Emmanuel ben Salomon de Rome. Commentaire sur les Proverbes (extraits)

Emmanuel ben Salomon was born in Rome around 1261, within Roman Jewry, one of the oldest and most continuously settled Jewish communities in Europe. Reference sources differ slightly on the dates: the Encyclopædia Britannica places his birth around 1260 and his death around 1328, and regards him as a Hebrew poet who lived chiefly in Rome, considered the founder of secular poetic writing in Hebrew. The same source adds that, probably an itinerant teacher by profession, he was a prolific Hebrew writer.

Emmanuel's biography contains a notable measure of uncertainty that historiography has learned to acknowledge. The supposition that he held a high office in the community has not been proven, any more than the hypothesis that he was a physician. As for the circumstances of his departure from Rome, they remain open: Emmanuel left Rome for unknown reasons, but his departure may be connected to the papal edict of expulsion pronounced against the community in 1321.

His literary renown rests above all on his collection in rhymed prose. Emmanuel's best-known work is his collection of maqāmāt in the Hebrew language, the Maḥberot Immanuel. This work, deeply rooted in its era, was composed in a shifting context: the Maḥberot Immanuel form a collection of twenty-eight chapters in Hebrew, in rhymed prose and poetry, written by the poet and amateur philosopher Emmanuel of Rome during an era of rapid political change in late medieval Italy. The last chapter, in particular, illustrates Emmanuel's permeability to the great literature of his time: the final chapter, Maḥberet ha-Tofet ve-ha-'Eden (Tale of Hell and Paradise), like Dante's Comedy, depicts Emmanuel's visits to hell and heaven.

This author, by turns secular poet, satirist, and exegete, embodies a figure of passage between two worlds—that of Jewish tradition and that of the nascent Italian culture.

Although his poetic fame has eclipsed the rest, Emmanuel was a biblical commentator of great scope. Although Emmanuel of Rome is best known for his Maḥberot Immanuel, he was also the author of a series of commentaries on most of the books of the Hebrew Bible, including Proverbs. The reference catalogues confirm this breadth: among his other works are commentaries on nearly the whole of the Bible, in which Emmanuel mainly explains the literal sense, while sometimes offering allegorical, philosophical, and mystical interpretations.

This dual dimension — literal and speculative — constitutes the signature of his exegetical method. According to the catalographic descriptions, by dividing his exposition of the biblical passages into two parts, Emmanuel manages both to explain the text and to set forth his own philosophical vision. He first carries out a strict grammatical examination of the passage, then, in the second part of his commentaries, he makes its content explicit according to a literal, philosophical, and at times singularly personal perspective.

This bipartite structure betrays the influence of the Judeo-Spanish and Maimonidean rationalist current that flowed through Jewish Italy. Emmanuel, an assiduous reader of philosophy, integrated into his exegesis a veritable intellectual curriculum: one finds in his poetic work a long list of philosophical texts he had read, equivalent to a program of studies approved by Maimonides. His biblical commentaries bear the trace of this training: in them one sees the philosopher at work, as in his commentary on the Psalms, where he explains the process of the contemplation of the Separate Intellects in his gloss on Psalms 18 and 19.

His aura as a sage exegete was recognized in his lifetime as in later memory. A scholarly library confirms it: while the Maḥberot were by far his most celebrated creation, Emmanuel was also well known as a biblical commentator, as attested by another exquisite incunable edition of his Commentaries on Mishlé (Proverbs), published as early as 1487 in Naples.

The Commentary on Proverbs deploys the bipartite method described above, but it distinguishes itself above all by the breadth of scientific curiosity its author displays therein. The detailed bibliographical descriptions underscore this trait: in his commentary on Proverbs, Emmanuel shows great interest in astronomy, navigation, and the measurements of the Earth.

A precise example illustrates this scholarly inflection. Commenting on a passage from Proverbs, Emmanuel ventures into the interpretation of a talmudic datum: in this passage, Emmanuel explains the words of Rabbi Joshua ben Levi to Rabban Gamliel in the tractate Horayot — "There is a star that rises once every seventy years and that disorients navigators" — which he explicates in an astronomical vein, with reference to the stars of the North and the South. This hermeneutic gesture is characteristic: a verse of wisdom becomes the pretext for a cosmographic exposition linking Scripture, rabbinic tradition, and natural knowledge.

The very structure of the commentary reflects a coherent pedagogical and philosophical intention. As the notices summarize it, Emmanuel first carries out a strict grammatical examination of the passage and then proposes, in the second part, an explication of the content according to a literal, philosophical, and sometimes personal perspective. The book of Proverbs, a collection of practical and moral wisdom, lent itself particularly well to this treatment: biblical ḥokhmah could be read there as a propaedeutic to philosophical wisdom, in direct continuity with the Maimonidean reading that equated intellectual perfection with the end of man.

This commentary thus belongs to a contemporary Italian exegetical tradition, in which other Roman scholars were working on the same books: one notes, for example, that Benjamin ben Judah of Rome, member of the preeminent Bozecco family, biblical exegete, grammarian, and philosopher, composed a commentary on Chronicles and Proverbs, preserved in manuscript. Emmanuel's work is therefore rooted in a milieu of shared erudition, and its originality lies in the place it grants to the exact sciences.

The major event in the material history of the text is its printing in Naples, at the end of the fifteenth century, in one of the principal centers of incunable Hebrew printing. The entry of a benchmark sale establishes it precisely: it is a Hebrew Bible, Mishlei (Proverbs), with the commentary of Emmanuel of Rome, Naples: Joseph ben Jacob Ashkenazi Gunzenhauser, between 28 March and 26 September 1487. A more complete bibliographic description confirms the identity of the publisher and the printer: Sefer Mishlei (Proverbs), with commentary by Emmanuel ben Solomon ben Jekuthiel of Rome, edited by Hayyim ben Isaac Halevi Ashkenazi, Naples, Joseph ben Jacob Ashkenazi Gunzenhauser, between 28 March and 26 September 1487.

This same description provides information on the materiality of the object: it is a chancery folio, comprising 102 leaves out of 104, without foliation or catchwords, signed at the fold. The typographic work is likewise remarkable: the characters employed include an unvocalized square type of 185 mm for the single initial word of Proverbs, and a vocalized square type of 120 mm for the text, unvocalized for the running titles and keywords.

The edition presents itself as the first of this commentary. A sale entry states it unambiguously: it is the first edition of the commentary, the first word (Mishlé) being placed within a floriated border. This careful presentation, where the word Mishlé is enthroned within an ornate border, attests to the prestige attached both to the biblical book and to its commentator. The role of the scholarly editor is documented by the colophon: the commentary was edited by Chaim bar Isaac Halevi Aschkenazi, as the colophon indicates.

The great research libraries preserve and showcase this incunable. Thus, an incunable edition of Emmanuel's Commentaries on Mishlé (Proverbs), published as early as 1487 in Naples, is held at the Dorot Jewish Division of the New York Public Library, where the word "Mishle" appears within the floriated border. The printer himself belonged to the Gunzenhauser dynasty, active in Neapolitan Hebrew production in the decade of the 1480s — a decade that saw Naples rival the other Italian centers of the nascent Hebrew book.

The transmission of the Commentary on Proverbs belongs both to scholarly memory and to the material archive, which confirm one another. On the archival side, copies of the 1487 incunabulum circulated through scholarly collections into the contemporary era: traces of them appear in prestigious sale catalogues, sometimes as complete, wide-margined copies, sometimes as bound and restored copies bearing the marks of their successive libraries—thus a worn nineteenth-century boards copy, reusing a sixteenth-century liturgical leaf, with a library cloth spine.

On the side of intellectual memory, Emmanuel's reputation as an exegete survives in the encyclopedias and histories of Jewish literature, which connect him to the great tradition of Italian rationalist exegesis. The scientific portion of his commentary—astronomy, navigation, the measurement of the Earth—has particularly drawn the attention of modern bibliographers, who see in it a distinctive trait of his genius.

The fate of the commentary is inseparable from that, more controversial, of the poet. The figure of Emmanuel has long elicited an ambivalent reception in the Jewish world: the secular and at times licentious verve of the Maḥberot earned him a posterity tinged with rabbinic reticence, even as his more austere biblical commentaries attested to his seriousness as a scholar. This tension between the satirical poet and the philosophical exegete runs throughout his reception. Recent historiography, through academic works devoted to the articulation of his poetry and his philosophy—notably Dana W. Fishkin's monograph Bridging Worlds—has helped to reappraise the unity of his work. As this research underscores, the Maḥberot Immanuel were composed during an era of rapid political change in late medieval Italy, a context that also illuminates his exegetical production. The intersection of literary memory and printed archive makes the commentary on Proverbs a telling milestone in the history of the Hebrew book in Italy.

Emmanuel ben Solomon of Rome's Commentary on Proverbs stands as a remarkable witness to Italian Jewish culture in the age of Dante. The work of a man whom posterity first remembered as a poet, it reveals the other facet of his genius: that of a rigorous exegete, at once a grammarian attentive to the letter and a philosopher attentive to meaning, nourished by the Maimonidean tradition and curious about the sciences of nature. The bipartite structure of his commentary — grammatical examination followed by philosophical elucidation — and his manifest taste for astronomy and cosmography make him a singular figure among the commentators on Proverbs.

The material history of the text reinforces its importance: the only one of his many biblical commentaries to have been printed — and that very early, as soon as 1487 in Naples by Joseph Gunzenhauser — it belongs to the heritage of Hebrew incunabula. Its transmission, documented by library and sale catalogues, makes it an object at the crossroads of the history of ideas and the history of the book.

Some areas of obscurity remain — the precise chronology of the composition, the exact relationships between Emmanuel's various biblical commentaries, the circumstances of his settling and death in central Italy — which call for caution and invite further research on the manuscripts preserved in Parma, Paris, and Oxford. But the essential is established: through this commentary, an entire intellectual world becomes discernible, that of an Italian Judaism capable of conversing simultaneously with the Talmud, with Maimonides, and with the great vernacular literature of its time.