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 für Judaistik of the Freie Universität 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 remained inaccessable for centuries: the translations of kabbalistic texts prepared in 1486 by Flavius Mithridates for Pico.