Published jointly with Harvard College
Three major topics are central to this volume: the history of the Jewish Kabbala during the Middle Ages, its major figures and its doctrines; the Christian Kabbalism of the Renaissance; and Pico himself, his doctrine and his sources.
The book’s first section discusses Pico’s knowledge of Hebrew and of kabbalistic literature and describes in detail the contents of the four extant manuscripts of Latin translations from the Hebrew prepared for Pico by Flavius Mithridates, a Jewish scholar from Sicily who converted to Christianity.
The subject of the second section is the translator Mithridates, the method and style of his translations, and the scattered interpolations, partly personal and partly doctrinal, which he added to the Hebrew texts.
In the third section, Wirszubski focuses on the role of the Kabbala in Pico’s thought. The volume is concluded by twenty-three appendices.