Guadalupe González Diéguez 538 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista 50 (2022) : 538-557 Kabbalistic Traditions in the Castilian Vernacular: R. Moshe Arragel’s Glosses to the Alba Bible 1 Guadalupe González Diéguez (Université de Montréal) Kabbalah “en español” Kabbalistic literature, which emerged for the first time in Provence in the second half of the twelfth century, experienced a major development in the following centuries in the Iberian Peninsula, first to the north in Catalonia, and later further south in Castile. Kabbalistic texts were typically composed in Hebrew, or Aramaic, as is the case of the most important kabbalistic work, the Zohar 2 (Damsma). During the Renaissance period, kabbalistic works provoked the curiosity of Christians, which gave impetus to the translation of kabbalistic materials into other languages, most frequently Latin, and their reformulation into a brand of “Christian kabbalah” (Huss 2016; Campanini 2020). It is not until the seventeenth century, between 1620-1632, in the Sephardic diaspora of Amsterdam, that we find for the first time kabbalistic treatises composed directly in Castilian language; namely, the works Puerta del cielo and Casa de la divinidad by a Jewish kabbalist born to a converso family, Abraham Cohen de Herrera 3 (Beltrán, Krabbenhoft). Already in the thirteenth century, Castilian king Alfonso X (r. 1252-1284) is reported to have sponsored the translation of kabbalistic literature. The notice is found in an often-cited remark in Libro de la caza (Book of Hunting, composed ca. 1325-1326) by Infante Don Juan Manuel, the nephew of king Alfonso X: 1 I would like to express my deep gratitude to Javier del Barco (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid) who kindly shared with me a copy of the edition of the Biblia de Alba by Paz y Meliá. 2 The Zohar, or Book of Splendor, the most important work of medieval kabbalah, is mainly (but not only) a mystical commentary on the Torah composed in pseudo-epigraphic form and ascribed to the second century c.e. Palestinian Rabbi Simeon bar Yohai. Scholars agree that at least a significant part of the “zoharic literature” was composed in Castile at the end of the 13th-beginning of the 14th century by R. Moses de León and his circle (Scholem 1995, 156-204; Liebes 85-138). 3 Abraham Cohen de Herrera was born in Florence ca. 1562 to a converso family. He studied kabbalah in Ragusa (today’s Dubrovnik) with Israel Sarug, disciple of Isaac Luria, and later settled in Amsterdan until his death in 1635. Between 1620 and 1632 he composed in Castilian the two mentioned kabbalistic treatises, which reinterpret Lurianic kabbalah in Neoplatonic key.