"And you should also adjure in Arabic": Islamic, Christian, and Jewish formulas in the Solomonic corpus

Owing to the transcultural nature of “Solomonic Magic,” multilingualism is one of the most dominant features of Solomonic works, which deal mainly with methods for summoning and binding demons for fulfilling wishes. The fifteenth-century Liber Bileth is such Solomonic work, where Arabic demonological structures appear alongside Hebrew and Aramaic formulas. While the process of incorporating “foreign” knowledge into magical texts is considered, occasionally, like an accident or a misunderstanding of the authors, in Solomonic works, especially in Liber Bileth, the authors are well aware of this kind of knowledge, and they even used it to bridge some gaps in their textual traditions. This chapter focuses on the case of Liber Bileth, followed by a discussion concerning a work by Yohanan Alemanno, a renaissance Kabbalist who used Arabic and Christian traditions to systematize Solomonic practices. These aim to shed light on the history of several Solomonic works.