BARTOLOCCHI, GIULIO. — Distinguished Orientalist, born at Celleno, in the diocese of Montefiascone (Viterbo), in 1613, died in Rome on 20 October 1687. He entered the Order of the Cistercians, and at his profession (1632) took the name Giulio di Sant'Anastasia. He was a pupil of the converted Jew Giovanni Giona Galileo Battista (v.), professor of Hebrew at the University of Rome. B. too taught this language for no fewer than 36 years at the College of Neophytes in Rome. Hebrew writer at the Vatican Library, he described its Hebrew manuscripts in three volumes.
The monumental work to which he owes his fame is the Bibliotheca magna rabbinica, printed by the «Propaganda Fide» press, Rome 1675–83. The last of the four volumes was completed by his disciple and fellow religious, Fr. Carlo Giuseppe Imbonati (ibid. 1693). It is an imposing alphabetically arranged collection of information on rabbinic authors and writings. Modern Jews, while acknowledging it as the first great rabbinic bibliography, consider it to be of little critical value. But Cristoforo Wolf (died in 1739) took it as the basis for his celebrated Bibliotheca hebraica; later, B. Ugolini made extensive use of it in his Thesaurus antiquitatum sacrarum, as did Calmet in Bibliothèque sacrée.
Fr. Imbonati added as the fifth volume of the work his Bibliotheca latino-hebraica (Rome 1694: a bibliography of Latin writings against the Jews or on Jewish subjects).
Other (unpublished) works by B. are an interlinear Latin version of the Book of Tobit, a version of the Targum to the Song of Songs; Defensio doctrinae christianae (translated into Hebrew by G. G. Battista); Collectanea de Trinitate, Messiae divinitate ac gentium vocatione; and, incomplete, Sacra Genesis a Iudaeorum erroribus vindicata, Dictiones difficiliores in Mischna declaratae, and a version of the treatise Middot (on the measurements of the Temple).