What Should We Make of Leonard and Leone?
The names were similar and their ideas coincided. But they were divided by 500 years.
In my most recent book, Leonard Cohen: The Mystical Roots of Genius I looked at how the maestro made prolific use of Christian and Jewish folklore, Bible, Talmud and Kabbalah in his music. I showed how he used these ancient sources as a vocabulary for his spiritual, romantic and deeply personal ideas. He didn’t rely exclusively on these sources, he was no religious evangelist; he was a profoundly learned man who drew from many other places as well. Nevertheless, Jewish and Christian traditions figure prominently in his lyrics and poetry.
Leonard Cohen was not writing for a religious or a particularly spiritually inclined audience. He was a popular musician, albeit one with astonishing depth. Just as Dylan did with society and justice, the Beatles occasionally with eastern spirituality and dozens of bands with psychedelia, he harnessed the culture that animated him to express his ideas. The secular audiences he sang to were mostly unfamiliar with the Jewish insights he used, much of the time they didn’t even recognise them as such.
What I didn’t do in the book, because it wasn’t really the theme, was to show how Leonard Cohen was part of a contemporary trend of integrating Jewish ideas into secular literature. He wasn’t the only one of course, Philip Roth, Woody Allen, Saul Bellow, Michael Chabon, Naomi Alderman and dozens of others tell secular stories from a Jewish perspective. But what made Cohen distinctive was that he wasn’t singing about contemporary Jewish culture, he wasn’t singing about New York or London, guilt or therapy; he was going back to ancient legends and ideas, reworking them to make them relevant today.
The ancient Jewish literary canon is prolific, it contains far more than is taught in traditional Jewish schools and colleges. Yet from the time of the Bible until the end of the Middle Ages, a period of three or four thousand years, the vast bulk of Jewish literature was only written by Jews for other Jews. It was inward looking, concerned only with its own culture, aware that few others would be interested, as indeed was the case. The advent of Christianity and Islam changed some of that. Christianity adopted the Hebrew bible and several apocalyptic, post-biblical texts. Islam reworked some of the biblical narratives and rabbinic legends. But that didn’t lead Jews to write for Christians or Muslims or vice versa (apart from Christian conversionary polemics). The three faiths ploughed their own furrows, rarely intersecting. When they did, the outcomes were generally bad. Leonard Cohen could not have sung his songs for secular audiences during the Middle Ages.
Things began to change during the Renaissance, with the rediscovery during the 15th century of the classical texts of antiquity. The cultural impact was breath-taking; it led to a whole new way of looking at the world, paradigmatic shifts in art and literature, the birth of science, medicine and technology; all those things that we take for granted today. It encouraged some Christians to explore Jewish ideas, particularly Kabbalah, hoping it would help them throw greater light on their own faith. And it motivated some Jewish philosophers, who had been studying Greek and Arabic philosophy to understand Judaism better, to take their ideas out into the wider world.
Dialogues of Love
In 1535 a book was published in Rome called Dialoghi d’amore or Dialogues of Love. It had been written by the Jewish philosopher Leone Ebreo. Although some people maintain that he had originally written it in Hebrew and that the 1535 edition was a translation, most experts believe that Leone Ebreo wrote his book in an Italian dialect. It was a very unusual thing for a Jewish philosopher to do; it meant that he was not writing for his Jewish co-religionists but for a wider, Italian speaking, Christian audience.
Leone Ebreo had been born as Judah Abravanel. His father was Don Isaac Abravanel, a highly distinguished philosopher and biblical commentator; the former leader of the Spanish Jewish community. I wrote about him a few weeks ago. Don Isaac had been expelled from Portugal in 1496; his son Yehuda, who like his father had been an eminent physician in Lisbon, fled to Italy with him.
Their exile was tragic for the whole family but particularly for Judah. He had been working as the personal physician to Ferdinand and Isabella, the King and Queen of Spain, who in 1492 expelled all the Jews from their land. However, they told Judah Abravanel that they would not expel him, they thought highly of his skills and asked him to stay behind. He refused; he would not abandon his family and his people. When the royal couple realised that he preferred familial loyalty to the luxury of the royal court, they ordered their servants to kidnap his one year old son, thinking this would force him to remain in the country.
Judah got wind of the plot to kidnap the baby and had him smuggled over the border to Portugal, planning to join him when he had settled his affairs. But a few years earlier his father had been sentenced to death by the king of Portugal, allegedly for taking part in a conspiracy against the monarch’s life. When the Portuguese king heard that Don Isaac’s grandson was in the country he had the boy seized and baptised as a Christian. As far as anyone knows that was the last that Yehudah Abravanel ever saw or heard of his son.
We don’t know much about Judah Abravanel’s life in Italy. We do know that he was in contact with several of the leading Christian philosophers and scholars in Naples, Florence and Venice. It was probably in one of these cities that he started to be known by his Italian name Leone Ebreo. It means Leon the Hebrew. He is called Leone in Italian because the symbol of the tribe of Judah is a lion. Leonard Cohen’s name is also connected to the word lion (though his Hebrew name was Eliezer). The similarity between the two names, Leone and Leonard, is of course nothing more than a coincidence. But the similarities in the themes they wrote about were no coincidence.
Cosmic Love
Leone Ebreo’s Dialoghi d’amore is not an easy book to understand, unless you have a particular penchant for medieval philosophy. It is composed as three discussions revolving around the subject of love, between Philo and his student, Sophia. Philo the the teacher is the lover, Sophia, symbolising wisdom, is his beloved.
The argument of the book is that love animates and maintains the universe; that it is the basis of the relationship between God, the cosmos and humanity. This is the starting point for a wide range of topics in the book that try to reconcile Aristotle more closely to Plato. Plato’s views on love, according to Leone Ebreo, represent the original, pristine universal wisdom which can be traced back through Jeremiah and Moses to Adam.
Dialoghi d’Amore was one of the most popular books of the early modern period. It was printed across Europe, went through 25 editions by 1607 and was translated into Latin, Hebrew, French and Spanish. It was popular because it was not a dry text book of philosophy; it was entertaining, mystical and highly readable. The Spanish author Cervantes quoted it in Don Quixote; Montaigne, John Donne, Giordano Bruno and Baruch Spinoza were all influenced by it. It was all about love.
This brings us back to Leonard Cohen, for whom love, both cosmic and physical, was the fundamental principle of the universe. We need only think of songs like The Window, in which he encourages a soul to mystically ascend into to the “arms of the High Holy One”, with its refrain “Oh Chosen Love, oh Frozen Love.” Or Suzanne, on his first album, with its image of a perfect body that can only be touched by the mind; the epitome of platonic love; Hallelujah’s “I remember when I moved in you, the holy dove was moving too”, the intriguing kabbalistic couplet “I am the one who loves; changing from nothing to one,” and so much more, as I try to show in my last book.
Leone and Leonard, half a millennium apart, two geniuses drawing on the traditions they were brought up with, reaching out to audiences beyond their native cultures. There is no doubt that these days we find Leonard far more interesting; many of us enjoy his music and have something to say about him. Leone may have been popular in his time, but it is not easy for us to make head or tail of him. But the question is, if there hadn’t been a Leone, if he hadn’t kicked off a process of taking Jewish thought out of its inward looking bubble and into the world; would there, five hundred years later, have ever been a Leonard?