Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T20:45:19.002Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

13 - Islamic and Jewish influences

from Part II - Intellectual traditions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2015

Luis M. Girón Negrón
Affiliation:
Harvard University
Zygmunt G. Barański
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Lino Pertile
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
Get access

Summary

Muslims and Jews loomed large in Dante's Italy between 1250 and 1350. It is possible, indeed, to speak of Jewish and Islamic traditions visibly present in late medieval Italian culture and to which Dante's literary oeuvre offers a significant witness. However, Jewish and Islamic are equivocal terms, as they denote not only two religious traditions, but also their cultural heritage. Any effort to ascertain what these religions meant to Dante's contemporaries must thus reckon both with their limited, mostly distorted theological understanding of Muslim and Jewish religiosity as living traditions of faith, and with their mediated textual access to the cultural archives of Islamic and Jewish intellectual life. This chapter aims at such a dual reconnaissance of Judaism and Islam in the Italo-Christian Middle Ages, with selective recourse to Dante's works as a privileged historical source.

Of course, it is not easy even to establish direct cross-cultural exchanges between Muslims, Christians, and Jews in late medieval Italy. No unequivocal evidence has been found, for example, of specific Muslims or Jews among Dante's known acquaintances, nor other direct contacts that could have inflected his personal views on their faith and culture. However, such personal contacts were more than just a possibility for an Italian Christian in Dante's time. Jews in Italy between the late thirteenth century and the early fourteenth century were concentrated in Sicily and the peninsular south (Apulia, Campania), but there were smaller clusters of Jewish families in Dante's Tuscany (Pisa, Lucca), a larger Jewish community in Rome, and, most relevant, a significant centre of Italo-Jewish intellectual life in Verona at the time of Dante's two visits as a political exile, first at the court of Bartolomeo della Scala (d. 1304) in 1303–04 and later, for a lengthier sojourn from 1312–18 under the patronage of Cangrande della Scala (1291–1329). Dante's putative friendship with the Hebrew poet Immanuel ben Solomon of Rome (‘Manoello Giudeo’, c.1261–c.1335), posited by nineteenth-century scholars, has been mostly discarded in the absence of unimpeachable proof. But Immanuel's genuine admiration for Dante, whom he eulogized in exchanged sonnets with Bosone da Gubbio (between 1260–90 and 1349–77) and whose Commedia he also emulated in his Mahberet ha-tofet ve-ha-eden (The Treatise on Hell and Heaven), gave way to the imagined possibility of such an encounter against the historical backdrop of a contemporary Italo-Jewish Renaissance.

Type
Chapter
Information
Dante in Context , pp. 200 - 220
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2015

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×