Moslem, Christian, and Jewish Cultural Interaction in Sefardic Talmudic Interpretation

The general participation of Iberian Jewry in the scholastic culture of the high middle ages is very well known. Less well known is the continuing in uence the Aristotelian tradition had on Spanish and Sefardic Jewish intellectual life in the Ž fteenth and sixteenth centuries, including its most particularly Jewish of activities, the interpretation of the Talmud. In this period, there appears a new theory and practice of Talmudic hermeneutic, which is called ’iyyun, “speculation:” Talmudic interpretation as an application of the Aristotelian theory of language. From the point of view of the history of Jewish culture, one of the most salient aspects of ’iyyun is the integration it brings to Jewish culture in two ways, vertically in that it integrates the diVerent branches of intellectual life among Jews in this culture and horizontally in that it integrates Jewish textual practice with the literary culture of the other elements of contemporary society. After discussing evidence for this thesis in the Ž rst part of the paper, I will have something to say about its implications for our general modeling of Jewish cultural history. Two of the most important methodological works of the school of ’iyyun are Darkhe hattalmud 2 by the father of the method, R. Yitzhaq Kanpanton (d. 1493), the last great spiritual leader of Spanish Jewry before the Expulsion and Kelale Shmuel, by R. Shmuel Ibn Sid