A Culture Under Strain
We cannot expect the age of the second dispersion to have produced a brilliant Jewish culture, since all the Jews' strength went into the hard duty of surviving in very unfavorable conditions. Education, one of their special skills, was neglected because of the constant instability of their lives. At the very time when Christian Europe was stepping joyfully and hopefully toward the Renaissance, the Jews of Christian countries sank into the ghettos and into the world of legal documents. The second commandment was taken to bar them from taking part in the revival of the arts.
Jewish scholars were countless, but most were engaged in teaching the Talmud. Among them were grammarians such as Profiat Duran and Abraham de Balmes, and translators such as Isaac ben Polgar, who turned the works of al-Ghazali into Hebrew, and Jacob Mantino, who translated Avicenna, Averroes, Maimonides and Levi ben Gershon into Latin. Elijah Levita disturbed the mass of strict Jews by proving with decisive arguments that the Masoretic text of the Old Testament could not be older than the fifth century of the Christian era.
The Odyssey of the Abravanels
The odyssey of the Abravanel family, together with the story of their wandering, shows well the upheavals and changes in Jewish thought in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Don Isaac Abravanel, born in Lisbon in 1437, entered the service of Alfonso V of Portugal as minister of finance. Throughout his political career he also studied the Bible and history, and made his pleasant home a gathering place for scholars, learned men and statesmen. When Alfonso died, Abravanel lost royal protection and fled to Spain (1484). While he was absorbed in writing commentaries on the historical books of the Bible, Ferdinand the Catholic called him into his service, and for eight years Abravanel managed the finances of Castile.
He made great efforts to prevent the disaster that fell on the Jews in 1492, and when he failed, he joined the exiles and left Spain. At Naples he was again placed in public service, but French invaders (1495) plundered his house and destroyed his fine library, and forced him to flee to Corfu. There he wrote notes that any other Jew might have written in those painful years: "My wife, my sons and my books are far from me, and I, like a stranger, am left alone in a strange land." He moved on to Venice, where he was entrusted with another political mission (1503). Amid these ups and downs Abravanel found time to leave several works of philosophy and theology which have little importance now, but he laid down the principle that the events and ideas described in the Bible must be interpreted according to the social and political conditions of their time. In the end he had the chance to spend his last six years in peace and security, unusual for him.
His sons were his glory. Samuel Abravanel rose to fame in Salonika, became minister of finance in Naples and won public affection by his charity. Judah Leon Abravanel, known as Leo Hebraeus, became so famous in medicine at Genoa and Naples that he was called Leone Medigo ("the physician"). He studied several branches of science, wrote poetry and even entered the world of metaphysics. In 1505 he became personal physician to Gonzalo de Cordoba, but two years later the relations of that "Great Captain" with Ferdinand turned bad, and Leon joined his father in Venice.
The Dialogues of Love
His Dialogues of Love (written 1502, printed 1535) found many readers among the Italians of the Renaissance, who used the philosophical analysis of love as a prelude or accompaniment to their own love conquests. In the author's view, spiritual beauty, the beauty of order, measure and harmony, is higher than material beauty. The highest beauty is the order, measure and harmony of the universe, which is the manifest form of divine beauty. Love rises from admiration and pursuit of material beauty to admiration and pursuit of spiritual and heavenly beauty, and in its highest degree reaches the spiritual love of God, that is, understanding and admiring the order of the universe and longing for union with the divine. Castiglione, author of The Courtier (1528), probably read the manuscript, since the same ideas come from the mouth of Bembo, and it is also possible that the printed edition reached Spinoza a century later and influenced his famous idea of the intellectual love of God.
The scattered Jews of Portugal preferred to this ethereal love the rhymed and passionate prose of Consolation for the Tribulations of Israel (Ferrara, 1553) by Samuel Usque, a Portuguese author. The book described at length the alternating ages of triumph and misery of the Jewish people and consoled them with the confidence that they were still the chosen people of the one God. Though they had incurred divine wrath through the sins they committed, they had been cleansed and purified by endless suffering, and no demonic trick of men could keep them from the eternal happiness and salvation God had fixed for them.
Science, Maps and Navigation
Naturally, in this long age of persecution and killing, the Jews' contribution to the progress of science was held back. Not only did insecurity, poverty and turmoil block research. One of the most respected and influential rabbis, Solomon ben Abraham ben Adret of Barcelona, at the start of the period under discussion (1305), forbade teaching science and philosophy to Jews under twenty-five and set excommunication as the penalty, lest such teaching shake their religious faith.
Even so, Isaac Israeli the Priest, of Toledo, summarized the astronomy of his time in a book (1320) and rescued the Jewish calendar from disorder and obscurity. Immanuel Bonfils of Tarascon prepared valuable tables and laid the groundwork of decimal arithmetic. Abraham Cresques of Majorca, called "master of maps and compasses to the crown of Aragon," made a world map (1377) that served as the best map available and became so important that the government of Aragon sent a copy as a choice gift to Charles V, king of France; the map is now one of the treasures of the National Library of France.
Judah Cresques, Abraham's son, was the first appointed head of Prince Henry the Navigator's school of navigation at Sagres and gave Henry great help in charting sea voyages. Pedro Nunes's treatise On the Sphere (1537) opened the way for Gerhard Mercator and all later mapmakers up to our day. And finally Garcia de Orta's Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India opened a brilliant era in botany and founded tropical medicine.
One of the leading Jewish figures in fifteenth-century science was Abraham Zacuto. While teaching at Salamanca (1473-1478) he wrote the Perpetual Almanac, whose tables served as navigation guides on the voyages of Vasco da Gama, Cabral, Albuquerque and Christopher Columbus (after 1496). Zacuto was one of the Jews who fled Spain in 1492 and found temporary shelter in Portugal. He was later consulted by the court on Vasco da Gama's sea route to India, and da Gama's ships were fitted with his improved astrolabe. But in 1497 the severity of persecution drove him out of Portugal as well. Zacuto spent long years in poverty and wandering, finding comfort in writing a history of the Jewish people.
His pupil Joseph Vizinho, personal physician to John II of Portugal, was sent to the coast of Guinea to tabulate latitudes and the declination of the sun, and maps he prepared were widely used on Vasco da Gama's voyages. Vizinho was a member of the commission appointed by John II to examine Columbus's proposal to find a way to the West Indies by sailing west (1484), and he was among those who voted against it.
The Physicians
In Europe Jewish physicians were still the most sought-after. Though they lived under religious condemnation and legal disabilities, and risked their lives if they undertook to treat a prominent Christian, popes and kings still entrusted their health to Jewish doctors. In this period, apart from Garcia de Orta's studies of tropical medicine, Jews did not contribute notably to medical progress. But Amatus Lusitanus, by his distinguished character, embodied the best traditions of the profession and of his people's qualities. He left Portugal for fear of the Inquisition, wandered for a time through Antwerp, Ferrara and Ragusa (Dubrovnik), and finally settled at Ancona (about 1549).
There he was often summoned to treat Pope Julius III, the very pope who worked hard to destroy the Talmud. To the last day of his life he could, and had the right to, swear that he had never looked for reward from the medical profession, never accepted costly gifts, treated the poor free, made no distinction among Christian, Jew and Turk, and never let difficulties of the hour or distance affect his visits and service to patients. His Seven Hundred Medical Cures (1563) held clinical reports of seven hundred cases he had treated himself; the text was later kept as a valuable treasure and studied across Europe. The king of Poland invited Amatus to become his personal physician, and he preferred to stay at Ancona. But in 1556, when Paul IV ordered that all New Christian Marranos in Italy either become fully Christian or be imprisoned, Amatus was forced to take up wandering again.