GIULIO BARTOLOMECI. — Distinguished Orientalist, b. at Celleno, diocese of Montefiascone (Viterbo), in 1613, d. at Rome on 20 Oct. 1687. He entered the Order of 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. Bartolomeci himself taught that language for 36 years at the college of the Neophytes in Rome. As a writer of Hebrew in the Vatican Library, he described its Hebrew manuscripts in three volumes.
The monumental work by which he is remembered is the *Biblioteca magna rabbinica*, printed by the press of *Propaganda Fide*, Rome 1675–83. The last of the four volumes was completed by his pupil and confrere Fr. Carlo Giuseppe Imbonati (ibid. 1693). It is an imposing collection, arranged alphabetically, of information on rabbinic authors and writings. Modern Jews, while acknowledging it as the first great rabbinic bibliography, consider it lacking in critical value. Yet Christoph Wolff (d. 1739) took it as the basis for his celebrated *Bibliotheca hebraea*; later, it was widely used by B. Ugolini in his *Thesaurus antiquitatum sacrarum* and by Calmet in *Bibliothèque sacrée*.
Fr. Imbonati added as a fifth volume to the work his *Biblioteca latino-hebraica* (Rome 1694: a bibliography of Latin writings against the Jews or on Jewish topics). Other works (unpublished) by Bartolomeci include a Latin interlinear version of the Book of Tobit, a version of the Targum to the Song of Songs; *Defensio doctrinae christianae*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. G. Battista); *Collectanea de Trinitate, Messiae divinitate ac gentium vocatione*; and, in incomplete form, *Sacra Genesi a Iudaeorum erroribus vindicata*, *Dictiones difficiliores in Mischna declaratae*, and a version of the treatise *Middot* (on the measures of the Temple).