Forgotten Paths to Modernity

An exploration of two distinct yet overlapping intellectual developments of early modern thought that draws on the fascinating life and writings of Isaac Abravanel

In Forgotten Paths to Modernity, Cedric Cohen-Skalli illuminates two distinct yet overlapping intellectual developments of early modern thought. In the first part of the book, Cohen-Skalli elucidates Jewish intercultural understanding of the rising early modern empires (Portuguese, Spanish, Ottoman) before and after the great shift of 1492. In the second, he reconstructs a forgotten interreligious history of early modern historical criticism. Both parts draw on the fascinating life and writings of Isaac Abravanel (1437–1508), a prominent Jewish leader and scholar.

Cohen-Skalli traces Abravanel’s shifting position from the end of the fifteenth century to the first decade of the sixteenth. Abroad, Iberian kingdoms launched maritime expeditions, subjugated new populations, and realized various forms of trade. At home, there were anti-conversos riots, the Inquisition, expulsions, and forced conversions of non-Christians. Beginning with Abravanel’s views as an early collaborative agent within the empire to his later perspective as a victim of Iberian expansionism, Cohen-Skalli chronicles how the Jewish scholar invented religious understandings of the geopolitical role the Jewish diaspora had among competing empires.

In the second part of the book, Cohen-Skalli tracks the legacy of Abravanel’s Commentary on the Former Prophets—a pioneering Jewish study of the composition of the Bible that incorporated humanist analysis and represented a radical departure from earlier biblical scholarship. He follows the interreligious odyssey of Abravanel’s Commentary over the next two hundred years, from its original Jewish Iberian context to its multifaceted reception in Northern European Christian biblical studies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Through the central figure of Abravanel, Forgotten Paths to Modernity not only depicts a dialogical and interreligious dynamic between a variety of agents in the elaboration of new attitudes and concepts but also offers a new understanding of historicization, restoring Jewish knowledge and its Christian reception to their central roles in shaping the past.