Review of Robert Bonfil, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy

This is a major work by one of the most creative and original historians of medieval and early modern Jewish history. Based on his extensive scholarship on Italian Jewry over the past twenty years, published primarily in Hebrew and Italian, it brings to the English reader a bold but mature synthesis of a significant epoch in Jewish and western history. Eschewing extensive annotation, the book, while hardly a popular survey, has a quality made more accessible to a wide readership by the elegantly simple and supple prose of the English translator Anthony Oldcorn, which captures Bonfil's original insights and observations concerning Italian Jewish culture and the Renaissance.