Una glossa "caldaica" di Flavio Mitridate nel ms. Vat. Ebr. 190

In the Sermo de passione Domini, preached on Good Friday 1481 before Pope Sixtus IV by the converted Jew of Sicilian origin Guglielmo Raimondo Moncada, later known as Flavius Mithridates, there are numerous quotations in exotic languages, but the most astonishing are two sentences in “Chaldean”, written in the Ethiopian alphabet. In reality, as Wirszubski and Polotsky have demonstrated, those signs hid sentences in Aramaic, passages from the targumim interpreted as Christological prophecies. The same method of encoding Aramaic reappears, in quotations from the presumed original of the Chaldean Oracles, in a manuscript containing a version of the Oratio (1486) by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who was Mithridates’ patron and pupil. A gloss by Mithridates, written in the margin of Vat. ebr. 190, which contains translations from Hebrew into Latin of Kabbalistic works, prepared by Mithridates for Pico, sheds considerable light on the circumstances of that curious diffusion of encrypted texts in the humanistic era.