An understanding of Christianity is impossible without attending to the Jewish context in which it arose. During the early centuries of Christianity, the two traditions were often indistinguishable to outsiders. Scholars of early Christianity have long recognized this and devoted great efforts to understanding early Christian interaction with Jews. What is less often recognized is that even after the two traditions more clearly distinguished themselves from one another their development and self-conceptions remained deeply intertwined. This was inevitable, as both traditions claim both a common inheritance of texts and to worship the God who revealed himself on Mt. Sinai. To understand the intellectual and doctrinal history of both traditions, then, those moments of most intense interaction must be understood. These sites of interaction are often texts that remain understudied by scholars. One such body of texts is a series of translations from Hebrew into Latin that was completed by a convert from Judaism for the Italian humanist and philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in the 1480s.
As someone who is passionate about retrieving neglected philosophical and theological sources, working with medieval and renaissance manuscripts is an essential part of my research. One of the benefits of studying at the Medieval Institute at Notre Dame is that you are both required and encouraged to undertake intensive training in Paleography, the study of historical handwriting systems, and Codicology, the study of book production. For these reasons, I jumped at the chance to be part of Dr. David Gura’s intensive two week Winter School in Latin Paleography and Codicology. This provided me with the chance to work with a manuscript of my choosing in the Vatican Library! This prospect was especially valuable as I had been trying to transcribe a set of fifteenth-century Latin translations of Jewish theological works contained in the manuscript Vat.ebr.191. The microfilm, however, that was available to me was of such poor quality that I was not having much success!
During the first week in Rome I, along with the other eleven students in the program, received an intensive immersion in Paleography and Codicology. Dr. Gura instilled in everyone the ability to recognize scripts ranging from the Carolingian period up through the fifteenth century, including both highly stylized scripts used in liturgical works to very mundane scripts used by medieval university students and urban notaries. We also learned how to recognize the various elements of medieval book construction, such as how to count the quires, how to tell the difference between the hair and flesh sides of parchments, and how to identify the watermarks on paper from the later Middle Ages. This crash course involved up to twelve hours of work a day at Notre Dame’s Rome Global Gateway, located one block from the Colosseum. This beautiful location, along with the consumption of many Roman espressos, certainly mitigated the long hours that we spent distinguishing scripts, puzzling over letter forms, and counting quires!
During our second week, we began our work in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. This library, which was founded by Pope Sixtus IV in the fifteenth century, now contains over 80,000 manuscript items, many of which have never previously been analyzed. The manuscript that I was able to examine was Vat.ebr.191. It contains a set of translations of Jewish theological materials, especially Kabbalah, into Latin. Unlike some medieval manuscripts, we actually know quite a lot about its composition. The fifteenth-century Italian philosopher, humanist, and polymath Giovanni Pico della Mirandola asked a formerly Jewish acquaintance of his, an enigmatic figure who went by the name Flavius Mithridates, to translate these works into Latin for him in late 1485. Among the works that he translated were a series of three commentaries on a mysterious late antique Jewish work called the Sefer Yeṣirah, or Book of Formation. This work, which was traditionally ascribed to the patriarch Abraham, offers an account of the creation of the world by means of the ten divine sefirot and the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The theological goal of the work was to reconcile emanationist metaphysics with the biblical account of creatio ex nihilo. The abstruse style of this work spawned a large number of commentaries during the High Middle Ages. Three of these commentaries were translated into Latin for Pico. He was especially interested in Kabbalistic speculation because he believed that it bore witness to the Prisca Theologia, an ancient tradition of wisdom that underlay many philosophical traditions and prepared the way for Christian revelation. Pico hoped that by showing how Kabbalistic metaphysics could be reconciled with Classical and Medieval Philosophy he would enable the spread of Christianity.
Pico’s desire to bridge the gap between post-biblical Jewish thought and the Christian tradition within which he was raised and worked exemplifies those sites of interaction between Judaism and Christianity that reveal how Christianity is unintelligible apart from its interaction with Judaism. During my time working in the Vatican Library, I concentrated on transcribing a commentary on the Sefer Yeṣirah that has been variously ascribed to the thirteenth-century rabbis Naḥmanides and Azriel of Gerona. After completing my transcription, I analyzed the various linguistic strategies that Mithridates employed to render the complexities of speculative rabbinic Hebrew into Latin. I found that Mithridates consistently employed the vocabulary characteristic of Scholastic Latin to render technical Kabbalistic terms. At some points, he even interpolated entire phrases reminiscent of Scholastic philosophy. One notable example of this comes when he is trying to translate the commentary’s discussion of the description of the earth immediately after its creation in Genesis 1:2, in which the words “Tohu va-Vohu,” normally translated as “formless and void,” appear. Mithridates translated a gloss on this phrase as “informe et formabile” and interpolated a description of this term as “inchoatio formarum.” These Latin terms are reminiscent of St. Albert the Great’s discussion of matter as containing within the potentialities for specific kinds of forms. When I began scouring Pico’s writings for evidence that he used this translation, I found that he himself made the same connection. In his work Heptaplus, a commentary on Genesis 1, Pico specifically mentions how the writings of Jewish sages agree with the opinion of Albert and many other Scholastics on the nature of prime matter. My work on Vat.ebr.191 revealed how important Mithridates’s translation choices were for the success of Pico’s project of reconciling Kabbalah with Christian philosophy.
There is much work left to do on the translations contained in Vat.ebr.191. I have only worked on one of more than a dozen translations that Mithridates undertook on Pico’s behalf. Pico’s interest in Jewish sources provided inspiration for other Renaissance thinkers to engage deeply with the Hebrew language and Jewish sources to understand their Christian faith better. This growing “Christian Hebraism” would make important contributions to Reformation debates over doctrine and church practice. Pico’s own writings and Mithridates’s translations would be consulted by later humanists as part of these efforts. In the centuries after Pico’s death, his interest in Judaism has often been understood merely as a harbinger of modern attempts at inter-religious dialogue. My research is part of a trend that contextualizes Pico not merely in his Renaissance, but also his late medieval context. Rather than being simply a harbinger of some idealized modernity, he was a product of a late medieval world in which conversion was the primary goal of engaging with others who did not share one’s faith. Instead of simply condemning or ignoring these aspects of Pico and Mithridates’s project, however, I hope that my research reveals how these goals could still be intellectually fecund. Much has often been made of Europe’s Christian heritage, but Christianity would not have arisen without Judaism, and paying attention to those points in history when Christians took that especially seriously can continually reveal the richness of both traditions. My initial foray at bringing this small chapter of that history to light, however, would not have been possible without the generous support of the Nanovic Institute. For that, I am deeply grateful.
Additional Readings
- Chaim Wirszubski, Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter with Jewish Mysticism, (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1989)
- Brian Copenhaver, Magic and the Dignity of Man: Pico della Mirandola and His Oration in Modern Memory, (Belknap: Cambridge, MA: 2019)
- Moshe Idel, Kabbalah in Italy, 1280-1510: A Survey, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011)
About the Author
Bruce McCuskey is a third-year Ph.d. student at the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame. He studies the history of late ancient, medieval, and renaissance philosophy. His research focuses on the long history of Platonism (200-1499), especially the distinct ways in which medieval Latin Scholastic and medieval Jewish thinkers received and developed NeoPlatonic thought. He is particularly interested in the distinct ways in which Jewish and Christian philosophers employed NeoPlatonic concepts in debates in philosophical theology and philosophical psychology, as well as these debates' interaction with medieval mathematics and science.
Originally published by at eitw.nd.edu on January 28, 2025.