Abulafia lamented that in the course of their exile his people had forgotten their original language. He looked on the cabalist as a laborer working to rediscover the original matrix of all the seventy languages of the world. Still, he knew that it would not be until the coming of the Messiah that all the secrets of the cabala would be definitively revealed. Only then, at the end of time, would all linguistic differences cease, and languages be reabsorbed back into the original Sacred Tongue.
This is not the only surprise provided by Abulafia, however. The Cabala of the Names, or the ecstatic cabala, was based in the practice of reciting the divine names hidden in the Torah by combining the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. In a process of free linguistic creativity, it altered, disarticulated, decomposed, and recomposed the textual surface to reach the single letters that served as its linguistic raw material.
And begin by combining this name, namely, YHWH, at the beginning alone, and examining all its combinations and move it, turn it about like a wheel, returning around, front and back, like a scroll, and do not let it rest, but when you see its matter strengthened because of the great motion, because of the fear of confusion of your imagination, and rolling about of your thoughts, and when you let it rest, return to it and ask [it] until there shall come to your hand a word of wisdom from it, do not abandon it. Afterwards go on to the second one from it, Adonay, and ask of it its foundation [yesodo] and it will reveal to you its secret [sodo]. And then you will apprehend its matter in the truth of its language. Then join and combine the two of them [YHWH and Adonay] and study them and ask them, and they will reveal to you the secrets of wisdom….
Afterwards combine Elohim, and it will also grant you wisdom, and then combine the four of them, and find the miracles of the Perfect One [i.e., God], which are miracles of wisdom.6
What justified this process of textual dissolution was that, for Abulafia, each letter, each atomic element, already had a meaning of its own, independent of the meaning of the syntagms in which it occurred. Each letter was already a divine name: “Since, in the letters of the Name, each letter is already a name itself, know that Yod is a name, and YH is a name” (Perush Havdalah de-Rabbi ‘Akiva).7
Paleographers say that in certain codes of the Divine Comedy I is written as Y. Why can this not lead us to suppose that the I of Dante was the YOD of Abulafia, a divine name?
I have spoken of the idea of the evolution of the primeval Adamic Hebrew, of a possible doctrine of a common Active Intellect and of Yod as a name of God. None of these elements, taken separately, constitutes a proof. Taken together, they sound, to say the least, very intriguing. Could Dante have known the theories of Abulafia?
Abulafia visited Italy on several occasions: he was in Rome in 1260 (five years before the birth of Dante); he remained on the peninsula until 1271, when he returned to Barcelona; he returned to Rome in 1280 with the project of converting the pope. He journeyed afterward to Sicily, where all trace of him is lost somewhere near the end of the 1290s. His ideas incontestably exercised an influence on contemporary Italian Jewish thought.
We have a record of a debate in 1290 between Hillel of Verona (who had probably met Abulafia twenty years earlier) and Zerakhya of Barcelona, who arrived in Italy at the beginning of the 1270s.
Hillel, who had acquaintances in the world of Bolognese intellectuals, had written to Zerakhya to ask him the question first posed by Herodotus: in what language would a child speak if it were brought up with no linguistic stimuli? Hillel sustained that such a child would naturally speak Hebrew, because Hebrew was man’s original natural language. Hillel either did not know or disregarded the fact that Abulafia was of a different opinion. Not so with Zerakhya. He sarcastically remarked that Hillel had been taken in by the siren song of the “uncircumcised” of Bologna. The first sounds emitted by a child without linguistic education, he asserted, would resemble the barking of dogs. It was madness to sustain that the sacred language could be naturally bestowed on man.
Man possessed a linguistic potential, but it was a potential that could be activated only through the education of the vocal organs. This, however, required instruction. At this point, Zerakhya brought forward a proof that recurs in a number of post-Renaissance Christian authors (for example, in Walton’s In Biblia polyglotta prolegomena of 1673 or Vallesio’s De sacra philosophia of 1652): had there been the primordial gift of an original sacred language, then all human beings, regardless of their native tongue, would have the innate ability to speak it.
The existence of this debate is enough to show, without the invention of a meeting between Dante and Abulafia, that Abulafia’s ideas were subject to discussion in Italy, especially in the Bolognese intellectual circles that influenced Dante, and that from them, as Maria Corti argues, he absorbed his notion of the forma locutionis. Nor does the Bologna debate constitute the only point of encounter between Dante and Jewish thought.
I am using freely various bits of information on the Italian Jewish milieu in the Middle Ages provided by Jacqueline Genot-Bismuth (especially in her still-unpublished and huge research on Immanuel of Rome).8 It is striking to notice how many things happened in the Jewish milieus in Verona, Forli, and Bologna, all places that Dante visited (and do not forget that Hillel was from Verona and that in Verona Dante wrote part of the Paradise). At the close of the thirteenth century, a scholar named Yehuda Romano gave a series of public readings of the Divine Comedy for his coreligionists; a Lionello de Ser Daniele did likewise using a Divine Comedy transliterated into Hebrew script; and the surprising personage Immanuel of Rome, in his own poetic compositions, seemed to launch an attack on Dante’s ideals, almost aspiring to produce a sort of counter-Comedy in Hebrew.
Naturally such information only establishes the influence of Dante on Italian Jewish culture, not the other way around. Yet Genot-Bismuth is able to show opposing influences as well, even to the point of suggesting that Dante’s theory of the four senses of scripture, found in his Epistula XIII, had a Jewish origin. Such a hypothesis may be too bold: there were any number of Christian sources from which Dante might have drawn this doctrine. What seems less daring and, in fact, entirely plausible is the suggestion that Dante would have heard echoes of the debate between Hillel and Zerakhya. One could say that in De Vulgari Eloquentia he appears still close to the position of Hillel (or that of the Christian inspirers for whom Zerakhya reproached Hillel), while in Paradise he turned toward the positions of Zerakhya, that is, the position of Abulafia.
Dante visited Forli in 1303, and in this same city Hillel presumably died about 1295. There is much discussion about whether Dante was in touch with Immanuel of Rome or not. I cannot thrust my nose into such specialized historical questions, and there are many legends surrounding the notion of such a connection, as there is still much debate as to the extent of the influence on Dante of Arab sources. The real problem is different. If, for instance, somebody asked whether my writings have been influenced by Dewey or Merleau-Ponty, the philological problem would not be whether I had actually met Dewey or Merleau-Ponty. The problem would be to establish, first, whether there are detectable literal or conceptual analogies between my work and theirs and, second, whether I had the physical possibility of reading the books of these thinkers (by the way, I never met either of them, but I have certainly read their books).
In other words, it is not necessary to document direct links but rather to demonstrate the existence of an intellectual climate in which ideas could circulate and in which formal and informal debate between the church and the synagogue might ensue. We should remember that, before the Renaissance, a Christian thinker would scarcely wish to admit publicly that he drew on Hebrew doctrine. Like heretics, the Jewish community belonged to a category of outcasts that—as Le Goff shrewdly observes—the Middle Ages officially despised but at the same time admired, regarding them with an admixture of attraction and fear, keeping them at a distance but making sure that the distance was fixed near enough so they would always remain close at hand. “What was termed charity in their regard more resembled the game that cats play with mice.”9
Before it was rehabilitated by the humanist culture, Christianity knew little
