BARTOLOCCHI, GIULIO. - Distinguished Orientalist, b. at Celleno, diocese of Montefiascone (Viterbo), in 1613, d. at Rome on 20 Oct. 1687. He entered the Cistercian Order, 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. also taught that language for fully 36 years at the college of the neophytes, in Rome. As Hebrew scribe 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 presses of "Propaganda Fide," Rome 1675-83. The last of the 4 vols. was completed by his disciple and confrere Fr. Carlo Giuseppe Imbonati (ibid. 1693). It is an imposing collection, in alphabetical order, of information on rabbinic authors and writings. Modern Jews, while recognizing in it the first great rabbinic bibliography, consider it of little critical value. But Christoph Wolf (d. in 1739) took it as the basis for his celebrated Bibliotheca hebraica; later it was used extensively by B. Ugolini in his Thesaurus antiquitatum sacrarum and by 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Other (unpublished) works by B. are an interlinear Latin version of the book of Tobit, a version of the Targum on the Song of Songs; Defensio doctrinae christianae (translated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).