Campanini, Saverio
Senior Fellow: July-August 2024
Research Project: Fame and Discredit. The Reception of the Zohar among Christian Readers in the Early Modern Period
The research project concentrates on the reception of the Zohar among a Christian (Catholic and Protestant) readership in the Early Modern Period. The consideration of the Zohar as a fundamental text of Jewish mystical literature changed dramatically between the late 15th century and the first half of the 17th century. What was first perceived as a sort of confirmation of the major tenets of the Christian faith turned out to be a forgery, a medieval text erroneously attributed to Shimon ben Yochay. As a result of this discovery, the attitude toward the theological conceptions expressed in the text changed accordingly, shifting from enthusiasm to open hostility.
One of the decisive factors in this attitude shift was the development of critical methods to analyse historical sources, which led to the exposure of several pseudo-Zoharic texts as forgeries circulating in the Renaissance – especially those by Pablo de Heredia and Petrus Galatinus.
At the same time (more precisely, at the beginning of the 17th century), another intellectual battle was being fought on multiple fronts: the Europe-wide dispute about the antiquity of the vowel-points in the Biblical text. A Huguenot, Louis Cappel, contested the antiquity of the Masoretic signs, while the Lutheran Johannes Buxtorf defended it, also against the ideas of Elia Levita, who was working for a Catholic cardinal. In this context, Buxtorf referred to the Zoharic literature (but also to the Bahir) in support of his views, since the vowel-points are mentioned and kabbalistically interpreted in several passages.
This project intends to show that the authority of the Zohar was one of the casualties of that memorable battle. This will also allow to analyse the origins of the sceptical attitude of Baroque philologists towards the Zohar: was it genuine critique, or just the usual clash of different, incompatible, faiths?
Saverio Campanini is professor of Hebrew language and literature at the Department of History and Culture of the Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna.