Fame and Secrecy: Leon Modena's Life as an Early Modern Autobiography

Abstract

Leon Modena was a child in Italy in 1575 when the polymath Girolamo Cardano put the finishing touches on his Book of My Life, and in 1580 when Michel de Montaigne brought out the first edition of his Essais, that incessant study of himself. By the time Montaigne's work had appeared in its first complete Italian edition in 1633, Leon, now a rabbi of Venice, had already written many pages of his own Life; when Cardano's De Vita Propria Liber had its first printed edition in 1643, the septuagenarian Leon was complaining bitterly in his manuscript of the miseries of old age.2 Leon's Life of Judah, as he called it, is thus situated within the flowering of Renaissance autobiography, and it adds much to our notion of what was possible in the seventeenth-century presentation of the self. There is confession, a choice autobiographical mode, but in the Jewish life to distinctive ends; there is a quest for fame, but in the rabbi's life, ever in tension with a catalogue of woes; and there is a contrast between the intimate life and the public persona somewhat unusual even among Leon's expressive coreligionists. European autobiography of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was fed by many currents,3 two of which we will consider here. The religious exploration