I HAVE ALWAYS KNOWN THAT THE words of others help me to think. Quotations (and misquotations), asides, seemingly dead ends, explorations and rummagings, retracing one’s steps and leaping ahead—all seem to me valid instruments for inquiry. I sympathize both with Little Red Riding Hood’s inclination to leave the set path and with Dorothy’s decision to follow the Yellow Brick Road. My library, in spite of its thematic and alphabetical arrangements, is less a place of order than a benevolent chaos, like one of those magical flea markets where you find treasures that only you can recognize. Anything you need is there, but you won’t know what it is until you see it. Recognition is nine-tenths of fulfillment.
Since as long as I can remember, I have believed that my library held every answer to every question. Or if not the answer, then at least a better phrasing of the question that would impel me along the path of understanding. Sometimes I will look for a specific author or book or sympathetic spirit, but often I let chance guide me: chance is an excellent librarian. Readers in the Middle Ages used Virgil’s Aeneid as a divination tool, asking a question and opening the volume in search of revelation; Robinson Crusoe does much the same with the Bible to find guidance in his long moments of despair. Every book can be, for the right reader, an oracle, responding on occasion even to questions unasked, as if putting words to what Joseph Brodsky called “a silent beat.” The vast oracle of the Internet is less useful to me; probably because I’m a poor navigator of cyberspace, its answers are either too literal or too banal.
In my library, at the exact height of my arm’s reach, are the works of Brodsky. In the early sixties, Brodsky, accused of some imaginary plot by the KGB, was condemned twice to a psychiatric asylum and later to internal exile in a prison camp in the north of Russia, where he was made to work on a state farm in temperatures of below thirty degrees Celsius. In spite of the terrible conditions, and thanks to a benevolent supervisor, he was allowed to send and receive letters, and also to write (he’d later say) “a fair amount” of poetry. Friends sent him books. Four poets became essential for him because of what he called their “uniqueness of soul”: Robert Frost, Marina Tsevetaeva, Constantin Cavafy, and W. H. Auden. Auden had once said that Frost’s favorite image was that of an abandoned house fallen into ruin. In a conversation with Brodsky, the critic Solomon Volkov reminded him that whereas in European poetry a ruin is usually associated with war or pillaged nature, in Frost it became “a metaphor for courage, an image of man’s hopeless struggle for survival.” Without reducing the image to an explanation, Brodsky agreed with Volkov’s reading, but he preferred this knowledge to lie dormant, not immediately apparent. Brodsky distrusted any account of the events surrounding the creative act: the text should be allowed to speak alone, in an amorous entanglement with the reader. “Circumstances,” he said, “may recur—prison, persecution, exile—but the result, in the sense of art, is unrepeatable. Dante was not the only one, after all, to be exiled from Florence.”
Years later, after being himself exiled from Russia, sitting outdoors one winter in the Venice he loved, he read the mazes of the city built on water as he had read his poets in the frozen Russian north: as something “in which life speaks to man.” Brodsky wrote, “The city, while words are at it, / is akin to attempts to salvage notes from a silent beat.”
“O where are you going?” said reader to rider,
“That valley is fatal when furnaces burn,
Yonder’s the midden whose odours will madden,
That gap is the grave where the tall return.”
—W. H. AUDEN, Five Songs, V
Often, the most difficult questioning begins with inspired guesswork. Arriving at the foot of Mount Purgatory, Virgil warns Dante that he must not be curious about everything because not everything lies within human ken.
Mad is he who hopes that our reason
may travel along the endless path
that one substance in three persons takes.
Be content, you human race, with quia:
For if you’d been able to see all
Mary would not have needed to give birth;
And you have seen the fruitless yearning of those who
Might have succeeded in contenting their desire
Given to them eternally to mourn.
To clarify his point, Virgil adds, “I mean Aristotle, Plato too / and many others.” Then he bends his head and remains silent, because he too is one of those who tried to content his desire.1
Scholasticism insisted on the acceptance of consequences: this tenet was deemed enough to offer substance for thought to the limited capacities of the human mind. Aquinas made the distinction clear between wanting to know why and wanting to know what. “Demonstration is two-fold,” he wrote in his Summa Theologica. “The one demonstrates by means of the cause, and is called propter quid . . . the other by means of the effect, and is called quia.” In other words, don’t ask why something exists, but merely start from the because and explore its existence. In the early years of the seventeenth century, Francis Bacon would take the opposite view on human inquiry: “If a man will begin with certainties,” Bacon argued, “he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.”2
For inquiring, for reflecting, for reasoning out, for demonstrating, language is obviously the essential tool. Immediately after his exile, as if the loss of his world demanded the reassurance that he still possessed his language, Dante began to write De vulgari eloquentia, his treatise on the vernacular tongue and its use in lyric poetry. Boccaccio, as we have mentioned, relates that the Commedia was perhaps begun in Latin and then changed to Florentine Italian. De vulgari eloquentia, perhaps because Dante felt that a scholarly instrument allowed him better to explore the language deemed vulgar (“of the people”), is written in the elegant Latin of the Scholastics. For several centuries, the text was scarcely read: only three medieval manuscripts survive, and it was not printed until 1577.
De vulgari eloquentia begins with the scandalous statement that the language of the people, learned by infants at their parents’ knee, is nobler than the artificial and legislated language learned in school. To justify his claim, Dante traces the history of language from the biblical story to his own time. The first language of the world, Dante says, a God-given gift that allowed humans to communicate with one another, was Hebrew; the first speaker, Adam. After the arrogant attempt to build the Tower of Babel, that single primordial language shared by all people was, as a punishment, divided into many, thus preventing communication and causing confusion. The punishment endures: language separates us not only from our contemporaries in other nations but also from our ancestors, who spoke differently from the way we speak ourselves.
Having reached the Heaven of Fixed Stars, Dante now encounters the soul of Adam, who tells him that “not the tasting of the tree / was of itself the cause of so great a banishment / but the overstepping of the mark.” Dante then asks Adam the questions that his contemporaries had long been troubled by: How long was his sojourn in Eden? How long did he afterwards live on earth? How much time did he spend in Limbo before Christ recalled him? And finally, what was the language Adam spoke in Eden? To this last question, Adam answers:
The tongue I spoke had all died out
Before the unaccomplishable task
Was by the people of Nimrod undertaken:
Never did our mind effect something
(For all human pleasure is renewed
As is the sky) that lasts unchanged forever.
It is Nature’s gift that humans speak;
But if this way or that, Nature allows
For you to do according to your choice.3
Dante’s ideas regarding the origins of language have changed here since De vulgari eloquentia. In the treatise, he had argued that it was God who both empowered Adam to speak and gave him the language to do so. In the Commedia, Adam says that while the gift of speech was indeed bestowed upon him, it was he who created the language he spoke, a first human language that became extinct before Babel. But what was that primordial language? Giving examples of what God was called before the Fall and after, Adam uses Hebrew terms: first “J,” pronounced jah, then “El,” meaning “the Mighty.”4 The reader must conclude therefore that the language spoken in Eden was Hebrew.
In De vulgari eloquentia, Dante attempts to justify the preeminence of Hebrew. God had bestowed upon Adam a forma locutionis, a “linguistic form.” “By this linguistic form spoke all his descendants up to the construction of the Tower of Babel, which has been interpreted as the ‘tower of confusion.’ This was the linguistic form inherited by the Sons of Eber, who were called Hebrews after him. This remained with them exclusively after the confusion [of tongues], so that our Savior, who because of the human side of His nature had to be born of them, was able to use a language not of confusion but of grace. That was how the Hebrew language was devised by the first being endowed with speech.”5
But the shattered remains of that first language, the shreds of linguistic forms inherited by Adam’s descendants, were insufficient to express the thoughts and revelations that humans conceived and wished to transmit. It was therefore necessary to build, out of the language available to us (in Dante’s case, Florentine Italian), a system that might allow a gifted poet to approximate the lost perfection and counteract the curse of Babel.
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, words are the beginning of everything. According to Talmudic commentators, two thousand years before the creation of heaven and earth, God brought into being seven essential things: his divine throne; paradise, placed to his right; hell, to his left; the celestial sanctuary, in front; a jewel with the name of the Messiah engraved upon it; a voice calling out from the darkness, “Return, ye children of men!”; and the Torah, written in black fire on white. The Torah was the first of these seven and it was the Torah that God consulted before creating the world. With some reluctance, because it feared the sinfulness of the world’s creatures, the Torah consented to the creation. Learning of the divine purpose, the letters of the alphabet descended from the august crown, where they had been written with a pen of flames, and one by one the letters said to God, “Create the world through me! Create the world through me!” From the twenty-six letters, God chose beth, the first letter in the word Blessed, and thus it was that through beth the world came into being. The commentators note that the only letter that did not put forward its claims was the modest aleph; to reward its humility, God gave aleph the first place in the Decalogue.6 Many years later, Saint John the Evangelist, somewhat impatiently, summed up the lengthy procedure with the declaration “In the beginning was the Word.” From this ancient conviction stems the metaphor of God as author and the world as book: a book we try to read and in which we are also written.
Because the word of God is supposed to be all-encompassing and perfect, no part of Scripture can be ambiguous or fortuitous. Every letter, the order of every letter, the placement of every word must have a meaning. To better attempt to read and interpret the word of God, sometime around the first century C.E. the Jews of Palestine and Egypt, perhaps under the influence of Persian religion, began to develop a system of interpretation of the Torah and the Talmud, the Kabbalah, or “tradition,” a term appropriated ten centuries later by the mystics and theosophists who became known as Kabbalists. The Mishnah, a digest of the oral Torah compiled by Rabbi Judah the Prince around the second century C.E., condemned human curiosity beyond certain set limits: “Whoever ponders on four things, it were better for him if he had not come into the world: what is above, what is below, what was before time, and what will be hereafter.”7 The Kabbalah circumvents such condemnation by concentrating on God’s word itself, which necessarily contains all these things in every one of its letters.
In the mid-thirteenth century, a brilliant student of the Kabbalah, the Spanish scholar Abraham Abulafia, inspired perhaps by encounters with Sufi masters during his extensive travels, developed through ecstatic experiences a technique of letter combination and divination by numbers which he called “The Way of Names.” Abulafia believed that his method would allow scholars to set down in writing their interpretations and meditations by an almost infinite combination of the letters of the alphabet. Abulafia compared this to the variations played in a musical piece (a simile dear to Sufi teaching): the difference between the letters and the music was that while music is apprehended through the body and the soul, the letters are perceptible only through the soul, the eyes being, as the ancient metaphor has it, the windows of the soul.8
For example, Abulafia systematically combined the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, aleph, with the four letters of the Tetragrammaton, God’s unpronounceable name, YHWH, obtaining four columns of fifty words each. Seven centuries later, in a hemisphere and on a continent Abulafia could not have suspected existed, Jorge Luis Borges imagined a library that would contain all these combinations in a countless series of volumes of identical format and number of pages; another name for this library is “Universe.”9
Abulafia argued that in Hebrew, which, like Dante, he considered the mother of all languages, there was a conventional correspondence, established by God for his prophets, between sounds and the things those sounds named. Because of this, Abulafia mocked those who suggested that an infant bereft of human contact would learn to speak Hebrew spontaneously; this, Abulafia argued, would be impossible because no one would have taught the child the semiotic conventions. He lamented that the Jews had forgotten the language of their forefathers, and looked passionately forward to the coming of the Messiah, when that knowledge would be restored to them by the generosity of God.
A great admirer of the twelfth-century Spanish master Maimonides, Abulafia saw his own work, in particular his Life in the Other World and Treasure of the Hidden Eden, as a sequel to Maimonides’ celebrated Guide of the Perplexed, a manual for students of Aristotelian philosophy puzzled by the apparent contradictions between Greek philosophy and biblical texts. To solve these, Abulafia eschewed the traditional techniques of the Kabbalah, based on the sefirot (the powers or potencies of the Godhead) and the mitzvoth (the commands or precepts in the Torah): for Abulafia, our understanding of God comes through the interactions among the intellect, that which is intelligible, and the act of achieving intelligence itself.10 This dynamic triangle allows our curiosity to pursue its endless quest.
For Abulafia, pleasure is the principal fruit of the mystical experience, and also its essential purpose, more important than the attainment of intellectual answers. In this he notoriously strays from both Aristotle and Maimonides, who believed that reaching the superior good was the desired goal. Using a fortuitous etymology between the Hebrew words ben, “son,” and binah, “understanding” or “intellect,” Abulafia argued that the conception of ideas was equal to sexual conception.
Dante, attempting to reconcile certain Epicurean principles with the notion of voluptas, or erotic pleasure, in the divine vision, has the Roman poet Statius guide him and Virgil through the upper reaches of Purgatory, where, on the sixth terrace, before reaching a tree of strange and forbidden fruit, they see how “a clear water fell from the high rock / and spread itself above over the leaves.”11 This is the water that will purify the waters of Parnassus, the spring of poetry from which Statius says he drank when he discovered the works of Virgil. Statius, who is purging on Mount Purgatory the excessive prodigality shown throughout his life, has said (without knowing that he is speaking to Virgil) that the Aeneid “was a mother / to me and was my nurse in poetry.”12 Virgil looks sternly at Dante to keep him from revealing the poet’s identity, but a smile on Dante’s lips makes Statius ask what the joke is. Virgil gives his ward consent to speak, and Dante tells Statius that he is standing in the presence of the author of the Aeneid himself. Then Statius (because shades can be overcome by emotion, too) stoops to embrace the poet’s feet. Virgil stops him, saying:
“Brother
Don’t, for you’re a shade and see a shade.
And Statius apologizes: such was his love for Virgil, he explains, that he forgot that they were both nothing, “treating a shade as a solid thing.” For Dante, who like Statius, reveres Virgil as the “glory and light” of all poetry and confesses to the “long care and great love / that made me search out your book,” the intellectual joy achieved in reading must now be transmuted into another, higher pleasure.13
Abulafia’s disciples carried his work to centers of Jewish culture outside the Spanish peninsula, mainly to Italy, which became, in the thirteenth century, an intermittent stronghold of Kabbalistic studies.14 Abulafia himself had visited Italy several times and lived there for more than a decade: we know that in 1280 he visited Rome with the intention of converting the pope. Dante may have learned of Abulafia’s ideas through the learned debates that took place in various cities after Abulafia’s visits, especially in the intellectual circles of Bologna. But, as Umberto Eco remarks, it is not likely that before the Renaissance a Christian poet would have wanted to acknowledge the influence of a Jewish thinker.15
Two centuries later, the Neoplatonists of the Renaissance, who would further explore Abulafia’s combinatory arts in the construction of their memory machines, would also rescue Abulafia’s belief in the importance of pleasure—in particular orgasmic pleasure achieved in both mystical and intellectual experiences—and also his notion of the intellect being an early intermediary between the Maker and his creatures. For Dante, the orgasmic experience takes place at the end of his voyage, when his mind is “battered” by the thrust of the ineffable ultimate vision; the role of the intermediary belongs to the poet himself.16
If the gift of linguistic forms that God gave Adam coincides, as Abulafia imagined, with God’s own linguistic gift in the act of creation, then it is in the act of artistic creation that the poet puts into action the powers bestowed by the shared gift. A work of art is, no doubt, as Plato judged it, an imitation that tells lies because it provides “false images”; however, these lies are for Dante “non falsi errori,” “not false falsehoods.” In other words, poetic truth.17
Cima da Conegliano, Il leone di San Marco (The Lion of Saint Mark). (Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice; courtesy of the Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali e del turismo)
An example of such truth elicited by “false images” is provided by a large painting by Cima da Conegliano dating from 1506–8, now in Venice. It depicts, against a landscape of tower-capped hills and the walls of a seaport, the lion of Saint Mark, standing on both land and water, thus reflecting Venice’s amphibious nature as Stato da terra and Stato da mare.18 With multicolored wings, his right front paw on an open book, the beast is framed by four saints: facing the lion’s haloed features are Saint John the Baptist and Saint John the Evangelist; facing his rump, Saint Mary Magdalene and Saint Jerome. Far behind, at the foot of a cliff on which some of the buildings of a distant city are perched, is a turbaned rider on a white horse. The lion’s book is the Bible, its open pages showing the words with which, according to tradition, an angel greeted Mark when he first arrived in Venice: Pax tibi, Marce, Evangelista meus (Peace be with you, Mark, my evangelist). The saints are grouped in complementary pairs: John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene are the active ones, reading God’s word in the world; John the Evangelist and Jerome, each carrying a codex, are the contemplative ones who read God’s word in the books. The lion shares equally in both these readings.
Reading is a craft that can never be fully accomplished. Even if every syllable of a text were to be analyzed and interpreted to its fullest extent, the obstinate reader would still be left with the readings of those who preceded him or her and which, like the tracks of animals in the woods, form a new text whose narrative and meaning are also open to perusal. And even if this second reading were successful, there would still remain the text formed by the readings of those first readings, commentaries on the commentary and glosses of the gloss—and so on until the last vestige of meaning has been thoroughly examined. The end of a book is wishful thinking. Like Zeno’s demonstration of the impossibility of movement, the paradoxical truth that every reader must accept is that reading is an ever-ongoing but not infinite enterprise and that, on one inconceivably faraway afternoon, the last word of the last text will finally be read. In the eighteenth century, Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev, asked to explain why the first page of each of the treatises in the Babylonian Talmud was missing, answered that this was “because however many pages the studious man reads, he must never forget that he has not yet reached the very first page.”19 That tempting page still awaits us.
If the quest to find the first page has not been successful, it is not for want of trying. Sometime in the second half of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese philosopher Isaac Abravanel, who had settled in Spain, later to be exiled and make his exodus to Venice, strict in the principles of his learned reading, raised an unusual objection to Maimonides. In addition to reconciling Aristotle and the Bible, Maimonides sought to extract from the Torah’s sacred words the basic principles of Jewish belief.20 Shortly before his death in 1204, following a tradition of summary exegesis begun by Philo of Alexandria in the first century, he had expanded Philo’s list of the five core articles of faith to thirteen.21 Thus increased, these thirteen articles were to be used, according to Maimonides, as a test of allegiance to Judaism, separating true believers from the goyim. Abravanel, arguing against Maimonides’ dogma, remarked that since the Torah was a God-given whole from which no syllable could be dispensed, the attempt to read the sacred text in order to choose from it a series of axioms was disingenuous if not heretical. The Torah, Abravanel asserted, was complete unto itself and no single word of it was more or less important than any other. For Abravanel, even though the art of commentary was a permissible and even commendable accompaniment to the craft of reading, God’s word admitted no double entendres but manifested itself literally, in unequivocal terms. Abravanel was implicitly distinguishing between the Author as author and the reader as author. The reader’s job was not to edit, either mentally or physically, the sacred text but to ingest it whole, just as Ezekiel had ingested the book offered to him by the angel, and then to judge it either sweet or bitter, or both, and work from there.
Abravanel belonged to one of the oldest and most prestigious Jewish families of the Iberian Peninsula, which claimed to be descended from King David: his father served the Infante of Portugal as a financial adviser, and his son was Leon Hebreo, the author of the Neoplatonist classic Dialogues of Love, which the prince of Sansevero later printed in Naples. Abravanel was a voracious bookworm, and he pursued readings of the word of God, not just those written on tomes of parchment and paper, but also those inscribed in the vast book of the world. In the Jewish tradition, the notion that the natural world is the material manifestation of the word of God stems from an apparent scriptural contradiction. The book of Exodus states that after Moses received God’s commandments on Mount Sinai, he “came and told the people all the words of the Lord, and all the judgments, and all the people answered with one voice, and said, ‘All the words which the Lord hath said will we do.’ And Moses wrote all the words of the Lord” (24:3–4; see also Deuteronomy, Leviticus, and Numbers). But the Abot treatise in the Mishnah declares that “Moses received the Torah on Mount Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, the elders to the prophets, the prophets to the members of the Great Assembly” (1:1). How to hold together these statements since both must be true? Like Maimonides’ and Abulafia’s attempts to hold together Aristotelian philosophy and the Word of God, Abravanel pondered how the apparently contradictory divine texts could be reconciled.
In the first years of the ninth century there appeared a collection of biblical commentaries attributed to the second-century master Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, The Chapters of Rabbi Eliezer, which proposes an answer to the conundrum: “Moses spent forty days on the Mountain before the Lord, blessed be His name, as a student sits before his master, reading the precepts of the written Torah during the day and learning the precepts of the oral Torah during the night.”22 The Torah was thus presented as a double book, written and oral, the written Torah being the immutable core made of God’s words and bound in the book that came to be called the Bible, the oral Torah an ongoing dialogue between God and his creatures, set down in the commentaries of inspired teachers and materialized for all in the hills and rivers and woods of the world itself. In the seventeenth century, Baruch Spinoza recognized God’s double manifestation in the famous maxim: God sive natura, “God or [in other words] Nature.” For Spinoza, God and Nature were two editions of the same text.
Detail of the 1933 RCA building mosaic “Intelligence Awakening Mankind,” by Barry Faulkner, at Rockefeller Center, New York, showing “Thought” with “the Written Word” on one side and “the Spoken Word” on the other, a modern depiction of God’s oral and written books. (Photograph © Christopher Murphy. Reproduced by permission.)
Perhaps because Abravanel understood that our duty is strictly to read the text, not add to it our own words, the learned man of the world mistrusted the concept of divine inspiration and was skeptical of prophets. He preferred the philologist’s task of comparing different editions, and used his political and philosophical skills to decipher the book of the world in the light of the written Torah. Since God, by means of one of his curious instruments, the Catholic crown, had decreed the expulsion of Jews and Arabs from Spain and led him, Don Isaac Abravanel, into painful exile, he would profit from this adversity by transforming his enforced wanderings into an experience of learning: he would prepare himself to study the pages of God’s other volume as they now unfolded before him in time and space.
After disembarking in Venice in 1492, Abravanel applied his knowledge of Scripture to the new society that confronted him on every minor and major occasion. He asked himself, for instance, in the light of the Torah, how the doge’s government, given the lukewarm welcome he himself had experienced, could be compared to the brutal and exclusionary rule of the Catholic kings. Deuteronomy 17:14–20 set down the manner in which a ruler should be chosen in order to rule well; according to Abravanel, the Spanish king had disobeyed these sacred precepts. Ferdinand did not, as Deuteronomy instructed, “write in a book a copy of the law,” nor did he read it faithfully “all the days of his life, that he [might] learn to fear the Lord his God, by keeping all the words of this law and these statutes, and doing them.” Stretching his exegetical rule, Abravanel argued that, according to the Talmudic commentary of this passage, Jews were not obliged to be governed by a king or an emperor. However, if they chose to be, the monarch’s powers would certainly fall under the Deuteronomical limitations. King Ferdinand had evidently refused to comply with these. Therefore, Abravanel concluded, the Venetian doges were closer to the Torah’s law, and even though they manifestly disdained another Deuteronomical prohibition—that no ruler should “greatly multiply for himself silver and gold”—by and large it could be said that they submitted faithfully to the sumptuary regulations of the Venetian Republic.
Abravanel became the head of the exiled Jewish community in Venice, using his political skills to help his brethren. He was, above all, a faithful and exacting reader, a rationalist, a practical man, a scientific scholar confident enough even to criticize the “prophetic leanings” of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and he probably knew of Dante and his Commedia, since several Jewish scholars had read and discussed the poem in Rome, Bologna, and Venice. The scholar Yehuda Romano lectured on the Commedia to his community, and transliterated it into Hebrew script, and the poet Immanuel de Roma (who was perhaps Romano’s half-brother) attempted to write his own version from a Jewish perspective.23
The core of Jewish faith is the belief in the promised coming of the Messiah. Based on his close readings of the Torah and using his mathematical knowledge, Abravanel concluded that the Messiah would arrive in the year 1503 (a date postponed by Abravanel’s contemporary, the learned medical doctor Bonet de Lattes, to 1505). In this expectation Abravanel was to be disappointed: he died in 1508, without witnessing any of the marvels that were said to announce the Messiah’s arrival. A literalist to the end, he assumed that the error was in his own reading, never in the sacred texts from which his conclusions had been drawn. It may be supposed that, if anything, his failure confirmed his conviction concerning the dangers of exegetical temptation.
As so many times in the history of human intentions, a grand ambitious curiosity was overshadowed by aleatory failure. Abravanel’s struggle to restore hermeneutical confidence in the totality of the sacred texts and in the mirror of the world was forgotten in the light of his failure to date the Messiah’s coming. If he had not been able to accomplish the latter, what faith could anyone have in the former?
Abravanel had argued that the proper reading of the Torah was one in which reason and logic must prevail over poetic and visionary disquisitions. But within the ever-constraining limits of the ghetto walls, the Jews of Venice, who by 1552 were to number over nine hundred souls, longed for something more than a strict reading of the Talmud: they longed for a reading that would offer if not magical assistance at least magical hope. In the early twentieth century, Rainer Maria Rilke described the Venice ghetto as a self-contained city which, instead of spreading out by the sea, because of the constricted space the Jews were allowed, grew into the heavens like a new Babel, a place for storytelling. The stories they chose to tell were tales of magic.24
Rather than profit from the rigorous lessons of the lost master, the majority of the Jews preferred to recall his (however inexact) auguries. In order better to understand, to assist, or even to refute the failed predicted chronology, the Jews of Venice began to show a thirst for occult learning and ancient conjuring that might help them establish a new date for the certain coming, and a flood of Kabbalistic books, from apocalyptic visions to manuals of divination (such as those by Abulafia), flowed from the Venetian presses under the fluctuating tolerance of the Inquisition, which intermittently allowed and prohibited the printing of Jewish books.25
Among the many titles, the Talmud, above all, was considered a book of both natural and magical knowledge. Though in the Mishnah, Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki, known as Rashi, the greatest of all Talmudic scholars, had declared that magicians (mekhasheph) who performed a “real” act of magic were to be stoned, the text distinguished clearly between the learning of the occult craft and its performance. Close to his death in 120, Rabbi Eliezer, wise in even the most humble things but forbidden to teach them for having disobeyed the rulings of the Sanhedrin (the council of Jewish leaders), bemoaned like Faust that all his knowledge was now useless. “I know,” he said, “three hundred rulings—and some say, three thousand rulings—concerning the planting of cucumbers, and no man has ever asked me about it, except for Akiva ben Yoseph. On one occasion, I and he were walking down the road: he said to me, Master, teach me about the planting of cucumbers. I said one thing, and the whole field was filled with cucumbers. He said, Master, you have taught me how to plant them, now teach me how to uproot them. I said one thing, and they were all gathered in one place.” On this magical performance, the Talmud comments: “It says, ‘You shall not learn to do’ (Deuteronomy 18:9)—to do you may not learn, but you may learn to understand and to teach.”26 The Talmud underscores the difference between the act imagined and the act performed, between what is permissible in literature and the imagination but not permissible in life.
To reflect on such weighty matters, access to the Talmud was of the essence: the Shulkhan Arukh, or Code of Jewish Law, demands that time be set aside for frequent study of the Talmud. Prior to the invention of printing, yeshiva students either themselves copied individual tractates or commissioned scribes for the task, but “the system was slow and prone to error.”27 A solution for this problem needed to be found.
Venice, in the early years of the sixteenth century, had already become the undisputed center of publishing in Europe, both because of the skill of its printers and because of the extent of its book trade. Though the first Hebrew book printed in Venice, Ya’akov ben Asher’s Arba’ ah Turim (The Four Orders), had issued from the press of Rabbi Meshullam Cusi and sons, the Venetian printing business was almost exclusively in the hands of gentiles such as Daniel Bomberg, Pietro Bragadin, and Marco Giustiniani, all of whom employed Jewish artisans when printing Hebrew books “to compose the letters and assist in the corrections.”28 In spite of this, what mattered was not who printed the books but the mere fact that Hebrew books were now easily available, and in this sense Gutenberg’s invention changed the relationship of the Jews to their books. Until the late fifteenth century, few Jewish communities could afford to have a good library, and much effort was spent on editing faulty copies to obtain correct texts. With the invention of the press, printers throughout Europe quickly recognized that there was a market for books in Hebrew not only in the Jewish communities but also among the gentiles. Numerous editions of the Hebrew Bible, the prayer book, the rabbinical commentaries, and works of Jewish theology and philosophy poured forth and reached every class of reader, facilitating among Jews the obligatory study of the Torah. A hundred and forty Hebrew volumes were printed during the incunabula period (before 1501) in Europe until Venice established its remarkable supremacy in the international market.29
Arguably, the masterpiece of the Venetian Hebrew book production was the first complete edition of the Babylonian Talmud, printed some fifty years after Abravanel’s death, by Daniel Bomberg. Born Daniel van Bomberghen and originally from Antwerp, Bomberg established himself in Venice in 1516, where he translated his name into Hebrew and, during his three decades in Venice (he returned to his hometown in 1548, dying there a year later), produced some of the best and most important editions of Jewish books, among them the Biblia rabbinica (the Hebrew Bible with translations into Aramaic and commentaries by noted medieval scholars), which he astutely dedicated to Pope Leo X. Though Bomberg was, above all, a businessman and published only what he believed would sell, he was also a man driven by what some scholars have called “missionary intentions,” a bookmaker who loved the work in which he was engaged. Probably to divert the censors, together with the Jewish books Bomberg printed in 1539 an anti-Semitic tract, Itinera deserti de judaicis disciplini (The Desert Wanderings of the Jewish People), by Gerard Veltwyck. It was his only anti-Semitic publication.30
Assisted by a friar, Felice da Prato, Bomberg began his catalogue of books printed in Hebrew characters with the Pentateuch, followed by a selection of the Prophets and later by both the Babylonian and the Palestinian Talmuds, including the eleventh-century commentaries of Rashi. For his edition of the Talmud, Bomberg employed a group of Jewish and non-Jewish scholars assembled for this purpose, thus setting a model for editing Jewish works that would later be followed by most other printing houses in Europe.
The Babylonian Talmud, printed in sets of twelve volumes, was a gigantic enterprise that took Bomberg three years to complete. Bomberg disliked ornamentation: the title page of each volume lacks any hint of a family crest or printer’s mark. The title page of the Pesahim tractate (in the third volume) reads:31
TRACTATE PESAHIM PESACH RICHON AND SHENI WITH THE COMMENTARY of Rashi, Tosafot, Piskei Tosafot, and the Asheri free from all impediments and precise for the purpose of study. As the hand of the Lord has favoured us, for this has never been printed, may the Lord enable us to complete all six orders as is the intent of Daniel Bomberg from Antwerp, in whose house this was printed, here in VENICE
Though a number of individual Talmudic tractates had appeared earlier in other cities, this was the first time that the entire corpus was printed as a scholarly whole. Bomberg relied for his text on the only extant manuscript, known as the Munich codex, of 1334. The layout of Bomberg’s edition is remarkable both for its efficiency and its originality: the text of the Talmud itself appears in square Hebrew type in the center of each page, Rashi’s commentary is on the inside margin, and the tosafot, or “additions” (other critical remarks by various commentators), are on the outer, both set in the semi-cursive Gothic lettering known as “rabbinical” or “rashi.” All subsequent editions of the Babylonian Talmud followed Bomberg’s layout, maintaining the disposition of text and commentary, as well as the exact position of words and letters.
It has been suggested by the French scholar Marc-Alain Ouaknin that the layout for Bomberg’s Talmud was inspired by the layout of Venice itself; it could also be said that it was inspired by the position of the ghetto within the city, a Jewish core nestled within Venice, the city itself boxed in by land and water, a frame within a frame within a frame. Less than a decade after Abravanel’s death, on 29 March 1516, the Jews of Venice were ordered for the first time to stay within the walls of the ghetto. To prevent them from “roaming about at night,” the two gates were locked at midnight by a couple of guards whose salaries the Jews themselves were obliged to pay. The prescribed enclosure is already notable in a perspective map of Venice printed in 1500 by Jacopo de’ Barbari: it shows the ghetto enclosed by canals and rows of buildings, like an island of text in the middle of an annotated page.32
Pages from Daniel Bomberg’s Talmud (Venice, 1519–23). (Photograph courtesy of Sotheby’s, Inc., and the Valmadonna Library Trust ©)
Like every visitor to Venice, Bomberg must have been struck by its inlaid, convoluted structure. Whether inspired by the city itself and its web of canals and islands or by the enclosed ghetto seen as a microcosm of the larger urban design, it seems likely that, consciously or unconsciously, the printer’s imagination mirrored on the page the mazelike contours of the place in which he had settled. Turn a map of Venice and its ghetto sideways and something akin to a page of the Talmud appears, its clean lines twisted and broken like a picture in a dream. The singular, unreal city that every visitor discovers is thus echoed in a book that is, like the city, a commentary on God’s work: the Talmud glossing the Torah mirrors Venice glossing the book of nature. Just as the Talmud surrounds with its learned annotations the word delivered to Moses for the people, the Venice of fire and air is surrounded by God’s earth and water, which gloss the flaming castles floating between land and sea with the responding breath of an enraptured speaker.
Jacopo de’ Barbari, “Perspective Plan of Venice,” 1500. (Palazzo Ducale, Venice, Cameraphoto Arte, Venice/Art Resource, NY)
G. K. Chesterton once remarked that “perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon.”33 On the scale of the stars or of the universe, God’s book is at the same time unique and repetitive, and we, its footnotes, try to follow suit, so that while the invisible and singular core of Venice is forever framed by a cacophony of commentaries— geographical and architectural, poetic and artistic, political and philosophical— the Talmud (aided by Gutenberg’s invention) reproduces its established wake of commentaries again and again, in copy after printed copy and in the very design of each of its pages. And because no design is fortuitous, both the layout of Venice and the layout of its Talmud allow readers to test their intuitive intelligence and cultural memory by means of these cartographies.
As any visitor to the city knows, maps are useless in Venice. Only the repeated experience of its pavements and bridges, its campi and glimmering facades, its Arsenal guarded by stone lions from different ages that Dante must have seen allow a small degree of knowledge of its meandering coherence. Getting to know Venice entails losing yourself in it as the Romantics spoke of losing yourself in a book. True Venice connoisseurs, if led blindfolded through the city, will always know where they find themselves, recognizing by touch or smell or sound, reading the city with their mind’s eye, its every twist and every turn.
The Talmud too is mapless, and yet a constant and wise reader will know what lies on every page, both through memory and force of habit. In a yeshiva reading test known as Shass Pollak (from Shass, an abbreviation of “Talmud” in Hebrew, and Pollak, “Polish”), the Talmud is opened at random and a pin is placed on a word. The reader undergoing the examination is asked what word is in that same place on any other page. Once the reader has given his answer, the pin is pressed through the book until it reaches the page mentioned. If the reader is a true scholar, someone who has “lost himself in the Talmud” and is therefore capable of visualizing the whole text in his head, the answer proves to be correct. A true reader of the Talmud knows always where he finds himself.34
In the thirteenth century, Saint Bonaventure noted that after God created the world through the Word, he perceived that it appeared dead on the page, and “He found it therefore necessary that another book should illuminate the first in order to show the meaning of things.” Bonaventure concludes: “This is the Book of Scripture that shows the similarities, the properties and the meaning of things as they are written in the Book of the World.”35 For Bonaventure, as for the Talmudists, one book (the Bible) enables the reading of the other book (the world), and both contain in essence the same text. The Talmudic commentaries continue to copy that text, clarifying and expanding, and producing in time a layering of readings that recognizes in the book of the world a vast, ongoing palimpsest. In this manner, reading advances in two directions: burrowing towards the universal core text in an attempt to fathom it, and reaching out to the generation of readers to come with an ever new individuated text which adds itself endlessly to the pile.
Perhaps without acknowledging this process of individuation as its own, Venice too exists in the tension between the two reading impulses. On one hand, few cities are so blatant about their mythology and their history. Venice demands at first sight an exploration of its imaginative roots, in earth and water and in stone and deeds, a deep retracing of every step a visitor takes, following its canals down into its legendary beginnings. On the other, it is through the succession of historical readings that Venice wants to identify itself in the present, discarding every new reading (which at first might appear illuminating) as repetitive, banal, and commonplace, and asking for yet another. There is no satisfying Venice. Pulling the reader in opposite directions at the same time, towards the theoretical city of history books and the imaginary city of the stories and pictures, all too often in the process Venice (like the world itself) is itself lost.
The story of how Venetian zealots stole Saint Mark’s remains from his tomb in Alexandria in the year 828 is well known. As a result of this furta sacra, or “holy theft,” Saint Mark and his lion replaced Saint Theodore and his dragon as the city’s patron, though both saints tower today, in amiable companionship, above Saint Mark’s Square. Sometimes with the book open to indicate prosperity, other times with it closed to signal a period of war, often with a sword or with a halo, the literate lion constantly alters or enriches his own emblematic significance. Though this symbolism has been questioned, these are still the popular readings.36
Maimonides, in his Hilkhot Talmud Torah (Laws for the Study of the Torah), notes that “the time for study is divided in three parts: one third for the written Torah, one third for the oral Torah, and the last third for reflecting, drawing conclusions from certain premises, deducing one meaning from another, comparing one thing to another, judging the rules by which the Torah must be studied, until one reaches the knowledge that the Torah is the foundation of the rules, thus learning to understand what is forbidden and what is permitted in that which is learned through hearing. This then is what is called Talmud.” For Maimonides, a scholar who becomes wise need no longer dedicate himself to reading the written Torah (the words of the prophets) or listening to the oral one (the learned commentaries) but can devote himself exclusively to studying “according to the measure of his mind and the maturity of his intellect,” pursuing his curiosity.37
Conegliano’s lion is, of course, a commonplace in Venice. Bas- and haut-reliefs, gargoyles, banners, coats of arms, fountain decorations, mosaics, stained-glass windows, capitals, wellheads, embrasures, keystones, single sculptures like the ones lining the Arsenal, and paintings in every museum: hardly anything in the city is deemed unfit for the lion’s presence. Andante, with his head shown frontally or foreshortened, or sitting on his haunches like an expectant domestic animal; reduced like the Cheshire Cat to almost nothing but his grin, or crowding his entire muscled body inside a gilded and opulent frame; stamping his outline in official ex libris or enshrined in plastic bells with artificial snow made in China, the lion is everywhere in Venice. And in every case, whether in his own beastly presence or metonymically reflected in his trappings and surroundings, the lion of Saint Mark always stands for more than any single reading presumes. Caught between God’s two books, as Conegliano’s lion stands between the saints of active and contemplative life, the almost invisible rider explores the solid landscape beyond the visible emblems of reading, book and world. It is as if, intuiting that neither book suffices unto itself (as Maimonides bravely argued), the artist has placed a third option in the picture, the emblem of something equivalent to Abulafia’s intermediary.
Psalm 32 advises: “Be ye not as the horse, or as the mule, which have no understanding: whose mouth must be held in with bit and bridle.” To which Psalm 33 adds: “An horse is a vain thing for safety: neither shall he deliver any by his great strength.” Curbing the beast’s ignorance, knowing that it will not grant protection from harm, directing its “great strength” towards a firm and certain purpose, in Conegliano’s painting the rider escapes the strictures of Scripture and of gloss, and creates a new landscape of phrases as yet unwritten, evolved in memory and thought, a text permitted to change and transform itself as the remembered pages of words and world are turned and annotated in the curious imagination. Whether exploring the city or exploring the book, between the Word of God spoken and written and the human world, the rider is allowed the freedom to seek that every reader must be allowed to claim. In the untranslatable, conventional language of ancestral symbols, perhaps this unanswerable questioner has his function.
