Four Short Kabbalistic Treatises: Aser ben David, Perus Sem ha-Meforas; Isaac ben Jacob ha-Kohen, ‘Inyan Gadol; two Commentaries on the Ten Sefirot

In 1486 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola charged Flavius Mithridates, alias Raimundo Moncada, a converted Jew of Sicilian provenance, with the task of translating from Hebrew into Latin a whole kabbalistic library, encompassing most of the Jewish mystical works then available. Mithridates spent months, if not for years, filling thousands of folio pages. When Pico died in 1494, the manuscripts with the translations came to the Vatican Library in Rome, where they have remained almost untouched till today. The entire kabbalistic library of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola is now being published in monographic volumes. The series is a joint project carried out by the Institut fur Judaistik of the Freie Universitat Berlin (Germany) and the Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento (Firenze, Italy). It aims to bring to light the real contents of a central undertaking of the Renaissance that has been inaccessible for centuries. The four short Kabbalistic Treatises gathered here bear the following editorial titles: Commentary on the Tetragram (Perus Sem ha-Meforas) by Aser ben David, the Great Mystery (‘Inyan Gadol) attributed to Isaac ha-Kohen of Soria, a longer Commentary on the Ten Sefirot (Perus 'al 'Eser Sefirot I) and a shorter Commentary on the same topic (Perus 'al 'Eser Sefirot II). The latter, due to its laconic style and its structure, would also deserve the title of Table of Symbolic Equivalence to the Ten Sefirot.