Biography and Autobiography in Yohanan Alemanno's Literary Perception

The intellectual and social self-perception of Yohanan Alemanno, one of the major Jewish intellectual figures flourished in 15th century Italy, may be appraised on the basis of the information provided by the author in his massive encyclopedias. It is thus possible to associate the birth of a specific biographic and autobiographic genre within Hebrew literature with the revival of biography in the early Renaissance, and certainly long before Leone da Modena's 17th century Sefer hayye Yehudà.