Jewish lullism around the expulsion: A Spanish-catalan fragment in Hebrew characters from Ramon Llull's introductorium magnae artis generalis

This essay demonstrates that the work of the Catalan philosopher Ramon Llull was read by Sephardic Jews around the time of their expulsion from Spain and contextualizes Jewish Lullism in terms of sociocultural identity. I identify a curious Hebrew fragment of seventeen philosophical definitions as having been extracted from Llull's centum formae (hundred forms) in his Introductorium magnae artis generalis. It is written in a peculiar Catalanized Castilian in Hebrew script that seems to indicate the existence of a lost Catalan version of the work. I situate the copying and especially its readership as coming from the milieu of Sephardic Jewish physicians in Italy, probably shortly after the expulsion. Llull's readership among these physicians reveals that his method was perceived as relevant for the trained Jewish physician and for the study of scholastic logic, both prior to and after the expulsion, reflecting the high degree of Jewish absorption and adoption of the Christian cultural trends of late fifteenth-century Spain, particularly Catalonia. An appendix offers a critical edition of the fragment with contrastive comments to known Latin manuscripts.