Publisher's Synopsis
In the upheavals of the 15th and 16th centuries, Judaism and the Catholic Church were both confronted with the question of the compatibility of tradition and the new view of the world. While the Catholic Church defended familiar modes of thought to maintain its authority, some representatives of Jewish culture saw the contrast between the old and new worlds as a fundamental moral issue. Both found an ideal model for representing their cultural and political ideas in the symbol of the Solomonic Temple. The aim of this study is to demonstrate parallels and to reconstruct the environment in which the Shilte ha-gibborim of Abraham ben David Portaleone were written.
