American Academy of Religion

Yoseph Schlomo Delmedigo (Yashar of Candia): His Life, Works and Times by Isaac Barzilay
Review by: Jeremy Zwelling
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 44, No. 3 (Sep., 1976), p. 572
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1462840 .
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572 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF RELIGION

JUDAICA

Yoseph Schlomo Delmedigo (Yashar of Candia):His Life, Worksand 7'mes (Studies

Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974. xii+379 pages.
Post-Biblica, vol. 25). By ISAACBARZILAY.
84 guilders. ISBN 90-04-03972-4.
This thoroughly researched volume presents a critical evaluation of Yashar
(Yoseph Shlomo Delmedigo), a seventeenth-century Jew much enamoured by the new
learning of the period. Like a few others at that time Yashar devoted his life to
disseminating the first fruits of the new method of inquiry to Jewish compatriots who
either scornfully rejected or totally ignored them. It is perhaps too paradoxical to
conclude with the author that Yashar was a man "ahead of his time" though his
interests were not unlike the later and more successful members of the Haskalah, and
he was one of the first to experience an estrangement from Jewish culture that would
become increasingly common and even more intense beginning with his younger
contemporary, Spinoza. Rather, the derivative nature of his thinking (which Barzilay
carefully demonstrates), his inability to make a grand synthesis, and the diminished
impact he had on the Jews of his time reflect the limitations which the age imposed on
persons like Yashar. The least persuasive section of Barzilay's fine work concerns
Yashar'sattitude to the Cabbalah, a subject upon which Yashar offered contradictory
opinions in various treatises. Barzilayargues that even the most positive statements are
actually camouflaged anti-cabbalistic opinions. I think it would be more accurate to
say that Yashar either misunderstood the Cabbalah, whose literature was becoming
quite popular at the time, or he significantly distorted it in rendering it a philosophic
system which would produce support for his own metaphysical views.
Wesleyan University JEREMY ZWELLING

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