Don Isaac Abravanel and Leonardo Bruni: A Literary and Philosophical Confrontation

Abstract

Don Isaac Abravanel (1437–1508) was one of the first Jewish thinkers to express republican positions, yet very little is known about his knowledge of humanistic republican conceptions. Had he read Leonardo Bruni’s republican writings? Had he even heard of them? In this essay I attempt to address this philological gap by comparing Abravanel’s republican commentary on 1 Samuel 8 with Bruni’s Laudatio florentinae Urbis, especially the motif of the plea to God to authorize a political regime. This comparison is particularly useful for illuminating their respective positions on republicanism, their shared interests and conceptions, as well as their divergent attitudes to their own political and historical environment. This divergence, I argue, sheds light on the early modern Christian and Jewish receptions of ancient republicanism.

Notes

1. For an almost complete bibliography, see Eric Lawee, Isaac Abravanel’s Stance toward Tradition: Defense, Dissent, and Dialogue (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001), 287–312; Jolene S. Kellner, “Academic Studies on and New Editions of Works by Isaac Abravanel: 2000–2008,” Jewish History 23 (2009): 313–17.

2. For the letters, documents, and interpretation of Abravanel’s relationship with the Da Pisas and Italy, see Cedric Cohen Skalli, Isaac Abravanel: Letters (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007).

3. Hans Baron, From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni: Studies in Humanistic and Political Literature (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 232–63. For the historical, philological, and intellectual context of the Laudatio, see Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955); Eugenio Garin, La cultura filosofica del Rinascimento italiano. Richerche e documenti (Bologna: Tascili Bompiani, 2001), 3–37; James Hankins, Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Gordon Griffiths, James Hankins, and David Thompson, eds., The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni: Selected Texts (Binghamton, NY: SUNY Press, 1987); Ronald G. Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Boston, MA: Brill, 2003), 392–442.

4. Don Isaac Abravanel, Commentary on the Former Prophets (Hebrew) (Jerusalem, 1965); hereafter page references to the Commenatry are cited in the text. For the translations from Hebrew of 1 Samuel 8, I relied (with a few changes) on Menachem Lorberbaum’s English translation in The Jewish Political Tradition, Volume 1: Authority, ed. Michael Walzer, Menachem Lorberbaum, Noam J. Zohar, and Yair Lorberbaum (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 150–54. Translations of other portions of the Commentary are from Elias Lipiner, Two Portuguese Exiles in Castile: Dom David Negro and Dom Isaac Abravanel (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1997), 55–60, or are my own. On Isaac Abravanel’s reception of ancient and Renaissance republicanism and the early modern Jewish reception of republicanism, see Leo Strauss, “On Abravanel’s Philosophical Tendency and Political Teaching,” in Isaac Abravanel: Six Lectures, ed. J. B. Trend and H. Loewe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937), 95–129; Aviezer Ravitzky, “Kings and Laws in Late Medieval Jewish Thought: Nissim of Gerona vs. Isaac Abrabanel,” in Scholars and Scholarship: The Interaction between Judaism and Other Cultures, ed. Leo Landman (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1990), 67–90; Avraham Melamed, Ahotan haketana shel hahochmot (Hebrew) (Raanana, Israel: Open University Press, 2011), 242–81, and Wisdom’s Little Sister: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Jewish Political Thought (Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2012), 272–304; and Walzer et al., The Jewish Political Tradition, 1.108–65.

5. On this episode in Isaac Abravanel’s life, see Lipiner, Two Portuguese Exiles in Castile.

6. Jonathan Irvine Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism: 1550–1750 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 5–34.

7. Haim Beinart, The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2002).

8. 1 Samuel 8 has, of course, to be contrasted with Gideon’s rejection of monarchy in Judges 6–8.

9. Walzer et al., The Jewish Political Tradition, 1.121.

10. For Afonso V and João II, see Saul Antonio Gomes, D. Afonso V (Rio de Mouro, Portugal: Circulo de Leitores, 2006); Luis Adão da Fonseca, D. João II (Rio de Mouro, Portugal: Circulo de Leitores, 2005).

11. Lipiner, Two Portuguese Exiles, 56–57.

12. To get a sense of the different modern critical responses to Abravanel’s commentary on 1 Sam. 8, see Ytzhaq Baer, “Don Yitzhaq Abarbanel ve-yehaso el beayot ha-historiyah ve-hamedina” (Hebrew), Tarbiz 8 (1937): 241–59; Strauss, “On Abravanel’s Philosophical Tendency and Political Teaching;” Ravitzky, “Kings and Laws in Late Medieval Jewish Thought;” Benzion Netanyahu, Don Isaac Abravanel: Statesman and Philosopher (London: Cornell University Press, 1988); Abraham Melamed, The Philosopher-King in Medieval and Renaissance Jewish Political Thought (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2003).

13. On the literary and historical background of Abravanel’s attitude to the rabbis and scholars of the past, see Lawee, Isaac Abravanel’s Stance toward Tradition.

14. For a study of this third claim, see Strauss, “On Abravanel’s Philosophical Tendency and Political Teaching,” 119–24; Melamed, Ahotan haketana shel hahochmot, 263–67.

15. See Abraham Melamed, “The Organic Theory of the State in Medieval and Renaissance Jewish Political Thought,” in Wisdom’s Little Sister, 140–74.

16. It is worth contrasting these arguments with Ptolemy of Lucca, On the Government of Rulers: De regimine principum, Ptolomy of Lucca with portions attributed to Thomas Aquinas, trans. James M. Blythe (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 60–103, 215–88.

17. Walzer et al., The Jewish Political Tradition, 1.150–51.

18. Leonardo Bruni, Panegyric to the City of Florence, trans. Benjamin G. Kohl, in The Earthly Republic: Italian Humanists on Government and Society, ed. Benjamin G. Kohl and Ronald G. Witt, with Elizabeth B. Welles (Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 1978), 169; hereafter page references to the Laudatio are cited in the text. Baron, From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni, 259.

19. On the circulation of Bruni’s Laudatio during the fifteenth century, see James Hankins, “Rhetoric, History and Ideology: The Civic Panegyrics of Leonardo Bruni,” in Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections, ed. James Hankins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 143–78.

20. For the medieval context of Bruni’s republicanism, see James M. Blythe, “‘Civic Humanism’ and Medieval Political Thought,” in Hankins, Renaissance Civic Humanism, 30–74.

21. The Commentary on the Former Prophets often elaborates on the difference between the particular, the general, and the divine. See, for example, 15–16, 93–96, 106–8, 123–14, 146–48, 162–66, 220–21. Contrast also with Marsilius of Padua, The Defender of the Peace, ed. and trans. Annabel Brett (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005), First Discourse, 3–136.

22. On this aspect of Abravanel’s life, see Cedric Cohen Skalli, Isaac Abravanel: Letters.

23. In his introduction to the book of Judges, he elaborates on the difference between the rule of the judge and of the king, stressing the former’s limitations compared with the latter’s extra-judicial role (Commentary, 93–95).

24. For example, Alemanno writes: “This people [of Florence] dwelling in the reigning city, are all sons of kings, because there are no guards, governors or rulers over it. Rather they all—or almost all—are great and honored ministers, judges, guards and governors, each on his own day, every month and every year, according to the custom of the laws of government. According to this they all are like kings and deputies, magnanimous and wise, because each one raises his son in just ways and kingly stratagems, so that they will know the law and government of the state when their time comes to officiate over the public and rule them. Therefore, the people of the state are more perfect and more kingly than the people of another city where one king rules” (Melamed, Wisdom’s Little Sister, 287).

25. On the “idealized,” “rhetorical,” or “ideological” presentation of the Florentine regime, see John N. Najemy, “Civic Humanism and Florentine Politics,” in Hankins, Renaissance Civic Humanism, 74–104.

26. Baron, From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni, 245. For another textual confrontation, see Ravitzky, “Kings and Laws in Late Medieval Jewish Thought.”

27. On the Christian sources of this conception, see Strauss, “On Abravanel’s Philosophical Tendency and Political Teaching,” 111–29.

28. “Te eligit Dominus Deus tuus ut sis ei populus peculiaris ideo voluit esse rex immediatus illius populi, propter quod legem dedit ei in monte sinai per se ipsum, id est per angelum in persona illius loquantem, et non per hominem mediatorem: propter quod voluit homines gubernatores illius populi ab ipso immediate institui, tanquem eius vicarii essent, non reges, vel Domini, ut patet in Moyse, et Iosue, et de iudicibus sequentibus, de quibus dicitur in libro Iudicum. Suscitavit eis Dominus talem, vel talem iudicem, propter quod filii Israel fecerunt contra ordinationem Domini, petendo super se regem hominum mortalem” (Glosa ordinaria I Regum VIII de Lyra, f. 71).

29. For an introduction to this question, see Salo Wittmayer Baron, The Jewish Community: Its History and Structure to the American Revolution (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1942), 208–82.

30. Ravitzky has rightly taken issue with Abravanel’s twofold criticism of biblical kingship and Roman emperors with a famous passage in Thomas Aquinas’ De regimine principum, bk. 1, chap. 5: “Experience therefore seems to show that a single city governed by rulers who hold office for one year only can sometimes accomplish more than a king can even if he has three or four cities, and that small services exacted by kings bear more heavily than great burdens imposed [on itself] by a community of citizens. This principle was exemplified during the emergence of the Roman commonwealth; for the common people were enlisted into the army and paid wages for military service, and when the common treasury was not sufficient to pay the wages, private wealth was put to public use to such an extent that not even the senators retained anything made of gold for themselves apart from one gold ring and one seal each, which were the insignia of their rank. Presently, however, the Romans became exhausted by the continual quarrels which eventually grew into civil wars, and the liberty which they had so striven to attain was then snatched from their hands by those civil wars, and they began to be under the power of the emperors: who at first would not allow themselves to be called kings, because the name of king was odious to the Romans. Some of these emperors faithfully pursued the common good, as kings should, and the Roman commonwealth was increased and preserved by their efforts. Most of them, however, were tyrants to their subjects and weak and ineffective in the face of their enemies, and these brought the Roman commonwealth to naught. A similar process occurred in the case of the people of the Hebrews. At first, while they were ruled by judges they were plundered on all sides by their enemies, for each man did only what was good in his own eyes. Then, at their own request, kings were divinely given to them; but because of the wickedness of the kings they fell away from the worship of the one God and finally were led away into captivity.” Saint Thomas Aquinas’ Political Writings, ed. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 15–16. See also Ptolemy of Lucca, On the Government of Rulers, 70–72.

31. On Abravanel’s rejection of the Aristotelian distinction between legal monarchy and tyranny, see Ravitzky, “Kings and Laws in Late Medieval Jewish Thought.” For Abravanel, it is a distinction between regimes (republic vs monarchy), not between types of monarchy.

32. On the internal changes in the Portuguese and Castilian kingdoms and their impact on Abravanel and the Jews, see Yitzhaq Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spainvol. II: From the Fourteenth Century to the Expulsion (Philadelphia, PA; The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1966); Maria J. Pimento Ferro-Tavares, Os Judeos em Portugal no Século XV (Lisbon: Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 1984).

33. Baron, From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni, 232–33.

34. Baron, From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni, 263.

35. See also Kohl et al., The Earthly Republic, 139, 149, 168; Baron, From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni, 236, 244, 258.

36. For a general description of these years, see Griffiths et al., The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni, 25–35.

37. See, for example, Bruni’s letters on the need to end the schism and the procedures required: Griffiths et al., The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni, 322–32.

38. Leonardo Bruni, History of the Florentine People, Volume I, Books 1–IV, ed. and trans. James Hankins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 109–11.

39. For a critical interpretation of Florence’s libertas as independence, see Najemy, “Civic Humanism and Florentine Politics,” 97–98. For the medieval context of Bruni’s republicanism, see Blythe, “‘Civic Humanism’ and Medieval Political Thought.”

40. See, for example, Najemy, “Civic Humanism and Florentine Politics;” Hankins, “Rhetoric, History and Ideology: The Civic Panegyrics of Leonardo Bruni;” Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients, 419–31.

41. Baron, From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni, 232–33.

42. On the urban background of Bruni’s humanism and of Italian humanism in general, see Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients.

43. See Griffiths et al., The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni, 334. “Litterae enim illae quicquid habuerunt boni jampridem in latinos translatum est, nec leves quidem auctores, sed gravissimi, ac doctissimi transtulerunt. Hic tu quid jam amplius requiras, non equidem intelligo. Nisi forte illis ipsis interpretibus diffidis, ac eos in disquisionem, & judicium vocare contendis, quod si feceris, crede michi, ineptus sis” (Lorenzo Mehus, ed., Leonardi Bruni Arretini Epistolarum libri VIII [Florence, 1741], 2.160–61).

44. Griffiths et al., The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni, 335. “Neque vero michi objeceris Graecarum litterarum studia, & operam illis impensam. Si enim tales interpretes, qualis Hieronymus fuit, Graeca lingua habuisset, labore me, & ceteros liberasset. Sed qui libros Aristotelis transtulerant, barbaros magis, quam latinos illos effecerant. Deinde quid simile habet Graecorum eruditio cum Judaeorum ruditate? Graeca enim lingua philosophiae, ceterarumque disciplinarum gratia addiscitur... Apud Hebraeos autem nullum tale invitamentum esse potest. Nulli enim illis philosophi, nulli poetae, nulli oratores reperiuntur” (Mehus, Leonardi Bruni Arretini Epistolarum libri VIII, 2.163).

45. Baron, From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni, 233.

46. Baron, From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni, 236.

47. Baron, From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni, 238–39.

48. In a letter to the Pope in 1405, Salutati describes these years: “It was our regular habit to study together, and, since he was the judge of all my compositions, and I in turn of his, we stimulated one another, as iron is whetted against iron. It would be hard to say which of us profited the more from this pleasant and honorable companionship, but both of us came out of it more learned, so that I have to say that we were to one another in turn both pupil and master” (Griffiths et al., The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni, 47).

49. Griffiths et al., The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni, 23–25, 100–116, 197–234.

50. The concept and history of the Roman Republic was well known to medieval political thinkers, yet in the Laudatio and other works Bruni deliberately concealed it. See Blythe, “‘Civic Humanism’ and Medieval Political Thought.” For Bruni’s adaptation of central themes of Aristides’ Panathenaic Oration to Ciceronian Latin, see Antonio Santosuosso, “Leonardo Bruni Revisited: A Reassessment of Hans Baron’s Thesis on the Influence of The Classics in the Laudatio florentinae urbis,” in Aspects of Late Medieval Government and Society: Essay Presented to J. R. Lander, ed. J. R. Rowe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 25–51; Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients, 404–31.

51. Baron, From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni, 263.

52. Aristides, ‘Panathenaic Oration’ and ‘In Defence of Oratory,’ trans. C. A. Behr (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 7–9.

53. Santosuosso indicates correctly that Bruni’s adaptation of Aristides’ Panathenaic Oration completely overlooked the section in the Oration dealing with the honors conferred by the gods on the city of Athens, but he did not mention that Bruni’s text opens with a plea to God. See Santosuosso, “Leonardo Bruni Revisited,” 37, 40.

54. Aristides, Panathenaic Oration, 9.

55. For Aristotle’s and Cicero’s affirmation of the common birth and development of logos or rhetoric and the city, see Aristotle, Politics, trans. Stephen Everson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1252b28–1253a37; Cicero, De invention; De optimo genere oratorum; Topica, trans. Harry M. Hubbel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949), 2.2–3. See also Cary J. Nederman, “Rhetoric, Reason, and Republic: Republicanisms—Ancient, Medieval, and Modern,” in Hankins, Renaissance Civic Humanism, 247–69.

56. Griffiths et al.,The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni, 63. Prosatori latini del Quattrocento, ed. Eugenio Garin (Milan: Ricardo Ricciardi, 1952), 44.

57. Baron, From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni, 233.

58. Baron, From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni, 244. On this aspect, see Hankins, “Rhetoric, History and Ideology.”

59. Aristides, Panathenaic Oration, 8.

60. Aristides, Panathenaic Oration, 28–29.

61. Najemy argued convincingly that Bruni’s insistence on a parental or paternal conception of the Florentine Republic as the son of the Roman Republic was both the result of the oligarchic transformation of the Florentine regime and also of the anxieties of the elites in light of a development of the state that would not be an imitation of the virtues of the Roman founders. See Najemy, “Civic Humanism and Florentine Politics,” but also Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients, 404–31, and Hankins, “Rhetoric, History and Ideology.”

62. In this essay I could not discuss Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism (1946), where he responds to Beaufret’s question on humanism: “You ask, ‘Comment redonner un sens au mot ‘Humanisme?’ How can some sense be restored to the word ‘humanism’?” Your question not only presupposes a desire to retain the word ‘humanism’ but also contains an admission that this word has lost its meaning. It has lost it through the insight that the essence of humanism is metaphysical, which now means that metaphysics not only does not pose the question concerning the truth of being but also obstructs the question, insofar as metaphysics persists in the oblivion of being. But the same thinking that has led us to this insight into the questionable essence of humanism has likewise compelled us to think the essence of the human being more primordially.” Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings from Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964) (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 224. Nevertheless, a more nuanced approach to the humanistic literature is needed, one that would stress the “history and destiny of Being” in its new humanistic features (partially attempted in my discussion of Bruni and Abravanel), and that would recognize that humanistic understandings of Being (city, nature, rhetoric etc.) cannot simply be reduced to an obstruction of Being or to the “tyranny over Being.” Would Heidegger’s ontological distinction between Sein and Seinde have been possible without humanists like Bruni who developed new rhetorical possibilities out of ancient sources while deepening their understanding of how these differed from early Christian and medieval sources? The Heideggerian distinction of Being from ontic entities is already present in Bruni’s confrontation of the transcendence of God with that of the city.