Leon Modena and Sarra Copia Sullam and l’Accademia degli Incogni, Howard Tzvi Adelman, Queen’s U, RSA, Berlin, March 2015 Studies of Leon Modena and other early-modern Jews, including Sarra Copio Sullam, deal with their interacons with Chrisan intellectuals. The literature on these relaonships, some of it wrien by me, has made these interacons seem random, but nevertheless relevant to a reconstrucon of their lives and thought. In this talk, I would like to step back and put these relaonships in a larger, but more inmate, context. That context is L’Accademia degli Incogni, one of many organized intellectual circles in early modern Europe. Centered in Venice, members lived in many other cies. Members were educated in the Church and universies. Gatherings involved conversaon, oral presentaons, and debate. Members leſt membership lists, correspondence, biographies, and published and manuscript works, including poetry, drama, music, and rhetoric, as well as painng, book, and manuscript collecons. Although the members leſt a paper-trail, their acvies were oſten anonymous. They conducted conversaons from behind masks, published anonymously – perhaps idenfying themselves with a pseudonym or an anagram of their name, and spoke playfully, using word games, parody, paradox, the bizarre, ambiguity, wit, and provocaon. Members traveled, searched for books and manuscripts, arranged for publicaons, visited with each other, corresponded, and introduced each other to kindred spirits, somemes French, Protestant, or other vising dignitaries. Their engagement with books brought them into contact with the inquision, either defending themselves or examining the works of others. Although members held posions in the Church, including the Inquision, their dissimulaon 1