Isaac Abarbanel's Stance Toward Tradition: Defence, Dissent, and Dialogue. .

Erik Lawee. Isaac Abarbanel's Stance Toward Tradition: Defence, Dissent, and Dialogue.

Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001. pbk. xiii + 320 pp. index. bibl. $20.95. ISBN: 0-7914-5125-9.

Isaac Abarbanel (1437-1508), a scion of an aristocratic Jewish family in the Iberian peninsula, was one of the most important Jewish scholars of the late Middle Ages. His intellectual career illustrates the gradual transmission from the medieval to the Renaissance cultural milieu, and its influence upon Jewish thought and culture of that period, better then any other contemporary Jewish scholar. Abarbanel spent most of his life in Portugal and Spain, until the expulsion of the Jews in 1492. After the expulsion he moved to Italy--first to Naples and finally to Venice, where he died. He arrived in Italy at the apex of the Italian Renaissance, and the influence of its various intellectual currents is clearly apparent in his writing. While Abarbanel spent most of his life in Iberia, most of his scholarly output was produced in Italy, during the last fifteen years of his life (1492-1508). In Iberia he had to shelve much of his intellectual ambitions due to the pressures of his commercial and political activities " in the courts and palaces of kings occupied in their service" (9). However, as was already established by previous research, and as Lawee cleverly emphasizes, the humanist influences reached Abarbanel already when in Iberia, at an early stage of his intellectual development, at least since the late 1470s, when the first humanist currents started to penetrate into Spain and Portugal.

In the last generation there is much scholarly interest in Abarbanel's multifaceted oeuvre. A few dozen papers on Abarbanel have been published in the last few decades (some by the author of this review), in Hebrew, English, and other languages. Among other things, this research established the Renaissance influences on the formation of Abarbanel's mind, which some earlier scholars tended to neglect, following the traditional pattern which viewed Abarbanel (and other Jewish scholars as well) in a somewhat narrow framework, neglecting outside influences. Thus, Abarbanel was considered to be the last great medieval Jewish thinker. Now we know that he was also--simultaneously--one of the first Jewish Renaissance thinkers. This can also help to explain the phenomena of his son, Judah Abarbanel (Leone Ebreo), whose Dialoghi d'Amore was to become one of the major scholarly fruits of the later Italian Renaissance.

This is, however, the first comprehensive study in English of Abarbanel's thought since Ben Zion Netanyahu's magisterial Don Isaac Abravanel, Statesman and Philosopher (Philadelphia, 1953). It is definitely time. Lawee builds upon the fruits of the scholarly research on Abarbanel and his times, which accumulated since Netanyahu first published his book fifty years ago, to create a careful and nuanced picture of the evolvement of Abarbanel's mind and his scholarly output in the context of the varied developments in Jewish and Christian cultures of this transitional period.

Unlike Netanyahu, Lawee follows the evolvement of Abarbanel's thought chronologically and not thematically. This is in a sense an intellectual biography. Chapter 1, "Life and Context," gives us a general framework of his life and activities, within the context of the major historical developments of the second half of the fifteenth century, in Jewish as well as in general history. This chapter is mostly based on existing research, always up-to-date, but it gives the reader a solid and useful overview upon which the rest of the book can establish itself. Chapter 2, "Work and Traditions," discusses the framework of Abarbanel's education and the intellectual influences which shaped his thought--from Maimonides and Aquinas to Cardinal Mendoza and--maybe--Yohanan Alemanno, Pico della Mirandola's Hebrew tutor in Florence in the 1480s. It was a very complex amalgam of influences--Jewish (both halachic, midrashic, and philosophical), classical and Christian, medieval and Renaissance, Iberian and Italian--which final ly shaped his thought. The following chapters discuss Abarbanel's various writings as they evolved in time--from the early Ateret Zeqenim (Crowns of Elders) (chap. 3) to the later Bible Commentaries produced in Naples and Venice in his later years (chap. 7).

The main theme which threads through the book, and is summarized in the last chapter, is Abarbanel's complex attitude towards the authority of the ancients. The debate between ancients and moderns was a thorny issue for Jewish scholars who strove to widen their critical freedom while strictly adhering to the authority of the Torah and the Sages, its authoritative interpreters. Although Abarbanel, unlike many of his Jewish contemporaries in Iberia and Italy, declined to use the old medieval parable likening the moderns to dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants, which regained popularity during the Renaissance, still he developed a similar attitude, which precariously attempted to create some equilibrium between the adherence to the ancient authority and the emphasis on the moderns' freedom of interpretation. As Lawee correctly phrases it: "Spirited in substance, Abarbanel's defense of innovation is deferential in tone" (64).

There is still much research to be done on Abarbanel's considerable literary output, and much of his work still waits for a proper critical edition. However, every future work on Abarbanel in particular, and Jewish thought of this period in general, will find this fine book a useful and thought-provoking companion.