La versione latina a cura di Paolo Ricci del Sefer Sha‘are Orah

The paper pays attention to the editio princeps of the kabbalistic treatise Portae Lucis (Augustae 1516) and to the first print of a sefirotic tree, which was included in its frontispiece. The book constitutes the Latin translation of the Sefer Sha‘are Orah (Book of the Gates of Light), a work on Jewish mysticism probably composed around 1290 in Castile and attributed to Rabi Yosef Giqatilla (ca. 1248 - ca. 1325). It is generally agreed, today, that Paolo Ricci (d. 1541), the translator, was a Jewish convert and that he was very close to the Aristotelian tradition of the University of Padua. It is perhaps less known the significance of Ricci’s Latin translation of the Sefer Sha‘are orah to reconstruct his own view, mainly rooted on Kabbalistic doctrines and Aristotelian thought. A brief example might clarify this concept, i.e. the main assumption contained in his In Cabbalistarum seu allegorizantium eruditionem Isagoge (first edition: 1509), an introductory work where the Kabbalah is described as a tool capable to produce the unification with the Agent Intellect. The last part of the paper seeks to reconstruct the reception of the Latin text and the fame of its frontispiece (1516), with particular focus to the responses offered by the Jesuit and the Protestant worlds between the 16th and 17th centuries, as well as to the interest which Scholem showed.