The Study of Hebrew and the Aspirations of Church Reform in 16th-century Rome

This article examines how the study of Hebrew in early sixteenth-century Rome became deeply intertwined with projects of Church reform. Moving beyond a purely philological history, it reconstructs a Roman milieu in which popes, cardinals, friars, and Hebraists treated Jewish traditions as a resource for rethinking Christian doctrine and ecclesiastical structures. After outlining the humanist and patristic background that linked Hebrew learning, Christian faith, and Platonism, the essay analyzes the activity of key figures such as Sante Pagnini and Agazio Guidacerio, who used Hebrew grammar, rabbinic commentaries, and new Bible translations both to correct the Vulgate and to answer Lutheran challenges. It then turns to churchmen like Giles of Viterbo, Pietro Galatino, Gian Matteo Giberti, and Federico Fregoso, showing how their engagement with rabbinic and kabbalistic literature fed broader visions of spiritual and institutional renewal. The “Francesco Zorzi affair” illustrates the tensions generated when such experiments in Christian Kabbalah appeared to undermine ecclesiastical authority. The article concludes by tracing how the confessionalization of Jewish studies, the burning of the Talmud in 1553, and post-Tridentine suspicion toward Hebrew and Kabbalah progressively narrowed the space for these projects. Nevertheless, the Roman experience of the early 1500s emerges as a crucial chapter for understanding how Christian interest in Jewish traditions shaped the religious debates of the first decades of the Reformation.