My research focuses on the role that Judaism played in the philosophical, political, and religious debate of the early modern period between the 15th and 17th centuries.
In my studies, I have tried to show that Christian interest in the Hebrew language and tradition (biblical and post-biblical) was not driven exclusively by scholarly motives or related to the revision of the translation of the Hebrew Bible, but that Hebrew was, from the beginning, an instrument for questioning and rethinking from the ground up certain aspects of the political, religious, and philosophical thought of the time. This is evident in the religious works of the philosopher Marsilio Ficino, who was among the first in Italy to take an interest in Jewish mysticism, in the historical works on Jewish political institutions by Carlo Sigonio, and in the Lutheran debate on the origins of philosophy in the seventeenth century.
The analysis of the Christian use of the Jewish political tradition led me to examine some of its Jewish counterparts and to study some key figures in Jewish political thought in early modern times, such as the exegete and philosopher Isaac Abravanel, the physician David de' Pomis, the rabbi Simone Luzzatto, and the philosopher Baruch Spinoza. The focus of this study has been and continues to be the search for a connection between the political organisation of Jewish communities (in the Italian peninsula, but not only) and the strongly republican thought of these authors.
This topic forms the basis for collaboration with the École Française de Rome, La Sapienza in Rome, the University of Hamburg, and the University of Pisa in a five-year project entitled Des Juifs en politique dans l'Italie de la longue Renaissance (XIIe-XVIIe siècles): pratiques, discours, modèles.
The relationship between practice and political theory has led me to take a closer look at a community, that of Rimini, which was important for the history of Judaism in the Papal States and in the central north of the peninsula in the 16th century. The discovery of more than 1000 documents, both in Latin and Hebrew, will allow me to publish the first results in the coming months.
Reflection on biblical and post-biblical political institutions in the Christian and Jewish worlds of the 16th century was also based on a dense exchange of sources and translations. Together with Cedric Cohen Skalli, professor of Jewish thought at the University of Haifa, I began researching the fate of the thought of Isaac Abravanel (an author frequently translated into Latin) in the Lutheran world between the 17th and 18th centuries.
The very Lutheran interest in Hebrew is the basis for another research collaboration with Giuseppe Veltri, Professor of Jewish Philosophy and Religion at the University of Hamburg, in which I intend to investigate the use of Hebrew in the German world of the Lutheran confession, focusing on university chairs of Hebrew and the works produced by professors and students.
