A Hebrew Dante: Moshe da Rieti's "Miqdash Me'at," its Cultural Background and its Reception

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Elisabeth Hollender
• Subject Area: Religious Studies and Jewish Studies
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 553771889

Moshe ben Yitzḥaq of Rieti (Mosè di Gaio, Rieti 1388-Rome, before 1466) was the main Jewish-Italian philosopher and poet of the first half of the 15th century. His main work, Miqdash Me’at (Little Sanctuary) is a poem of about 4,400 Hebrew verses in terza rima (the meter used in Dante’s Divine Comedy) with a religious, scientific and philosophical content. Using a subdivision that corresponds to the different areas of the Jerusalem Temple, Rieti expounds first the profane or “external” sciences of the medieval trivium and quadrivium. He specifically refers to various ancient Greek thinkers, such as Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy and Porphyry, as well as Arab (al-Fārābi, al-Ghazālī, Avicenna, Averroes) and Jewish (Gersonides) philosophers. His principal point of reference is Maimonides, who “reconciled” the profane sciences with the Torah. Among all disciplines, poetry occupies a special place, as it allows the author’s love of intellectual contemplation to express itself fully. Another section of the work includes a description of Paradise, reminiscent of Dante in the general inspiration but also in the use of elements drawn from Jewish literary tradition. Additional chapters focus on the written and oral Torah. Rieti’s work probably represents the late stage of a Jewish-Italian school of thought, initiated by the philosopher Judah Romano (ca. 1293-after 1330), that associates the centrality of Maimonides’ rationalistic thought and neo-platonic elements drawn from the Liber de causis. The idea of the loss of knowledge, and their possible recovery through semi-prophetic visions, expressed in that school, is particularly emphasized in Rieti’s work. His oeuvre is among the most important and original poetic/philosophical endeavors of the Late Middle Age/early Renaissance Jewish and Italian culture; but is accessible only through a 19th century incomplete edition, without notes or commentary. The proposed project serves to complete the German contribution to a German-French project, which will publish a scholarly edition with an English translation and commentary, as well as editions of the early modern Italian translations of one chapter, the commentary on eight chapters (16th century), which has survived in six manuscripts, and the glosses on one chapter, which go back to the author himself.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants