Dante and Judaism

Did you know that there may be links between Dante and the Jewish Kabbalah? Or that the images of Dante's Inferno have been used by Primo Levi as a metaphor for the Holocaust? From the thirteenth century to the present day, Dante has help to evolve the relationship between Dante and Judaism.

Spirituality is an increasing presence in the writings of Dante. In addition to his famous journey in the afterlife in the Divine Comedy, some historians and thinkers have also found correspondence between Dante and Judaism .

According to Sandra Debenedetti Stow (http://www.giuntina.it/ElencoRecensioni/Dante_e_la_mistica_ebraica__180/Dante_e_la_mistica_ebraica__68.html), you can find similarities between the universe of Dante and practices of the Jewish Cabala (http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabala_ebraica), or the esoteric teachings of Judaism: both turn to an inner search to the transcendent.

A Cabalistic painting. 

Is that happenstance? It seems so. In fact, there is no historical evidence of direct links between Dante and Judaism since the thirteenth century in Florence there were no circles of Jewish scholars, and Jewish mystical texts had not yet widespread. To see the full expansion of the Kabbalah in the West, you will have to wait until the fifteenth century, when the Jewish mysticism will be taken into account in European thought.

Yet, some contact between Dante and Judaism is obvious: the Jewish religion appears in several works of the great Florentine poet. In addition, Dante was also aware of the importance of the Hebrew language, especially in religious texts and myths.

In the treatise De vulgari Wloquentia, written between 1303 and 1305, Dante says that it was in Hebrew that Adam spoke for the first time. The first sound of the first man was "El", which in Hebrew means "God." The source of this primordial human affirmation is not the Bible, but Dante himself, who so imagined the first dialogue - in Hebrew, the first word uttered by mankind.

So far there have been theories around the references to Judaism in the writings of Dante, but you can also do a reverse lookup, or investigate the presence of Dante in the Jewish world. The Florentine poet has been known and respected in the Jewish philosophical circles for several centuries. The pioneer was definitely the Divine Comedy, a work as much appreciated as it is widespread.

In the nineteenth century the first translations into Hebrew of the Divine Comedy appeared and in 1865 and the jew scholar Samuel David Luzzatto (http://www.aecfederazione.it/dante.html) highlights the strong sense of justice that appears in Dante's Divine Comedy.

Famous Jewish author, Primo Levi.

Many are also contemporary poets who are inspired by the writings of Dante. The images of hell are used as metaphors of the Holocaust: just think of the book by Primo Levi's The Drowned and saved (http://www.primolevi.it/Web/Italiano/Contenuti/Opera/110_Edizioni_italiane/I_sommersi_e_i_salvati) in the title that contains references to some groups of souls Dante, condemned to be perpetually submerged in the ground.