Flavius Mithridates

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Flavius Mithridates was a Sicilian Jewish convert to Christianity and a Hebraist of the late fifteenth century, remembered above all as the translator who put the literature of Jewish Kabbalah into Latin for Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. He was born Samuel ben Nissim Abulfaraj, in Sicily, around the middle of the century, took the baptismal name Guglielmo Raimondo Moncada, and styled himself in his learned career as Flavius Mithridates — one of several names a restless and self-fashioning life left behind.

His command of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic was real, and it carried him far. He lectured at the universities and taught oriental languages in Rome; on Good Friday of 1481, before the papal court, he preached a celebrated sermon on the Passion, arguing that Jewish sources themselves bore witness to Christ — the kind of conversionary scholarship that gave a learned convert his standing in that world. His later movements are harder to trace, and he seems to have left Rome under some cloud before entering the service that made his lasting mark.

That service was to Pico. In 1486, the young count was assembling material for his nine hundred theses and the planned Roman disputation, and he could not read the Kabbalistic books he wished to draw on. Mithridates supplied them: over the course of that year he rendered a great mass of Hebrew and Aramaic works — commentaries, treatises, and texts of the Kabbalah — into Latin, filling thousands of manuscript pages for his patron. Scholarship has shown that the translations were not neutral. Mithridates abridged, glossed, and at points silently altered his originals, on occasion inserting Christological readings into the Jewish texts he was turning over, so that the Kabbalah Pico encountered was already bent toward the use he would make of it.

What Pico made of it was the claim, advanced in his theses, that the Kabbalah rightly understood confirmed the truth of Christianity — that its secret doctrine, like the wisdom he traced to Hermes Trismegistus and the Platonists, pointed to the Christian mysteries. This is the founding gesture of what later became Christian Kabbalah: the conviction that the Jewish esoteric tradition, read in a certain light, was a hidden witness to the Church. Mithridates was the hinge on which that transmission turned. Without his Latin, the texts would have stayed closed to the Latin-reading scholars who built the current after Pico, from Reuchlin onward.

He is, in the end, a transmitter rather than a thinker in his own right, and the sources leave much about him uncertain — his exact dates, the end of his life, how much of the slant in his versions was design and how much haste. What is clear is the consequence. A converted Sicilian scholar, working to a deadline for an ambitious young patron, opened a channel between two esoteric worlds that had run separately for centuries, and the channel did not close again.

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