Rome

120/ Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Rforme diverse interests, " [t]he interrelation of the different fields are part of the central epistemological problem rather than mere ornaments."Better, perhaps, than any other figure discussed in this volume, Lusitanus stands as the paradigmatic "cultural intermediary," straddling the worlds of Christian and Jew; Portugal, Italy and the Ottoman Empire; history, literature, philosophy, medicine, and the natural sciences.As court musician in an emphatically Christian world, Salamone Rossi Ebreo, the subject of Harrn's multi-faceted essay, repeatedly found himself in the precarious position of having to compose music that was neither too Christian-for how dare a Jew have the temerity to write in a sacred register?-nortoo Jewish-for what place could Jewish music have in the Mantuan court?As a musician also seeking to contribute to his Jewish community, Rossi was repeatedly cautioned not to desecrate the synagogue by incorporating Christian and secular elements.Rossi's resistance to conversion in the face of what is likely to have been enormous pressure and temptation is noteworthy.Yet he was not wholly embraced by the Jewish community, either, having to find his most distinctive voice in the instrumental music he composed for neither court nor synagogue.Our preliminary questions reemerge here: to what extent it is helpful to call Rossi's instrumental, moderno music particularly Jewish?The volume's concluding essay, by the preeminent scholar of Jewish mysticism, Moshe Idel, proposes yet another binarism to be interrogated, the distinction between Safedian and Italian Kabbalah.In characteristic fashion, Idel disputes the view, standard since Gershom Scholem, that the Kabbalah of the sixteenth-century Safed mystics was the dominant form, influencing others without itself being influenced.He acknowledges that Italian Kabbalists were certainly reading and responding to Safedian Kabbalists, and makes the convincing case that Safed kabbalists, in turn, reacted quite negatively to Christian Kabbalah's influence on Jewish Kabbalah in Italy.As a locus of vital thought, the Italian Jewish community could not be ignored.This excellent volume is one of several published in the last few years to participate in the reshaping of early modern intellectual history by revealing the extensive and complex interactions between Jews and Christians

Art · European history and politics · Historical and Religious Studies of Rome · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics