Egidio da Viterbo’sBook on Hebrew Letters:Christian Kabbalah in Papal Rome^*

Abstract

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.

Sir Thomas Tresham and the Christian Cabala

“…As Brian Copenhaver and Daniel Kokin have shown, in the early years of the sixteenth century an ecstatic Christian Cabalism enjoyed considerable prestige, even at the papal court. 12 These explorations came to an abrupt end in the 1550s with the papacy of Pope Paul IV, who instituted virulently antisemitic policies amid fear that study of the Jewish Kabbalah might produce heresy, against the background of an advancing Protestant Reformation. 13 Gareth Lloyd Jones has portrayed the impact of this esoteric strand of Renaissance Hebraism on England as limited, arguing that the English humanists of the early sixteenth century 'were not entirely unsympathetic' to the Christian Cabala, but regarded it as a 'blind alley'.…”

The converting sea: Religious change and cross‐cultural interaction in the early modern Mediterranean

“…When such intellectual collaborations were deemed detrimental to their respective faiths, they were banned (Weil, , pp. 20–26; Dweck, ; Copenhaver & Kokin, , p. 38).…”

The Syriac World

“…Cardinal Egidio da Viterbo (1469-1532), prince of the church, orientalist, and kabbalist was patron of the early encounters with the Maronites attending the Fifth Lateran Council. In addition, his book On the Hebrew Letters provided material for Teseo to ascribe a mystical significance to the Syriac alphabet (Copenhaver and Kokin 2014). The cardinal was thus initially responsible for imposing a mystical and Kabbalistic appreciation of Syriac in the first half of the sixteenth century (Wilkinson 2007a: 30-62).…”