On the Threshold of the Renaissance: New Methods and Sensibilities in the Biblical Commentaries of Isaac Abarbanel

Abstract

On the Threshold of the Renaissance: New Methods and Sensibilities in the Biblical Commentaries of Isaac Isaac Abarbanel, celebrated scholar, financier, and leader of Spanish Jewrv at the time of the 1492 expulsion, is usually viewed as a late medieval figure. Yet he spent the first half of his life in Portugal at a time when new humanist winds were blowing and composed nearly all of his prodigious theological and exegetical tracts in Spain and Italy at a time when cultural ideals had taken root. The article highlights the Renaissance side of Abarbanel's intellectual profile in three new ways. It explores the impact of historical thinking, a central feature of humanism, on Abarbanel. It illustrates the influence of this and other sensibilities on his biblical scholarship rather than on his theological views. And it draws many of its examples from Abarbanel's Spanish biblical commentaries, written almost a full decade prior to his arrival in Italy. In th...