Note 92 — Chapter X · FREETHOUGHT IN THE RENAISSANCE

While it lasted, the light of Italy had shone upon all the thought of Europe. Not only the other nations but the scholars of the Jewish race reflected it; for to the first half of the sixteenth century belongs the Jew Menahem Asariah de Rossi, whose work, Meor Enayim, “Light of the Eyes,” is “the first attempt by a Jew to submit the statements of the Talmud to a critical examination, and to question the value of tradition in its historical records.” And he did not stand alone among the Jews of Italy; for, while Elijah Delmedigo, at the end of the fifteenth century, was in a didactic Maimonist fashion doubtful of literary tradition, his grandson, Joseph Solomon Delmedigo, flourishing early in the seventeenth century, “wrote various pamphlets of a deeply skeptical character.”92 That this movement of Jewish rationalism should be mainly limited to the south was inevitable, since there only were Jewish scholars in an intellectual environment. There could be no better testimony to the higher influence of the Italian Renaissance.