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BACKGROUND ON IMMANUELLO ROMANO

 

IMMANUELLO ROMANO

A brief note on the Rome-based poet Immanuello Romano (1265-c.1330).  A very close contemporary (some would say a friend) of Dante, he invites comment because he was the author of a Hebrew poetic text, the "Heaven and Hell", which is inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy.

Considering the extent of his literary output (several volumes of the Mahberot; a large number of sonnets; a commentary on the Song of Songs etc), he is surprisingly under-represented in the critical literature in English and Italian, and the situation is not much better in Hebrew. However the basic facts of his life are available, and leaving aside the literary terrain which he shares with Dante we can say that aspects of his life were strikingly similar to those of Dante.

Briefly, he appears as an eager polymath, very ready to put pen to paper on a wide range of secular and religious subjects. As well as writing serious prose items and Bible commentaries he produced copious amounts of poetry (including many sonnets, in both Hebrew and Italian), evidently within a social milieu that involved other poets. He is intensely interested in the relations between men and women, and amorous verses sit alongside high-minded intellectual and religious texts (to such an extent that his works were later banned for reading by Jews). He is also known to have had an interest in music concomitant with his poetic output.

In 1321, after the murder of his father-in-law Rabbi Samuel, he leaves Rome and travels to other Italian cities (including Perugia, Orvieto and Ancona). Moving from one town to another, seeking income and patronage (which he finds in Fermo). These are troubled times. During this period of "exile" from Rome he finds himself at the court of Can Grande della Scala (precisely, Dante's patron) in Verona, and describes the cultural climate there. And from his writings it is apparent that he was actively engaged with the new intellectual ideas of his time. 

There is no doubt that Immanuello represents a link in a chain of transmission of Arabo-Andalusian culture as mediated into Italy by the internationally mobile Jewish intelligentsia of the time. His teacher may have been Zehariah ben Isaac, of Barcelona. Immanuello's Mahberot are modelled on the Mahberot of al-Harizi, which in turn are modelled on the Maqamat of Al-Hariri of Basra (1054-1121).

It is not surprising that the Rome-based Immanuello has links into Arab-Andalusian culture. For instance we know that the Jewish community in Rome was active in absorbing philosophical texts from the Arabic. Among others the above Zeharia of Barcelona, a writer and translator from the Arabic, “translated for the use of the learned Jews of Rome [...] Aristotle’s Canon and a large part of Averroes’ commentaries on the corpus of Aristotle’s writings”.

If these Jewish poets and intellectuals lived in a ghettoised world of their own there would be no reason to suppose that their "Arabism" impacted on Christian/Italian culture. But they did not. Immanuello numbered among his friends Bosone da Gubbio and Cino da Pistoia, with whom he corresponded, and both of these featured as part of Dante's poetic circle. The circle of songsters and sonneteers.

 

Ed Emery

Universitas adversitatis

31.vii.02

 

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