The Del Medigo Family

The island of Crete, which the Venetians called Candie after the name of its capital, harbored throughout the late Middle Ages one of the most vibrant Jewish communities in the eastern Mediterranean. Positioned on the routes connecting Italy to the Byzantine and Ottoman Orient, it was a crossroads where Romaniote, Sephardic, and Italian traditions intersected. It was there, in the Jewish quarter of Candia, that the Del Medigo house took root and where, generation after generation, a reputation for learning was forged.

Tradition attaches to the name the memory of a family of physicians and scholars — the patronym itself bears witness to this. One cannot, without forcing the sources, draw up a continuous genealogy of the earliest Del Medigo; the registers of the Candiote community have come down to us only in fragments. But the milieu in which Élie Del Medigo was born was that of an insular Judaism of letters, where mastery of Hebrew, Greek, Italian, and philosophical Arabic was nothing exceptional. According to his biographers, Élie Delmedigo was born around 1460 in Candia, Crete, in this household where dual culture, Jewish and Greco-Latin, was an inheritance rather than an achievement.

This learned insularity was, for the lineage, a school of tolerance and openness. To live in Venetian Crete was to dwell at the borders of several worlds and learn to converse with the stranger without renouncing oneself. In this willingness to welcome the thought of others — that of the Greeks, that of the Arabs, that of Latin Christians — to test it in the light of the Law, one recognizes one of the virtues that the Jewish tradition has never ceased to meditate upon: the confident and critical relationship to the wisdom of the nations, that ḥokhma ba-goyim which the sages permitted to gather without idolatry. The Del Medigo house would make it their emblem.

No figure dominates this lineage like that of Elijah Del Medigo (c. 1458–1493, according to other sources c. 1460–1497). Trained in Candia and later established in Northern Italy, he became one of the most profound scholars of Averroes's philosophy of his time, and one of the rare Jews to teach Aristotelian philosophy publicly to Christians.

His major work, written in Hebrew, remains bound to the memory of philosophical Judaism. Elijah Delmedigo is known for his Beḥinat ha-dat ("Investigation of the Religion"), in which he criticized the Kabbalah; he also translated some of Averroes's commentaries and wrote a Latin commentary on Aristotle's Physics. This short treatise enjoyed considerable posterity: Delmedigo is especially known for his brief treatise Beḥinat ha-dat ("The Examination of Religion"), a philosophical-religious work that influenced, among others, Spinoza, and in which he reinterpreted certain key questions from Averroes's Decisive Treatise.

In the Beḥinat ha-dat, Del Medigo strives to demarcate the respective domains of philosophical reason and revealed faith, questioning what the Torah requires one to believe and what it leaves to the free examination of intelligence. His reservation regarding the Kabbalah—of which he doubted the antiquity and authority—places him among the uncompromising rationalists; but it is a reservation born of concern for truth and intellectual honesty, not of contempt. In this, Del Medigo expresses with force a cardinal virtue of Jewish thought: the courage of critical examination in service of the Law, the requirement that faith not pay the price of illusions.

His influence extended far beyond the Jewish circle. Modern scholarship has measured the imprint of his Averroist teaching on the culture of the Italian Renaissance: learned works have thus studied Elijah del Medigo's Averroist teaching and his role in certain sources of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's Conclusiones nongentae of 1486. Elijah was indeed the Hebrew master of Pico della Mirandola, that young prodigy prince who wished to embrace all human wisdom; he translated and explained Averroes's commentaries to him, opening to him the treasures of Arab-Jewish philosophy. That the most universal of Christian humanists should have wished to sit at the feet of a learned Jew from Candia speaks volumes about the place Del Medigo occupied in the great dialogue of cultures. In this magistracy consented to the foreigner, in this gift of knowledge beyond confessional borders, the lineage expresses Israel's vocation to be, in the words of the prophets, a light offered to the nations.

If Candia was the cradle of the lineage, Padua became its second homeland. The University of Padua, jewel of the Venetian Republic, had something unique in Europe: it admitted Jewish students, notably in its celebrated faculties of medicine and philosophy. For a family whose very name proclaimed medicine, it was a place of election.

It was there that the second great chapter of the house took shape, with the figure of Joseph Salomon. Born in Crete in 1591, he descended from this illustrious lineage: born in Crete into a distinguished Sephardic family, Delmedigo was the son of Rabbi Elijah Delmedigo. His illustrious education exemplified the genius of the house, entirely bent toward the conjunction of traditional learning and new sciences: after receiving a traditional Jewish education, he was admitted at the age of fifteen to the University of Padua, where he studied mathematics and astronomy under Galileo.

This detail is capital for the history of ideas: a Cretan rabbi, heir to a Talmudic lineage, seated among the auditors of the greatest astronomer of his century, at the very dawn of the scientific revolution. Joseph Solomon Delmedigo (1591-1655) was a rabbi, physician and polymath from Crete; at Padua, he studied medicine and attended Galileo's lectures on astronomy in 1609-1610. The student did not betray the master: Delmedigo became one of the very first propagators, in Hebrew, of the discoveries of the new science.

In this dual faithfulness to the Torah and to the observation of the heavens, the lineage brings to its height a virtue that Jewish tradition holds in high esteem: scientific knowledge understood not as rival to faith, but as contemplation of the work of the Creator. For a Delmedigo, studying the stars was yet another way of sanctifying the Name by scrutinizing the order of the world.

The life of Joseph Salomon Delmedigo is a novel of knowledge and exile. A graduate of Padua, he never knew the rest of a professorial chair nor the security of a lasting residence. His curiosity and circumstances made him a perpetual traveler, peddling modern sciences from one community to another as others peddled merchandise.

Sources trace this odyssey. In 1613, he returned to Crete to practice medicine there, but did not stay long, and took to traveling again. His itinerary drew him across a vast Mediterranean and Eastern space: after a brief stay in Venice, he traveled through the Near East, before finally settling. From Candia to Venice, from Egypt to Constantinople, from Poland to Lithuania, he crossed the Sephardic, Italian, Ottoman, and Ashkenazi worlds, everywhere a physician, everywhere a scholar, everywhere a teacher.

It was in Amsterdam, capital of Jewish refuge and Hebrew printing, that his work found its lasting form. The itinerant polymath Rabbi Joseph Salomon Rofe — del Medico / Delmedigo — of Candia (1591-1655) came to Amsterdam in the summer of 1626 and formed a friendship there with Menasseh ben Israël. From this encounter was born his great book.

Delmedigo's wandering is not merely a eventful biography: it is a figure of the destiny of dispersed Israel, but also a lesson. Wherever he passed, he brought remedy to the body and light to the spirit; he made of exile not a shipwreck but a ministry of transmission. In this physician who healed without distinction and who sowed knowledge from city to city, the lineage expresses two kindred virtues dear to tradition: care for the other — the refuah, art of healing held as a sacred duty — and the generosity of transmission, for he who teaches another, say the sages, gives him life.

The masterwork of Joseph Salomon Delmedigo, the Sefer Elim, deserves a chapter unto itself, for it crystallizes all that is noblest in the lineage: the universality of knowledge placed at the service of dialogue.

The book appeared in Amsterdam in 1628–1629, under the presses of the great Menasseh ben Israël. Its very genesis is remarkable: the work comprises twelve general questions ("sources") and seventy particular questions ("palms") posed by the Karaite scholar Zerah bar Nathan of Troki to Delmedigo, together with the latter's responses. That the rabbinic master should have agreed to respond at length, patiently, and learnedly to the inquiries of a Karaite—a member of that current which Rabbinic Judaism had long kept at a distance—testifies to an uncommon breadth of mind. Here tradition and archive answer to one another: the memory of a tolerant lineage finds in the very title of the printed book its documentary confirmation.

The content of the Sefer Elim unfolds an encyclopedia of knowledge. Delmedigo addresses therein many subjects, including algebra, trigonometry, physics, metaphysics, Kabbalah, astrology, astronomy, and cosmology. Moreover, the work marks a milestone in the history of Jewish sciences: the Sefer Elim treats problems of mathematics, natural philosophy, and metaphysics, and contains the first explanation in Hebrew of the theories of the Polish astronomer Copernicus.

Thus, through the pen of a Delmedigo, the language of the Bible welcomed for the first time Copernican heliocentrism. Yet one knows the limits of this diffusion: the in-depth analysis that Delmedigo devoted to Copernican theories remained unpublished and is today lost, but his circumscribed references within the Sefer Elim are nevertheless revealing. This shadow—a lost work, an audacity in part cautious—is also part of the honesty of the narrative: Delmedigo lived at the hinge between two ages, bearing new knowledge with the assurance of the scholar and the circumspection of the man of tradition.

The book seduced through its beauty as much as through its science. The Sefer Elim is preceded by a handsome portrait of Delmedigo, commissioned by Ben Israël in 1628 from W. Delff after a painting by W. C. Duyster, and it is richly illustrated. This engraved portrait, one of the first of a Jewish scholar, speaks in itself of the place Delmedigo occupied in the Republic of Letters. In this work offered to an interlocutor of another current, in this desire to share the entire patrimony of human sciences, the lineage expresses its contribution to Jewish thought and the love of the Law broadened to the dimensions of universal knowledge.

What remains, beyond the two great figures, of the Del Medigo house? Its direct lineage fades into the shadows of the archives; the communities of Candia, Venice, and Padua where it shone have long since experienced the vicissitudes of history, and the fall of Venetian Crete to Ottoman hands in the mid-seventeenth century scattered what remained of island Judaism. But the heritage of a lineage is not measured solely by the number of its sons: it is measured by the imprint left upon thought.

Yet this imprint was lasting. Élie's Beḥinat ha-dat continued to be read, commented upon, reprinted, and its reception up to Spinoza makes him one of the secret links in philosophical modernity. Joseph Salomon's Sefer Elim remained, for generations of Jewish students, an open door to the exact sciences. In both cases, the lineage played the same role: that of a bridge. A bridge between Averroes and Pico della Mirandola; a bridge between Galileo and the Hebrew language; a bridge between rabbinism and Karaism; a bridge between Renaissance Italy and the Lithuania of the yeshivot.

One must measure here the audacity and fertility of this stance. At a time when many circles were withdrawing into themselves, the Del Medigo made the opposite wager: that Jewish truth has nothing to fear from confrontation with the knowledge of the world, and that it gains instead in understanding itself. This wager carried its tensions — the distrust of rationalists toward Kabbalah, the caution facing celestial novelties, the silences imposed by the authorities — and it would be dishonest to conceal them. But these very tensions are the price of an awakened intelligence.

In embodying this virtue, the Del Medigo lineage partakes of an immemorial tradition of Israel: that of the sages who, from Saadia Gaon to Maimonides, held that serving God is also understanding His work, and that ignorance is never piety. The house of Candia was, in its place and hour, one of the watchtowers of this conviction.

At the end of this journey, it appears that the Del Medigo lineage, among all the virtues that Jewish tradition has carried, will have best expressed the sanctification of knowledge — that conviction that study, in all its breadth, from the Talmud to astronomy, is an eminent form of divine service and a good to be shared without reserve.

This virtue, the house of Candia declined in three inseparable modes. In Elie, it took the face of intellectual courage: daring critical examination, dialoguing with Averroès, teaching a Christian prince, measuring faith against the measure of reason without ever leaving the Law. In Joseph Salomon, it took the face of the generosity of knowledge: healing bodies and enlightening minds from one city to another, offering the Jewish world the first Hebrew voice of the new science, patiently responding to the questioner from another current. And throughout the entire lineage, it took the face of openness to the stranger, that insular disposition, born of Candia and matured in Padua, to gather wisdom from wherever it came to test it in the light of Israel.

The name they bore — Del Medigo, "of the physician" — suited them better than perhaps they knew. For they were, in the broadest sense, healers: of ignorance through science, of narrowness through dialogue, of forgetting through the book. And if the collective memory of Israel keeps their remembrance, it is because they remind us, across centuries and continents, of that truth that tradition has continually meditated upon: he who spreads knowledge does not impoverish it, he multiplies it, and he becomes in turn, for those who come after him, a source of living waters beneath the palms of Elim.