A Jew at the Medici Court

A Jew at the Medici Court PDF Author: Benedetto Blanis
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442643838
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Edward Goldberg shares his sensational discovery of the largest body of surviving correspondence from any Jew in Early Modern Europe. Over the course of six years, Benedetto Blanis — a scholar and entrepreneur in the Florentine Ghetto — wrote nearly 200 letters to his princely patron Don Giovanni dei Medici. For the first time, these letters are available in a definitive critical edition — with full transcriptions in the original Italian, English language summaries, and explanatory notes. This book is a companion volume to Jews and Magic in Medici Florence, in which Goldberg narrates Blanis's startling rise and fall. Readers can now take a step closer and hear Blanis's compelling story in his own words — tracing his fraught relations with Jews and Christians, his desperate (and often illegal) business schemes, his disastrous strategies for advancement at the Medici Court, and his pursuit of arcane knowledge, including astrology, alchemy, and Kabbalah.

A Jew at the Medici Court

A Jew at the Medici Court PDF Author: Benedetto Blanis
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442643838
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Get Book Here

Book Description
Edward Goldberg shares his sensational discovery of the largest body of surviving correspondence from any Jew in Early Modern Europe. Over the course of six years, Benedetto Blanis — a scholar and entrepreneur in the Florentine Ghetto — wrote nearly 200 letters to his princely patron Don Giovanni dei Medici. For the first time, these letters are available in a definitive critical edition — with full transcriptions in the original Italian, English language summaries, and explanatory notes. This book is a companion volume to Jews and Magic in Medici Florence, in which Goldberg narrates Blanis's startling rise and fall. Readers can now take a step closer and hear Blanis's compelling story in his own words — tracing his fraught relations with Jews and Christians, his desperate (and often illegal) business schemes, his disastrous strategies for advancement at the Medici Court, and his pursuit of arcane knowledge, including astrology, alchemy, and Kabbalah.

Jews and Magic in Medici Florence

Jews and Magic in Medici Florence PDF Author: Edward L. Goldberg
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442613335
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
In the seventeenth century, Florence was the splendid capital of the Medici Grand Dukedom of Tuscany. Meanwhile, the Jews in its tiny Ghetto struggled to earn a living by any possible means, especially loan-sharking, rag-picking and second-hand dealing. They were viewed as an uncanny people with rare supernatural powers, and Benedetto Blanis—a businessman and aspiring scholar from a distinguished Ghetto dynasty—sought to parlay his alleged mastery of astrology, alchemy and Kabbalah into a grand position at the Medici Court. He won the patronage of Don Giovanni dei Medici, a scion of the ruling family, and for six tumultuous years their lives were inextricably linked. Edward Goldberg reveals the dramas of daily life behind the scenes in the Pitti Palace and in the narrow byways of the Florentine Ghetto, using thousands of new documents from the Medici Granducal Archive. He shows that truth—especially historical truth—can be stranger than fiction, when viewed through the eyes of the people most immediately involved.

A Jew at the Medici Court

A Jew at the Medici Court PDF Author: Benedetto Blanis
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781442698017
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
Edward Goldberg shares his sensational discovery of the largest body of surviving correspondence from any Jew in Early Modern Europe. Over the course of six years, Benedetto Blanis -- a scholar and entrepreneur in the Florentine Ghetto -- wrote nearly 200 letters to his princely patron Don Giovanni dei Medici. For the first time, these letters are available in a definitive critical edition -- with full transcriptions in the original Italian, English language summaries, and explanatory notes. This book is a companion volume to Jews and Magic in Medici Florence, in which Goldberg narrates Blanis's startling rise and fall. Readers can now take a step closer and hear Blanis's compelling story in his own words -- tracing his fraught relations with Jews and Christians, his desperate (and often illegal) business schemes, his disastrous strategies for advancement at the Medici Court, and his pursuit of arcane knowledge, including astrology, alchemy, and Kabbalah.

The Jews and the Reformation

The Jews and the Reformation PDF Author: Kenneth Austin
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300186290
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
The first comprehensive account of Protestant and Catholic attitudes toward Jews and Judaism in the European Reformation ​In this rich, wide-ranging, and meticulously researched account, Kenneth Austin examines the attitudes of various Christian groups in the Protestant and Catholic Reformations towards Jews, the Hebrew language, and Jewish learning. Martin Luther’s writings are notorious, but Reformation attitudes were much more varied and nuanced than these might lead us to believe. This book has much to tell us about the Reformation and its priorities—and has important implications for how we think about religious pluralism more broadly.

A Companion to Cosimo I de’ Medici

A Companion to Cosimo I de’ Medici PDF Author: Alessio Assonitis
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004465219
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 659

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Book Description
Mining the rich documentary sources housed in Tuscan archives and taking advantage of the breadth and depth of scholarship produced in recent years, the seventeen essays in this Companion to Cosimo I de' Medici provide a fresh and systematic overview of the life and career of the first Grand Duke of Tuscany, with special emphasis on Cosimo I's education and intellectual interests, cultural policies, political vision, institutional reforms, diplomatic relations, religious beliefs, military entrepreneurship, and dynastic concerns. Contributors: Maurizio Arfaioli, Alessio Assonitis, Nicholas Scott Baker, Sheila Barker, Stefano Calonaci, Brendan Dooley, Daniele Edigati, Sheila ffolliott, Catherine Fletcher, Andrea Gáldy, Fernando Loffredo, Piergabriele Mancuso, Jessica Maratsos, Carmen Menchini, Oscar Schiavone, Marcello Simonetta, and Henk Th. van Veen.

The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance

The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance PDF Author: Dana E. Katz
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812240855
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Dana E. Katz reveals how Italian Renaissance painting became part of a policy of tolerance that deflected violence from the real world onto a symbolic world. While the rulers upheld toleration legislation governing Christian-Jewish relations, they simultaneously supported artistic commissions that perpetuated violence against Jews.

The World of a Renaissance Jew

The World of a Renaissance Jew PDF Author: David B. Ruderman
Publisher: Hebrew Union College Press
ISBN: 0878201386
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Within the Italian city states of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a relatively high degree of mutual tolerance and tranquility existed between the enlightened Christian majority and the small Jewish minority. With the prevalence of favorable political, social, and economic circumstances for Jewish life in Italy, a considerable number of Jews participated freely in Renaissance culture while upholding an intense awareness of their own particular identity. This work is a study of the life and thought of one such Jew, Abraham b. Mordecai Farissol (1452-ca. 1528). While born in Avignon, Farissol spent most of his life in Italy close to the cultural centers of Renaissance society, primarily in Ferrara, but also in Mantua, Florence, and other Italian cities. As scribe, educator, cantor, communal leader, polemicist, Biblical exegete, and geographer, Farissol developed variegated interests and associations which provide exciting vantage points from which to view his cultural and social world. As one of the first comprehensive studies of any Italian Jewish figure of the period, this book represents an important contribution to an understanding of Jewish society and culture. But the significance of this study of Farissol's life extends beyond what can be learned about the man and his immediate community of co-religionists. Utilizing the life and thought of one person, it explores and explicates the dialogue between Judaism and the culture of the Italian Renaissance. Despite its intrinsic interest, Jewish intellectual history in the Renaissance has remained an underdeveloped field. Many sources still remain unexamined; monographs on specific themes and figures have yet to be written. David Ruderman's study breaks new ground by making use of extensive, yet previously unpublished sources on Farissol and his society and by integrating them into the broader context of Jewish and Renaissance culture. The work is of particular interest to historians of the Jews and of Renaissance Italy. It also offers the general reader an excellent case study of the symbiotic relationship between Western culture and its Jewish minority in one of the most fertile periods of European civilization. In dramatic fashion it illustrates how Jews not only survived but creatively flourished in a pluralistic setting by appropriating from the outside new forms and ideas which they integrated into their own vital cultural experience.

The Jewish Traveler

The Jewish Traveler PDF Author: Alan M. Tigay
Publisher: Jason Aronson, Incorporated
ISBN: 1461631505
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 592

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Book Description
What is there of Jewish interest to see in Bombay? In Casablanca? Where are the kosher restaurants in Seattle? How did the Jewish community in Hong Kong originate? The Jewish Traveler: Hadassah Magazine's Guide to the World's Jewish Communities and Sights provides this information and much more.

A Sceptical Jew. Richard H. Popkin’s Private Republic of Letters

A Sceptical Jew. Richard H. Popkin’s Private Republic of Letters PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004711120
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 548

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Book Description
Richard H. Popkin (1923–2005) was a pioneer in the field of Jewish studies. His numerous books and articles broke new ground in the study of Jewish-Christian relations in the early modern period and in the exploration of the impact of Jews and Judaism on philosophy and religious thought. A Sceptical Jew: Richard H. Popkin’s Private Republic of Letters brings together selections from Popkin’s private correspondence and other documents to illuminate the sources of his interests and the nature of his contributions to the fields in which he worked.

Renaissance Emir

Renaissance Emir PDF Author: T.J. Gorton
Publisher: Interlink Publishing
ISBN: 1623710537
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
A groundbreaking biography of the mysterious Levantine prince Fakr ad-Din. The year is 1613: the Ottoman Empire is at its height, sprawling from Hungary to Iraq, Morocco to Yemen. One man dares to challenge it: the Prince of the mysterious Druze sect in Mount Lebanon, Fakhr ad-Din. Yielding before a mighty army sent to conquer him, he—astonishingly—takes refuge with the Medici in Florence at the height of the Renaissance. Fakhr ad-Din took along with him a diverse party of Moslem, Christian, and Jewish Levantines on their first visit to the “Lands of the Christians.” During his five-year stay in Italy, he fights to persuade Popes, Grand-Dukes and Viceroys to support a grand plan: a new Crusade to wrest the Holy Land from the Ottomans, giving Jerusalem back to Christendom and himself a crown. This groundbreaking biography of Fakhr ad-Din, Prince of the Druze, is based on the author’s vivid new translations of contemporary sources in Arabic and other languages. It brings to life one remarkable man’s beliefs and ambitions, uniquely illuminating the elusive interface between Eastern and Western culture.