CHAPTER I

IN ITALY

MOSES HAYYIM LUZZATTO


In its precise sense, the term Renascence cannot be applied to the
movement that asserted itself in Hebrew literature at the end of the
fifteenth century, as little as the term Decadence can be applied to the
epoch preceding it.

Long before Dante and Boccaccio, as far back as the eleventh century,
Hebrew literature, particularly in Spain, and to a certain extent also
in the Provence, had reached a degree of development unknown in European
languages during the Middle Ages.

Though the persecutions toward the end of the fourteenth and the
fifteenth century crushed the Jewish communities in Spain and in the
Provence, they yet did not succeed in annihilating completely the
intellectual traditions of the Spanish and French Jews. Remnants of
Jewish science and Jewish literature were carried by the refugees into
the countries of their adoption, and in the Netherlands, in Turkey, even
in Palestine, schools were founded after a short interval.

But a literary revival was possible only in Italy. Elsewhere, in the
backward countries of the North and the East, the Jews, smarting from
blows recently inflicted, withdrew within themselves. They took refuge
in the most sombre of mysticisms, or, at least, in dogmatism of the