His works were versatile rather than profound.  He wrote grammatical treatises and commentaries, which display learning more than originality.  But his poetical writings are of great interest in the history of Jewish literature.  He lived in the dawn-flush of the Renaissance in Italy.  The Italian language was just evolving itself, under the genius of Dante, from a mere jumble of dialects into a literary language.  Dante did for Italy what Chaucer was soon after to do for England.  On the one side influenced by the Renaissance and the birth of the new Italian language, on the other by the Jewish revival of letters in Spain and Provence, the Italian Jews alone combined the Jewish spirit with the spirit of the classical Renaissance.  Immanuel was the incarnation of this complex soul.

This may be seen from the form of Immanuel’s Machberoth, or “Collection.”  The latter portion of it, named separately “Hell and Eden,” was imitated from the Christian Dante; the poem as a whole was planned on Charizi’s Tachkemoni, a Hebrew development of the Arabic Divan.  The poet is not the hero of his own song, but like the Arabic poets of the divan, conceives a personage who fills the centre of the canvas—­a personage really identical with the author, yet in a sense other than he.  Much quaintness of effect is produced by this double part played by the poet, who, as it were, satirizes his own doings.  In Immanuel’s Machberoth there is much variety of romantic incident.  But it is in satire that he reaches his highest level.  Love and wine are the frequent burdens of his song, as they are in the Provencal and Italian poetry of his day.  Immanuel was something of a Voltaire in his jocose treatment of sacred things, and pietists like Joseph Karo inhibited the study of the Machberoth.  Others, too, described his songs as sensuous and his satires as blasphemous.  But the devout and earnest piety of some of Immanuel’s prayers,—­some of them to be found in the Machberoth themselves—­proves that Immanuel’s licentiousness and levity were due, not to lack of reverence, but to the attempt to reconcile the ideals of Italian society of the period of the Renaissance with the ideals of Judaism.

Immanuel owed his rhymed prose to Charizi, but again he shows his devotion to two masters by writing Hebrew sonnets.  The sonnet was new then to Italian verse, and Immanuel’s Hebrew specimens thus belong to the earliest sonnets written in any literature.  It is, indeed, impossible to convey a just sense of the variety of subject and form in the Machberoth.  “Serious and frivolous topics trip each other by the heels; all metrical forms, prayers, elegies, passages in unmetrical rhymes, all are mingled together.”  The last chapter is, however, of a different character, and it has often been printed as a separate work.  It is the “Hell and Eden” to which allusion has already been made.