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Sacred Poetry, Eternal Felicity, and the Redemption of Israel: Obadiah Sforno’s Commentary on Psalms in the Berlin Haskalah


The article explores the philosophical exegesis in Obadiah Sforno’s sixteenth-century Psalms commentary and its reception in Berlin of the late eighteenth century, where it was reprinted in the Haskalah’s biggest bestseller—an edition of Moses Mendelssohn’s Psalms translation with Hebrew commentary. While the inclusion of entire commentaries by earlier exegetes was unique among all Haskalah Bible editions, I argue that the choice to include Sforno’s commentary alongside Mendelssohn’s translation of Psalms, itself an expression of Mendelssohn’s political-theological defense of Judaism, was intended to buttress shared philosophical doctrines and concepts located by the two scholars in Psalms, notwithstanding temporal and cultural divergences: imitatio Dei, the salvation of the individual soul, and Israel’s eternity.