from Aaron Hughes’ Study of Judaism,1 contains in a nutshell one of the main theses of his book. According to Hughes, the field of Jewish studies or מחשבת ישראל has its roots in a profoundly apologetic enterprise. “The sense of mission and the desire to defend Judaism from the attacks of non-Jews”, Hughes writes, “played a formative role in the disciplinary formation of Jewish studies, and it is one that seems – whether consciously or unconsciously – to have remained at the heart of Jewish studies into the present.”2 The validity of Hughes’ claim will be attested in this paper by turning to a particular test case – the academic reception of Beḥinat haDat (henceforth BH) and the consequent canonization of its author, Elijah Del Medigo (c. 1460-1493), within the field of Jewish studies. Del Medigo’s story illustrates both aspects of Hughes’ claim: the apologetic roots of Jewish studies, on the one hand, and the impact of the apologetic formative stages on the current stage within the field, on the other.
Before embarking on my analysis, I will provide a few bibliographical notes concerning the protagonist of this paper. Elijah Del Medigo was a Jew born in Crete in the second half of the 15th century. Del Medigo received a traditional education and, most likely, a certain degree of philosophical training already at home. Crete being under Venetian rule at the time, the young Del Medigo moved to the lagoon city and spent almost ten years travelling between the cities of north Italy, mainly Venice and Padua.3 During this period, Del Medigo was unofficially associated with the University of Padua, an affiliation clearly manifested in his literary activity. All of Del Medigo’s works written in Italy orbited around the thought of the 12th-century Andalusian philosopher Averroes (Ibn Rushd), who, thanks to the Latin translations of his works, was among the most influential authors studied at the University of Padua at the time. Del Medigo had access to both Hebrew and Latin versions of Averroes’ works, and played a major role in introducing the ideas of the Cordovan philosopher to his Christian patrons and benefactors,4 translating the Hebrew versions of Averroes’ works from Hebrew into Latin, and composing works which elucidated Averroes’ ideas on Aristotelian physics, metaphysics, logic and psychology. In composing such works and translations on themes that were not particularly ‘Jewish’, Del Medigo was participating in the intellectual endeavor of a non-Jewish intellectual milieu.5 I will return to this point later on.
Sometime around 1490, Del Medigo returned to his native Crete (where he was to pass away a few years later) and composed his last and most celebrated work, the BH. Unlike his previous works, BH was written in Hebrew, explicitly addressing a Jewish readership, and treating themes that were widely discussed within the medieval Jewish tradition.6 Most notably, BH examines the relation between reason and revelation and the rational foundation of Jewish belief, as opposed to the unnatural nature of the Christian creed. Similarly to Averroes’ Desicive Treatise, BH begins by asking whether the study of philosophy is forbidden, permissible or mandatory for the religious practitioner, and concludes with Del Medigo’s own idiosyncratic solution, which does not concern us here.7 While the work touches upon other themes as well (including a critical account of the Kabbalah tradition), its focal points are the relation between reason and revelation and the rational foundations of Judaism. It is not surprising, therefore, that scholars working in the field of Jewish studies refer to BH as Del Medigo’s most significant achievement, mentioning his earlier works, if at all, only in passing.8 Moreover, it seems that BH is the sole reason why scholars of Jewish thought found interest in Del Medigo in the first place, and it is by virtue of BH that Del Medigo was canonized as a Renaissance ‘Jewish philosopher’. Del Medigo’s other, more ‘technical’ works mentioned above were only studied to the extent that they contained scattered remarks of a reflective nature on the relation between reason and revelation and philosophical practice. These notes are taken out of their original context and re-contextualized against the background of Del Medigo’s more systematic account of these themes, as discussed in BH.9
BH was published no less than three times, and two of these editions may be considered critical.10 The editio princeps appeared in 1629, and was known to 17th-century Jewish intellectuals, among them Leone Modena and Spinoza11. The academic interest in BH began with the publication of the 1833 edition, published in Vienna and edited by Isaac Samuel Reggio. As noted by Giovanni Licata, Reggio was one of the major proponents of the Italian Haskalah, or ‘enlightenment’ movement.12 In addition to editing BH, Reggio had translated the Torah into Italian, and was one of the founders of the rabbinical seminary in Padua. Reggio’s activity should therefore be evaluated in the context of a certain zeitgeist, characterized by an attempt to reform Judaism emphasizing its rational foundations and arguing against Kabbalistic interpretations. Del Medigo’s endorsement in BH of a rational form of Judaism as well as his attack on certain Kabbalistic trends, accorded well with Reggio’s own thought. Reggio found in Del Medigo – who also lived and worked in Padua – a predecessor of his own interpretation of Judaism. It is therefore not surprising that, in the introduction to his edition of BH, Reggio explicitly associates Del Medigo and Maimonides with the same rational trend within Judaism, a trend to which he himself felt he belonged.13 The tangled relationship of scholarship, ideology, and biography, characteristic of the formation of Jewish studies in its early stage, can be clearly seen in this first modern attempt to canonize Del Medigo as a significant Jewish author.
Similarly to Reggio, the German scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums and their successors saw in Del Medigo an intellectual and ideological father figure, a celebrated predecessor with whom they shared the same vision of Judaism and fought against the same irrational tendencies, embodied first and foremost in the dangerous teachings of the Kabbalah. The accounts of Del Medigo’s activity that began to appear from the second half of the 19th century, all, without exception, refer to the BH as the main – if not only – gateway to Del Medigo’s thought. In 1878, censored sections from BH were published as a supplement to the Magazin für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, followed by Adolf Huebsch’s Elia Delmedigo’s Bechinath ha-Dath und Ibn Roshd’s Facl al-maqal in 1882. Early in the 20th century, Julius Guttman, another significant figure in the later generation of German Jewish scholars published his Elia del Medigos Verhaeltnis zu Averroes in seinem Bechinat ha-Dat. Yet of particular interest in the context of this paper is Heinrich Graetz and his reading of BH. In his History of the Jews, published in 1894, Graetz argues that:
It is a striking proof of his sober mind and healthy judgment that Elias del Medigo kept himself aloof from all this mental effeminacy and childish enthusiasm for the pseudo-doctrine of the Kabbalah. He had profound contempt for the Kabbalistic phantom, and did not hesitate to expose its worthlessness. He had the courage openly to express his opinion that the Kabbala is rooted in an intellectual swap.14
Aaron Hughes depicts Greatz and Abraham Geiger as 19th century figures who “shared a common assumption that Judaism possesses an internal structure” which one cannot simply reduce to its historical record.15 Graetz’s ideological and polemical tendencies are clearly manifested in the passage cited above, where Del Medigo is praised for his rational methodology, again associating the latter with Maimonides.16 Graetz, Hughes reminds us, viewed the medieval period as the golden age of Jewish rational thought and Del Medigo certainly belonged – in Graetz’s view as in Reggio’s before him – to that highpoint of Jewish intellectual history.17
The attitude manifested by Reggio, Graetz, and other early scholars has dominated the study of Del Medigo ever since. Most (though not all) Del Medigo scholars in the 20th and 21st centuries seem to presuppose the following:
1 that the opposition between rationality and superstitious tendencies is the focal point of Del Medigo’s thought, and
2 that BH, where Del Medigo discusses the theme in a systematic manner, is the latter’s most significant work.
The canonization of BH in the field of Jewish studies, a process characterized by the two assumptions cited above, is a clear manifestation of the apologetic roots of Jewish studies to which Hughes refers in his book. Del Medigo’s reception in modern scholarship also manifests the second of Hughes’ main claims: the damage to modern scholarship caused by