(“Leone Ebreo.”) Dialoghi di Amore (“Conversations on Love.”).

ABRABANEL, JUDAH.

Casa de’ figliuoli di Aldo (Aldus Manutius)

Venice

1545

Printer’s device on opening and closing leaves. Italian marginalia on ff. 103-104. Bookplate of Wm. Wynne, Esq. of the Inner Temple, and his signature of 1730.

Adams A-61.

Judah Abrabanel (c. 1460-after 1532), physician, poet and Renaissance philosopher, was the eldest son of Don Isaac Abrabanel. Commonly known as Leone Ebreo, his reputation rests upon the Dialoghi, among the most popular philosophical works of the age. Exiled from Spain, Judah Abrabanel settled in Italy and became one of the major standard-bearers of the Italian Renaissance. His central thesis in the Dialoghi is that love is the foundation of the world. Judah Abrabanel spurned the rationalism of the Aristotelian-Maimonidean system and was more attracted to the mystical world of ideas of the medieval Kabbalah, with its strong inclination toward neo-Platonism. See I. Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, Vol. IV, pp. 15-20; C. Roth, The Jews in the Renaissance (1959) pp. 128-36.