Lelli, Fabrizio

Senior Fellow: April–August 2022

Research Project: The Sceptical Student: Learning and Dissent in Renaissance and Early Modern Jewish Italy

While scholarly research has dealt with the reconstruction of the curriculum studiorum of Italian Jews and the economic impact of Jewish education on communal life, including the teacher–disciple relationship, its complex dynamics and intellectual reverberations still await a thorough investigation. The proposed research project aims to fill this lacuna by addressing the following questions: How can we measure the intellectual impact that teachers and their authority exerted on students? Were the developments in early modern Italian Jewish education and pedagogics a result of the influence of sceptical views in humanist circles, according to which the seeker of knowledge was considered a “perpetual student”? If so, what role did the “perpetual student” play in the context of communal education? Our investigation will focus on notable Jewish educators and “perpetual students” of the Renaissance and early modern period: (1) the Cretan rabbi Elijah Capsali; the Venetian rabbis (2) Elijah Menahem Halfan and (3) Leon Modena; and 4) the latter’s student Giulio Morosini. The role they played will be explored against the background of the main educational frameworks that characterised late medieval and early modern Italian Jewish society: the yeshiva, private tutoring, and the communal school.

Fabrizio Lelli has been teaching Hebrew language and literature since 2001 in the Faculty of Languages of the Università degli Studi di Lecce (now called the Università del Salento), where he became an associate professor in 2006.