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Renaissance and Rebirth: Reincarnation in Early Modern Italian Kabbalah (Studies in Jewish History and Culture)

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Renaissance and Rebirth: Reincarnation in Early Modern Italian Kabbalah by Brian Ogren (Studies in Jewish History and Culture: Brill Academic) Metempsychosis was a prominent element in Renaissance conceptualizations of the human being, the universe, and the place of the human person in the universe. A variety concepts emerged in debates about metempsychosis: human to human reincarnation, human to vegetal, human to animal, and human to angelic transmigration. As a complex and changing doctrine, metempsychosis gives us a well-placed window for viewing the complex and dynamic contours of Jewish thought in late fifteenth century Italy; as such, it enables us to evaluate Jewish thought in relation to non-Jewish Italian developments. This book addresses the problematic question of the roles and achievements of Jews who lived in Italy in the development of Renaissance culture in its Jewish and its Christian dimensions.
Excerpt: All of the kabbalists reckon that the world was created and that it will cease in motion, but that from the beginning the souls were created together, and they continuously change bodies until the end of motion.'
Ideas of change and motion played a significant role in fifteenth century perceptions of the soul in both Christian and Jewish forms of discourse, which often times overlapped and increasingly found a shared borrowing of ideas. This is the case not only with Jewish thinkers borrowing from the dominant Christian culture, but with Christians borrowing from and being shaped by Jewish forms of thought as well. Indeed, with the above quoted passage, the highly influential Italian Renaissance Christian Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino remarkably alludes to a specifically Jewish understanding of soul migrations.2 As one of the most important fifteenth century Christian philosophers who dealt extensively with matters of the soul, Ficino's invocation of "the kabbalists" concerning the origin of souls and their relation to cosmic processes is certainly noteworthy. Ficino goes on in the same passage to state that "the world has already lasted for 5240 years."' This rather unique matter of Hebrew dating by a Christian humanist who otherwise does not much rely upon the Hebrew kabbalists undoubtedly places Ficino's ruminations concerning the subject within an uncharacteristically Jewish context. It also allows us to note that according to the secular reckoning, Ficino was already having these thoughts, within their kabbalistic framework, in late 1479 or in early 1480. This early date is quite significant, considering the fact that Ficino's younger contemporary Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who is rightly considered to be one of the original innovators of Christian kabbalah, only seems to have begun learning Hebrew in 1486,4 and mentions kabbalah for the very first time in his works of that same year.
Ficino's early mention of the idea of metempsychosis within a Jewish kabbalistic context provides an indication of the concept's heightened importance in regard to matters of the human soul and its relation to the cosmos. Moreover, the overlap of kabbalah and Renaissance humanism, which in the above example involves direct reference to kabbalists by a preeminent humanist, denotes an important point of departure for research into Renaissance Jewish and Christian trends of thought. Namely, it indicates that shared concepts between kabbalists and humanists, such as metempsychosis, can act as ideal devices for the gauging and the analysis of intellectual interaction and reaction, of possible mutual influence, and of particular, contextualized developments in thought. Such is the purpose of this present study. The concept of metempsychosis, mainly within its Jewish contexts, will act as an axis around which to study and to analyze developments in Renaissance intellectual history.
Indeed, metempsychosis stood as a salient element in the Renaissance conceptualization of the human being, the universe, and the former's place in regard to the latter. Under the rubric of this doctrine, which is known in variant forms with diverse subtleties of meaning by the English terms palingenesis, the transmigration of souls, rebirth, and reincarnation, and which is associated with the Hebrew locutions gilgul neshamot, ha'atakah, 'ibbur, din b'nei halof, and sod ha-shelach, stand concepts and theories as diverse as its names. These include ideas such as human to human reincarnation, human to vegetal, animal, or angelic entities and vice versa, the cohabitation of more than one soul in one body, and the transmigration of souls between various spheres of existence, including between the divine and the human realms. Some versions of this doctrine maintain that individuals who have not completed their tasks here on earth but who have the potential to do so can be 'reborn' after death in order to be given the chance to fulfill that unrealized potential, while other versions maintain that individuals undergo bodily change as a form of punishment or reward. Some models posit a three or four-time limit for the return of the soul to life, while others allow up to a thousand times, or even an open-ended number.
Common to all of these theories of metempsychosis is the idea that a separate entity or entities within the individual, called the "soul" in western parlance, has some type of existence distinct from the body and that upon physical death, the souls of certain individuals live on and pass into new physical or spiritual bodies or realms of existence. From there, the idea is that they then can possibly pass on to other spheres or bodies, or even return in a circular pattern to their 'original' sphere. As Moshe Idel proposes, "More than assuming that survival of the soul involves the occasion for a final account, transmigration involves a much more open type of worldview." Indeed, in opposition to absolute notions of finality as related to classical notions of final judgment, paradise, and hell, in all of their alternative forms of conception, and even of purgatory as a set, intermediate stage to finality, metempsychosis presupposes change and dynamism, both in relation to the individual and in relation to the workings of the cosmos.
This present study will focus upon eight significant fifteenth century thinkers who discussed the idea of metempsychosis from within Jewish and humanist contexts. The first two scholars to be treated, Rabbi Michael ha-Cohen Balbo and Rabbi Moshe ha-Cohen Ashkenazi, were Jewish communal leaders at the ends of two opposing philosophical camps in the community of Candia on the Venetian controlled island of Crete. In 1466, Balbo and Ashkenazi engaged in an unprecedented, detailed debate concerning the veracity of metempsychosis. Balbo argued in favor of the truth of the doctrine on kabbalistic and philosophical grounds, while Ashkenazi argued against the doctrine by criticizing kabbalah, by appealing to philosophy, and by invoking worldwide halachic opinion. The lengthy proceedings of the debate will be analyzed in the first chapter of this book, with an eye toward the unique interplay of philosophy and kabbalah in a struggle for intellectual hegemony and in the shaping of Renaissance modes of consciousness. The second chapter will discuss literature by the two interlocutors that is not in the notebooks of the debate itself but that further deals with philosophical, kabbalistic, and legalistic questions related to the belief in metempsychosis. This includes an epistolary exchange concerning metempsychosis between Balbo and one of his students, and a series of halachic responsa concerning the laws of levirate marriage and their relation to metempsychosis between Ashkenazi and the rabbinic authorities of Mestre and Jerusalem. Issues of national character and personal identity are raised within this extra-debatal literature, and the second chapter of this present book will seek to flesh these out and to examine the kabbalistic, philosophical, and halachic implications of identity formation through ideas such as metempsychosis, both on the personal and on the national levels.
Two next two thinkers to be treated in this study, Rabbi Isaac Abarbanel and Rabbi Isaac Abarbanel, were prominent Spanish Jewish thinkers who both made their way to Italy after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. Though they both brought with them elements from their original Iberian environs, both Abarbanel and Hayyat wrote their respective treatises in which they deal with metempsychosis while upon Italian soil; Abarbanel wrote his philosophico-mystical masterwork Mira lot Elohim around 1500 while in Apulia and his commentary on the book of Leviticus while in Venice a few years later, and Hayyat wrote his kabbalistic opus Minhat Yehuda upon his arrival in Mantova after 1493. Abarbanel did not consider himself to be a kabbalist, but he positively viewed the philosophical possibility of the doctrine of metempsychosis and he categorically supported its truth value from a more mystical point of view. Chapter three will examine this dual character of philosophy and mysticism in Abarbanel's writings concerning metempsychosis. It will analyze his unique usage of Italian Renaissance Neoplatonic elements for Jewish exegetical purposes and his simultaneous preservation of and deference to Iberian kabbalistic ideas as shaped by his Spanish predecessor Nahmanides. In contrast to Abarbanel, Hayyat was a self-avowed kabbalist who blatantly rejected philosophical interpretations of kabbalistic lore and who held himself to be in line with the more mythical Spanish school of the ohar. Hayyat saw himself as a preserver of this endangered form of wisdom and as a fighter against its more philosophical expressions. Nevertheless, an analysis of his ideas on metempsychosis reveals elements of the more philosophical kabbalah of Italy that made their way into his writings. Chapter four examines this dialectic within Hayyat's thought and its rhetorical implications for the flow of knowledge and for the development of distinct forms of kabbalah.
The next two thinkers who will be examined, Rabbi Elia Hayyim ben Binyamin of Genazzano and Rabbi Yohanan Alemanno, were both born in Italy and were active in Tuscany. In contrast to Balbo and Ashkenazi who were active on Venetian controlled Crete, and as opposed to Abarbanel and Hayyat who were Iberian imports to Italy, 'both Genazzano and Alemanno were native Italian kabbalists who were deeply immersed in and involved with Italian humanist trends of thought. Both thinkers extensively incorporated philosophy into their writings, both set up hierarchies of wisdom, and both saw the need to assert the supremacy of the Jewish kabbalah as the most reliable and efficacious form of ancient wisdom. Genazzano may have been influenced by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola regarding metempsychosis, and seems to have possibly read Eusebius' Preparatio Evangelica, which was translated into Latin in 1448 by the humanist George of Trebizond. Notwithstanding these humanist influences, Genazzano ties the idea back to Moses and Abraham through the Midrash Ruth of the Zohar Hadash and through his Italian kabbalistic predecessor, Rabbi Menahem Recanati. Chapter five of this book traces these variant lines of development as perceived within the thought of Genazzano, who saw the idea of metempsychosis as originating with Abraham and developing in two separate trajectories, namely, that of the unperverted path of Torah and that of the true, albeit less reliable path of the pagan philosophers. Similar to Genazzano, Alemanno based himself on different paths and trajectories in relation to the idea of metempsychosis, yet in a manner almost opposite to that of Genazzano, Alemanno sought to create a convergence and a unity of variant streams of thought regarding the idea. Indeed, Alemanno synthesized older Jewish traditions regarding metempsychosis in a manner that may have been affected by and may have affected wider Renaissance thoughts of coincidentia oppositorum. Chapter six fleshes out this unique synthesis of Jewish sources and the philosophical neutralization of mythical elements within these sources by Alemanno, who was one of the most preeminent Italian kabbalists of his day and who was one of the direct teachers of Pico della Mirandola.
The final two thinkers to be analyzed in this book were prominent Christian philosophers of the Italian Renaissance who fell under the influence of kabbalistic lore. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino were two of the most influential and important Italian humanist philosophers of the fifteenth century, and an analysis of their thought concerning metempsychosis will help us to moor the idea in the wider cultural and philosophical context of the Italian Renaissance. Indeed, both Pico and Ficino discussed the idea at some length within their writings, and both seem to have lent it a degree of support. Nevertheless, the idea was in opposition to the standard sentiments of the Church, and both thinkers veiled their support of the doctrine of metempsychosis in allegory. Interestingly, Pico, who is widely known for his familiarity with kabbalistic lore, completely omits kabbalistic reference to metempsychosis and relies most heavily upon Plotinus in the formulation of his own theories. In contradistinction, Ficino, who is not known for his reliance upon kabbalah, invokes the kabbalistic tradition in regard to metempsychosis, oftentimes at points that go beyond mere allegory and venture into questions of veridicality. Chapter seven examines Pico's non-kabbalistic, Plotinian understanding of metempsychosis as participated transmigration for the human soul. It attempts to make sense of discrepancies within Pico's writings concerning metempsychosis, including the lack of mention of kabbalah and a final reticence to show outright support for the idea. In contrast to Pico, Ficino seems to show definitive, albeit veiled support for the doctrine as applied to human-to-human transmigration specifically. In this regard, he not only invokes Plato and Plotinus, as does Pico, he also remarkably appeals to the Jewish kabbalistic tradition. Chapter eight analyzes Ficino's innovations in regard to metempsychosis, including his allegorical understanding of the doctrine in regard to human-to-animal transmigration and his more literal understanding of it in its human-to-human form within his later writings. Ficino's noteworthy references to Jewish mysticism and kabbalah, alongside Plato and Plotinus, bring full-circle the analysis of the meeting-point and development of Jewish thought and Renaissance humanism through the concept of metempsychosis.