Pico della Mirandola's Encounter with Jewish Mysticism

Chaim Wirszubski's Pico della Mirandola's Encounter with Jewish Mysticism, published by Harvard University Press in 1989, established through painstaking manuscript work exactly which Kabbalistic texts the Renaissance philosopher Pico della Mirandola actually read, tracing them to the Latin translations made for him by the convert Flavius Mithridates. Wirszubski was a specialist in Jewish intellectual history whose access to the original translation manuscripts let him settle a question earlier scholars had only speculated about. Its strength is that direct manuscript grounding, still the reference study on Pico's Kabbalistic sources. Its limit is that establishing what Pico read is not the same as settling how faithfully Mithridates's translations rendered the originals, a separate and still open question in the history of Christian Kabbalah that a claim about Pico's own understanding should keep distinct.