The Age of Secrecy by Daniel Jütte

The Age of Secrecy by Daniel Jütte

Author:Daniel Jütte
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2015-11-15T00:00:00+00:00


Who Was Abramo Colorni?

In the drafts to one of the most enigmatic works of modern literature, there is an entry that is as surprising as it is cryptic: “scotographia/-scribia,” wrote James Joyce in one of the notebooks for his last great work, Finnegans Wake (1939).698 Was this a coincidence, or did Joyce know about Abramo Colorni, the Jewish professore de’ secreti whose 1593 treatise on cryptography was titled Scotographia, a neologism not found anywhere else? We do know that Joyce liked to take cues from Jewish history, as in Ulysses, a work containing various allusions to Jewish Renaissance mysticism.699 It is entirely plausible that Joyce learned of Colorni’s work, or least its title, from the secondary literature or a library catalogue. After all, Joyce lived briefly in Italy after 1900. In the case of Finnegans Wake, the author’s familiarity with the world of early modern Italy is strikingly revealed in the way the novel’s basic setup is influenced by the philosophy of Giambattista Vico.700 Moreover, Finnegans Wake also contains a wide range of allusions to Judaism. One can read this equally witty and experimental opus, which has no plot in any conventional sense and uses words from almost seventy languages, as a “farced epistol to the hibruws” (Joyce’s words)—a wordplay that borrows from the New Testament (“first epistle to the Hebrews”).701 If our hypothesis is correct, however, it does not necessarily mean Joyce was interested in Colorni as a Jew. If he came across the Mantuan Jew’s cryptographic treatise, he was probably intrigued by the idea of a “dark writing,” which is how the word “scotographia” would be translated. Symbolic imagery revolving around darkness and dreams plays an important role in Finnegans Wake, as Joyce himself acknowledged.702 Joyce’s interest in the concept of a “dark writing” has to be seen against this backdrop, even though he did not return to the term he had entered into his notebook when it came to putting the novel in writing. But even if the notebook entry was entirely coincidental, it is tempting to speculate about a link between Colorni, the professore de’ secreti vaunted by contemporaries, and the very novel that has been called an unsurpassed literary “compilation of arcane materials.”703

Secrecy and mastery of the arcane are keywords for understanding Colorni’s biography. His career exhausted the entire spectrum of activities in the economy of secrets—from military inventions, to trading in curiosa and dealing with divinatory practices, to magic and card tricks. This could easily create the impression that Colorni chose his activities aimlessly and that he was indeed the kind of opportunistic charlatan that some historians suggest he was. Colorni is certainly not to be envied for his posthumous reputation in historical scholarship. This is not just because he has largely fallen into oblivion. (He is not even mentioned in the authoritative works on Jewish magic, alchemy, and esotericism.) When Colorni’s biography actually does get mentioned, it is often written off as a curious episode.

We can distinguish three different approaches to Colorni in previous scholarship.



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