Elijah ben Abraham Benamozegh (1823-1900), whose family had come to Italy from Morocco, was rabbi of the important Jewish community of Livorno (Leghorn), an intellectual leader of 19th-century Italian Jewry, and its most articulate advocate of Kabbalah. Among his distinguished volumes, Israel and Humanity is perhaps his masterpiece. It has been translated from the original French into Hebrew and Italian, and now, for the first time, into English.
Israel and Humanity forms a grand synthesis of Benamozegh's religious thought. It is at once a wide-ranging summa of scriptural, Talmudic, Midrashic, and kabbalistic ideas, and an intensely personal account of Jewish identity. It is also a systematic, meticulously reasoned philosophy of Judaism in its relation to the other religions of mankind, especially its daughter religions, Christianity and Islam. Scrupulously orthodox in his Jewish perspective, Benamozegh was a highly original thinker and wholly at ease in European secular and religious culture. His book breathes the exceptionally tolerant religious atmosphere of 19th-century Italy.
