Abstract
In the 16th century, the Catholic Church’s censorship of Hebrew manuscripts in Italy was largely carried out by converts to the Christian faith. One of the few Jews permitted to censor such manuscripts was Yiṣḥaq of Arles, whose note מתוקן על ידי יצחק מארלי (‘Corrected by Yiṣḥaq of Arles’) can be found in around thirty manuscripts and books. Isaiah Sonne (1942) identified him as the brother of Giacomo Geraldini, a convert whom the Pope commissioned with the task of censoring Hebrew works in the middle of the 16th century. Since the signature of Laurentius Franguellus appears at the end of one of the manuscripts that Yiṣḥaq of Arles ‘corrected’ and that Sonne was able to examine personally, the latter concluded that the censoring Yiṣḥaq had performed had subsequently to be confirmed by a Christian before being accepted. Franguellus’s signature is also found in the Hamburg manuscript known as Codex hebraicus 18. A material analysis of the two kinds of ink both men used in this codex points to the inks coming from the same region as both contain nickel (Ni).