The Land Is Mine: Sephardi Jews and Bible Commentary in the Renaissance

By Andrew D. Berns

After their expulsion from Spain in 1492, Sephardi Jews such as Isaac Abravanel, Abraham Saba, and Isaac Arama wrote biblical commentaries that stressed the significance of land. They interpreted Judaism as a tradition whose best expression and ultimate fulfillment took place away from cities and in rural settings. Iberian-Jewish authors rooted their moral teachings in an ethical treatment of the natural world, elucidating ancient agricultural laws and scrutinizing the physical context and built environments of Bible stories. The Land Is Mine asks what inspired this and suggests that the answer lies not in timeless exegetical or theological trends, but in the material realities of late medieval and early modern Iberia, during a period of drastic changes in land use.

The book uses a highly traditional source base in a decidedly untraditional way. In Jewish Studies, Andrew D. Berns observes, biblical commentary is typically studied as an intramural activity. Though scholars have conceded that Jewish scriptural exegesis welcomes material and ideas from other fields and traditions, little to no work treats premodern Hebrew Bible commentary as also drawing upon Classical and Christian sources as well as contemporary writings on land management and political economy. Abravanel, Saba, and Arama were engaged with questions that had broad resonance during their lives: the proper way to treat the land, the best occupations to pursue, and the ideal setting for human community. Scriptural commentary was the forum in which they addressed these problems and posed solutions to them.

A work of intellectual history,The Land Is Mine demonstrates that it is impossible to understand Jewish culture without considering the physical realities on which it depended.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Apr 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9780812298314

Book preview

Cover: The Land is Mine. Sephardi Jews and Bible Commentary in the Renaissance by Andrew D. Berns

JEWISH CULTURE AND CONTEXTS

Published in association with the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania

Series Editors:

Shaul Magid,

Francesca Trivellato,

Steven Weitzman

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

THE LAND IS MINE

Sephardi Jews and Bible Commentary in the Renaissance

Andrew D. Berns

PENN

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2022 University of Pennsylvania Press

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ISBN 978-0-8122-5369-6

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1. Life in the City

Chapter 2. Life in the Country

Chapter 3. The Root of the Entire Torah

Chapter 4. Pastoralists and Agriculturalists at Odds

Chapter 5. Greed and the Land

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Introduction

In his commentary on Leviticus, written shortly after 1492, the Spanish rabbi Abraham Saba highlighted the importance of agricultural laws in the Bible, especially those concerning the Sabbatical and Jubilee. Those commandments, which proscribe farming, mandate letting the land lie fallow, revoke property ownership, and remit debts, contain profound mysteries and things which are the secret of the world. According to the plain sense [of Scripture] it is the root of the entire Torah and the secret of the whole world.¹ Saba and his rabbinic peers, some of Sephardic Jewry’s most articulate representatives who were expelled from their ancestral homeland in 1492, were preoccupied with land. They interpreted Judaism as a tradition whose best expression, and ultimate fulfillment, took place away from cities and in rural settings. In one sense, their focus on the land is understandable: they ached for what they had lost.² Iberian Jews certainly had more direct contact with the land, its products, and its natural processes than do most readers of this book and than modern scholarship typically acknowledges. Some of them farmed, raised animals, cultivated vines, and managed rural properties.³ Even those like Saba, who dwelled in cities, regularly saw and engaged with farmers, shepherds, and slaughterers.⁴

But in another sense, Saba’s emphasis on the Sabbatical and Jubilee is puzzling: why should a relatively obscure set of biblical laws, buried late in the book of Leviticus, and honored only in the breach for much of the Jewish historical experience, constitute the root of the entire Torah and the secret of the whole world? The Land Is Mine proposes that the answer to this question lies in the lived experience of late medieval⁵ Iberian Jewry rather than the abstractions of their theology. To grasp why they lavished so much attention on the soil, and why they invested it with so much moral significance, we need to understand how central it was to the social, economic, and environmental problems of their era. And we need to comprehend how steeped these commentators were in classical traditions that glorified rural life.

The Land Is Mine takes its point of departure from the works of three major Sephardi Bible commentators: Isaac ben Judah Abravanel, Abraham ben Jacob Saba, and Isaac ben Moses Arama. It also incorporates insights and observations from two of their lesser-known contemporaries: Isaac ben Joseph Caro (whose nephew, Joseph Caro, composed early modernity’s most important code of Jewish law, the Shulḥan ‘arukh); and Joseph ben Meir Gerson. Abravanel, Saba, and Arama have been studied as individuals.⁶ However, they have never been treated as a collective.⁷ These men shared a number of things in common. They were all born on the Iberian Peninsula; they all endured exile in 1492 and underwent significant personal trauma; each wrote a commentary on the Pentateuch, as well as other books of the Bible; all of them died in exile; none converted to Christianity (or Islam); all wrote both directly and indirectly about the indignities they suffered in Spain and the meaning of the Expulsion; and they borrowed from, and may even have plagiarized, each other.⁸ Most importantly, these writers had similar and complementary ideas about the centrality of land—both to the biblical narrative and to their own times—and regarding wealth and its corrosive effects. For Abravanel, Saba, and Arama environment was the lens through which a cluster of spiritual, moral, and social issues came into sharper focus. They considered the manner in which biblical characters treated the land, and lived upon it, as ciphers for how they treated each other and indicators of the health or infirmity of their inner lives. Often, Iberian Jewish exegetes conveyed these ideas through meditations on the disparities between city and country, as they assessed which setting was most conducive to a morally wholesome existence.

To the protagonists of this book, cities were, at best, dangerous places from which they and their coreligionists had been expelled.⁹ At worst, they were morally repugnant dens of iniquity. This perspective developed in the context of the Iberian cities they knew and in which they had lived—Saragossa, Tarragona, Seville, Lisbon, and Toledo—and it colored the way they saw biblical conurbations from Sodom to Babylon to Nineveh. It was reinforced by their tumultuous passage to Italian and Ottoman locations where they were initially made to suffer: Naples, Corfu, and Salonica. We tend to think of Jews, in both the modern and premodern worlds, as paradigmatic cosmopolitans: urban, urbane, deracinated from the soil.¹⁰ There is some truth to this claim. But some of the most civilized premodern Jews—in the literal, etymological sense of that word (civis, or townsman)—extolled the lives of rural farmers, and especially shepherds. For these prolific writers and incisive social commentators, cities were no places of grace.¹¹

In the twilight of the fifteenth century and at the dawn of the sixteenth, several members of late medieval Jewry’s most acculturated, intellectually accomplished, and politically influential diaspora professed to reject the world that had brought them their success: the increasingly urbanized, economically developed, environmentally exploitative Spanish kingdoms. By denigrating cities and celebrating country life, Arama, Saba, and Abravanel ostensibly repudiated the culture their ancestors had long been recognized for building.¹² This rejection was more rhetorical and figurative than earnest: they did not urge, nor expect, their readers to flee urban centers and become shepherds. Though they presented shepherding as a non-commercial ideal, they knew it was anything but. Herding enchanted Abravanel, Saba, and Arama through its promise to provide security and self-sufficiency—a noble dream for men who had lived through an expulsion. More importantly, these thinkers were champions of the type of spiritual growth which that lifestyle supposedly encouraged: to their minds shepherding offered the space and seclusion necessary for direct communion with God. Their pastoralism, which implied a program of moral renovation, depended on an idealization of the past and a concomitant disparagement of the present. As the social critic Christopher Lasch observed, The charm of pastoralism lies, of course, not in the accurate observation of country life but in the dream of childlike simplicity and security. The cult of idyllic simplicity, Lasch elaborated, took for granted the impossibility of its attainment.¹³ Saba, Arama, and Abravanel emphasized land as a hermeneutic key to Scripture and a symbol for moral excellence. These men grafted their vision of an ideal life in the mythologically distant Golden Age onto the trunk of biblical morality using the tools of humanistic learning. They did this in order to have the biblical rootstock produce a fruit representative of what these men saw as one of the main spiritual messages of the Bible for their times: the path to fulfillment modeled by the patriarchs and prophets led away from cities and into the country.

Sephardic Jews who belonged to the generation of the Expulsion put forth these views in ethical letters, historical compositions, and imaginative works. But the fullest articulation of their claim that misuse of the land and excessive devotion to urban mores were to blame for their national downfall came in a genre less familiar to modern readers, and less elaborated upon by historical scholarship on premodern Jewry: biblical commentary.¹⁴ Spanish Jews of this period, like other Jews and Christians, wrote commentaries on Bible stories in order to express their ideas and frame their social and cultural criticism. They saw the Bible as a mirror of their own times. Biblical heroes were models worthy of emulation; biblical villains were typologies of evil. It can be said that this form of scholarship represented the apogee of Jewish intellectual life, at least in Spain. According to one student of the subject, in biblical studies the intellectual history of Spanish Jewry found its most fundamental and concrete articulation.¹⁵ The centrality of Bible study was hardly unique to Jewish culture: as Beryl Smalley observed seventy years ago, the Bible was the most studied book of the middle ages, and Bible study represented the highest branch of learning.¹⁶

Accordingly, in the fifteenth century a number of learned Spaniards penned commentaries to the Bible in either Latin or various Iberian languages.¹⁷ Among these were a convert from Judaism, Pablo de Burgos, and a Jew, Moses Arragel de Guadalajara.¹⁸ One feature of these works is a desire to bring the Bible to life, by making the ancient Near East more vivid or by using biblical stories to comment—directly or indirectly—on contemporary problems. Several generations preceding that of Abravanel, Arama, and Saba, the polemicist, grammarian, and physician Profayt Duran devoted considerable attention to biblical literature. The political and realistic emphasis Duran placed on the David saga, for example, in his grammatical work Ma‘aseh ’Efod constitutes an important precedent to Abravanel’s own historically minded exegesis.¹⁹ As innovative as Abravanel and his peers were, there was strong Iberian antecedent to their realistic attitude toward the Jewish past.²⁰ And even though he has received disproportionate scholarly attention, Abravanel was not unique in using his exegetical powers to respond to the problems of his time: Arama and Saba did as well, and they deserve more study.

This approach to the Bible was informed by the commentators’ lives. One goal of this book is to challenge a subtle but entrenched assumption in medieval and early modern histories of the Jews: that biblical commentary is insulated against the biographical realities of Jewish writers and the political conditions of their times. As a leading scholar of Jewish life in late medieval Spain has observed, Jewish historiographical tradition … privileges philosophical, theosophical, and polemical texts and often overlooks crucial details of Jewish socioeconomic life.²¹ We know, for example, that both Jewish and non-Jewish Bible commentators in the Middle Ages and early modern period welcomed a variety of theories and disciplinary approaches into their scriptural analyses.²² But the extent to which biblical explication provided a forum for Jewish commentators to wrestle with contemporary social, agrarian, and economic problems is largely uncharted territory—at least in historiography on premodern Jews.²³ Scholars of Christian Bible commentary in the later Middle Ages have no difficulty acknowledging this: Smalley’s fundamental work on the subject states that the history of interpretation can be used as a mirror for social and cultural changes.²⁴ More recent work on humanist Bible commentary, for example Daniele Conti’s study of Marsilio Ficino, confirms and extends this approach.²⁵ Nor do Hispanists who study this period shy away from observing that cultural production … always occurs within an intersection of social, economic, and political dynamics or that ideas emerge from and reflect the context of the material world.²⁶ In Islamic Studies several scholars have recently argued for the progressivist qualities of commentary in this period, seeing such works as innovative rather than imitative.²⁷ Like the commentaries of their Muslim contemporaries, Jewish work on the Bible does not float in a timeless ether. The insights of Abravanel, Saba, and Arama are inseparable from the conditions of their lives; more likely, they were strongly influenced by them.

It wasn’t only the elite who saw the Bible as their intellectual and moral lodestar; Jewish masses did, too. In fact there is evidence that the Jewish exegetes of this generation directed their energy to biblical interpretation with such fervor because their congregants and readers wanted the Bible to be relevant to them and their lives. Isaac Abravanel, for example, criticized his medieval predecessor Abraham Ibn Ezra—and the entire Andalusi Jewish exegetical school—for a constricted focus on grammar and the superficial meaning of the text, a Hebrew phrase with clear resonances to contemporary Latin usage.²⁸ Abravanel’s peer Isaac Arama related how his parishioners complained that while Christian preachers search enthusiastically for religious and ethical content, their Jewish counterparts limit themselves to grammatical forms of words and the simple meaning of the stories and commandments.²⁹ In his introduction to ‘Aqedat yiẓḥaq, Arama pointed out that traditionally Jewish exegetes were concerned with grammar and the simple meaning of Scripture but that they neglected the deeper meaning of the Bible.³⁰ Arama set out to correct this problem by writing sermons and commentaries in a decidedly different style.

When Abravanel, Arama, and others searched enthusiastically for religious and ethical content, they found it in abundance. These scholars were anti-materialists and ruralists.³¹ They believed that Judaism presented an alternative to the false gods of acquisitiveness, who, as they saw it, exerted powerful control over Jews in late medieval Spain. They perceived Spain as increasingly cursed after the violent persecutions and forced conversions of 1391.³² They elaborated this view not only in response to the Jews’ grim fate—the events of 1391 would roil Iberian Jewry for the next hundred years—but also in terms of Spanish mismanagement of land and other natural resources. One notable feature of the tragic events of that year was that so many of its massacres were directed against urban Jews; once the violence subsided, the restoration of property to former owners (or heirs) was extremely difficult.³³ As such, animosity toward cities was an understandable feature of Iberian Jewish intellectual life over the course of the next century. The challenges of their lives, and those of their embattled coreligionists, provided a structure through which Abravanel, Saba, and Arama framed their ideas.

This cadre of writers dichotomized many features of their society—from occupations to philosophical attitudes—into the natural and the artificial. In their scorn for the artificial and their celebration of the natural, they proposed a romantic and unrealistic plan: that Jews take up the profession most prized by their ancestral, biblical heroes: shepherding. They imagined shepherding as the best way to fulfill their spiritual and contemplative yearnings. Trapped in a binary between corrosive modernity and its artificial, unnatural lifestyles on the one hand and their escapist fantasies of salvation in rustic places on the other, they pondered humanity’s duty to the land and how God’s promises of reward and punishment were contingent upon human relationships to the earth and its bounty.

Fantasies about a return to the land were, at their core, merely that: fantasies. At a deeper psychological and cultural substratum, Spanish Jews of this generation who witnessed the development of agrarian capitalism may have longed for some sense of what Durkheim and scholars in his wake call organic solidarity.³⁴ The lettered protagonists of this book inveighed against the mores of their brethren, both before the Expulsion and after. Perhaps predictably, their descendants were fated to fall into the same materialist traps in Italy and the Ottoman Empire that their forebears so eloquently warned them about. For example, in the summer of 1495, Abravanel took refuge for a few months on the Mediterranean island of Corfu, then under Venetian control. There were a number of Sephardic exiles on Corfu, and the scene was not a heartening one. In his commentary on the Ethics of the Fathers, Abravanel painted a grim picture of Spanish exiles’ comportment and lamented that the refugees neglect eternal values and are interested in temporal affairs only, like dissolute slaves. They spend all their days either in diligent pursuit of money and the comforts they desire … or in the ways of the sinful, in the company of the lightheaded [Ps. 1:1]. They breathe forth falsehoods [Prov. 6:19], and play games with dice, and they band together with irreverence. And as for the work of the Lord [Isa. 5:12], which is the beginning of His way [Prov. 8:22] and the gift of His Torah, they see not even in their dreams.³⁵

The idealization of rural life and concomitant scorn for cities that are prominent features not only of Abravanel’s work but of that of his peers are worthy of our attention. For their ideas about land use, wealth acquisition, and property represent a component of their political thought—in the broadest sense of that term. Most scholars of premodern Jewish political thought rely on the explication of a restricted corpus of biblical texts: Exodus 18:13–27, in which Jethro criticizes Moses for acting as Israel’s sole judge; Deuteronomy 17 and its permittance of a form of modified kingship as Israelites enter the Land of Israel; and 1 Samuel 8, Samuel’s warnings about the evils of kingship.³⁶ My interest lies not in scriptural texts that serve as obvious hooks for political philosophy to be draped upon but rather on biblical stories and myths that helped fifteenth-century writers delve deeper into what they saw as the natural essence of humankind. Angst about cities and paeans to the country, after all, mask the idealization of a world, remote in time (or in space), in which, to quote Raymond Williams, one is not necessarily a stranger and an agent, but can be a member, a discoverer, in a shared source of life.³⁷ As scholars of early modern intellectual life have long known, religion played a key role in the development of a taste for country life and the romanticizations those tastes represent: for many writers faith was no mere defense mechanism against a corrupt world; it was an open gateway to paradise before the Fall.³⁸ Jewish ideas about rural redoubts have barely been examined at all.

Though sacred texts constitute one important source from which late medieval Sephardic Jews drew their ideas, there was another body of literature nearly as compelling: classical Greek and Latin works, especially those which later scholars have classified as primitivist.³⁹ Primitivist ideas come in a variety of colors, several of which found their way onto the palettes of Abravanel, Saba, and Arama, who applied them to varying degrees in their works. One common cluster of ideas is known as chronological primitivism, which is characterized by notions of a Golden Age found in the works of Hesiod, Ovid, Vergil, and Lucian. For the purposes of Arama, Saba, and Abravanel, the importance of these writers pales in significance when compared to another strain in classical literature: Stoicism, chiefly the form expounded by Seneca in his Epistulae Morales, whose importance to Iberian intellectuals cannot be overestimated.⁴⁰ Thanks to the pioneering works of Gutwirth, Motis Dolader, Cohen-Skalli, and Nelson Nevoa we know that fifteenth-century Iberian Jews were steeped in this literature.⁴¹ Isaac Abravanel cited some of these authors—especially Ovid, Vergil, and Seneca.⁴² Although explicit citations are somewhat limited, all three of this book’s protagonists allude to and weave this thread of classical thought into their Hebrew Bible commentaries.

Understandably, many scholarly accounts of Jewish intellectual life in this period draw their heat from the trauma of the 1492 Expulsion.⁴³ This book does not. Although my analysis does not deny the dramatic effects of the uprooting of a millennial community from its native land, it is not a study of the upheavals of expulsion. There are plenty of those.⁴⁴ The Land Is Mine examines how a learned, cultured, insightful group of Sephardic Jews responded to changes in late medieval Spanish economy and society. Though they may have seen the Expulsion as a culmination of those changes (rather than an aberration), their view of economy and society was not exclusively shaped by the tragedy of 1492. Many of those economic and social shifts had to do with changing attitudes toward land, particularly urbanization and the conversion of large swathes of Iberia from farmland to pasture. To these commentators, land was the key setting for meaningful human action and morality. As we will see, the dominant mores of the fifteenth century that stressed accumulation and ostentation were liable to ferocious castigation by gifted writers such as Abravanel, Arama, and Saba.

For these authors and a few of their peers, land was both a real concern and an interpretive lens through which they viewed the Bible and evaluated human conduct. While historians and literary scholars of the medieval and early modern world have long paid attention to the importance of earthly concerns, both economic and intellectual, historians of the Jews have lagged behind.⁴⁵ Scholars of the Jewish past are still largely under the spell of a narrative according to which, from the institution of the kharaj (land tax) in the early Umayyad Caliphate through their near genocide in the twentieth century (or at least their pioneering efforts to make the deserts of Palestine bloom), Jews were removed from the land, a form of alienation that was both legislated by non-Jewish authorities and accepted by an ethnic-religious group that preferred the advantages of urban life to the exigencies of living off the land.⁴⁶

In truth, throughout the period this book covers (as well as before and after), some Jews lived on the land and off its produce. Many others owned property, managed land, and oversaw laborers. It should hardly be surprising that land was central to Spanish Jewish commentators: their scriptural analysis was shaped by lived concerns as much as by theological abstractions. Sephardi Jewish biblical commentaries, with their emphasis on land, demonstrate the historically contingent nature of premodern Jewish scriptural exegesis. While these authors may not have formulated an environmental ethic, they certainly knew that environment mattered. There’s no greater proof of this than the fact that they returned to agrarian issues again and again in their commentaries on Judaism’s most sacred text.

Major Figures and Their Works

Abraham Saba, a Castilian preacher and exegete, wrote his main works in Portugal between 1492 and 1497. These include his commentaries on the Pentateuch, Ẓeror ha-Mor (A Bundle of Myrrh);⁴⁷ on the Five Scrolls (Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and Esther); and on the rabbinic text Pirqe ’avot.⁴⁸ Like many Castilian Jews, Saba chose exile in Portugal rather than undertake the longer, more expensive, and more dangerous voyages to southern Italy or the Ottoman Empire.⁴⁹ Though we do not know much about his early life, there is evidence that he lived in Zamora for approximately eight years prior to the Expulsion.⁵⁰ His occupation is unknown, though he did preach and may have earned his living doing so.⁵¹

The text of Saba’s commentary on the Pentateuch that we possess, from surviving manuscripts to the first sixteenth-century edition (1522) to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century reprintings, is a mere abridgment of what he originally wrote.⁵² After the Portuguese Edict of Expulsion was issued in 1496, Saba stashed many of his works, a number of books that I had composed, beneath the trunk of a large olive tree outside of Porto.⁵³ He then departed the kingdom, traveling by sea to North Africa and alighting at Portuguese-controlled Arzila. Soon thereafter he made his way to El Qsar el Kebir, where he reconstructed his Pentateuch commentary from memory.⁵⁴ From 1498 he lived mainly in Fez, and from there he may have gone to Adrianople—or perhaps elsewhere in Turkey. There is competing evidence that he lived his final days in northern Italy, at Verona.⁵⁵

Ẓeror ha-Mor has not received extensive scholarly attention. As Abraham Gross points out, Saba’s work has been overlooked for a number of reasons, including that exegesis modeled as sermons attracts less attention.⁵⁶ Saba’s commentaries may have been intended to guide preachers: at the beginning of his work on Deuteronomy he announced his plan to structure the work around a topic (nos’e) and dictum (ma’amar).⁵⁷ Saba states that he was focused above all on peshat (the plain meaning of the text), followed by midrashic interpretations, as well as esoteric ones.⁵⁸ Saba’s commentaries are digressive and feature extensive wordplay.⁵⁹ Ẓeror ha-Mor also draws from, and makes reference to, the contemporary realities of Saba’s life. As Gross observes, any preacher’s commentary is more likely than that of an exegete to be closely related to contemporary reality.⁶⁰ This indebtedness to contemporary reality is a prime reason Ẓeror ha-Mor is a rich mine for Sephardi perspectives on issues of the day, including land use, and the moral valences that underlay Scripture’s presentation of natural setting.

Another preacher whose work reflects the world in which it was written is Isaac Arama. Born in Zamora, the same city where Saba spent the years immediately preceding the Expulsion, Arama wrote one of the best-known scriptural commentaries of his generation: ‘Aqedat yiẓḥaq (Binding of Isaac).⁶¹ At an unknown date, Arama left Zamora for Tarragona in Aragon—a kingdom with far fewer Jews than Castile.⁶² Given the language with which Arama described Zamora, he must have felt at home there. He called Zamora the place of my desire [Ps. 107:30] and my resting place, fair in situation, in the uttermost parts of the north (Ps. 48:3). But Arama seemed no less fond of his new home, musing that God brought me here to a peaceful habitation [Isa. 33:20], the kingdom of Aragon, the pleasant and enjoyable Tarragona. His original plan was to open a yeshiva (academy), but he could not secure the requisite funds. Characteristically, he chose a natural metaphor to describe this dearth of available capital: Tarragona was not a place of cattle (Num. 32:1).⁶³

Unable to find employment as head of a Jewish academy, he began to preach. From his own testimony he was quite successful: he claimed in the author’s introduction to ‘Aqedat yiẓḥaq, I have become rich! I have gotten power! (Hos. 12:9). Apparently his audience in Tarragona wanted more—and livelier—preaching. Some Jews in Tarragona had attended church services and heard Christian preachers. From Arama’s own description, as well as outside evidence, it is unclear whether or not the Jews of Tarragona were forced to listen to conversionary sermons. Arama is unabashed in noting that some of the Jewish attendees took delight in the remarks of Christian preachers: they heard their words, which were pleasing.⁶⁴ Arama was inspired by this emphasis on preaching in contemporary Christian culture and set out to explicate Scripture to his fellow Jews in a manner that would similarly engage them. By some measures he succeeded: one scholar has called Arama the most creative exegete and preacher in late medieval Spain.⁶⁵ As Bernard Septimus, one of Arama’s most perceptive students, observes: the spiritual needs of Arama’s congregants reflected the challenge of a learned and eloquent Christian culture.⁶⁶ Septimus also argues that Arama’s audience craved philosophy: Arama reminds us that a fundamental impulse to philosophical preaching came from below.⁶⁷ And perhaps not only from below: philosophical studies were so widespread in Sephardic yeshivot that Yoel Marciano has deployed the term "philosophical yeshiva" to describe the phenomenon whereby Torah study and philosophical pursuits were undertaken in tandem.⁶⁸

The Zamoran rabbi’s exegetical corpus comprises ‘Aqedat yiẓḥaq, an exposition of the Torah divided into 105 portals, as well as commentaries on the Five Scrolls and Proverbs.⁶⁹ ‘Aqedat yiẓḥaq has been called an elaborately reworked record of oral sermons delivered by Arama in the synagogue.⁷⁰ Each portal is divided into two parts: an investigation (derishah) of a particular subject in the Torah, such as the soul, prophecy, or repentance, and a commentary (perishah) according to Scripture’s plain sense, in which difficulties are raised and resolved. Compared to the relatively straightforward, lucid writing of Abravanel, Saba, and Caro, Arama’s prose style is intricate and borders on the baroque.⁷¹ With regard to content and purpose, it has been said that Arama aims to repel