This collection of essays offers a fresh look into Christian-Jewish cultural interactions during the Renaissance and beyond. Christian scholars, it is shown, were deeply immersed in a variety of ...Hebrew sources, while their Jewish counterparts imbibed the culture of Humanism.
The myth of the Jewish origins of philosophy and science is an ancient tradition dating from the Hellenistic period. It originated with pagan scholars, as part of the Greek-Hellenistic myth of the ...eastern origins of wisdom. Hellenistic-Jewish scholars acquired this theme from them, developed it further and transmitted it to the Church Fathers. In time, this myth achieved great popularity among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Aristotle's prominence in medieval culture gave rise to traditions claiming that he studied with Jewish sages and was deeply impressed and influenced by Jewish books. Some of these traditions even maintain that he converted to Judaism, or was born a Jew. Although stories about the Judaized Aristotle continued to circulate, many accounts of the Jewish sources of Plato also began to appear in various forms among Christian and Jewish scholars. Stories about Plato proliferated especially following the decline of the Aristotelian-Averroist tradition, when kabbalistic-hermetic influences were first discernible in the writings of Ficino and Pico della Mirandola in the late Quattrocento.
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The first complete and annotated English translation of Maimon's influential and delightfully entertaining memoir
Solomon Maimon's autobiography has delighted readers for more than two hundred years, ...from Goethe, Schiller, and George Eliot to Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt. The American poet and critic Adam Kirsch has named it one of the most crucial Jewish books of modern times. Here is the first complete and annotated English edition of this enduring and lively work.
Born into a down-on-its-luck provincial Jewish family in 1753, Maimon quickly distinguished himself as a prodigy in learning. Even as a young child, he chafed at the constraints of his Talmudic education and rabbinical training. He recounts how he sought stimulation in the Hasidic community and among students of the Kabbalah--and offers rare and often wickedly funny accounts of both. After a series of picaresque misadventures, Maimon reached Berlin, where he became part of the city's famed Jewish Enlightenment and achieved the philosophical education he so desperately wanted, winning acclaim for being the "sharpest" of Kant's critics, as Kant himself described him.
This new edition restores text cut from the abridged 1888 translation by J. Clark Murray, which has long been the only available English edition. Paul Reitter's translation is brilliantly sensitive to the subtleties of Maimon's prose while providing a fluid rendering that contemporary readers will enjoy, and is accompanied by an introduction and notes by Yitzhak Melamed and Abraham Socher that give invaluable insights into Maimon and his extraordinary life. The book also features an afterword by Gideon Freudenthal that provides an authoritative overview of Maimon's contribution to modern philosophy.
Aristotle was considered in medieval thought as the greatest philosophical authority. On this background, various fanciful traditions were invented in order to prove his Jewish contacts and sources. ...The story discussed in this paper is exceptional, since it describes the great Greek philosopher in negative terms, as a lecherous old man, who betrayed his student Alexander. This story first appeared in anti-Aristotelian Christian circles during the 13th century, and exerted great popularity. In Jewish sources it first appeared in the Kabbalist R Isaac of Acre, Sefer Me'irat Eynayyim, composed at the end of this century. R Isaac created a Hebrew version of the story, suitable for Jewish readers with Kabbalistic tendencies who abhorred the Aristotelian influence. He superimposed on the Hebrew version the vocabulary and motifs of the Biblical book of Esther, portraying Aristotle in the image of Haitian, thereby enhancing his negative description. This paper analyzes this story in depth, tracing its sources, and later influence, in Azariah de Rossi Me'or Eynayyim, of the late 16th century, and other sources, up to early modem times.
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