An outstanding Jewish thinker of the Italian Renaissance, Alemanno combined an eclectic Jewish philosophic rationalism, steeped in the medieval sources - Maimonidean, Averroist and Kabbalistic - with Renaissance humanism and Neoplatonism. He was an Aristotelian and Maimonidean in ethics, a Platonist and Averroist in political philosophy and a Neoplatonist and Kabbalist in metaphysics. His fusing of Aristotelian rationalism with Platonizing mysticism is striking but not atypical for the period. Influenced by Renaissance thought after he settled in Italy, he was active in Christian as well as Jewish circles in Florence, Padua and Mantua. Pico della Mirandola learned Hebrew under his instruction and relied on him for access to medieval Jewish texts in philosophy and Kabbalah. Both Christian Kabbalah and Renaissance Hebraism were products of the interactions in which Alemanno was a chief participant. His ties to the Florentine Academy of the late 1480s are evident in his
adaptations to Jewish thinking of the ideas current among its members as to the unity of truth, the immortality of the soul and the dignity of man.
1 Life and background
Like many of his philosophical contemporaries, Alemanno was an immigrant to Italy. His name is an Italianized rendering of the surname Ashkenazi. He was born in Paris and died probably in Mantua. The work of such
immigrants had a profound intellectual impact on the Italian Jewish communities of the latter Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Their influence was also felt on Renaissance culture at large. Like most of his scholarly Jewish contemporaries, Alemanno was a wandering scholar who travelled in search of a livelihood as a private teacher, preacher or secretary, always seeking the patronage of influential Jewish financiers. While wandering among such cities as Florence, Mantua, Padua and Bologna, he met many of the leading Jewish scholars of his time, including Judah Messer Leon, author of the Nofet Tzufim (The Book of the Honeycomb’s Flow), an important rhetorical treatise that aimed to integrate biblical rhetoric with the revived Ciceronian tradition of the Renaissance. Messer Leon’s work profoundly influenced Alemanno, leading to his discovery of the full gamut of Renaissance humanist and Neoplatonic ideas and to his contacts with such leading exponents of Renaissance humanism as Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, his nephew Alberto Pico and Girolamo Benivieni. These scholars, especially Pico della
Mirandola, relied on Jewish scholars like Alemanno, Elijah Delmedigo and Abraham Farissol, to learn Hebrew and to gain access to the sources of Jewish philosophy, the fascinating materials of Kabbalah, and the works of such Islamic thinkers as Averroes (see Ibn Rushd), which their Jewish guides translated for them into Latin from the medieval Hebrew and Arabic texts. The collaboration of Jewish with Christian scholars led to the creation of a Christian Kabbalah and was the foundation of Renaissance Hebraism.
Alemanno and other Jewish scholars cultivated their contacts with the humanists not only as an avenue to patronage, but also for the knowledge it gave them of the latest developments in literature, philosophy, medicine, politics and magic (see Humanism, Renaissance). Alemanno was particularly interested in such current learning and in transmitting it to his Jewish students and audiences. While Averroists like Delmedigo held suspect the mystical tendencies of Christian Neoplatonism, Alemanno eagerly pursued them. Commissioned by Pico in the late 1480s, the heyday of the Platonic Academy which Marsilio Ficino had established at Florence (see Platonism, Renaissance), Alemanno wrote his Heshek Shelomo (The Passion of Solomon), an allegory on the Song of Songs and one of the first expressions of the Renaissance ideal of Platonic love, enunciated in Ficino’s contemporaneous commentary on Plato’s Symposium. Jewish exegetes had traditionally read the Song of Songs as an allegory of the spiritual love between God and Israel. That reading was now re-visioned through a Neoplatonic prism, in many ways anticipating the approach of Judah Abravanel (Leone Ebreo) in the Dialoghi d’Amore (Dialogues of Love). In the foreword to his long introductory essay, Shir ha-Ma‘alot le-Shlomo (The Song of Solomon’s Ascents), Alemanno describes his contacts with Pico at length, and portrayed Lorenzo di Medici, the patron of the Platonic Academy, as the living embodiment of the Platonic-Averroist philosopher king. In the text itself, King Solomon is made the prototype of the ideal philosophical ruler.
2 Writings
Most of Alemanno’s writings survive today only in manuscript. Shir ha-Ma‘alot le-Shlomo has been printed, but the early editions are partial and inaccurate. Of Alemanno’s other writings, only a few extracts have appeared in
scholarly papers.
His most important work is Hai ha-Olamim (Immortal Life), a work influenced in its construction by Ibn Tufayl’s
Hayy Ibn Yaqzan (The Living Son of the Vigilant) (see Ibn Tufayl). Alemanno in fact wrote a supercommentary on Moses of Narbonne’s commentary on this work, most probably for a translation of the work from Hebrew to Latin commissioned by Pico. Hai ha-Olamim takes the form of a Platonic dialogue between a plain speaker and a philosopher, which unfolds in painstaking detail the development of the perfect individual, from his creation in the womb, through his physical, moral, political and intellectual development, until he reaches mystical union with God. As the title suggests, the soul of this perfect individual will become an immortal, Hai ha-Olamim. The description of his physical and moral perfection follows the Aristotelian tradition; that of his political perfection, mainly the Platonic tradition - all, of course, as seen through the eyes of medieval Muslim and Jewish
intermediaries. With the approach to spiritual perfection, the Neoplatonic and Kabbalistic elements intensify, and the discussion ends on a powerful mystical chord.
Alemanno’s other major work, ‘Enei ha-‘Edah (The Eyes of the Community), is a commentary on the Pentateuch through Genesis 5:1 and was probably linked originally to Pico’s Heptaplus de opere sex dierum Geneseos (On the
Sevenfold Narration of the Six Days of Genesis), which deals with the same text and issues and was composed at
the same time, in the late 1480s. His Liqqutim (Compendia), comprises notebooks containing early drafts of his mature writings and important data on his life and intellectual background.
3 Philosophy
Rejecting what he saw as a medieval dichotomy between faith and reason, revelation and philosophy, and reacting against the widely bruited Christian Averroist notion of a double truth, Alemanno, like Pico, proclaimed the unity of truth and strove to harmonize philosophy, halakhah, Kabbalah, alchemy and astrology (see Halakhah;
Kabbalah; Alchemy; Averroism, Jewish). His synthesis depended on ranking the various disciplines, spheres of existence and virtues in a hierarchy that acknowledged a dynamic relationship of emanation and love between the Creator and creation, and on making frequent analogies between matter and spirit, animal and man, microcosm and macrocosm, the Neoplatonic Intelligences and the Kabbalistic Sefirot (mystic Neopythagorean hypostases that mediate between the Infinite and creation). The heavy reliance on hierarchy and analogy generates a thick amalgam of ideas, in which Alemanno tried, often without success, to validate Neoplatonic theses by way of Aristotelian methods and typologies.
In the face of the esotericism fostered by medieval Jewish philosophers and Kabbalists, and insisted upon by many irate contemporaries, Alemanno addressed his writings to the widest possible audience, as is shown not only by his own declarations but also by his typically humanist attention to style and exposition. His model was the prophetic programme of addressing the entire community, each member in accordance with his highest understanding. For thinkers imbued with the values and practices of medieval Jewish philosophy, such exposure of the higher reaches of tradition to anyone who would listen was palpably subversive, but the aura of revealing long hidden secrets may explain the special interest that Pico and other Christian humanists took in Alemanno.
Central among the mysteries to be made known was the Platonic or Neoplatonic theory of the immortality of the soul, a core topic for the Florentine Academy. Following the teachings of medieval Jewish thought, both
philosophical and Kabbalistic, Alemanno identified the soul’s immortality with its knowledge of the one eternal truth that puts us in contact with the ‘active intellect’ and allows us to share the eternity of the Platonic Forms. But unlike many medieval thinkers who tended to limit this possibility to a handful of philosophers, Alemanno strove to widen it to the whole community, giving them access not only to physical resurrection, with the coming of the messiah, but also to spiritual immortality. Alemanno’s teaching, preaching and lecturing was not only a quest for a livelihood, but also a vocation, a quest to disseminate knowledge, and so immortality, as widely as possible. Not surprisingly, Alemanno adopted the Florentine theory of the dignity of man. He dovetailed Ficino’s
assignment of man to the mid-rank of being, between the bestial and the Divine, with Pico’s insistence that while each created being has its proper place in the chain of being, only humans hold all the possibilities of existence. They can choose to descend into bestiality or raise themselves towards the Ideas and God. Alemanno, however, found limits to this freedom in the play of astral influences, and he was less sanguine than Pico as to our ability to make sound choices. In addressing this problem of human moral weakness, which a Christian thinker might have
interpreted in terms of original sin, Alemanno fell back on Jewish tradition: following Maimonides, he argued that the Commandments can steady our irresolution. But this meant that only Jews can properly use their freedom to attain the moral perfection that human beings need to achieve intellectual perfection and so be linked to the Sefirot and gain immortality.
See also: Averroism, Jewish; Ficino, M.; Humanism, Renaissance; Kabbalah; Pico della Mirandola, G.; Platonism, Renaissance
ABRAHAM MELAMED List of works
Alemanno, Yohanan ben Isaac (c.1488-92) Shir ha-Ma‘alot le-Shlomo (The Song of Solomon’s Ascents), ed. A.M. Lesley, ‘The Song of Solomon’s Ascents by Yohanan Alemanno: Love and Human Perfection According to a Jewish Colleague of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1976, 2 vols.(Lesley’s dissertation provides the Hebrew text with English summary and detailed introduction. Alemanno’s long introduction to Heshek Shelomo, describing the various human virtues embodied by King Solomon.)
Alemanno, Yohanan ben Isaac (c.1488-92) Heshek Shelomo (The Passion of Solomon), MS Oxford-Bodleian 1535/2 (Laud 103), MS London-Mentefiori 227, MS Berlin 143, and MS Moscow-Ginzburg 140.(An allegorical commentary on the Song of Songs.)
Alemanno, Yohanan ben Isaac (c.1470-1503) Hai ha-Olamim (Immortal Life).(A detailed description of the various stages of human life, culminating with the metaphysical knowledge of God.)
Alemanno, Yohanan ben Isaac (c.1478-1504) Liqqutim (Compendia).(An eclectic and fragmentary collection of notes and ideas, accumulated over a long period of time.)
Alemanno, Yohanan ben Isaac (before 1504) ‘Enei ha-‘Edah (The Eyes of the Community).(A philosophical commentary on the Torah. We have only the commentary on Genesis 1-5: 31. It is not clear whether it is incomplete or the later parts of the manuscript did not survive.)
References and further reading
Cassuto, U. (1918) Gli Ebrei in Firenze, Nell’ Eta del Rinascimento, Florence: Tipografia Galletti e cocci, part 3, ch. 3.(Contains a description of Alemanno’s life and writings.)
Idel, M. (1983) ‘The Magical and Neoplatonic Interpretation of the Kabbalah in the Renaissance’, in B.D. Cooperman (ed.) Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 186-242.(Examines Alemanno’s Kabbalistic ideas and Renaissance Kabbalism.)
Melamed, A. (1988) ‘The Hebrew Laudatio of Yohanan Alemanno - In Praise of Lorenzo il Magnifico and the Florentine Constitution’, in H. Beinart (ed.) The Jews in Italy, Studies Dedicated to the Memory of U. Cassuto
on the 100th Anniversary of His Birth, Jerusalem: Magnes.(Discusses Alemanno’s political philosophy and
Renaissance humanism.)
Novak, B.C. (1982) ‘Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Jochanan Alemanno’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 45: 125-47.(A detailed account of their relationship.)