Delmedigo, Elijah

Elijah Delmedigo is one of the most representative Jewish philosophers of the Italian Renaissance. As a staunch follower of Averroes, he played a key role in disseminating Averroes’ ideas among early modern scholars and philosophers through commentaries, quaestiones, and various translations from Hebrew into Latin. Between 1481 and 1486, he was among the Jewish collaborators of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and assisted him in his investigations in Aristotelian and Averroistic philosophy. Delmedigo is known mainly for his short treatise Beḥinat ha-Dat (The Examination of Religion), a philosophical-religious work that influenced, among others, Spinoza. In it he reinterpreted some of the key issues in Averroes’ Decisive Treatise in the light of Jewish context.