Crying at the Florence Baptistery entrance – A testimony of a travelling Jew

An anonymous Jew arrived in Florence in the second half of the fifteenth century and spotted a pair of porphyry columns at the entrance of the Florence Baptistery. The spot overwhelmed the Jew, as it reminded him of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, and he began to cry. Some time later he recorded his intense emotional experience in a quasi-Zoharic homily on the margins of a manuscript of the Zohar. In this study, the homily is presented for the first time; copied, translated and contextualized. The article argues that it has to be understood as a response to the view of the Florence Baptistery entrance in its entirety – the columns surrounding Lorenzo Ghiberti’s famous ‘Porta del Paradiso’ (Gates of Paradise), with the Christian biblical images inscripted on them. Following this approach, a suggestion is made to see the homily as a Jewish reaction to the Christian use of the Old Testament during the Renaissance.