Flavius Mithridates und der unmögliche Abschied vom Selbst

The conversion of Shemuel ben Nissim Abulfarag, Sicilian Jew who lived in the second half of the 15th century, was for him, who changed his name first into Guglielmo Raimondo Moncada and later on into Flavius Mithridates, an occasion for promoting his career as a humanist, a translator, a librarian and an academic instructor, but his roots were not only very much present in his mentality and in his psychological constitution, but they were also the main source for his astounding career as a polyglot and as an orientalist at the Vatican curia, in Federico da Montefeltro's service and, most famously, as the translator of a Kabbalistic library for Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. The paradox, or rather the dialectical tension between the old and the new identity of this baptised Jew of the Humanistic age, is compounded by the fact that in many "secret" glosses, directed to Pico, he did not hide the fact that his relationship to religions, Judaism and Christianity alike, was at best very much strained: he appears to our eyes as a post-religious figure, but perhaps this is just the most sincere confession of a much widespread condition among the Jews and the persecuted religious minorities who were forced or felt constrained to adhere to a new religion in order to merely survive. What survives after an opportunistic or forcible conversion in the religious experience of a loquacious convert forms the object of this article.