Ludovicus Carretus was a physician and a Jewish convert to Catholic Christianitybooks.google.com
/ref> of the sixteenth century.

Life

He lived at

Florence Florence ( ; it, Firenze ) is a city in Central Italy and the capital city of the Tuscany region. It is the most populated city in Tuscany, with 383,083 inhabitants in 2016, and over 1,520,000 in its metropolitan area.Bilancio demografico an ...

. He was a native of France and was originally called "Todros Cohen." As the physician of a Spanish duke, he was with the imperial troops who besieged Florence in 1545. Later, at the age of fifty, he embraced Catholic Christianity at

Genoa Genoa ( ; it, Genova ; lij, Zêna ). is the capital of the Italian region of Liguria and the List of cities in Italy, sixth-largest city in Italy. In 2015, 594,733 people lived within the city's administrative limits. As of the 2011 Italian ce ...

Works

Carretus is the author of ''Mar'ot Elohim; Liber Visorum Divinorum'', in which he relates the history of his conversion and quotes passages from the Bible and

kabbalistic Kabbalah ( he, קַבָּלָה ''Qabbālā'', literally "reception, tradition") is an esoteric method, discipline and Jewish theology, school of thought in Jewish mysticism. A traditional Kabbalist is called a Mekubbal ( ''Məqūbbāl'' "rece ...

writings in favor of Christianity. The work, published at Paris in 1553, was translated into Latin by

Angelo Canini Angelo Canini (Angelus Caninius; 1521–1557) was an Italian grammarian, linguist and scholar from Anghiari. Life His first publication was Book II of the commentary of Alexander of Aphrodisias on the ''De anima'' of Aristotle (Venice 1546). In ...

(Florence, 1554) under the title ''Epistola Ludovici Carreti ad Judæos, Quæ Inscribitur Liber Visorum Divinorum''. Another Latin translation of it was made by Hermann Germberg, and is inserted in

Johannes Buxtorf Johannes Buxtorf ( la, Johannes Buxtorfius) (December 25, 1564September 13, 1629) was a celebrated Hebraist, member of a family of Orientalists; professor of Hebrew for thirty-nine years at Basel and was known by the title, "Master of the Rabbis" ...

's ''Synagoga Judaica''.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Carretus, Ludovicus 16th-century Italian Jews 16th-century French Jews Italian Roman Catholics Physicians from Florence Converts to Roman Catholicism from Judaism