Review of Judah Messer Leon and Issac Rabinowitz, The Book of the Honeycomb's Flow (Sepher Nopheth Suphim)

Published as early as 1475-76, Judah Messer Leon's Hebrew rhetorical handbook, The Book of the Honeycomb's Flow, is clearly one of the most notable examples of the interaction between the Italian Renaissance and Jewish culture. Messer Leon, an accomplished physician, Aristotelian scholar, and rabbinic luminary, lived in a number of cities in north-central Italy during the second half of the fifteenth century. Having already composed Hebrew educational treatises on grammar and logic, he now introduced to his students the third part of the medieval trivium, the study of rhetoric, and placed it squarely at the center of his novel curriculum of Jewish studies.