Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Alemanno, Yohanan ben Isaac

Their influence was also felt on Renaissance culture at large. Like most of his scholarly Jewish contemporaries, Alemanno was a wandering scholar who travelled in search of a livelihood as a private teacher, preacher or secretary, always seeking the patronage of influential Jewish financiers. While wandering among such cities as Florence, Mantua, Padua and Bologna, he met many of the leading Jewish scholars of his time, including Judah Messer Leon, author of the Nofet Tzufim (The Book of the Honeycomb's Flow), an important rhetorical treatise that aimed to integrate biblical rhetoric with the revived Ciceronian tradition of the Renaissance. Messer Leon's work profoundly influenced Alemanno, leading to his discovery of the full gamut of Renaissance humanist and Neoplatonic ideas and to his contacts with such leading exponents of Renaissance humanism as Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, his nephew Alberto Pico and Girolamo Benivieni. These scholars, especially Pico della Mirandola, relied on Jewish scholars like Alemanno, Elijah Delmedigo and Abraham Farissol, to learn Hebrew and to gain access to the sources of Jewish philosophy, the fascinating materials of Kabbalah, and the works of such Islamic thinkers as Averroes, which their Jewish guides translated for them into Latin from the medieval Hebrew and Arabic texts.