Letters
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Letters
（Studia Judaica : Forschungen zur Wissenschaft des Judentums, Bd. 40）
Walter De Gruyter, c2007
- Other Title
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Isaac Abravanel : letters
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Note
In English with letters in Portuguese and Hebrew, including English translations
Includes bibliographical references (p. [183]-191) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Almost five hundred years after his death, Don Isaac Abravanel (1437-1508) remains a legendary figure of Sephardic history, and above all of the Expulsion of 1492. There are numerous "portraits" that have been painted of him by pre-modern and modern scholars. And still we hesitate and cannot discern which is the true one. This first critical edition of Abravanel's Portuguese and Hebrew letters opens a unique window on a complex cultural process of assimilation and dissimulation of humanism among the fifteenth-century Jewish elite. On the one hand, it establishes Abravanel's assimilation of Iberian humanism and of major aspects of the Petrarchian consolatio; on the other hand, it points at the strategies used by him to dissimulate and adapt humanism to Jewish leadership. The duality of Jewish humanists like Don Isaac was obviously a great richness, but it indicated as well their difficulty in expressing themselves coherently and comprehensively in one of the two agoras - Jewish or Christian - in which they were involved as literati and writers. The present edition and study of Abravanel's Portuguese and Hebrew letters sheds a new light on the complexity of this new figure of the Jewish humanist.
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