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The Zohar among the Christians in the Renaissance

Saverio Campanini

Saverio Campanini

Paper by Saverio Campanini

Car si je connais mal la Psychanalyse de Freud, ou celle de Jung, en revanche j’ai étudié de très près la Kabbale dans le «Zohar».
Antonin Artaud

One of the most striking features of the complex attitude of the Christians towards the Jews and their books at the middle of the XVIth century is the ambivalence in their policies concerning, for example, the prohibition and persecution of certain Jewish books, notably the Talmud and the fascination and even promotion of other equally Jewish intellectual products, such as the Zohar. It is quite striking, as I have already pointed out on a previous occasion ¹, to read the report of Sixtus of Siena, who was sent to Cremona in order to burn the Talmud, which he did with devastating success. At the same time, as we also read in his fortunate Bibliotheca Sancta, stumbling upon the staks of newly printed copies of the Vincenzo Conti edition of the Zohar, he was proud to report that he managed to rescue them from the impending risk of being destroyed by the Spanish soldiers occupying the city. One cannot avoid the impression of witnessing the deployment of a definite paradigm of substitution ², alternating brutal repression and mellifluous blandishments in order to eradicate one corpus and to promote another one, in order to promote the Zohar over the Talmud as an alternative which was considered capable of bringing about or at least to ease Jewish conversion to Christianity. Even attenuating the polemical exaggerations of Heinrich Graetz, who defined the Zohar a “Schosskind des Papstes” ³ (a spoiled child of the Pope), a question still deserves to be raised: given that the depreciation or even the aggressive attitude of the Christians against the Talmud had a long and tragic history, where did this preference for the Zohar come from? Moreover, what did the Christians know about the Zohar before it was printed, with a clear participation of Christians in authorizing the printing and even in financing it?

The present essay aims at providing materials for a plausible answer to that question in studying the prehistory of the Christian attitude towards the Zohar, on the footsteps of the pioneering work written in the nineteen fifties of the previous century by François Secret ⁴ and, of course, on the footsteps of the most important recent work dedicated to the fortunes of the Zohar by Boaz Huss ⁵, looking for the earliest attestations of some knowledge of the Zohar among the Christians. This preliminary research is necessary in order to explain a fairly striking phenomenon: the decade following the burning of the Talmud in 1553 and the forcible closing of the Hebrew printing presses in Venice was not, as one might have expected, a desert of repression and compulsory inactivity but rather a unique “window of opportunity”, to use an expression already employed for another epoch by Moshe Idel ⁶, and an age of flourishing. As the silence of the Venetian printing enterprises brought about the expansion and the extraordinary success of the printing houses located in other northern Italian towns, I just recall here Mantua, Cremona, Sabbioneta and Riva di Trento, in the same fashion, the violent suppression of the Talmud and of the Talmudic literature coincided, not by any chance, with the dissemination of the Zohar and the Zoharic literature which was to have a decisive influence on the development of Jewish culture at the dawn of the modern age ⁷.

At the same time, as the beautifully reproduced copy of the Mantuan edition of the Zohar ⁸, among many, abundantly proves, the Christians did not deem the Zohar completely acceptable without interventions, corrections, and even outright censorship: the copy of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, for example, bears the signature of four censors: Domenico Gerosolimitano and Alessandro Scipione (both 1597), Giovanni Domenico Carretto (1617) and Vincenzo da Matelica (1622 ⁹) and it bears also, in accordance with the Sefer ha-Zikkuk, erasures and censorships throughout its three volumes. Only apparently is this case different from that of the Tiqqune ha-Zohar, published in Mantua in 1556, about which, due to an annotation of the hand of Vittorio Eliano ¹⁰, we know that the procedure of the censorship took place before the publication, so that it was unnecessary, at least according to the censor, to revise the book again after its printing. As a matter of course, any act of censorship is more efficient if not immediately conspicuous.

It is my persuasion that the complex attitude of the Christians towards the Zohar, which led to such contrasting results as its publication, promotion and even rescue on the one hand, and to its censorship on the other, can only be understood on the backdrop of the diffusion of the Zohar (and its pseudo-versions) among the Christians in the XV and XVI centuries. From the very start, in fact, one can easily recognize two trends, which characterize the entire history of the Christian perception of Jewish literature between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. On the one hand there is the tendency to instrumentalize authentic and forged bits of Jewish literature, purportedly confirming the truth of Christianity in order to support the sustained effort towards the conversion of the Jews to Christianity. This trend can be epitomized under the title of the most influential summa and anthology of Jewish (authentic and forged) texts ready to use in predication and controversy, the Pugio Fidei ¹¹. On the other hand, in a similar but distinct vein, one witnesses the diffusion, especially towards the end of the XV century, of a Christian fascination for the Kabbalah, once again in the persuasion that it would be entirely compatible with the Christian faith but with no special emphasis on the conversion of the Jews. The Christian Kabbalists of the Renaissance seemed rather persuaded that the Christians should learn Hebrew in order to read Kabbalistic books, from which a unique spiritual benefit, moral edification and even mystical revelations were to be expected. The two attitudes are clearly interwoven so that it is not always easy to keep them separate, one could even argue that the point of view of the Christian Kabbalah represents an evolution of the foundation laid by the Pugio Fidei literature but, since I am convinced that the elements of rupture prevail on the obvious continuities ¹², I will try to articulate a more nuanced picture in the following considerations.

Upon reviewing the vast landscape of the first mention and quotations of the Zohar among the Christians, one might be tempted to establish a distinction between “authentic” and “forged” references to the Zohar and to derive, from this philological criterium a theological nuance, separating the polemicists who were interested, with dubious means if necessary, to reach the conversion of the Jews at any price, and the forefathers of Jewish Studies, who would have rather lost some Jewish souls in order to reach a truthful and exact knowledge of the reality of Jewish tradition in order to convince the fellow Christians of its incalculable value for confirming the truth of Christianity. The divide between polemical tool (ad extra) and true prophecy (ad intra) does not constitute, for tempting that it might appear, the correct historical framework for understanding the phenomenon we are confronted with nor the right path leading us to comprehend the intellectual context allowing and even fostering the printing of the Zohar in the second half of XVI century Italy.

The very concept of “forgery” does not work very well in the case of the Zohar, which has been repeatedly exposed as a forgery in itself, not only for its pseudo-epigraphic nature, but also for the simple reason that, before its canonization coinciding only partially with its appearance in print, since, as for any other canonical text, paralipomena and apocrypha continued to be copied and, in due course, would be also published, there was not a normative “Zohar” allowing the easy decision whether a “new” Zoharic text should or should not be considered part of the Zoharic literature. In fact, even after the publication of the Zohar, the learned ‘Azariah de Rossi ¹³ could accept as plausibly authentic, although with a dubitative formula (“if they really have written thus”), a notorious passage about which we will deal again in the following pages, seemingly confirming the Trinitarian interpretation of the “Sanctus” or Trishagion of Isaiah 6 ¹⁴. De Rossi limited himself to note that it would only be a matter of terminological discrepancy, provided that one should not “trespass the limit” and attribute corporeality to the Godhead. After all, he continues, the sage Recanati did write statements that are very similar to that, in other words, there was no need to discard the Trinitarian reading of the Sanctus as a forgery. If one considers that Yehudah Liebes ¹⁵ is inclined to believe that the “normative” passage in question might have been censored by the Jews in order to avoid its Christianizing interpretation, we ascertain that the unstable textual situation of the Zohar before and after its publication opened widely the possibility to vindicate it for divergent, or even opposite hermeneutical receptions.

Nevertheless, contrary to what Scholem was inclined to believe ¹⁶, the first mention and the first two quotations from Zoharic literature in a Christian context are not forgeries made by a converted Jew, constructing, if we follow the image coined by Johann Widmannstetter and appreciated very much by Scholem ¹⁷, a Trojan horse ¹⁸, neither in the camp of the Jews nor in the one of the Christians. To the best of my knowledge the very first quotations from the Zohar are to be found in the Contra Iudaeos, or Tractatus de conflictu Christianorum contra infideles, in three books, completed in 1397 and penned by Maestre (Juan) Pedro Figuerola ¹⁹. For a long time, one did not know much about this controversialist, not even his name (Joann or Pedro), but it seems rather likely that Klaus Reinhardt should be correct in assuming that he was a physician, most likely of Jewish origin, who, in the aftermath of the campaign lead by Vicente Ferrer in 1391, was charged by the King of Aragon John I, to examine the books of the Jews of Valencia together with three Franciscans ²⁰. The tractate is, as the almost contemporary Victoria Porcheti of the Genuese Chartusian Porchetto dei Salvatici, a reworking of the Pugio Fidei, with the most interesting addition of two quotations from the Zohar, which he must have known from a different source, either from his personal acquaintance with some manuscript containing one of the many versions of the Zohar than in circulation or from the documents turned in or confiscated to the Valencian Jews. His tractate, at odds with the Victoria Porcheti, was not printed, but it enjoyed a distinguished readership, especially on a local basis, since the polemicist Jaime Perez of Valencia, in his Tractatus contra Judaeos, published in Valencia in 1484, quotes his fellow Valencian with respect ²¹ and again, in the 16th century, the distinguished exegete Pedro Antonio Beuter, also a Valencian, mentions and quotes him with praise, in his Annotationes decem in Sacram Scripturam (Valencia 1547) ²². Figuerola’s tractate, at least in part, was not only preserved in Valencia, at the Library of the Cathedral, where three volumes are still held, but also at the Inguimbertine Library of Carpentras, a sign of the diffusion of this tractate among the libertines of the XVII century such as Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc and Jacques Gaffarel. The two quotations, as Chen Merchavia has shown ²³, are taken from the Midrash ha-ne‘elam, and have appeared in print, in the original Hebrew, in the Zohar Chadash, that is only in 1597²⁴. Even the original Hebrew of these quotations, though, had been transmitted, albeit only in a manuscript (at the Escurial Library near Madrid), among the hundreds of quotations collected by the convert Alfonso de Zamora, in his Sefer Chokmat Elohim, published in Spanish translation by Federico Pérez Castro ²⁵ and, since they coincide perfectly with their Latin translation in the two manuscripts of the Contra Iudaeos of Figuerola, one has to conjecture that Zamora, in 1532, did have access, in Alcalà, to the original of Figuerola’s quotations, be that the latter’s source, or his very compilation, in the original or in a copy. As Pérez Castro has shown, the two quotations are used to confirm with new materials two arguments brought about in the Pugio Fidei, one concerning the identification of the Messiah with the stone (אבן, even) and one concerning the punishment of the wicked in the seven dwellings of the Hell. It could not be more evident that the first Christian contact with the Zohar, dated to the end of the XIV century, is entirely comprised within the project of the Pugio Fidei (to convert the Jews by their own literature, in the aftermath of the official disputation of Barcelona), the texts are “authentic” and their function is, as Alfonso de Zamora has it, with an obvious pun: כְּדֵי לִתְפּוֹשׂ מְשׁוּבַת הַעִבְרִים שְׁהֵם עִִוְרִים, “in order to facilitate the conversion of the blind Jews”, based on the homophony of “blind” (‘iwrim) and “Jews/Hebrews” (‘ivrim)²⁶. One point is thereby acquired: the Zohar, together with a large collection of Rabbinic sources, could be used as a valid tool in order to convert the Jews, thus justifying the effort of searching for it, of studying it carefully and even to preserve it in the arsenal of the weapons for controversy with the Jews and for their persuasion to embrace Christianity and receive baptism.

The second appearance of the Zohar in a very similar context is the well-known or, I should rather say, notorious quotation found in the Zelus Christi, of the convert Pedro de la Caballeria, compiled in 1450 but printed much later in Venice in 1592. Once again, the remote context of this quotation is an official disputation, this time the one held in Tortosa, which brought to the conversion of the prestigious family of de la Caballeria. Everything Pedro has to say about the Zohar is of extreme interest for our purpose: he declares that the entire work, called “Cefer Azohar” is very large (liber magni voluminis) and full of great secrets (magnorum secretorum), written in Aramaic (scriptus Caldea lingua) and it is found among private Jews (peculiares Judaeos) in the Kingdom of Castile. Moreover, he honestly confesses that he could not see the whole book (Ego non vidi totum librum), but only a quire. This is a symptom which will characterize the entire reception of the Zohar, the dialectics between the brief portions of text anyone has seen or possesses, and the “whole” Zohar, the large and mysterious book, always to be found somewhere else, in somebody else’s hands. The myth of the complete Zohar, which only could provide the definitive unveiling of the partial, fragmentary secrets it so abundantly contains, affects already the early stages of the dissemination of the Zohar with the archetypical scene, described in a biography of Isaac of Acco, in which the widow of Moshe de León and his daughter, disappointing the “horizon of expectation”, reveal that the “whole” Zohar, or its Vorlage, only existed in the head of Moshe de León ²⁷. It is also well known that in the first decades after the “publication” of the Zohar, many imitations were produced, and some of them made it into the main corpus of the Zohar. It is interesting to note that, precisely when the “myth” of the “whole Zohar” was introduced in the Latin world and in a polemical treatise, of the two supposed quotations produced by Pedro de la Caballeria, one, concerning the equivalence between “Binah”, the third sefirah, and its anagram “Ben Yah”, Son of Yah or “Filius Dei”, can be said to be authentic, since it is found in many passages of the Zohar; the other one, the principal, is not present verbatim in the printed Zohar, nor, for that matter, in any known manuscript of that tantalizing collection of fragments. It is the first known occurrence of a very fortunate (Pseudo-)Zoharic maxim: “Sanctus de ²⁸ Abba, sanctus Dabera, Sanctus da Ruha de Cudsa” ²⁹. The existence of a mythical “complete” Zohar, made it impossible for anybody to disprove the authenticity of this or any other fabrication, since any given copy of the Zohar one could produce, could always be suspected of being incomplete. Here we would have, almost in the very days when the printing press was introduced in Germany and some years before the first Hebrew book would be printed, an excellent argument (from a Jewish perspective) in favor of the printing of the Zohar, in order to construct, at least a posteriori, a normative Zohar, in order to stop the proliferation of imitations and all sorts of apocrypha, be they Jewish or, even more dangerous, Christian.

As a matter of fact, although the Zelus Christi remained unpublished in its time, this and other “Zoharic” fragments found their way to press and were vastly distributed. According to the later testimony of Abraham Farissol, there was even a society of Spanish conversos, who fabricated a collection of false Zoharic texts confirming blatantly the main tenets of the Christian faith in a mocking imitation of the Aramaic style of the Zohar ³⁰. In 1487 or 1488 yet another Spanish converted Jew, Pablo de Heredia, in contact with the Dominicans and knowledgeable of the literature of the Pugio Fidei, after having received a small book, as he recounts, from a certain Rabbi Abraham Papur in Jaca (Aragon), containing wondrous secretes and astounding prophecies confirming that Jesus was the Messiah, published in Rome the Epistola de Secretis, confirming the Zoharic passage quoted in the Zelus Christi and adding another one, also very much fortunate, interpreting in a Trinitarian fashion, the authentic wording of the Zohar on the Shema‘ of Deut. 6 ³¹. The Epistola was certainly widely read, but its fortune was limited if compared with the enormous diffusion found by the De arcanis catholicae veritatis of the Franciscan Pietro Galatino, printed in Ortona a Mare by Gershom Soncino in 1518. This voluminous tractate, rehashing for a larger audience the main contents of the Pugio Fidei, was not only reprinted several times during the XVI century and the first half of the XVII century until the Pugio Fidei itself was finally brought to print – first in Paris (1651) and then in Leipzig (1687), – it was also quoted by virtually every polemicist writing against the Jews from the XVI through the XIX century. Among the many texts, reprinted by Galatino in his work, Heredia’s pseudo-Zoharic passages were given a prominent place and reached thus a much broader readership ³². Galatino, who was well aware that no Jew would confirm the presence of the Trinitarian interpretation of the Shema‘ in the “authentic” Zohar, hastened to quote, as the convert Paulus Riccius already had done before him in 1507 ³³, the Commentary on the Pentateuch by Menachem Recanati, in which one could find the “preemptive” explanation of any censorship the Jews would have imposed to their copies of the Zohar. Recanati, in turn, had referred a passage from the Zohar in which Rabbi Shim‘on ben Yochay had cautioned that specific secrets concerning the Shema‘ prayer would only be revealed after the coming of the Messiah ³⁴. Moreover, he anticipated the objection by stating that, no matter what the Jews will claim, he himself had seen in Lecce, before the general expulsion of the Jews from southern Italy in 1510, upon consulting a very old Hebrew book in which another contested passage of the Targum should contain a Trinitarian explanation of the Trishagion of Isaiah ³⁵. In other words, if the texts he quotes are not found in Jewish sources, it must be the result of a campaign of censorship perpetrated by the Jews to avoid the embarrassment caused by such authoritative confirmations of Jewish dogmas. It can be safely stated that no other polemical work contributed more to the diffusion among the Christians of the idea that the Zohar, if complete and correctly understood, would represent, once printed, a tremendous resource towards the conversion of the Jews. To be perfectly honest, some voices were raised against this astounding “confirmatio catholica”: how could those texts be authentic and “canonical” among the Jews and so ineffective, since the Jews denied their authenticity and were not impressed by them nor had they been motivated to embrace Christianity? Even the Pope, Paul III must have voiced some apprehension, but Galatino reassured him in a letter, in which he stated that the Hebrew original of Heredia’s source was in his hands and that he would translate it anew ³⁶. Since the passage of the “Zohar” commenting upon Deuteronomy was not found in the Gale Razaya, the main prophecy of Heredia, but in the Postillae, the alleged original was even more elusive, until, as it is far from surprising, it was fabricated in due course, first in a very poor Hebrew version found in the apologetical book Il Messia Venuto (1659) by Giovanni Maria Vincenti ³⁷, and much later back-translated into dubious Aramaic by the notorious convert and forgerer Juan Joseph Heydeck in his Defensa de la religion Cristiana (1793) ³⁸.

The already mentioned Alfonso de Zamora who, as we have seen, did copy authentic passages from the Midrash ha-ne‘elam, could not refrain from quoting in his apologetic, bilingual letter to the Jews of Rome (published as an appendix to the second edition of his Hebrew Grammar, which appeared in Salamanca in 1526), with only small variants, the Trinitarian Trishagion ³⁹

קדיש אבא קדיש ברא קדיש רוחא דשמיא

One of the most striking features of the numerous quotations from the Zohar in the Christian polemical literature between the end of the XV and the first half of the XVI century, but already remarkable since Pedro de la Caballeria, is the coexistence of “authentic” and “forged” Zoharic texts. Alfonso de Zamora, in fact, is certainly not alone in this category: the influential physician of the Emperor, the already mentioned Paulus Riccius in several of his works quotes both authentic passages from the Zohar and the “forgery” on Deuteronomy. François Secret has supposed that Riccius knew and was influenced by the Epistola de Secretis, but this view seems to me quite questionable, and it is more than likely that, through Recanati’s Commentary, since it is far from assured that Riccius had direct access to a manuscript of the Zohar, this suggestive reding of the Zohar could have been “discovered” anew by yet another baptized Jew ³⁹ On Riccius in general B. Roling, Aristotelische Naturphilosophie und christliche Kabbalah im Werk des Paulus Ritius, Max Niemeyer, Tübingen 2007. The question of the source of Riccius’ Trinitarian interpretation of the Zohar and of Menachem Recanati’s Commentary on the Pentateuch has to be left for another occasion which, hopefully, will present itself in the near future. .

Even more interesting is the case of Ludovico Lazzarelli, who, in his Crater Hermetis (written in 1494 published in 1504), attributes to the Zohar a speculation on Adam’s sin, which is not to be found in our editions. Moreover, he quotes a passage on the shemot shel tum’ah, authentically Zoharic, but attributes to the Midrash Bereshit Rabba by Moshe ha-Darshan the well-known passage on Deuteronomy 6 which, as we have seen, is ascribed to the Zohar by Heredia ⁴⁰. In the biography of Lazzarelli, written by his brother Filippo, it is stated that he used precisely this passage in a public discussion with a Jew in Teramo, and that this quotation helped him to win the controversy ⁴¹. The attribution of this “Zoharic” passage to Moshe ha-Darshan is a clear indication that all these pseudepigrapha and apocrypha are still very much indebted to the ideological and doctrinal framework of the Pugio Fidei since Ramón Martí, or his team of translators, quote him most frequently as the source of texts of doubtful authenticity.

In the first decades of the XVI century the Zoharic literature penetrates Jewish and sometimes Christian libraries so much that it can even happen to quote the Zohar inadvertently, such as in the case of the most prominent Christian Kabbalist of the Renaissance. Johannes Reuchlin, who did not master Aramaic enough to be able to read the Zohar, if at all, in the numerous quotations found in Menachem Recanati’s Commentary on the Pentateuch, does quote, without noticing it, the Midrash ha-ne’elam (a passage missing from modern editions but assigned to that work by Chayim Vital), attributing it, nevertheless to Todros ha-Levi Abulafia, whose name Reuchlin misspelled as Tedacus Levi. This quotation and wrong attribution have been reproduced in the ensuing centuries by dozens of authors, comprising eminent personalities such as Jean Bodin ⁴² and Athanasius Kircher, before Scholem ⁴³ and Idel ⁴⁴ were able to reconstruct the origin of the mistake ⁴⁵. The most relevant point for the present survey is the acquisition of the fact that Zoharic literature permeates Christian writings from the late XV century onwards in many forms: as correct citations, as forged pseudo-epigraphic texts and also as unrecognized quotations.

Reuchlin is also important since, in his very influential bibliography of Kabbalistic literature ⁴⁶, printed in his De arte cabbalistica in 1517, he did not fail to mention the Zohar ⁴⁷, and the same did Augustinus Riccius ⁴⁸, thus contributing to create a bibliographic curiosity, an expectation, mobilizing the readers to search for this valued Jewish source.

The power of bibliography, although often based on second hand references and more often than not relying on a very vague acquaintance with the titles it so carefully lists, should by no means be underestimated. I will quote, in this context only one example ⁴⁹: the Christian Kabbalist Francesco Zorzi listed the Zohar in the vast bibliography of his De harmonia mundi ⁵⁰, although, judging from the few quotations he offers, his knowledge of the Zohar in 1525 was still minimal, as it seems that he only had obtained a fragmentary manuscript on Leviticus and he recalls it only rarely ⁵¹. In any event, the few mentions of the Zohar contained in this prestigious text found resonance even in relatively popular literature, such as in the miscellany of the physician Federico Crisogono, published in Venice in 1528. Crisogono, in a chapter dedicated to the pursuit of happiness, offers a list of the indispensable books promising to attain that coveted goal, that is intellectual and contemplative happiness, and the very first book on his list is none other than the Zohar (liber Zoar a Simone ben Jochai editus) ⁵². Although he denies that the Kabbalistic books would maintain this promise, it is significant that Crisogono felt necessary to mention them, a clear sign of the “popularity” of these arcane tomes, or at least of their titles among a prophane readership. It would be easy to multiply the occurrences and the range of the pure mentions of the Zohar in Christian books before the publication of the original Zoharic corpus, but the ones we have referred to should suffice to show that the Zohar, when it finally appeared in print, could not fall upon deaf ears.

The popular dimension of the expectations connected among Christian readers with the Zohar has been confirmed recently by a fortuitous discovery I have made in the flyleaves of a Soncino Bible held at the Vatican Library ⁵³. There one reads an interesting example of yet another Zoharic pseudephigraphon in a very poor Aramaic wording, prophesizing the birth of Jesus from a “matronita” (translated as Empress), the duration of his life (33 years), his death and resurrection. It seems a fairly good example of the type of forgeries described by Abraham Farissol and, as a matter of fact, the text, although purportedly coming from the Orient, was brought to Rome by a converted Jew named Hieronymus of Tudela, according to the notice written on the same flyleaf by the owner of the Bible, a certain Veriano da Toscanella, a canon of the Church of the saints Celso and Giuliano in Rome. We know that he bought the book in 1508, but the inscription could have been written some years later. In any case it documents eloquently that the fascination for the Zohar, understood as a prophetic book confirming the essential tenets of Christian faith was widespread well beyond the cultivate and erudite circles of the Hebraists and reached larger strata of the Christian readership.

This diffusion and expectation, based on a quite vague acquaintance with the actual contents of the Zoharic corpus, reaching back typologically to the Pugio Fidei model, was certainly not the only, unchallenged modality of penetration of the Zohar among the Christians prior to its publication. As I have already hinted, a completely different modality of approach to the Zohar acquired an increasing importance in the same decades: between the end of the XV and the first half of the XVI century, an alternative conception of the Zohar became relevant: the Christian Kabbalistic approach. As a matter of fact, it was the father of Christian Kabbalah, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, in his Conclusiones, printed in Rome at the end of 1486, the very first to mention, in a printed work, the title of the Zohar ⁵⁴. In his mention of the Bahir, in fact, he was preceded by Marsilio Ficino, who in turn depended from Pablo de Santa Maria ⁵⁵. As Wirszubski ⁵⁶ has shown, Pico’s knowledge of the Zohar was derivative, mediated as it was through the Commentary on the Pentateuch by Menachem Recanati. Upon studying the manuscripts of the Latin translations of Kabbalistc books made for Pico by Flavius Mithridates, it is easy to find out that the Zohar is quoted by many of his sources, not only Recanati on the Pentaeuch and on the daily prayers ⁵⁷, but also Judah ben Nissim Ibn Malka ⁵⁸, the Yeriah ha-gedolah (where it is called “Zohar Magnus” ⁵⁹), an anonymous commentary on the Aggadot of the Talmud ⁶⁰, etc. In this large corpus we find no trace of interpolations or of apocryphal Zoharic texts, although Mithridates, in his earlier career, did use materials from the Pugio Fidei and other similar dubious sources ⁶¹. Pico stands at the beginning of a completely different approach to the Zohar, still dependent on anthologies and isolated quotations and incapable of reading them without the help of his translator. Nevertheless, it was in his footsteps that some Christian Kabbalists searched, and found, authentic Zoharic manuscripts, and published some fragments also in the Aramaic original, and large paraphrases of the Zohar many decades before its printing in Mantua and Cremona, contributing thus to a radically new evaluation of the potential usefulness of this fundamental text.

The first authentic sentences of the Zohar published in print are, to the best of my knowledge, the seven quotations found in the glosses to the polyglot Psalter published in Genua in 1516 by the Dominican, bishop of Nebbio in Corsica, Agostino Giustiniani ⁶². It is most likely that Giustiniani had at his disposal only a partial copy of the Zohar since his quotations are taken, with only one exception ⁶³, from the Idra rabba ⁶⁴. It is also noteworthy that Giustiniani never mentions the name “Zohar”, speaking rather, most likely in accordance with the copy at his disposal, of a commentary on the Book of Genesis, “written in the esoteric language of Jerusalem”, and he shows also some skepticism as to the author of the Book, attributed sometimes to Shimon ben Jochai (creditur) and sometimes as anonymous (quicumque fuerit). To this day no one could identify the Hebrew manuscript from Giustiniani’s legendary library, which served as a basis for his edition but, upon studying anew his quotations, I have been lucky to find Giustiniani’s Zohar in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana ⁶⁵ in Florence. The manuscript is abundantly glossed in Latin on the margins by the very hand of this Christian Kabbalist ⁶⁶. Even if the hand of Giustiniani would not confirm abundantly that precisely this Hebrew manuscript, written in an Italian hand datable to the XIV century, served as his basis, the textual peculiarities that characterize it, especially the fact that, only in this manuscript, the section called Idra Rabba is found immediately before the parashiot Noach and Lekh Lekah a peculiar textual inversion (Zohar I,94 preceding I,93), exactly reproduced by Giustiniani in his quotation, would have sufficed to indicate that precisely this fragmentary copy of the Zohar must have been consulted by Giustiniani for the princeps before the princeps, as it were. Since I plan to publish a separate study on the topic, I will not delve here into the philological details of this interesting finding, nor on the peculiar interpretation of this “authentic” piece of Zoharic literature he displays in his glosses, albeit subsumed under the title Yerushalmi, also attested in the Jewish tradition ⁶⁷, but I will limit myself here to a brief observation. In line with Pico’s ideology Giustiniani was able, with some exegetical tour de force, to say the least, to confirm the dogma of Trinity or the Incarnation by using a genuine Zoharic anthology. The method indicated by Pico only by way of allusion and by Giustiniani in more detailed terms, was followed by other Hebraists in the Renaissance. Cardinal Egidio da Viterbo, to name the most prominent, acquired a manuscript of the Zohar copied in Tivoli in 1513, had it translated into Latin only to find out that it must have been incomplete and thus wrote to the Augustine friar Gabriele della Volta in 1514 in order to start a search for a “complete Zohar” in the Orient ⁶⁸. Egidio spoke with the highest respect of the Zohar (labore magno quaesitus, maiore inventus maximo rescriptus), which he quoted repeatedly in his works on the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and on the state of the Church and the possible new coming of the Messiah, foreseen for the year 1530 ⁶⁹. On his footsteps Johann Albrecht Widmannstetter ordered from the convert Francesco Parnas in 1550, with the help of Jacob Mantino’s more complete copy, an eclectic Zohar with marginal Latin excerpts, still preserved in three volumes at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich ⁷⁰.

The single Christian Kabbalist who did more for the diffusion of the Zohar among the Christians in the first half of the XVI century was the already mentioned Francesco Zorzi who, after a slow start in his De harmonia mundi, as we have recalled, must have found and thoroughly studied a more complete copy of the Zohar between 1525 and 1536, when he published his 3000 In Scripturam Sacram Problemata, a commentary on the Bible and selected ancient authors organized according the principle of question and answer. Hundreds of questions concerning crucial points of Christian theology found thus a stimulus, and more often than not, a straightforward answer in the venerated text of the Zohar. The polemical dimension is here almost completely absent, as in general his attitude towards Kabbalah is far removed from the shrewd fabrications of the Pugio Fidei and its humanistic tradition. The main aim in Zorzi’s vast usage of the Zohar was not so much to convert the Jews to Christianity, an activity in which nevertheless, he was quite successful, but to convert his Christian readers, as it were, to the venerable and “authentic” tradition of Kabbalah. His enthusiasm, in a time of deep crisis for Christianity, conquered many followers, even among the Cardinals, such as in the case of Federico Fregoso, who hired a “personal Kabbalist”, a Jewish physician, to help him study Kabbalistic literature ⁷¹, but also even more vocal adversaries.

The previous survey should contribute to understand the complexity of the Christian attitudes towards the merits and the dangers of the publication of the Zohar at the eve of its final double printing, in Cremona and Mantua, between 1558 and 1560. The echo of the burning of the Talmud, which was decreed in 1553 and continued to resonate through Italy in the ensuing years, was still deafening for any Jewish soul, as it is vividly recorded by one of the correctors of the Mantuan edition, Abraham ben Meshullam da Sant’Angelo ⁷². This tragic act of repression at the climax of Counter-Reformation did not have only a negative dimension, it was also, de facto, a powerful incentive to spread a text such as the Zohar, considered, if not holy, certainly more apt to open the eyes of the “blind Jews” to the splendor of Christian faith. Within the Christian camp at least three attitudes were represented. The enthusiasts, such as Guillaume Postel, who translated the Zohar twice ⁷³ and who, if we believe his own testimony, convinced Moshe Basola to take a decisive stand in favour of the much-debated printing of the Zohar; on the other hand there were many who were aware of the polemical potential of the Zohar, provided that it be complete, for the goal of bringing about the conversion of the Jews; finally some maintained an attitude of suspicion, fearing, not without reasons ⁷⁴, that the Zohar could contain anti-Christian passages, or that it might be printed in a way as to censor the passages which could be read as confirming the truth of Christianity. It is therefore far from surprising that both printing enterprises of the Zohar, more openly in Cremona, but also in Mantua, were the result of an objective convergence of Christian and Jewish aims, not solely from a commercial point of view. There was certainly a Jewish interest in disseminating this masterpiece of literary and spiritual creativity in the most complete, stable and authoritative version but, at the same time, many Christians, on different levels and with different functions, were involved: promoting, financing, and even surveilling with both negative and positive censorship, since the imprimatur came close, in the case of the Zohar, to an outright endorsement.

The printing of the Zohar can be described as a luminous example, though not without its dark spots, of what Wilhelm Wundt called once the “heterogony of ends”. We are in the position for better understanding, thus, the words of Immanuel of Benevento, who was instrumental for the printing press in Mantua, and especially for the Zoharic collection. In his preface to the 1558 Mantua edition of the Ma‘areket ha-Elohut, he countered the objection of the ones who feared that the Christians, if the Zohar would be printed, could learn about it and use it for their purposes, after having remarked, once again, that the loss of the Talmud and of the halakic commentaries, could lead to the paradoxical result of the Jews being forced to apprehend the glory of God from “the works of Boccaccio or from history books”, he counters the objection levelled against the printing of the Zoharic literature on the basis of the risk that the Christians might take offence at it, with the following rhetorical question, with a remarkable dose of lucidity and “optimistic realism”:⁷⁵

Do they not own already these books, in manuscripts as well as in print, in their language, far more abundantly than we do?

The printing of the Zohar was both at the end of a long process of consolidation of a literary tradition and at the beginning of the struggle for establishing it at the core of Jewish self-identification. At the same time the elegant portal of its frontispiece can be seen as the threshold and the meeting place of Jews and Christians discussing, once more, about their shared and bitterly contested heritage. The Zohar with its obscure radiance had already proven to be capable of supporting diverging and even incompatible readings.

Frontispice du premier volume de l'édition Princeps du Zohar, Mantoue 1558 (Fonds E.-J. Nahmias, Alliance Israélite Universelle, Paris) — Frontespizio del primo volume dell’*editio princeps* dello Zohar, Mantova 1558 (Fonds E.-J. Nahmias, Alliance Israélite Universelle, Paris)

This paper was published in english in Materia giudaica : rivista dell’associazione italiana per lo studio del giudaismo : XX/XXI, 2015/2016 – La Giuntina (torrossa.com) “The Zohar among the Christians in the Renaissance, in «Materia Giudaica» 25 (2020), pp. 511-524.”

The Zohar among the Christians in the Renaissance

Saverio Campanini

Saverio Campanini

Paper by Saverio Campanini

Autres Publications