Giovanni Spano e gli ebrei. Due mss. ebraici della sua collezione nella Biblioteca Universitaria di Cagliari e nuove scoperte sulla Sardegna Judaica

In the first part of this study the author examines the attitude of Giovanni Spano (1803-1878), a learned ecclesiastical scholar in Sardinia during the 19th century, towards the Jews and Judaism, as it appears from his “History of the Jews in Sardinia” published in Cagliari in 1875. Spano, who studied Oriental Languages in Rome at the University “La Sapienza” and not in an Ecclesiastical or Pontifical institution, was a pioneer in the study of the presence of the Jews in Sardinia. He considered the Jews as Sardinian people for almost 1500 years and appreciated their values and merits in the development of the commercial activities. His attitude towards them is characterized by a total absence of anti-Semitism, which on the contrary was still widespread in the Catholic Church at that time, and by a sympathetic evaluation of their capacities. In the second part the author describes two Hebrew manuscripts which belonged to Giovanni Spano’s collection, now preserved at the University Library in Cagliari. These manuscripts escaped from the census carried out from the Sixties of the 20th century by the Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts in Jerusalem. The manuscript 197, copied in Emilia Romagna - northern Italy during the 15th century and belonged to some members of the Finzi Jewish family of Reggio Emilia, contains prayers for the Jewish Holydays celebrations of the liturgical year. The second manuscript, bearing the call number 194, was copied in the Tunisian area during the 17th century and is a miscellany of Magical texts and recipes and of astrology as well. In the third part the author describes some documents relating to the Jewish presence in Sardinia. In particular the upper part of two funerary Jewish lamps decorated with a menorah, discovered recently in Porto Torres, and a fragment of white marble with incised a five-branch menorah: all these findings date back to the 4th-5th century C.E. Finally a vellum handwritten folio in Latin and Hebrew, discovered in the Eighties of past century reused as binding in the Diocesan Archive Lanusei, is described. The content of the two pages, which has never been identified, is a part of the Pugio fidei, a work composed in the second half of the 13th century by the Catalan Dominican friar Ramón Martí. In this work for the first time he tries to prove the truth of the Christian religion in order to convert the Jews starting from the Hebrew and Aramaic texts of rabbinic literature, which thanks to the Pugio became known to the Christian world for the first time.