The Manuscripts of Abraham ibn Ezra’s Second Commentary on Genesis in the Context of Sixteenth-Century Italy Censorship

In 1140 the Andalusi sage Abraham ibn Ezra fled Sepharad owing to the imminent Almohad conquest and started a wandering life through the Christian Europe that lasted until his death. During his sojourn in Italy, France and England, Ibn Ezra found in patronage and teaching a way of surviving that led him to compose a variety of treatises in different fields such as Grammar, Astrology, Mathematics and Exegesis. His expertise in Hebrew language and lexicography granted his Bible commentaries a significant place within the medieval Jewish textual corpus, as it is reflected in the most recent editions of the Miqraot Gedolot.

On some occasions, Ibn Ezra even devoted two commentaries on the same book commissioned by different benefactors of the Jewish communities in which he taught. This is the case of his Second Commentary on Genesis, an unfinished grammatical-exegetical work written in Rouen for R. Moshe ben Meir that intended to be a second commentary on the whole Torah. Unlike his first commentary composed in Lucca, only six manuscripts of this work between the 14th and the 17th century are known so far, three of which have been censored. The codices that contain the aforementioned censored text were elaborated in Italy during the Counter-Reformation period in which the Hebrew literature was supervised by the Catholic Church in order to erase any possible blasphemy or offense against the Christian faith.

The aim of this talk is to analyse the presence of internal and external censorship in the manuscripts of Ibn Ezra’ Second Commentary on Genesis in the context of 16th century Hebrew textual production in Italy. In addition, this talk will try to establish a possible relation between the content of the missed sections —a clear criticism of Christian interpretations in the 12th century—and the so called Sefer ha-Ziquq, the most important Index Librorum Prohibitorum for Hebrew books written by the apostate rabbi Domenico Yerushalmi, whose signature is found in the codices.