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The quincentenary of his birth, 1937, saw numerous commemorations of Isaac Abarbanel, a figure who has long served as a "totem" (thus Jean-Christophe Attias) for Spanish Jewry's 1492 catastrophe, as well as its transition from pre- to post-expulsion times. Especially striking in retrospect was the major Abarbanel exhibition mounted in 1937 at the Jewish Museum in Berlin against the dark backdrop of the fifth year of Nazi rule. Then, too, the quincentenary saw a profusion of academic Abarbanelia, including books in Hebrew, English, and German (the latter by a young Abraham Joshua Heschel) and articles by such leading scholars as Yitzhak Baer, M. S. Segal, Leo Strauss, and Ephraim Urbach.
Turning to this century's opening years leading up to the quincentenary of his death in 2008, one finds little evidence of a popular commemorative impulse toward Abarbanel but strong indications of a resurgence in scholarly interest. Restricting consideration to English-language entries, there have been three recent full-scale monographs (one by the current reviewer, the others by Seymour Feldman and Alfredo Borodowski) and numerous article-length treatments. To these can now be added Cedric Cohen Skalli's superb edition of Abarbanel's surviving letters, accompanied by English translations and an extended introduction that places these short texts in a variety of historical, intellectual-literary, and sociocultural contexts.
The letters all belong to Abarbanel's too little studied Portuguese period (1437-83), which, it is well to recall, comprised two-thirds of his life and all his formative years. Though much ink has been spilled on Abarbanel's writings over the centuries, Cohen Skalli rightly affirms (if perhaps slightly overstates) earlier scholarly neglect of the letters. His volume, therefore, makes an important and decidedly fresh contribution to the field.
The first of the four epistles, written in Portuguese in the early 1470s, is especially interesting, standing as it does as a...