Abstract: The article highlights the influence of the Jewish tradition on the religiously disabused libertine culture. Jewish discourse had, in two versions of the Talmud and perhaps in the Toledot, offered summaries of the counter-Gospel set forth in Celsus’s' Discourse of Truth, offering a natural version of sacred history where the doubts of natural philosophers are mixed with a theory about the astral cyclicity of religions, and with the messianic expectations of the Sephardim expelled from the Iberian peninsula.
