TY - BOOK ID - 78640950 TI - Isaac Abravanel : letters AU - Abravanel, Isaac AU - Cohen Skalli, Cedric PY - 2007 VL - 40 SN - 3110896664 9783110896664 3110194929 9783110194920 PB - Berlin: de Gruyter, DB - UniCat KW - Rabbis KW - Jewish statesmen KW - Jewish philosophers KW - Philosophers, Jewish KW - Philosophers KW - Statesmen, Jewish KW - Jews in public life KW - Abravanel, Isaac, KW - 296*63 KW - 296*63 Joodse theologie en filosofie--in de moderne en hedendaagse tijd KW - Joodse theologie en filosofie--in de moderne en hedendaagse tijd KW - Abravanel, Isaac KW - Rabbis - Correspondence KW - Jewish statesmen - Portugal - Correspondence KW - Jewish statesmen - Spain - Correspondence KW - Jewish statesmen - Italy - Correspondence KW - Jewish philosophers - Correspondence KW - Abravanel, Isaac, - 1437-1508 - Correspondence KW - Humanism. KW - Letter writting. KW - Renaissance Judaism. KW - Renaissance Portuguese literature. KW - Abravanel, Isaac, - 1437-1508 UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:78640950 AB - Almost five hundred years after his death, Don Isaac Abravanel (1437-1508) remains a legendary figure of Sephardic history, and above all of the Expulsion of 1492. There are numerous "portraits" that have been painted of him by pre-modern and modern scholars. And still we hesitate and cannot discern which is the true one. This first critical edition of Abravanel's Portuguese and Hebrew letters opens a unique window on a complex cultural process of assimilation and dissimulation of humanism among the fifteenth-century Jewish elite. On the one hand, it establishes Abravanel's assimilation of Iberian humanism and of major aspects of the Petrarchian consolatio; on the other hand, it points at the strategies used by him to dissimulate and adapt humanism to Jewish leadership. The duality of Jewish humanists like Don Isaac was obviously a great richness, but it indicated as well their difficulty in expressing themselves coherently and comprehensively in one of the two agoras - Jewish or Christian - in which they were involved as literati and writers. The present edition and study of Abravanel's Portuguese and Hebrew letters sheds a new light on the complexity of this new figure of the Jewish humanist. ER -