveries of his time and shared the values of other scholars of the
Renaissance—among them a curiosity and fascination about the natural world
and world geography.
Reading theIgeretagainst contemporary geographic works reveals its
author to be highly conversant with them. Ruderman convincingly shows
that theIgeretwas part of the humanist project as envisioned by Farissol.
Above all, he wanted to bring to print, in Hebrew, all the “innovations”
(hidushim) in world cartography of the time.^71 TheIgeretis a superb example
of the intense sixteenth-century dialogue between Jews and Christians in Italy.
Historian Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has shown it to have encompassed many
forms of knowledge, mostly religious but also scientific.^72 Farissol exemplifies
this dialogue, deploying “gentile” knowledge in the preface to his work, with
information from “their” books. Apologizing for the limited scope of theIgeret,
he writes: “even the Christians, leading authorities of this craft [of geography]
could not say everything.” Christian geographers determined facts and named
places by “way of agreeing on them”—by using evidence, testimony, and proof
and drawing on a shared and growing body of knowledge deemed to be
accurate and authoritative. His text “follow[ed] them” in this regard.^73
Despite the disclaimer about its limited scope, theIgeretis conceived as
comprehensive, promising to “teach [the] Seven climates, and three inhabited
parts [of the world]: Asia, Europe and Africa,” including “the distant islands
recently discovered by the Portuguese boats next to the South Pole.” His reader
would also “find [information] about the river Sambatyon, and locations of the
enclosed Jews, where they are.”^74 Comprehensive world geographies, according
to Farissol, should include both theoikoumeneand “distant islands,” but also the
enclosed Jews and the River Sambatyon. The geography of the world was made
up of three categories of habitation: the classical inhabited and known world; its
newly discovered parts, not yet fully known; and the enclosed realms.
The notion that humans inhabited the entire planet was hotly debated
during the later parts of the sixteenth century, bearing serious theological
implications for Christianity, a supposedly universal religion. Triggered by
the dramatic discoveries of the preceding few decades, which exposed the
world as something radically different than what the Europeans had imagined,
the center of the debate was Italy, particularly Venice—Europe’s foremost
center for world cartography, where new geographic data were processed and
mapped.^75
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