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Magnificence as a Royal Virtue in Ottoman Jewish Political Thought
Abstract
Recent years have seen a growing body of literature on relations between Renaissance Italy and the Ottoman Empire. One of the major lacunae in this research concerns the role of the Jews in the transmission of Italian humanist ideas. In order to address this topic, this article will focus on the “Crónica de los reyes otomanos” by the Sephardi polymath Moses ben Baruch Almosnino (ca. 1515–ca. 1580). My goal is to identify a shared set of themes present in Almosnino's thought and key fifteenth-century Italian sources on the correlation between magnificence and good government, and also to shed new light on the influence of Italian humanism in the Ottoman world.
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Social and Psychological Conditions and Attitudes of the Hispano-Jewish Society in 16th Century Ottoman Jewry
Published in: I. Twersky; B. Septimus (eds.), Jewish Thought in the 17th Century, Cambridge Ma. 1987, 95-135
Corrective and Distributive Justice: From Aristotle to Modern Times retraces the intricate history of the distinction between corrective and distributive justice. This distinction is elaborated in the 5th book of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, which was rediscovered in Western Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries by the Scholastics and turned into a central topic in legal and theological scholarship. After a decline of interest in the wake of the enlightenment and secularization, a surprising revival of these notions of justice occurred in U.S. legal and philosophical discourse during the last four decades that has made this distinction a central issue in tort law, restitution and other important fields of private and public law. In literally hundreds of articles and a considerable number of books, the Aristotelian distinction has been elaborated, discussed, and applied. Englard’s unique contribution to this aspect of legal history grants the contemporary reader a historical perspective that is vital for a deepened understanding of the distinction and modern concerns. Organized chronologically, Englard’s research covers: Aristotle, High Scholastics, Late Scholastics, Post-Scholastics, and Modernity. The relevant literature is notoriously difficult to access, not only because of its Latin language, but because of the physical rarity of the relevant books scattered throughout the world. This book offers the modern reader a touchstone synthesis of intellectual and legal history.
Around 1650, Jacob Cansino, a Jew who lived in the city of Oran, translated the Libro de los Extremos y Grandezas de Constantinopla (Book of the Magnificence and Greatness of Constantinople), the work of Rabbi Moses Almosnino of Salonica, into Spanish. As an introduction to this work, Cansino listed all the services the Cansino family had performed for the Spanish Crown, so that the published book consists of two parallel texts, or rather the translation is the pretext for justifying the introductory panegyric. The twofold objective of this introduction can be detected by careful reading. On the one hand, to show that the Jews were useful because of the knowledge they had of the Muslim world in general and of the Ottoman world in particular. On the other, to support the cause of Jacob Cansino himself, who wrote this panegyric in Madrid, closely watched by the Inquisition, at a time when he was in competition with a member of the other great Jewish family from Oran Jacob Saportas, for the official title of Royal Translator
This edited volume addresses the ways in which the city has been explored in works of literature by classical and modern ‘Arab’ authors from different theosophical and ideological backgrounds. Crucial to its organizing theoretical paradigm is its rejection of the stark rupture that most often separates the pre-modern and modern Arabic literary traditions. Instead, we view the entirety of the tradition as an evolving continuum, making our collection relevant to scholars of both classical and modern Arabic literature.
Beginning with a sustained analysis of Seneca's theory of monarchy in the treatise De clementia, in this 2007 text Peter Stacey traces the formative impact of ancient Roman political philosophy upon medieval and Renaissance thinking about princely government on the Italian peninsula from the time of Frederick II to the early modern period. Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince offers a systematic reconstruction of the pre-humanist and humanist history of the genre of political reflection known as the mirror-for-princes tradition - a tradition which, as Stacey shows, is indebted to Seneca's speculum above all other classical accounts of the virtuous prince - and culminates with a comprehensive and controversial reading of the greatest work of renaissance political theory, Machiavelli's The Prince. Peter Stacey brings to light a story which has been lost from view in recent accounts of the Renaissance debt to classical antiquity, providing a radically revisionist account of the history of the Renaissance prince.
This book explores the intersecting worlds of those who regularly traversed the early modern Venetian–Ottoman frontier, including colonial migrants, redeemed slaves, merchants, commercial brokers, religious converts, and diplomatic interpreters. In their sustained interactions across linguistic, religious, and political lines these trans-imperial subjects helped to shape shifting imperial and cultural boundaries, including the emerging distinction between Europe and the Levant. The book argues that the period from 1570 to 1670 witnessed a gradual transformation in how Ottoman difference was conceived within Venetian institutions. Thanks in part to the activities of trans-imperial subjects, an early emphasis on juridical and commercial criteria gave way to conceptions of difference based on religion and language. The book begins the story in Venice’s bustling marketplaces, where commercial brokers often defied the state’s efforts both to tax foreign merchants and define Venetian citizenship. The story continues in a Venetian charitable institution where converts from Islam and Judaism and their Catholic Venetian patrons negotiated their mutua!Sl transformation. It ends with Venice’s diplomatic interpreters, the dragomans, who not only produced and disseminated knowledge about the Ottomans but also created dense networks of kinship and patronage across imperial boundaries. The book’s new conceptual and empirical framework sheds light on institutional practices for managing juridical, religious, and ethnolinguistic difference in the Mediterranean and beyond.
A two-volume study of political thought from the late thirteenth to the end of the sixteenth century, the decisive period of transition from medieval to modern political theory. The work is intended to be both an introduction to the period for students, and a presentation and justification of a particular approach to the interpretation of historical texts. Quentin Skinner gives an outline account of all the principal texts of the period, discussing in turn the chief political writings of Dante, Marsiglio, Bartolus, Machiavelli, Erasmus and more, Luther and Calvin, Bodin and the Calvinist revolutionaries. But he also examines a very large number of lesser writers in order to explain the general social and intellectual context in which these leading theorists worked. He thus presents the history not as a procession of 'classic texts' but are more readily intelligible. He traces by this means the gradual emergence of the vocabulary of modern political thought, and in particular the crucial concept of the State. We are given an insight into the actual processes of the formation of ideologies and into some of the linkages between political theory and practice. Professor Skinner has been awarded the Balzan Prize Life Time Achievement Award for Political Thought, History and Theory. Full details of this award can be found at http://www.balzan.it/News_eng.aspx?ID=2474
As Fulke Greville examines Suleiman the Magnificent’s 1552 execution of his son Mustapha in his tragedy Mustapha , so too does the Ottoman episode figure prominently in Jean Bodin’s most important political works, exposing the fraught relationship between nature and sovereignty. This chapter examines Bodin’s treatment of the Mustapha episode, illustrating how he uses the event to subtly expose the paradoxes at work in sovereignty before demonstrating the relevance of these discoveries to Greville’s own work. Greville, moreover, seizes upon tragedy’s capacity to express these paradoxes, to dramatize in vivid detail the insoluble problem at the heart of Bodin’s theses on nature and sovereignty. Mustapha does not ground any one politics but rather reveals the aporetic foundation of any sovereign power in nature—that is to say, of every sovereign power—as well as the confusing and often conflicting character of political life.
Moses Almosnino (1518-1580), arguably the most famous Ottoman Sephardi writer and the only one who was known in Europe to both Jews and Christians, became renowned for his vernacular books that were admired by Ladino readers across many generations. While Almosnino's works were written in a style similar to contemporaneous Castilian, Olga Borovaya makes a strong argument for including them in the corpus of Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) literature. Borovaya suggests that the history of Ladino literature begins at least 200 years earlier than previously believed and that Ladino, like most other languages, had more than one functional style. With careful historical work, Borovaya establishes a new framework for thinking about Ladino language and literature and the early history of European print culture.