On the Threshold of the Renaissance: New Methods and Sensibilities in the Biblical Commentaries of Isaac Abarbanel

"On the Threshold of the Renaissance: New Methods and Sensibilities in the Biblical Commentaries of Isaac Abarbanel." Isaac Abarbanel, celebrated scholar, financier, and leader of Spanish Jewrv at the time of the 1492 expulsion, is usually viewed as a late medieval figure. Yet he spent the first half of his life in Portugal at a time when new humanist winds were blowing and composed nearly all of his prodigious theological and exegetical tracts in Spain and Italy at a time when Renaissance cultural ideals had taken root. The article highlights the "Renaissance" side of Abarbanel's intellectual profile in three new ways. It explores the impact of "historical thinking," a central feature of Renaissance humanism, on Abarbanel. It illustrates the influence of this and other Renaissance sensibilities on his biblical scholarship rather than on his theological views. And it draws many of its examples from Abarbanel's Spanish biblical commentaries, written almost a full decade prior to his arrival in Italy. In this way, it illuminates heretofore over-looked aspects of Abarbanel's intellectual biography while furnishing a case study in the transition from medieval to Renaissance biblical scholarship.