Ogren, Brian

Senior Fellow: June–August 2022

Research Project: Love, Language, and Scepticism in Early Modern Judaism: The Case of Yohanan Alemanno

This project will develop a book chapter exploring the ideas of the famed fifteenth-century thinker Yohanan Alemanno with regard to love as expression and the limited ability of language to properly convey thoughts. As a medium that externalises and connects between two or more self-contained internal souls, love itself is a form of language. If it is given over to ambiguation for Alemanno, as he holds is the case with all language, then ideas of true union are thrown into doubt, on both the human and the divine planes. This project will examine the foundations of these ideas and how Alemanno seeks to overcome this scepticism.

Alemanno’s main ideas on love may be found in his commentary on the Song of Songs entitled Heshek Shlomo, as prompted by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. This was perhaps the first Jewish contribution to Renaissance trattati d’amore (treatises on love), though it was certainly not the only one. The most famous was Judah Abravanel’s Dialoghi d’amore, which was published in Italian in 1535. The phenomenon includes two additional commentaries on the Song of Songs: the 1605 Kenaf Renanim by Isaac Alatrino of Cingoli and Tzehalah u-Rinnah by the famed seventeenth-century physician Jacob Zahalon. The larger monograph that will ultimately result from this project will include analyses of all of these, though the research at MCAS will focus upon Alemanno.

Brian Ogren is an associate professor of Judaic studies at Rice University, Houston, Texas.