Epistola sacra seu de sacro concubitu. La traduzione dell’Iggeret ha-qodesh di Jacques Gaffarel

The rare scholars who have studied the Iggeret ha-qodesh and especially its fortune among the Christians did know that the Holy Letter had been translated into Latin in the XV century, by the convert Flavius Mithridates for Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. It was known, moreover, that Jacques Gaffarel had translated it anew and provided the text with erudite annotations, as the translator himself remarked in his letter-preface to the Historia dei riti Hebraici of Leone Modena (1637). Gaffarel mentioned his intention of printing his commented translation, but, if the printing had taken place, it was considered irretrievably lost. The article documents the discovery, at the Biblothèque Inguimbertine of Carpentras, of the galleys of this edition, beside a manuscript version (preserved only partially) derived from the galleys. The author offers a first survey of the features of this large fragment (only the annotations of Gaffarel are incomplete) and suggests some clues in order to find a solution to two questions: why did Gaffarel abandon the project of publishing his translation and what were the peculiar traits of the manuscript, allegedly very old, that he used for his translation. A forgotten chapter of Baroque intellectual history is therefore unearthed here for the first time, documenting also a further stage of the diffusion of the Holy Letter among a Christian readership.