:Renewing the Past, Reconfiguring Jewish Culture: From al‐Andalus to the Haskalah.(Jewish Culture and Contexts.)

Abstract

How do groups wishing to retain their traditions adjust to societies that invite or pressure them to adopt new ideas, values, and practices? This question, so pressing in liberal, multicultural societies today, has received considerable attention in recent years. Typically the choices presented in the scholarship are between assimilation or acculturation on the one hand and resistance on the other. This collection of erudite and thought‐provoking essays offers another possibility. In the case of the Jews from medieval Spain to nineteenth‐century Germany and the United States, the contributors argue, poets, philosophers, and religious leaders “renewed” and “reconfigured” tradition, thus making it relevant to the concerns of their day. They interpreted texts from the past in terms that made them compatible with the values of the societies in which they lived. In the first chapter, Joseph Yahalom shows how both medieval poets and eighteenth‐century exponents of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, responded to the wider Enlightenment trend of criticizing ornamentalism in literature by invoking an ancient tradition of pure, lucid, and succinct Hebrew poetry. Next Esperanza Alfonso explores the theme of exile in eleventh and twelfth‐century poetry, arguing that the reconfiguration of this older motif provided a means of comprehending the upheavals and (sometimes literal) dislocations of the Reconquista. Dvora Bregman reveals how Hebrew poets in Renaissance Italy justified their borrowings from contemporary gentile forms by insisting that the result captured the spirit of Biblical verse. Similarly, Alessandro Guetta examines the Jewish response to the Italian Renaissance. Focusing on the fifteenth‐century poet/philosopher Moses da Rieti, he describes Rieti's use of Maimonides, a twelfth‐century thinker who, like many of his non‐Jewish contemporaries, sought to reconcile rationalism and faith.