God’s Essence and Attributes according to Some Jewish Thinkers in Renaissance Mantua

The aim of this paper is to give an account of some arguments used by Judah Moscato and other Mantuan Jewish thinkers of the Renaissance to equate God’s essence with the Supernal Torah, and to argue that nature can be considered as a realm in which God’s signs are ubiquitously stamped. According to Moscato’s Sermons, God transmits His spiritual energy to nature in such a way that He is in some manner all of the existents. Given so, man is required to search for the evidence of God in nature by means of his intellect, to decode the signs through which God unveils the eternal intelligible truths contained in the Supernal Torah. The Neoplatonic bias perceptible in the Kabbalistic works of Yohanan Alemanno and Abraham Yagel is also examined.