Great changes in culture are only rarely the effect of single causes. They involve the causes of creating the substance of the new modes of thought, the ways of their transmission and proliferation, and the various manners of their reception, which differ from the other causes we mentioned earlier. This is true as far as the Florentine Renaissance in late 15th century is concerned, and in some similar ways also of what I call the Safedian Renaissance, in the two middle quarters of the 16th century. The Sultan and the Turks that conquered Constantinople in 1453 did not create the Italian Renaissance, but they were agents of cultural changes, by triggering the emigration of Greek Orthodox scholars to a Catholic country, without knowing or intending it. Neither were the Medicis' inclination to assist Ficino's Platonic translations, central for the content of what happened in Florence, though certainly they were instrumental in encouraging the activities of thinkers like Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, to be intellectually active in their entourage. It was the activity of the latter that made the intellectual difference, by selecting, translating, commenting and printing the forlorn Greek and Hellenistic texts, as well as triggering the translation of some Hebrew Kabbalistic ones into Latin.
This is also the case of the emergence of Safedian Renaissance. The Catholic kings in Spain had no idea that by closing the glorious chapter of Jewish culture in the Iberian Peninsula, they were instrumental in triggering a new and quite glorious chapter in Jewish culture by some of the descendants of those Jews they expelled in the Ottoman Empire. Some of those two groups of expellees made their ways to Northern Italy. In both cases, texts that were first consumed by very small elites, have been put in circulation, by putting them together, commenting to them and sometimes printing. In both cases, various forms of Kabbalah played an important role in shaping ways of thought and behavior, which were adopted by much broader audiences. In both cases, there was a feeling of returning to a glorious past, by circumventing the thought of the Middle Ages and by cultivating a certain spiritual arousal.
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Lecturer
Prof. Moshe Idel
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Duration
Summer semester
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Language
English
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Dates & Hours