The Notion of Time as History in Kabbalistic Treatises from Renaissance Italy

Notwithstanding the declared tendency to refute the Greco-Arabic philosophical influence on the Jewish tradition, Italian Renaissance kabbalists followed in the footsteps of earlier thinkers to postulate two modes of temporality: one that applies to corporeal beings, and one that may be attributed only to entities that are not subject to generation and corruption. This second category, albeit eternal, interacts with human time through God's knowledge of particulars, and this may be thought of as the atemporal time of the Torah, whose ongoing revelation can be related to the changing nature of the reception of the kabbalistic doctrine according to the various periods of the history of Israel. In the article texts from Maimonides and his medieval commentators on the notion of time as history are compared with kabbalistic interpretations offered by 15th and a16th century Italian Jewish authors.