By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the humanist revival of classical Greek and Latin letters had come to embrace the third of the linguae sacrae, Hebrew. Although their primary focus was the Hebrew Bible, Christian scholars seeking to acquire Hebrew could not avoid engagement with the traditions of Jewish – more specifically, rabbinic – learning within which the language was embedded. Moreover, they risked being drawn into the fraught arena of Jewish-Christian theological controversy, where an interest in Hebrew books could easily be construed as sympathy for Jewish ‘blasphemies’.
The collection reviewed here explores the parameters of this developing relationship, revealing the diverse ways in which works written within a Jewish context came to shape the intellectual culture of early modern Europe. The volume is made up of twelve essays by participants in the European Seminar on Advanced Judaic Studies, held at Oxford in 2010, and considers aspects of the reception and use of Jewish books by both Christian and Jewish readers during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially in northern and central Italy and western Germany. The first two contributions deal with the transmission of Jewish works on the Bible and its interpretation. Scott Mandelbrote looks at the early modern reception of the text known as the Letter of Aristeas, identifying three distinct phases in this process. At first, the work was read as a ‘mirror for princes’, as it appeared to provide a model for royal patronage of humanistic letters. Following the Council of Trent, it was deployed for confessional purposes, to support the Catholic understanding of the Septuagint as a divinely inspired translation. Finally, it was demoted to the status of a Hellenistic Jewish forgery, after Joseph Scaliger demonstrated that it could not be contemporaneous with the events that it described. Alessandro Guetta's contribution revolves around the figure of Antonio Brucioli, the author of the first Italian translation of the Bible based on the original texts. Guetta sheds light on the two-way nature of Jewish-Christian interaction during this period: not only was Brucioli assisted by the Jewish rabbi and lexicographer Elijah Levita, but there is evidence that his own translation influenced Jewish glossaries and translations of biblical texts into the vernacular in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Italy.
In Catholic Europe, ecclesiastical censorship was a key factor in determining how Jewish texts were presented to their readers, Jewish as well as Christian. Piet van Boxel looks at the practice of censorship of Hebrew books in Italy, with specific reference to David Kimhi's commentary on Isaiah. Although recently a case has been made for viewing the expurgation of such works as a positive editorial intervention during the transition to print, van Boxel finds no evidence that censorship amounted to more than the mechanical deletion of suspect terminology or references to Christian belief and practice. What is more, it had little impact on the traditional Jewish understanding of sacred texts, as educated Jewish readers were able to restore many of the expurgated terms and passages. Federica Francesconi's essay looks at the careers of two important early seventeenth-century Italian rabbis, Netanel Trabotti of Modena and Leon Modena of Venice, whose interactions with the censors coincided with a period of intense suppression of Jewish literature and ghettoisation of Jewish communities. Both men walked a fine line in their dealings with the Inquisition, Trabotti as an official corrector of Jewish texts for the Holy Office and Modena as the author of the Historia de’ gli riti hebraici, which he modified repeatedly to accommodate the censors’ concerns and to reconfigure Judaism as irenical in its attitude towards Christianity.
The next three contributions illustrate the different uses to which Jewish texts could be put by Christian readers. William Horbury takes a fresh look at two works generated by the Reuchlin controversy, De arcanis catholicae veritatis, by Petrus Galatinus, and Jean Thenaud's Traicté de la Cabale. Like Reuchlin, Galatinus defends the value of the Talmud as a repository of authentic Mosaic teaching that is ultimately supportive of Christianity and thus to be distinguished from overtly anti-Christian works such as the Toledot Yeshu. Thenaud, while sharing Galatinus’ Christian kabbalism, takes the opposite view, condemning the Talmud as irredeemably corrupt and blasphemous, and conflating it with the Toledot. In similar vein, Joanna Weinberg contrasts the treatment of Jewish texts by two early modern Reformed scholars, Philippe Duplessis-Mornay and Johannes Buxtorf, to expose the differences in approach that were emerging within Christian Hebraism by the beginning of the seventeenth century. Whereas Duplessis-Mornay, like the medieval Christian polemicists from whom he drew much of his inspiration, looked to Hebrew sources to expedite the conversion of the Jews, Buxtorf represented a new breed of professional Hebraist, capable not only of understanding Jewish texts on their own terms but of applying rabbinic exegetical principles to the New Testament. The same shift is apparent in attitudes towards the Talmud, which, as Anthony Grafton shows, scholars such as Jean Bodin, Joseph Scaliger and John Selden were coming to see not as an inchoate mass of Jewish traditions but as a systematic compendium of Jewish juridical opinion, on a par with Justinian's Digest.
While theological concerns remained important, increasingly the study of Jewish letters was driven by wider intellectual interests, often antiquarian in nature. Andrew Berns highlights the case of Ulisse Aldrovandi, a self-taught Hebraist, who valued the language primarily as a key to understanding natural phenomena, while Theodor Dunkelgrün charts the development of a tradition of Hebrew letter-writing among Christians, beginning with Reuchlin and reaching its apogee with the publication of Buxtorf's Institutio Epistolaris Hebraica (1610). Buxtorf also pioneered the study of Hebrew funerary inscriptions, growing numbers of which were published during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As Michela Andreatta shows in her contribution, the fact that most surviving Hebrew epitaphs were of relatively recent vintage did little to deter Christian antiquarians from the pursuit of these texts, which, like the Jewish communities that produced them, were regarded as fossilised relics of the biblical past.
In the volume's last two essays, the focus turns from Christian to Jewish readers. Benjamin Williams analyses the annotations preserved in a copy of the Bomberg edition of the Midrash Rabbah (1545) now held in the Bodleian library. Owned initially by a series of Ottoman Jews, who inserted hagahot from existing collections to correct errors and omissions in the printed text, the volume eventually passed into the hands of an early seventeenth-century Christian reader – identified here as Edward Pococke, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford – who used their annotations to inform his own biblical commentaries. Moving away from Hebrew books entirely, Yosef Kaplan looks at the role played by Spanish literature in the cultural life of the Amsterdam Sephardim, uncovering some of the ways in which this former converso community's identity continued to be informed by its Iberian heritage.
This hugely impressive collection showcases the wide range and high quality of research that is currently being undertaken into the relationship between Christian and Jewish intellectual culture, and Christianity and Judaism more generally, during the early modern period. In their introduction, Mandelbrote and Weinberg emphasise the limitations inherent in the term ‘Christian Hebraism’ and the need for an approach that does justice to the complex set of interactions involved, which combined elements of appropriation, collaboration and competition, and varied widely across different cultural contexts. The contributions published here represent an important first step towards developing such an approach.
