T HE J EWISH Q UARTERLY R EVIEW, Vol. 104, No. 4 (Fall 2014) 573–599 Sefirotic Depiction, Divine Noesis, and Aristotelian Kabbalah: Abraham ben Meir de Balmes and Italian Renaissance Thought BRIAN OGREN F IFTEENTH- AND SIXTEENTH-CENTURY Italy witnessed a conspicu- ous prevalence of syntheses between philosophical speculation and kab- balistic thought. This is due, in part, to the autodidactic syncretism of many Italian Jewish thinkers, who were garnering variegated forms of knowledge from diverse textual sources. It is also due, in part, to the prisca philosophia tradition of the Renaissance, which saw the revitalization of a wide range of ancient speculative sources as a necessary factor in human perfection and the search for truth. It is within this milieu that writers like the famed Jewish exegete Isaac Abravanel were able to bring Socrates into constructive dialogue with Rabbi Shimon bar Yoh . ai. 1 It is also in this milieu that a thinker like Abravanel’s illustrious son Judah, better known in humanist circles as Leone Ebreo, was able to boldly make the following assertion regarding Plato, in allusion to Kabbalah as ancient wisdom: Plato, because he had greater notions of this ancient wisdom than Aris- totle, followed it. Aristotle, who penetrated less deeply into abstract things, and unlike Plato did not have the testimony of our ancient theo- logians, denied that hidden territory, which he could not see . . . And I would like to thank Professor Fabrizio Lelli of the University of Salento for encouraging me to carry out research on Abraham de Balmes. This research was completed with the help of a grant whose givers prefer to remain anonymous, and was appositely administered through the University of Salento, which is in Abraham de Balmes’s birth city of Lecce. 1. See, for example, Isaac Abravanel, Commentary on The Torah, vol. 5, Deuter- onomy (Hebrew; Jerusalem, 1999), 385. The Jewish Quarterly Review (Fall 2014) Copyright  2014 Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved.