The quincentenary of his birth, 1937, saw numerous commemorations of Isaac Abarbanel, a figure who has long served as a “totem” (thus Jean-Christophe Attias) for Spanish Jewry's 1492 catastrophe, as well as its transition from pre- to post-expulsion times. Especially striking in retrospect was the major Abarbanel exhibition mounted in 1937 at the Jewish Museum in Berlin against the dark backdrop of the fifth year of Nazi rule. Then, too, the quincentenary saw a profusion of academic Abarbanelia, including books in Hebrew, English, and German (the latter by a young Abraham Joshua Heschel) and articles by such leading scholars as Yitzhak Baer, M. S. Segal, Leo Strauss, and Ephraim Urbach.
Turning to this century's opening years leading up to the quincentenary of his death in 2008, one finds little evidence of a popular commemorative impulse toward Abarbanel but strong indications of a resurgence in scholarly interest. Restricting consideration to English-language entries, there have been three recent full-scale monographs (one by the current reviewer, the others by Seymour Feldman and Alfredo Borodowski) and numerous article-length treatments. To these can now be added Cedric Cohen Skalli's superb edition of Abarbanel's surviving letters, accompanied by English translations and an extended introduction that places these short texts in a variety of historical, intellectual-literary, and sociocultural contexts.
The letters all belong to Abarbanel's too little studied Portuguese period (1437–83), which, it is well to recall, comprised two-thirds of his life and all his formative years. Though much ink has been spilled on Abarbanel's writings over the centuries, Cohen Skalli rightly affirms (if perhaps slightly overstates) earlier scholarly neglect of the letters. His volume, therefore, makes an important and decidedly fresh contribution to the field.
The first of the four epistles, written in Portuguese in the early 1470s, is especially interesting, standing as it does as a lone surviving witness to Abarbanel's literary production in one of several vernacular languages that he must have learned (and, in the case of Portuguese, certainly mastered) during his lifetime. The letter's addressee was Dom Afonso Count of Faro, a member of the house of Bragança, the most influential noble family during the thirty-year reign of Portugal's Afonso V. Abarbanel sent the letter to the count upon the death of the count's father-in-law. As part of his efforts to console this Christian noble, to whom he was clearly quite close, Abarbanel found occasion to, among other things, juxtapose biblical sources with a number of classical ones rarely if ever cited by earlier Jewish writers (Seneca, Cicero), creating what Cohen Skalli deems “the first humanistic vernacular epistle written by a Jew” (ix).
Apart from its substance, the manner in which the letter to the Count of Faro has been preserved tells a tale. The upshot of Cohen Skalli's astute discussion is that the letter's appearance in two sixteenth-century Portuguese humanistic codices that include letters of kings and popes, as well as other epistles meant to serve as models of rhetoric, attests to ongoing recollection of Abarbanel as one who contributed to Portuguese humanism and politics (5).
On the plane of intellectual biography, Cohen Skalli convincingly links Abarbanel's vernacular letter with incipient Portuguese humanism, thereby filling out recent efforts to expose Abarbanel's Renaissance profile as it emerges not only from his post-1492 Italian sojourn but also from his much longer pre-1492 Iberian period. Unfortunately, Cohen Skalli's tight focus on the epistolary genre prevents him from drawing points of contact with Abarbanel's larger corpus on this score. Still, study of this letter advances understanding not only of Abarbanel's Portuguese phase but also of the nascent field of Jewish Renaissance studies beyond Italy.
The other epistles that the volume presents are vestiges of an ongoing Hebrew correspondence between Abarbanel and Italian Jewry's leading banker and patron of culture, Yehiel da Pisa. These illumine such things as Abarbanel's role in redeeming Jewish captives taken during Portugal's capture of the city of Arzilla (Asilah) on the northern coast of Morocco; his savvy intervention on behalf of Lusitano-Jewish interests in a mission sent by Afonso V to express the king's obedience to Pope Sixtus IV; and Abarbanel's and Yehiel's regular exchanges of learned writings, including Abarbanel's own earliest works of biblical commentary. While making it clear that the letters are not simply Hebrew adaptations of the humanist epistle, Cohen Skalli casts them as something of a cultural equivalent that cultivated “a new self-image of Jewish leadership informed by humanistic trends” (xi–xii). At the same time, he identifies a significant similarity between the Portuguese letter and its Hebrew counterparts, as parts of the latter echo the humanistic consolatory genre.
As with his handling of the Portuguese letter, Cohen Skalli's treatment of the Hebrew epistles gives evidence of painstaking research and deep immersion in the epistolary genre. Obscure Portuguese figures whom Abarbanel mentions are identified (41–42, 58), the fate of a black slave girl sent by Abarbanel's wife as a gift to Da Pisa is tracked (51–52), and so forth. Integration of Cohen Skalli's own current work on other correspondence emanating from Da Pisa lends the analysis added interpretive depth (26–30). Only somebody fully conversant with the relevant primary and secondary Portuguese and Italian sources could unpack these sides of the correspondence so impeccably. (By contrast, one can quibble with the odd comment regarding Jewish intellectual context, such as the overstated observation that Abarbanel mentions Profiat Duran “often” [57 n. 355].)
A few words are in order about the critical editions of the letters, their translations, and the overall presentation. The original texts are set forth with admirable fastidiousness, far surpassing earlier published versions (see 74–78 for the editor's discussion). It is certainly welcome to have all four letters appear between the same covers. If the English version of the Portuguese letter flows more than its Hebrew counterparts, the latter remain accurate and commendably readable given the challenge that Cohen Skalli faced in seeking to render Abarbanel's highly stylized epistolary Hebrew, chock-full of biblicisms, into mellifluous English. White space dominates on pages containing the Hebrew letters and even on most of the facing pages with their English translations. A different format, especially for notes, which are mostly unadorned scriptural references, would have yielded a more compact volume, though this outcome would have made the book's already prohibitive price (above $100) harder to abide.
Price aside, Abarbanel scholars, Iberianists, and students of medieval and Renaissance epistolary culture should all be grateful for this well-executed tome that illumines several poorly understood areas while bringing others into view for the first time. In terms of the letters' author, readers can gain from the volume a new or enhanced awareness of Abarbanel's place in the world of Iberian humanism, deployment of the consolatory epistolary genre, use of a “dual discourse” (xiii) directed at Christian and Jewish aristocrats at home and abroad, involvement in the “multilingual writing of the Jewish economic elite” (73), and more. True, such insight only increases the considerable air of complexity that hangs over Abarbanel's multifaceted aspirations and activities, which embraced intense cultivation of scholarship and literary activity on one hand and ongoing engagement in an amazing range of fiscal, communal, and political enterprises on the other. Still, appreciation of the letters, properly integrated into a larger tableau, should move us toward a more holistic understanding of the astonishing and in many ways perplexing man who stands behind these remarkable epistolary remains.
