7:52 AM
Gil Student
R. David Berger, "Judaism and General Culture in Medieval and Early Modern Times" in Judaism's Encounter with Other Cultures, pp. 131-133:
Azariah de' Rossi's Me'or `Einayim, which is not a narrative history but a series of historical studies, utilized non-Jewish sources to test the validity of historical assertions in Rabbinic texts to the point of rejecting the accepted chronology of the Second Temple and modifying the Jewish calendar's assumptions about the date of creation. The author was clearly sensitive to the prospect of opposition, and he defended the study of history on the grounds of religious utility and the intrinsic value of the search for truth. There is, however, considerable irony in his argument for rejecting historical statements of the Rabbis in favor of gentile authorities. The Sages, he writes, were concerned with important matters; with respect to trivial concerns like history, we should expect to find a greater degree of reliability in the works of gentiles, who after all specialize in trivialities. The difficulty of distinguishing the strands of sincerity and disingenuousness in this assertion speaks volumes for the problematic nature of de' Rossi's undertaking. He can justify his methodology only by minimizing the significance of his discipline...
Bonfil has demonstrated convincingly that the Italian attack on Meor `Einayim was much more limited in both its ideological scope and its degree of support than historians used to think... Yerushalmi, writing before Bonfil's study, made the cautious observation that "it is perhaps a token of the flexibility of Italian Jewry that the ban upon the book, [which] only required that special permission be obtained by those who wanted to read it, was not always enforced stringently." If we accept, as I think we should, both Yerushalmi's perception of the book and Bonfil's findings about the ban, the implications for Italian Jewry become more striking. A substantial majority of the rabbinic leadership accepted with equanimity a work which treated the historical statements of the ancient Sages with startling freedom. The contrast with the intense opposition to Me'or `Einayim from R. Joseph Caro in Safed and R. Judah Loew (Maharal) in Prague highlights the openness of sixteenth-century Italian Jews to non-Jewish sources and the willingness to utilize them even in the most sensitive of contexts.
