refuge in Italy. Those who settled in the south soon had to relocate again when
Spain conquered southern Italy and extended the expulsion edict and the
Inquisition’s jurisdiction there. In northern Italy, Jews found safe haven under
the aegis of leading Italian magnate families, such as the Medicis in Florence
and the Este family in Mantua, Padua, and Modena. These Jews arrived in
northern Italy at the height of the Italian Renaissance.
In assessing how the Renaissance affected Jews, it is essential to note that,
despite the emphasis on humanism, Renaissance culture was Christian cul-
ture. The participation of Jews in this cultural movement, therefore, varied
from discipline to discipline between imitation and engagement. Jews largely
abstained from the “plastic arts” – painting and sculpting – while fashioning
a Jewish equivalent of other aspects of the new cultural movement. The
renewed interest in Greek mythology, for example, led Italian rabbis such as
Abraham Yagel to compose sermons using mythological in addition to bibli-
cal references, prompting one observer to note that “Christians baptized the
pagan myths; Jews circumcised them.” Akin to the growing interest in his-
tory among Renaissance Catholics, Azaria de Rossi of Mantua wrote Meor
Eynayim, an early attempt at a history of the Jews that extended beyond the
conventional Shalshelet ha-Kaballah, or chain of tradition genre, which had
been the only form of Jewish historical writing since ancient times.
Jews also embraced Renaissance dancing and tennis, as indicated by the
frequent complaints by Italian rabbis regarding young Jews who skipped
Saturday morning services to play “the sport.” More ambitious and engaging
was the Jewish contribution to Renaissance rhetoric. David ben Judah Messer
Leon of Padua, in his handbook on rhetoric, Sefer Nofet Tzufim(The Book of
the Honeycomb’s Flow), boldly claimed that the true font of rhetoric in the
ancient world was not the Roman rhetorical tradition of Cicero and Tacitus,
but rather that “every science, every rationally apprehended truth that any
treatise may contain is present in our Holy Torah.” The true font of rhetoric,
he claimed, was the biblical orations of Moses and the prophets.
Most complex, though, was the Jewish engagement with Renaissance phi-
losophy. That the rise of Renaissance culture coincided with the influx of Jews
into Italy from Spain underscores the importance of distinguishing between
those aspects of Renaissance culture that also represented a renaissance in
Jewish culture, and those that did not. Renaissance philosophy belongs in the
latter category. For Christians, the Renaissance expanded the study of Greek
philosophy from a hitherto limited interest in Aristotelianism into a broader
philosophical inquiry that incorporated the Neoplatonic school – that is, a
revival of Plato. This was nothing new for Spanish and Provençal Jews such as
Nachmanides, whose kabbalistic writings had reflected the influence of
Neoplatonic philosophy as early as the thirteenth century.
This shift in Renaissance philosophy led to the appearance of Christian
Kabbalists, Christian scholars who took a growing interest in Kabbala. Unlike
World Jewry in flux, 1492–1750 107