Egidio da Viterbo (1469–1532) wrote his Book on Hebrew Letters (Libellus de litteris hebraicis) in 1517 to persuade Pope Leo X to reform the Roman alphabet. Behind this concrete, if farfetched, proposal was a millenarian theology that Egidio revealed by introducing his Christian readers to Kabbalah, whose first Christian advocate, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, had done his pioneering work only a few decades before. Inspired by Pico and by Johann Reuchlin, Egidio also absorbed the Platonism of Marsilio Ficino, applying it in the Libellus to a Kabbalist analysis of the Aeneid, which he reads as a prophecy of papal victory over the Jews at the end of time, while also seeing Pope Leo as a modern-day Etruscan. But the main source of Egidio’s apocalyptic theology is a medieval Hebrew book, the Sefer ha-Temunah, which in Italy was new to Jews at the time Egidio read it.
This article publishes and extensively analyzes a previously unstudied Hebrew letter sent by Isaac ha-Kohen, a Jewish scholar from Syracuse, to the learned Venetian politician Marco Lippomano (ca. 1390-ca. 1446). Written at the latter's clear request, this epistle offers a brief introduction to the Arabic verbal system and was probably composed in the 1420s or 30s. Already recognized as an accomplished Hebraist, thanks to this letter we now know that Lippomano sought to learn Arabic as well, in one of the earliest documented cases of interest in the language in the context of the Italian Renaissance. The article argues that Lippomano's motivation was, as it had been in the case of Hebrew, primarily scientific in nature and suggests that he was specifically interested in learning Judeo-Arabic. It notes how Isaac draws upon Sephardic paradigms concerning the relationship between the languages of "Sarah" and "Hagar" in deducing that Arabic, like Hebrew, has seven "buildings" or verbal stem formations. And it further observes that the verb tables at the letter's core offer an important indication as to the continued vitality of Sicilian Judeo-Arabic into the fifteenth century. It also uses Isaac's letter to highlight the neglected linguistic element of Sicilian Jewish scholarship. Finally, this article places this unique document in a larger context of shared economic discourse concerning Jewish-Christian intellectual exchange. The article concludes with an listing and discussing all known manuscripts associated with this Isaac ha-Kohen, helping bring to light a clearly important, but previously neglected, Sicilian Jewish scholar.
Writing back in 1888, Adolf Neubauer, the father of modern scholarship on the Lost Tribes, warned that “It would be lost time . . . to trouble ourselves about the identification of this stream.” Neubauer was referring, of course, to the Sambatyon River, the mythical waterway that, according to common understanding, rests each Sabbath and separates missing Jews—the ten lost tribes or others—from their brethren, and indeed from the known world. Six days each week, according to the legend, the river runs so powerfully that neither these tribes nor their seekers can cross it; on the Sabbath, either natural wonders or halakhic restrictions prevent them from doing so as well. Thus, whether showcasing the sheer power and solemnity of the seventh day or the piety of the isolated (or general) community, the Sambatyon legend certifies that only in the messianic age will this lost population be restored to the rest of the Jewish people.
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