Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material / Giuseppe Veltri and Michela Torbidoni -- Copyright Page / Giuseppe Veltri and Michela Torbidoni -- What Kind of (Sceptical) Work is Simone Luzzatto’s Socrates ? / Josef Stern -- Sextus Empiricus’s Works as Guideline for Simone Luzzatto’s Socratic Ignorance / Michela Torbidoni -- Apologetic Strategies, Scepticism, and Empiricism in Simone Luzzatto’s Works / Giuseppe Veltri -- Simone Luzzatto’s Scepticism in Light of Medieval Jewish Apologetics / Fabrizio Lelli -- “Everyone is Free to Decide to Investigate Every Kind of Discourse” / Anna Lissa -- The Image of King Solomon in Simone Luzzatto’s Writings / Warren Zev Harvey -- Simone Luzzatto’s Political Thought: Between Reason of State, Scepticism, and Jewish Political Tradition / Guido Bartolucci -- Simone Luzzatto’s View on Jewish Ritual and Its Social Functions: A Consideration of His Sceptical Thought in the Intellectual Context of His Age / Mina Lee -- Simone Luzzatto’s Appraisal of Prudence / Giuseppe Veltri and Anna Lissa -- Varieties of Mercantilism: Simone Luzzatto and the Economic Role of the Jews in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries / Luca Andreoni -- “Seek the Peace of the City to which I have exiled you” in Simone Luzzatto and Menasseh ben Israel, with Azariah de’ Rossi behind the Scenes / Myriam Silvera.

Much of the most recent research on Jewish scepticism was inspired by the work of the early modern Venetian rabbi Simone Luzzatto, the first thinker in the history of Jewish thought to declare himself a sceptic and a follower of the New Academy. This collected volume shines new light on the intimate relationship between Luzzatto’s sceptical thinking and an era marked by paradoxes and contrasts between religious devotion and scientific rationalism, as well as between the rabbinic-biblical Jewish tradition and the open tendency towards engagement with non-Jewish philosophical, literary, scientific, and theological cultures. It plots out an original path along which to understand Luzzatto’s scepticism by pointing to the various facets of being a Jewish sceptic in seventeenth-century Italy.

English

Description based on print version record.