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. The cognomen was a humanist’s choice, not an inheritance: Mithridates, the polyglot Pontic king of antiquity famous for mastering the tongues of every people he ruled, was the emblem a man trading on his languages would reach for. He carried, by various accounts, half a dozen names across his career, and the layering is itself a fact about him — the converted Jew who became a Latin orator, the Sicilian who lectured in Rome, the intermediary whose whole value lay in standing between worlds and belonging fully to neither.

The languages and the man

His command of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic was real, and unusually complete; he read and wrote Latin and Greek besides, and the range was the foundation of everything he became. Trilingual fluency in the Semitic languages was rare among Christian scholars of the period — Latin Christendom had let Hebrew lapse for the better part of a millennium, and the recovery of Hebraica veritas, the truth of the Hebrew original behind the Latin Vulgate, was only beginning. A man who could move freely among the Hebrew of the Bible, the Aramaic of the Targums and the Zohar, and the Arabic of the philosophers held a kind of capital that the new humanism prized and could not yet supply for itself. That capital, more than any doctrine of his own, is what carried him.

He lectured at the universities and taught oriental languages in Rome under Sixtus IV, holding a chair that placed him among the learned servants of the papal court. The position depended on a particular role: the convert who could turn his old tradition into evidence for his new one. On Good Friday of 1481, before the papal court, he preached a celebrated sermon on the Passion — the Sermo de Passione Domini — arguing that the sources of Israel themselves bore witness to Christ, that the rabbis and the Aramaic paraphrasts had testified, in spite of themselves, to the crucified Messiah. This was the characteristic instrument of the learned convert: scholarship in the service of conversion, the old learning marshaled to confound those who still held it. It was the same instrument he would later turn on the Kabbalah, and the continuity matters. The man who translated the divine-name literature for Pico had already made a public career out of reading Jewish texts toward a Christian conclusion.

His later movements are harder to trace, and he seems to have left Rome under some cloud — the record speaks of imprisonment and disgrace, the details unrecoverable — before entering the German lands and then the service that made his lasting mark. The trajectory is characteristic of the convert-scholar of his generation, whose standing was always provisional, leased against continued usefulness and revocable at a turn of fortune. He had no community to fall back on: he had left the one and was never fully admitted to the other, and the biography reads as a succession of patrons and positions rather than a settled life. He surfaces again in the orbit of the young count of Mirandola, and there the obscure end of one career becomes the beginning of the work for which he is remembered.

The commission for Pico

That work was for Pico. In the mid-1480s the young count was assembling the material for his nine hundred Conclusiones, the theses he meant to defend in a grand public disputation at Rome, and among them he intended a block drawn from the secret doctrine of the Hebrew sages — propositions that would make the Kabbalah a witness, alongside Hermes Trismegistus and the Platonists, to the truths of the Church. Pico could not read the books he wished to draw on. He had begun Hebrew, but the dense theosophical and ecstatic literature of the Kabbalists lay beyond him, and the texts existed in no Latin at all. Mithridates supplied them.

The scale of what he produced in roughly ten months across 1485 and 1486 is difficult to overstate. He rendered into Latin close to forty Hebrew and Aramaic works — commentaries, theosophical treatises, the literature of the divine Names and of prophetic-ecstatic ascent — filling thousands of folio pages for a single reader. The pace was extraordinary, and it bears directly on the texts: a man translating that volume that fast, often interleaving his Latin with the original on facing pages and adding his own running commentary in the margins, was not producing a scholar’s careful edition but a working library made for use, and the conditions of its making are written into its character. Pico, for his part, was not a passive recipient. He had begun Hebrew under Jewish teachers in Italy — among them, very probably, the philosopher and kabbalist Yohanan Alemanno, his contemporary — and he read the Latin Mithridates handed him with a mind already turned toward the synthesis he meant to build. The translation and its reading were a collaboration of a kind, the translator anticipating the use, the patron pressing toward it. The principal codices survive in the Vatican Library, in the manuscripts Vat. ebr. 189, 190, and 191, with related volumes among the Chigi collection and the Latin manuscripts: a private library of Kabbalah made to order, in a language its patron could read, by a man working against a deadline for a disputation the world was meant to watch.

What passed through his hands was a particular Kabbalah, and naming it precisely matters, because Pico’s whole later reputation rests on what these pages contained. Mithridates translated the Pentateuch commentary of Menahem Recanati, the early theosophical text known as the Bahir, portions of the Zohar, treatises of Joseph Gikatilla including the Ginnat Egoz, and a substantial body of the prophetic-ecstatic Kabbalah of Abraham Abulafia — the meditative letter-mysticism that worked on the names of God. This is the Zoharic theosophy of the Castilian-Geronese line joined to the Abulafian science of the Name: a recognizably medieval Kabbalah, formed long before the Safed innovations of the sixteenth century that later readers, anachronistically, would project back onto it. The architecture of divine emanation, the play of letters and numbers as the hidden grammar of creation, the meditative ascent through the Names — these were the contents Pico met. He met them, however, already shaped.

The bent channel

The translations were not neutral, and the demonstration of this is the single most important fact about Mithridates as a historical figure. The Israeli scholar Chaim Wirszubski, in a posthumous reconstruction published in 1989, worked the Latin versions against their Hebrew and Aramaic originals line by line and showed what the comparison forces one to conclude: that Mithridates abridged, glossed, paraphrased, and at points silently rewrote his sources, and that the alterations ran in a consistent direction. He inserted Christological readings into the body of the text, attributing to the Jewish authors doctrines they did not hold; he introduced the Trinity, the Incarnation, the divinity of the Messiah where the originals said nothing of the kind; in places he manufactured passages outright and presented them as Kabbalah. The seams do not show in the Latin. A reader without the Hebrew — which is to say Pico himself — would have had no way to tell the interpolation from the source.

The consequence is precise. The Kabbalah Pico encountered was already bent toward the use he would make of it. When he advanced in his Conclusiones the claim that no science certifies the divinity of Christ better than magic and Kabbalah, and when he read the unpronounceable four-letter Name of God as completed and made flesh by the insertion of a single consonant to yield the name of Jesus, he was building on foundations a translator had quietly prepared. Some of the supersessionist reading Pico took to be discovery — the finding of Christ latent in the secret tradition of Israel — was placed there in advance, in the act of translation, by the man who handed him the texts. The mediation problem that would haunt all of Christian Kabbalah is present at its very source: the first Latin Kabbalah was a translated Kabbalah, and the translation had a thesis. How much of the slant was deliberate program and how much the habit of a convert who had spent years reading Jewish sources toward Christ cannot be fully separated, and the sermon of 1481 suggests the two were never wholly distinct in him.

This is not to make the Christological reading a fraud and leave it there. The Renaissance program of reading the Jewish esoteric tradition as a hidden witness to the Church was a serious intellectual undertaking, pursued by serious scholars across more than a century; it was also, openly and from the start, an instrument of conversion, framed within a world of forced disputation and pressure on Jewish communities. Both faces are real and they are not separable. The point about Mithridates is narrower and harder: that the bias entered not only in the interpretation of the texts but in their very rendering, so that the Kabbalah Latin Europe first read was, in part, a Kabbalah that had never existed in Hebrew.

The structure of the appropriation

The doctrines Mithridates carried over would become the working vocabulary of the whole current that followed. From the theosophical Kabbalah came the ten sefirot, the gradations of divine emanation descending from the hidden infinite, Ein Sof, into the manifest world; the Christian Kabbalists would read the upper triad as the Trinity. From the science of the divine Names came the techniques of reading by which letters and their numerical values were taken to reveal hidden identities — the operations a later shorthand would gather under the names gematria, notarikon, and temurah. From Abulafia came the meditative working on the letters of the Name as a discipline of ascent. These were not Mithridates’s inventions; they were the inheritance of medieval Jewish Kabbalah. His contribution was to make them legible in Latin — and, in making them legible, to make them point.

It is worth being exact about the architecture rather than the operation. The divine-name praxis of the sources he translated is a structure: a doctrine that the Name of God is the armature of creation, that the letters of scripture encode the order of the cosmos, that meditation on them is an ascent toward their source. The Christian Kabbalists received this structure and refitted it — the Tetragrammaton becoming, by the addition of a letter, the name of the incarnate Word. What changed hands through Mithridates was the framework; what the framework was made to say changed in the changing of languages.

Research and sources

The reconstruction that defines the modern understanding of Mithridates is Chaim Wirszubski’s Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter with Jewish Mysticism (Harvard University Press, 1989), assembled from the author’s papers after his death and still the indispensable study; it established, by collation of the Latin against the originals, the pattern of Christianizing interpolation summarized above. The critical recovery of Mithridates’s own texts is the ongoing series The Kabbalistic Library of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, edited by Giulio Busi and Saverio Campanini and published by Nino Aragno Editore in Turin since 2004; its volumes present the Latin translations against their sources, among them Campanini’s edition of the Bahir, The Book of Bahir: Flavius Mithridates’ Latin Translation, the Hebrew Text, and an English Version (Aragno, 2005). For the wider Italian Kabbalah that Mithridates drew on, and for Pico’s living contacts with Jewish teachers, the standard treatments are Moshe Idel’s Kabbalah in Italy, 1280–1510 (Yale University Press, 2011) and his earlier Kabbalah: New Perspectives (Yale, 1988); for the founding generation as a whole, Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann’s Christliche Kabbala (Thorbecke, 2003) and François Secret’s Les Kabbalistes chrétiens de la Renaissance (Dunod, 1964) remain the surveys of record.

The primary documents stand behind these. Pico’s Conclusiones nongentae, the nine hundred theses of 1486 — including the terminal Kabbalist block drawn from Mithridates’s work — survive in the editio princeps printed at Rome by Eucharius Silber, digitized by the Vatican Library, and in the posthumous Opera; his sevenfold Genesis commentary the Heptaplus (Florence, 1489), the most accessible demonstration in Latin of his kabbalistic-allegorical method, is digitized by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. The standard critical edition of the theses is Stephen A. Farmer’s Syncretism in the West: Pico’s 900 Theses (1998). The literature of the Names that Mithridates translated for Pico is hosted in early English in the partial Zohar of Nurho de Manhar and the Sepher Yetzirah in William Wynn Westcott’s version. Of Mithridates himself almost nothing survives in his own voice beyond the translations and the Good Friday sermon; the man is legible chiefly in the margins of other men’s books, which is the condition of the intermediary.

The hinge

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 manner and place of his end, how much of the slant in his versions was design and how much the reflex of a converted reader. He vanishes from the record around 1489. What is not uncertain is the consequence. The Latin he made was the foundation Pico built on; Pico’s synthesis was what Johann Reuchlin took up and gave systematic form, in De Verbo Mirifico and De Arte Cabalistica, for the German Hebraists who carried the current into the next century — to Egidio da Viterbo in Rome, to Cornelius Agrippa and Guillaume Postel and beyond. Without his versions the texts would have stayed shut to the Latin readers who built Christian Kabbalah after Pico. 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.

→ In the library: The Zohar (partial English) — Nurho de Manhar (1914) · Sepher Yetzirah — Westcott (1911)

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Gnosis · Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola · Christian Kabbalah · Kabbalah · Johann Reuchlin · Egidio Da Viterbo · Joseph Gikatilla · Abraham Abulafia · Marsilio Ficino · Prisca Theologia · Christianity