Famous for his expertise in classical philology and exposure of the Hermetic texts as forgeries, Isaac Casaubon comes alive in unexpected ways in this erudite and beautifully produced book. Through an examination of Casaubon's study of Hebrew, Jews, and Judaism, Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg reveal entirely new aspects of Casaubon's scholarly and personal life, while placing him firmly in the context of the Reformation. As the authors point out, Casaubon's Judaic studies have received no scholarly attention whatsoever, and this despite the fact that he read and extensively annotated many works by Jews (in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and even several in Yiddish) as well as books written by Christian Hebraists on Judaism and Jewish customs and institutions. As the authors say, “To know Casaubon the Judaist is, as we will argue, to know Casaubon the classicist in a new way” (4). What they mean is that recognizing Casaubon as a Christian Hebraist will result in a rejection of the generally accepted opinion of Casaubon as something of a tragic, scholarly drudge—the view encapsulated in George Eliot's portrait of “Mr. Casaubon” in Middlemarch and in Mark Pattison's biography (1875). Instead, Casaubon must be appreciated as a scholar whose scholarship reflected the religious controversies of his age.

Given the importance of Casaubon's interest in Judaism, the question naturally arises as to why the topic has been ignored for so long. The answer lies, first, in the sheer difficulty of studying this aspect of Casaubon's scholarship since it is largely unpublished and in the form of notes written in the margins of his books or in his notebooks and diaries. Pattison dismissed many of Casaubon's notes as unenlightening because they were in the form of single words or quotations from the text in question. But through masterful detective work Grafton and Weinberg have gotten into Casaubon's head, so to speak, and have made sense of his notes: “by retracing Casaubon's steps and reweaving his webs of annotation, we can learn how this most erudite of men stocked his memory in the first place….More exciting, we can master the code of his quotations, and rediscover the arguments about antiquity and modernity, that they put” (22).

A second obstacle to appreciating Casaubon's Christian Hebraism is the fact that until relatively recently the works of Christian Hebraists were ignored and there was little sympathy for Casaubon's interest in the church fathers and late antique writers. Pattison, for example, regretted the fact that Casaubon had turned his attention away from the great classical writers to focus on such minor authors. What Pattison and others did not realize is how central late antiquity was not only in the history of the Mediterranean world but in the thought of Reformation scholars and theologians as they tried to reconstruct the world of the early Christians.

The attempt to rediscover the “true” nature of early Christianity was a huge part of the polemical debate between Protestants and Catholics concerning what interpretation of Christianity was most faithful to that of Jesus. Casaubon, a Calvinist, was intensely involved in this debate; his scholarship was devoted to the task of digging through what he and fellow Protestants considered layers of Catholic distortion to reach the bedrock of early Christian beliefs and practices. In undertaking this task, Casaubon, like his much-admired epistolary friend, Joseph Scaliger, recognized that neither early Christianity nor the Gospels could be understood without a clear perception of the world of Hellenistic Judaism. Casaubon was interested in every aspect of late antiquity, including material culture. Unlike many of his fellow Christians he recognized the Mishnah and Talmud as important sources for understanding the preaching and practices of Jesus and his followers; and he did not reject, as so many Christians did, the learning of contemporary Jews. Casaubon's personal experience with two contemporary Jews, Julius Conradus Otto and Jacob Barnet, offer further proof that unlike most of his contemporaries he “could be surprisingly open to individual Jews,” although “his openness to Judaism as a larger world had certain limits” (233)—limits undoubtedly defined by the antisemitism so prevalent at the time.

Casaubon treated the Old Testament in the same way he treated the Latin and Greek texts of classical authors. His approach was scholarly and semantic, and he was highly critical of the mystical exegesis of Jewish kabbalists and their Christian devotees: “The Hebrew masters often not only waste their time, but actually make fools of themselves as they seek out the mysteries of the holy letters” (88–89). Unlike many of his contemporaries who studied oriental languages to discover the mysteries hidden in oriental texts, all of Casaubon's scholarly work was focused on recovering the true history of early Christianity. The religious motivations behind this quest are nowhere more apparent than in his last and vast treatise, his Exercitationes, which presented a “withering attack” (164) on Cardinal Cesare Baronio's Annales ecclesiastici. In twelve double-column volumes that claimed to present a comprehensive history of the church from the time of Jesus to the Middle Ages, Baronio set out to defend the Catholic Church as the sole guardian of authentic Christian tradition. This infuriated Casaubon, who went through each volume underlining words and writing angry marginalia denouncing Baronio's assertions as “fooleries,” a “diabolic deception,” a “loathsome falsehood” (164). Casaubon's intention was to prove that Baronio's history “rested on foundations so shoddy that it could not survive a close reading, much less a serious attack” (164). But his polemic was too technical to attract readers at the time and even much later. Pattison, for example, dismissed the work as “a waste of paper” (168). Grafton and Weinberg reject this assessment, arguing that Casaubon's treatise was “the culmination of his lifelong passion for the early church and the sources that preserved its customs and beliefs” (169).

Casaubon's polemical attack on Baronio was of a piece with his unmasking of other texts as fraudulent. In every case his goal was to recover the history of early Christianity. His dismissal of the Hermetica as late forgeries and not the work of Moses's reputed contemporary Hermes Trismegistus was driven by his refusal to believe that some ancient prophet could have spoken “a good bit more clearly about the mysteries of our faith than the prophets, or the rabbis,…but also more openly, in many cases, than the Evangelists or the Apostles” (40). In taking this position, Casaubon revealed his humanist credentials. His aim was to base his scholarship on authentic texts whose authors' opinions, whenever possible, were based on eyewitness testimony. Casaubon's emphasis on the veracity of the texts he studied became a major issue in the early modern period as scholars, theologians, and natural philosophers were faced with an “information explosion” and the consequent need to separate fact from fiction. Grafton and Weinberg point out that the same impetus drove the great Hebrew scholar and contemporary of Casaubon, Azariah de' Rossi, whose Me'or ‘einayim (Light of the Eyes) (1573–75) offered a reassessment of Jewish history and tradition. The fact that Rossi and Casaubon were attempting to do the same kind of history is one more indication of the fruitful interaction between Christians and Jews in the early modern period.

A short review cannot do justice to the richness of Grafton and Weinberg's reassessment of the work of Isaac Casaubon. By taking into account all his writings, including his notes and marginalia, they have given us a more rounded and human picture of the great scholar, who produced seventeen children along with a “vast stream of learned works,” some of which were written while he used “one foot to rock the current infant's cradle” (11). Casaubon was a man of his times, and this study will be of interest to anyone involved in Reformation and Counter-Reformation history and the way this contentious period affected the reading habits, scholarly practices, and opinions of both Jewish and Christian theologians and scholars. The book has three useful appendices: the first, by Alastair Hamilton, assessing Casaubon's attempt to learn Arabic; the second, an insightful overview of Casaubon's view of the masoretic text; and a third listing the books dealing with Hebrew and Judaica in Casaubon's library.