 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode… As Far As East From West – Jewish Philosophy in Renaissance Italy Never underestimate the ability of philosophers to be puzzled by things that don't, at first glance, seem particularly puzzling. Take the question of desire. What could be a more familiar everyday phenomenon? I mean, I don't know about you, but I desire things all the time. Almond-Gosan, philosophy books, a few million dollars to cover other sudary expenses. So you'd think it would be obvious to me and everyone what desire is. A rough working definition might be something like, wanting something you don't have. That sounds plausible and comes with the backing of no less an authority than Plato. In his symposium, he has Socrates tell of how his instructor in matters of love, Theotima, taught him that eros, passionate love or desire, is constantly in need because it involves striving after something beautiful that one lacks. So for instance the gods have no love or desire for wisdom because they are already wise. The true lover of wisdom, the philosopher, is someone who knows that wisdom is precious but has not managed to attain it yet. Plausible or not though, this way of thinking about desire faces some difficulties. Don't I still desire an almond croissant even once I have it? Don't people stay in love once they're already married? Sometimes? And to the Renaissance mind, Theotima's remark about the gods not experiencing love could also seem problematic. Christians are fond of saying that, to the contrary, God loves us and all his creation. But surely that is not a manifestation of lack or need on his part. Nowadays philosophers don't spend that much time being puzzled by love, or at least not as part of their job they don't. But ancient and Renaissance Platonists were fascinated by it, as we saw a couple of episodes ago, with everyone from Plotinus to Ficino writing treatises on the topic. Among these authors, the one who offers the most interesting reflections on our particular puzzle is Leon Ebreo. In his three Dialogues on Love, a hugely popular work that saw about 25 editions in the 16th century, two characters named Philo and Sophia, see what he did there, are depicted working through a number of problems about love. How does it relate to desire more generally? What role does love play in human life and the universe? What is its origin? Throughout their conversations, the two keep returning to this question of whether love implies neediness. Ebreo makes the nice point that, even if desire is concerned with what is lacking, it doesn't aim at what has no being at all, because to desire something you must at least consider it as having a possible being. One idea might be to distinguish love from this sort of desire for things one could but does not possess. Think again of wisdom. The wise person loves it but already has it, and so doesn't need to desire it. This would also be a difference between more exalted and permanent goods like virtue and wisdom and, on the other hand, earthly goods. The former can be attained and then possessed indefinitely without change, the latter perish as they are enjoyed, or if they don't then their goodness seems to vanish as desire is satisfied. Think of how I have to consume that almond croissant in order to satisfy my hunger for it, and how if it is too big I will have no desire for the part that's too much for me to eat. For me, an admittedly hypothetical scenario. Upon further reflection though, the characters decide that love might be the same as desire, or a special kind of desire that is directed towards those higher goods and not carnal satisfactions. Even if you already have what you love, you also want to keep having it into the future. The mere fact of being subject to the passage of time means that in a sense you even lack what you already possess. You can never have what you really want, which is to possess what you love forever. What about spiritual beings who might seem to be able to achieve this? And they experience love and desire too? Yes, souls and angels strive towards ever greater union with and understanding of God, and since God is infinite this desire will never be completely satisfied. As for God himself, of course, he never experiences lack or deficiency in himself, but he wants perfection for the things he creates. So since there is, to put it mildly, always room for improvement in the created world, there will always be something for him to desire. This is what we mean when we say that God loves his creation. One brilliant feature of Leon Ebreo's dialogues, and no doubt one reason they were so popular, is that they dramatize the topic of erotic desire as well as thematizing it. The male character, Philo, is usually the one advancing arguments and theories which are criticized and resisted by the female character, Sophia. She also resists his more literal advances. Especially at the end of each of the dialogues, we get passages in which Philo pleads with Sophia to give in to his love for her, using the full humanist arsenal of rhetoric and philosophy to talk her into having an affair with him. In each case, she rebuffs his entreaties. As she complains at one point, what I want from you is the theory of love and what you want from me is its practice. This feature of the text makes it more entertaining, but also allows Ebreo to contrast two approaches to love. Where Sophia tends to argue that true love is for intellectual and eternal goods, Philo insists that bodily pleasure has a place in the best life and can be an expression of true love. So, like Pietro Bembo before him, Ebreo exploits the dialogue form to juxtapose contrasting ideas about love and indirectly human nature. Are we ultimately just intellectual souls, as classical Neoplatonism and Ficino would have it? Or should our theory of love pay due regard to our complex nature as embodied beings? Ebreo's fusion of literary panache and philosophical content is still winning him admiration down to the present day. One scholar has gone so far as to say, A Neoplatonist in his soul and a humanist in his style, Leoni succeeded in making philosophical ideas understandable, a task at which Ficino had failed entirely. But there was something else he added to the humanist tradition of Platonist reflection on love, the perspective of a different religious faith. The Ebreo part of his adopted Italian name signifies that he was a Hebrew, that is Jewish. As for his original name, it was Judah Abravanel. That sound you hear is the second shoe dropping as we finally meet the son of Isaac Abravanel as promised back in episode 169. On the off chance you don't remember that episode with crystal clarity, Judah's father Isaac hailed from Portugal and Spain and worked for the Christian king and queen Ferdinand and Isabella. He moved to Italy with his family after the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492, which is how Judah, aka Leoni Ebreo, wound up in Naples working as a doctor. He would subsequently live in Genoa, Naples again, then Venice, and possibly Rome, where his dialogues were published in 1535 only after his death. The fact that his life story was so peripatetic in the non-philosophical sense is typical. As Robert Bonfils wrote in his history of Italian Judaism in this period, Jews settled where they were given permission to settle and where life was not rendered unbearable by Christian hostility. Often they came to Italy to escape persecution, as with the aforementioned exile from Spain or an earlier expulsion from France in 1394, or to escape pogroms launched against them in Germany. Once in Italy, they faced further persecution. Numerous cities banned Jews entirely, with Florence for example accepting them only in 1427. Those cities that did allow them hardly put out the welcome wagon. Jews were often forced to wear identifying insignia like yellow patches of fabric or coloured hats, and they were subjected to enforced teaching intended to bring about their conversion. Pope Paul IV, whose policies were particularly malignant, said that, "...the Church tolerates the Jews in order that they may bear witness to the truth of the Christian faith." But beginning with Venice in 1516, Italian cities started designating certain areas as ghettos for the Jewish community, implicitly shifting from a policy of conversion to one of segregation. The social pressure brought to bear by the majority culture could affect even wealthy Jews and make itself felt in their intellectual pursuits. To see this, we can cheat a little bit by going past our usual chronological range for this current series and considering Sarah Copia-Soullam. She was born in the Venice Ghetto in 1590, but to a prosperous family who had her well-educated in subjects including philosophy and theology. She would go on to host an intellectual salon at her home, frequented by other philosophers like Leoni Modena and her tutor Numidio Paluzzi. As with the female humanists we discussed in episode 337, we have extensive correspondence from her and sent to her, often from Christian men trying to cajole her into converting. This is also the subtext for the most philosophical exchange involving Soullam. A Christian named Baldassare Bonifacio, who was a regular at her salon and also an archdeacon of Treviso, sent her a letter describing how humans lost their immortality through original sin. The point, of course, was to encourage her to become a Christian so as to cleanse herself of the stain of this sin. It was with some consternation that Bonifacio instead received a set of philosophical musings from Soullam in which she pointed out that material bodies are intrinsically subject to corruption and so cannot be made eternal through the influence of a soul, no matter how sinless. The question of immortality must concern particular human essences, since otherwise we would be eternal only at the level of species and not as individuals. The human species would, as Soullam says with an evident allusion to a famous saying of Heraclitus, be like a river which remains the same river even though it is always made up of different waters. Bonifacio should have been pleased to receive this sophisticated philosophical reply. He claimed to have no objection to being instructed by a woman in such matters since, in intellects, there is no distinction of sexes. Nonetheless, he reacted by denouncing Soullam for putting the soul's indestructibility in question. He confronted her with proofs of immortality drawn from the Jewish Bible and Plato, a pretty formidable combination. In response, Soullam protested that she was far from denying this thesis, since immortality is affirmed by Jews just as much as Christians. She simply wanted to have a good philosophical rationale for her already firm belief. But she complains Bonifacio is too busy hectoring her about her religion to provide that. This debate shows how difficult it was for Christian and Jewish intellectuals to exchange ideas in the Renaissance. Yet just as had happened earlier in the Islamic world, we see Jewish authors in Italy adopting the concerns and ideas of the wider intellectual culture while also exploring problems and traditions unique to their faith. For an example we can return to Leone Ebreo. Though his dialogues are written in their Italian vernacular, some wonder whether this is a translation from an original Hebrew version. In terms of content, he is powerfully influenced by Christian thinkers like Ficino and Pico. Yet even the way he responds to this influence displays his different religious commitments. He has the characters in the dialogue affirm that God loves himself, as well as his creation, and admit that this self-love involves three elements, the lover, the beloved, and the love itself, all of which are identical with God. But where Christian authors saw this as a way to understand the Holy Trinity, Ebreo cautions us that God only seems to be threefold because of, as he says, the inferiority and impotency of the intellect. Far from being an exposition of Trinitarian doctrine, this looks more like an explanation of how the Christians were confused into putting forth that doctrine. Nor was humanist Platonism the only Christian philosophical tradition co-opted by Jews. There was also Scholastic Aristotelianism. That style of philosophy does not really show itself in Ebreo's dialogues, though a poetic lament he wrote over his son, who was taken from him and forcibly converted, seems to boast of his ability to outdo the schoolmen. I visited their schools of learning, and there were none who could engage with me. I vanquished all who rose in argument against me, and forced my opponents to surrender, putting them to shame. I have a soul which is higher and more splendid than the souls of my worthless contemporaries. Italian Jews recognized the advantages of scholastic education. Rabbinical diplomas were similar to those of the Christian schools, and the rabbis produced voluminous legal scholarship reminiscent of what the jurists of the universities were churning out. Their ambition, only partially successful, in the face of Christian obstruction and repression, was to set up a parallel system of legal and spiritual authority with rabbis as community leaders. The most intense engagement with scholasticism, though, came with thinkers who carried on the long-standing tradition of Jews reading Aristotle and his greatest medieval commentator of Verruese. After Verruese's works were rendered into Hebrew, they were avidly read by Jewish philosophers of the 13th and 14th centuries like Ibn Falakhera and Gersonides, who went so far as to write commentaries on Verruese's commentaries. Now 15th century Italy offered a new context for Jewish Aristotelianism. The central figure here was Elijah del Medigo, who originally hailed from Crete and came to northern Italy in 1480. Before returning to Crete ten years later, he would write treatises inspired by or commenting on Verruese's philosophy and also translate Verruese from the Hebrew versions into Latin. Del Medigo thus contributed to the upsurge of interest in Verruese towards the end of the 15th century that we associate especially with Padua. More on this in a later episode. Verruese was an author who posed particular challenges for reconciling philosophical teaching with religious orthodoxy. Alongside his clear affirmation of the eternity of the world, Verruese's most problematic teaching had to do with the human mind. His long commentary on the de anima reached the surprising conclusion that all of humanity shares only one mind. We've already seen Ficino pouring scorn on this doctrine. Del Medigo treats it much more respectfully, seeing clearly how difficult it is to explain the diversity of minds within an Aristotelian framework. In this framework it had become standard to say that general substances are differentiated from one another by the matter from which they are made. But human minds are immaterial, so what distinguishes them? Del Medigo was aware of contemporaries who followed Aquinas in making the human rational soul a form that can survive as an individual even in the absence of matter, but found that account rationally untenable. Yet he admitted that such a view would fit better with Jewish belief, saying, The Torah might encourage one to believe and accept this view, but scientific investigation does not. This remark fits well with a work by Del Medigo written in Hebrew called Examination of Religion. It tackles head-on the question of how philosophy relates to revealed religion, taking its cue from the rationalism of Maimonides and also of Verruese's decisive treatise. Like Verruese, Del Medigo believes that philosophical investigation is encouraged and even required for those capable of it, as it increases one's understanding of God and the world he has made. But he also thinks that there are some truths found in scripture that human reason cannot discover. This attitude is more reminiscent of those Parisian arts masters of the 13th century who have received the problematic designation Latin Verruese. Verruese himself thought that philosophy establishes the same truths as religion, but on the basis of rational demonstration. For the arts masters, and now for Del Medigo, by contrast, scripture goes beyond the scope of reason and in some sense trumps it. As an expert scholar of Aristotle's and of Verruese's philosophy, Del Medigo is willing and able to expound their arguments, but that doesn't mean he needs to agree with them in the end. So in one treatise, after explaining Verruese's rationale for the unicity of the intellect, he says, Let none of my co-religionists think that the opinion which I firmly believe is this one, for my belief is truly the belief of the Jews. Ironically, one reason Del Medigo opposed Verruese on this point is that it reminded him too much of something he could find in the Jewish tradition. The influx of Jews from the Iberian peninsula brought the mystical tradition known as Kabbalah to Italian soil. As a hard-nosed rationalist, Del Medigo was bound to find Kabbalah distasteful, and he was struck by the similarity between Verruese's theory of the single mind and ideas put forward by some Kabbalists. A similar attitude was adopted by Leone di Vitali, commonly known by his honorific Messer, or Master, Leone. He was a well-rounded Renaissance thinker who on the one hand commented on Verruese, drawing here on Christian scholastic authors like Walter Burley and Paul of Venice, but on the other hand produced a compendium of rhetoric using heroes of the humanist pantheon like Quintilian and Cicero. His succulently titled Book of the Honeycomb's Flow aims to demonstrate the rhetorical excellence of the Bible, but his versatile mind had no place for Kabbalah. He forbade other Jews to study the writings of the Kabbalists who, he said, groped forward through the darkness of their misunderstanding of the purposes of the founders of their doctrine, which as far as I can see is definitely in partial accord with the doctrine of the Platonists. In the meantime, the mystics were also pondering their own standing relative to the philosophers and declaring themselves the winners. One Kabbalist from Tuscany by the name of Elijah Hayem Ginatsano attacked a range of rationalists including Gersonides and Isaac Abravanel, the aforementioned father of Leone Abreu. For Elijah, the Jewish revelation is beyond rational knowledge, though he did not think that it actually showed such knowledge to be false. The fundamental roots of Jewish belief, such as God's oneness and incorporeality, are affirmed in common by reason and religion, and as he puts it, the Torah will not come to cancel the intellect. Still, Elijah is confident that the revelation is best understood through the methods of Kabbalah. It's symbolic and mystical system centering on the ten letters, or seferot, that stand for God's relationship to the created universe provides far greater insight than philosophy. As Elijah says, the two approaches are as far apart as east from west. It's ironic that he put it this way because as he fulminated against Isaac Abravanel, Elijah was failing to understand that Abravanel and other Western, that is Spanish, Jews, had already found ways to fuse Kabbalistic and rationalist methods. From works like the Zohar, which presents itself as a work of late ancient Judaism, but was in fact composed in 13th century Spain, many Jewish intellectuals in Italy took over the habits of speculative Kabbalah. An early and influential figure here was Menachem Rekhanati, already active in the 13th century. His commentary on the Torah, strongly influenced by the Spanish tradition of Kabbalah, was translated into Latin and diffused widely in the Italian Renaissance. This strand of Jewish thought helped itself to philosophical ideas, especially Neoplatonist ones, but kept reason firmly in its place. Thus Rekhanati commented that philosophers did not have the wisdom of our Torah, since they did not believe in anything except in matters that they derived from logical demonstration. About 200 years later, an Italian rabbi named Isaac Marhaim was still sounding the same note when he advised a Jewish banker friend, you must make Kabbalah the root and try to make reason conform to it. One way to resolve the long-running tension between philosophical and Jewish wisdom was to claim that the two are ultimately the same. A diverse range of Renaissance Jews, including the aforementioned Elijah Genizano and Messer Leon, claimed that philosophy, especially Platonism, was in fact based on older ideas traceable to Biblical figures like Moses and Abraham. One idea, based on legends already circulating in Hellenistic times, was that Plato had visited Egypt, where he met the prophet Jeremiah. This kind of thinking opened the way to a syncretic style of philosophy in which Kabbalah, Platonism and, to a lesser extent, Aristotelianism could all be gathered together into one harmonious body of doctrine. The great exponent of this style was Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Pico's philosophical and scholarly achievements were made possible in part by the Jewish tutors he consulted for knowledge of the Hebrew language and Kabbalistic lore. He also learned from them about Averroes. In fact, Delmedigo explained that it was Pico who prompted him to explore Averroes' theory of the mind. He told Pico, Just as Averroes explained Aristotle's words fully, I have to explain the words of Averroes, since such wisdom has almost been lost in our day. For Kabbalah, Pico turned to Phlevius Mithridates, who produced a massive body of translations for him in about 1486. We hear from Ficino about a debate held at Pico's home involving both Delmedigo and Mithridates. Then there was Johann Alemanno, who came to Florence in the 1450s and studied medicine and philosophy in Pisa. Alemanno showed Pico how to combine philosophy and Kabbalah, which earned him the disapproval of some other Jewish mystics who complained of his making Kabbalistic matters conform to speculation. But for Alemanno, all the traditions coincided, showing the way to purify the body, then the soul, finally making it possible to seek union with God through the divine names mentioned in the Bible. Through reflection on these, he wrote, One may enjoy such divine visions as may be emanated upon pure, clear souls who are prepared to receive them. As we'll be seeing, Alemanno may have been a decisive influence on Pico's so-called oration on the dignity of man. But we won't get to that most famous work by Pico for a couple of episodes, because first we'll be taking a more general look at Pico's astonishing body of work, which he achieved with the help of these Jewish advisors, his own precocious and curious mind, and last but not least, his abundant family fortune. If you happen to be independently wealthy and are wondering what you might do with all your money and leisure time, and if in addition you don't mind really annoying the Pope, then you could do worse than to imitate Pico della Mirandola, and you could start by donating a few million dollars to the history of philosophy without any gaps.