Philosophy, Kabbalah and Science in the Culture of the Italian Ghetto: On the Debate between Samson Morpurgo and Aviad Sar Shalom Basilae

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Penn collection
Departmental Papers (History)
Degree type
Discipline
Subject
Cultural History
European History
History
History of Religion
Intellectual History
Jewish Studies
Funder
Grant number
License
Copyright date
Distributor
Related resources
Contributor
Abstract

Two common assumptions about Jewish culture in the period of the Italian ghettos have been disavowed by contemporary scholarship. First, that in contrast to the earlier period of the Renaissance, Jewish culture had become and arid intellectual desert, relatively devoid of contact with the outstide world, sterile and uncreative, isolated and absorbed in pietistic and messianic delirium; and second, that the primary agent of this cultural retreat, that throwback to medievalism and obscurantism, was the kabbalah. To the contrary, we have come to learn that despite the patent diminution of social and cultural contacts between Jews and Christians engendered by the ghetto walls, Jewish culture remained vibrant, creative, and open to new expressions of literary and artistic accomplishment. Indeed, the ghetto, with all its negative connotations, was the virtual birthplace of bold innovations in Hebrew poetry and drama, in music, in medical and scientific writing, as well as in the traditional domains of rabbinics, moralistic literature, and liturgy.1 And kabbalah, paradoxically, as Robert Bonfil had recently argued, was the critical mediator between the medieval and modern worlds, the primary agent of many of these innovations, particularly in the religious sphere, and even of modernity itself.2

Advisor
Date Range for Data Collection (Start Date)
Date Range for Data Collection (End Date)
Digital Object Identifier
Series name and number
Publication date
1993
Journal title
Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought
Volume number
Issue number
Publisher
Publisher DOI
Journal Issue
Comments
Recommended citation
Collection