The Rimini Papers: A Resurrection Controversy in Eighteenth-Century Italy

Apart from the fundamental issue of whether or not God would resurrect the dead at the end of days, which was the subject of the first Maimonidean controversy in the late twelfth century, medieval Jewish theologians also speculated about how this amazing miracle might be effected. Yet the intellectual leaders of Europe in the middle ages and early modern era – Jews and Christians – concentrated on the posthumous fate of soul, rather than body. Although the two issues are intertwined, there are few discussions of the nuts and bolts of resurrection, or for that matter scholarly treatments of the subject. A set of letters about resurrection, dated 1773, exchanged by four Italian Jews is, therefore, an unexpected and exciting discovery. The letters, located in the Moscow State Library, shed light on prevailing attitudes not only towards resurrection, but also towards religion, science and philosophy in general. Jewish thought in eighteenth-century Italy is a sparsely cultivated field, and from this perspective, too, the documents are highly illuminating. The most striking feature of the correspondence is the similarity between the ideas articulated by these Italian thinkers to those of English philosophers at the turn of the eighteenth century. Thus, the context of the discussion turns out to be surprisingly broad, geographically as well as culturally.