Loans of books and Kabbalah in the fragments from the Biblioteca Casanatense

This article is the first to present the fragments brought to light in the Casanatense Library in Rome. Before taking a glance at the wealth of the findings and their typologies, it provides a sketch on the formation and the characteristics of the collection. Two kinds of sources are of particular interest to our knowledge of the Hebrew books circulating in Italy at that time. For one, I provide a transcription of three records documenting loans of books borrowed by members of the Jewish community between the 15th and the 16th century. Subsequently, I discuss the inventory of a set of kabbalistic fragments which have not been described so far; notably, I edit four folios of a Sephardi manuscript (ca. 15th century) which combines portions of the anonymous mystical work Sefer ha- Bahir (12th–13th century) and of Sefer Shaʿare Orah and Sefer Shaʿare Tzedeq by the Castilian kabbalist Yosef ben Avraham Giqaṭilla (1248–1305).