Volume 18, 2018
Jewish Philosophy
Hernán Matzkevich
Pages 3-6
From Leon Hebreo to Abraham Cohen de Herrera
Their Syncretism, Assimilation and Influence in Western Philosophy
In this proposal I would like to present figures and works such as Leon Hebreo´s Dialoghi d´Amore and Abraham Cohen de Herrera´s Porta Coelorum as examples of the interrelation between Jewish and Christian scholars. This is a story that begins in 1492, when the Expulsion of the Jews from the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon took place. Alongside with the spread of Jewish people around the Maghreb, the Balkans, Palestine, the Netherlands, England and Italy this community started to have intellectual exchanges with the Christian population around them and this situation of course modified the cultural universe of both, Jewish and Christians. The fashion of Hebraism among Christian scholars during the sixteen and seventeen centuries had been place in part thanks to this kind of syncretism that could teach them the keystones of the Jewish intellectual framework but in an understandable way for their sensibility. The Jewish writings were because of that, one of the keystones in the foundation of modern science and philosophy, a source of inspiration for the systems and theories of space and matter of figures such as Conway, More or Newton.