The Legacy of Medieval Jewish Rationalism in Early Modern Thought

The corpus of medieval Jewish philosophy surveyed in this module did not end with Abravanel and the 1492 expulsion; it fed, through several distinct channels, directly into the intellectual world of the Renaissance and early modern Europe. Isaac Abravanel's own son, Judah Abravanel, known in the Italian humanist milieu he entered after 1492 as Leone Ebreo (c. 1465–after 1521), composed the Dialoghi d'Amore (Dialogues of Love, published posthumously in Rome in 1535), an immensely influential Italian-language Neoplatonic treatise on love and cosmic beauty that was translated into Spanish, French, and Latin and read widely by figures ranging from Michel de Montaigne to Baruch Spinoza, illustrating a direct genealogical link between the exiled Iberian Jewish philosophical tradition and mainstream European Renaissance letters.