2011-2012 - The Italian Academy - Columbia University

sabbaticals and jubilees, as delineated in Leviticus 25. There, God
commands that the land should be worked for six years, and that
in the seventh year it should rest. The Levitical passage further commands
that after a period of seven sabbaticals, a jubilee year should
be declared, in which freedom for all slaves should be granted and
all debts should be annulled.
Such cycles were interpreted cosmically in the Talmud. According
to the Talmud, the land that is to rest in the seventh year refers
to the material world, and each year actually represents a thousand
years. Thus, the sabbatical cycle of Leviticus actually represents six
millennia for the existence of the world, with a seventh millennium
as a period of repose. After this seventh millennium, God re-creates
the world anew.
This rabbinic interpretation laid the groundwork for later
philosophical and kabbalistic discussions. Some thinkers connected
this sevenfold patterned idea to the movement of the spheres, while
others connected it to the theosophical hypostases, known in kabbalistic
parlance as the sefirot. Some saw the idea as a positively
regressive idea of a striving to return to purer origins, while others
saw in the idea a progressive move that ultimately cycles forward.
Such discussions were apt to Renaissance re/conceptualizations of
time, and harmonized well with a revived interest in ancients such
as Empedocles and Pythagoras.
My research looked at the development of this idea in the
thought of both Christians and Jews, and their diverse uses of it in
their constructions of time and history. I tracked the Christological,
sometimes polemical usage of this originally Jewish concept in the
writings of prominent Christian Humanists, such as Marsilio Ficino
and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. I then focused my attention on
the idea as expressed in the writings of Isaac Abarbanel, the illustrious
Jewish exegete and the father of the famed philosopher Leone
Ebreo. I found that Abarbanel takes a rather apologetic stance for
Jewish esoteric ideas of time in the face of contemporaneous Christian
appropriations of this kabbalistic concept. I hypothesize that
this dialectic of polemics and apologetics was one factor leading to
the early modern exotericization, i.e., the revelation to the general
public, of the esoteric lore of kabbalah.
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