These questions, put with renewed force at the beginning of modern Jewish history in the sixteenth century, have never gone away. Is Judaism a self-sufficient or an open culture? Is it heedless of time or marked by history? Were Torah, Bible, Talmud, and the myriad interpretative texts obsessively commenting on them and being in turn commented upon, enough unto themselves for leading an authentically Jewish life? Is that life necessarily diluted and compromised by immersion in Gentile culture, or deepened and enriched by it? It was in this precious but deceptive Italian dawn, before the
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