Medieval Jewish Aesthetics: Maimonides, Body, and Scripture in Profiat Duran

Abstract

Reconnaissance of sixteenth-century French literature convinced Lucien Febvre that like their acute hearing and sharp sense of smell, the men of that time doubtless had keen sight. But that was just it. They had not yet set it apart from the other senses. As he wittily concluded, ... there was no Hotel Fairview in the sixteenth century, nor any Prospect Hotel.... The Renaissance continued to up [a' descendre] at the Rose, the Wild Man, or the Golden Lion, refugees from heraldry that had stumbled into the hotel business. Taking a cue from Febvre's search for the sensory underpinnings of thought in different periods,' historians of Judaism might ask: what are the aesthetic doctrines of Jewish thought? Where, for example, did medieval Jewish philosophers put up? Was their hearing acute, their sense of smell sharp, and their sense of sight keen? Did they set vision apart from the other senses? Before proceeding to the combined textual and artifactual evidence on which fresh answers to these questions must be based, I want briefly to describe the conventional answers and to explain why they have gone stale. When the conventional answers were first formulated, historical scholarship was conceptually dominated by Cartesian dualism, neo-Kantian moralism, and Hegelian enthusiasm for poetry and Volksgeister Idealism. This scholarship was simultaneously embroiled in socio-political warfare over the questions of Jewish emancipation, assimilation, and cultic reform.2 In the middle