Years in the making, Stephen Burnett's monumental work of scholarship is a tour de force that will be of enormous use to scholars of early modern Europe. Burnett's book thoroughly investigates the world of Christian Hebraism during the Reformation era. His aim is to explain the exponential growth in the market for Christian Hebraist books in that period; to identify Christian Hebraist authors, their printers, and their collectors; and to examine the effect that press controls had on the dissemination of Christian Hebraist texts. While books have been written about individual Christian Hebraists, no book in recent years has been devoted to the relationship between Christian Hebraism and the Reformation. Burnett's book does precisely this and in doing so sheds light on the way confessional differences affected Christian Hebraist scholarship. Roughly two thousand Christian Hebraist imprints were published between 1501 and 1660. By identifying these books, their authors, printers, and publishers, Burnett has been able “to map the world of Christian Hebrew scholarship with its centers and peripheries” (6). Such a map tells us what kinds of Jewish learning were considered “useful” knowledge for Christians. Burnett's conclusion that Christian Hebraism moved steadily northwards after 1560 as Reformation controversies intensified may come as no surprise, but the detailed evidence he provides to support this claim has wider implications for Reformation scholarship in general and for the history of European Jews and Jewish-Christian relations.
Before 1560 Protestant and Catholic Hebraists communicated with each other and often worked with Jews who taught them Hebrew and helped with the printing of Christian Hebraist works. After the Council of Trent (1545–1563), however, such confessional fluidity became ever more difficult, and with the publication of the first Roman Index of Prohibited Books in 1559 Christian Hebraists were increasingly trained and worked in different religious environments. As Jerome Friedman pointed out in The Most Ancient Testimony: Sixteenth-Century Christian Hebraism in the Age of the Renaissance (1983), the growth of Christian Hebraism led somewhat paradoxically to diminished collaboration between Christians and Jews, a conclusion supported by Burnett.
In his first chapter, “The Birth of a Christian Hebrew Reading Public,” Burnett argues that the Reformation provided the catalyst that jump-started Christian Hebraism. Before the Reformation there was little reason for Christians to learn Hebrew, but with the Reformation and as a result of Luther's insistence on sola scriptura, understanding and interpreting the biblical text became of the utmost importance. On the basis of the number of copies of Hebrew grammars produced each year between 1501 and 1660, Burnett estimates that a substantial number of students were taught Hebrew in Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed universities (45–6).
In chapter 2 Burnett turns his attention to Hebraist authors, their supporters and the centers in which Christian Hebraism flourished. The confessionalization of scholarship, particularly after the Council of Trent, had a profound effect on Catholic Christian Hebraism, cutting off Catholic from Protestant Hebraists. Burnett offers profiles of confessional Hebraism after 1560. While Catholic Hebraists came from many different countries, most worked in the major centers of learning in the Catholic world, Paris and Rome, and for a brief period, Salamanca. Lutheran Hebraists were dispersed throughout Lutheran cities and territories. They were less concentrated in university towns or centers of scholarship than their Catholic counterparts, and a good half of Lutheran Hebrew authors taught in Latin schools. Reformed Hebraists came from more diverse backgrounds than Lutherans because Calvinism was more of an international religion. They tended to be based in universities and had better library collections than Lutherans. Anglican Hebraists were not university centered and a good half were ministers. Patronage also differed among the confessions. As Burnett says, “. . . Catholic Hebraism was a hot house flower that required more tending than its Protestant counterpart” (89). Without the same kind of institutional support offered to Protestant Hebraists, Catholics “had a far greater need of patronage than any of their Protestant counterparts” (82).
Turning to “Hebraist Authors and the Mediation of Jewish Scholarship” in chapter 3, Burnett concludes that Christian Hebraists had much greater need for Hebrew grammars, dictionaries, concordances, Bibles, and commentaries than Jews, since Jews grew up reading Hebrew. Some 80% of Christian Hebraist books published after 1560 belonged to these categories. Such books became even more necessary after the Council of Trent officially declared the Vulgate the “authentic Bible” in 1546 (120). The debate over the reliability of the consonantal text and the introduction of vowel points became highly contentious between Catholics and Protestants. While Hebraist books dealing with the Hebrew language and the biblical text were the most popular, Christian Hebraists were interested, although to a much lesser degree, in the Jewish Kabbalah, Mishnah, Talmud, and theological polemics. But as Burnett concludes, “The mediation and assimilation of the literature of Judaism that took place during the Reformation era is remarkable for both its sheer size and its rather narrow scope” (135).
When it comes to “Jewish Libraries: Imagined and Real,” the subject of chapter 4, Burnett describes the major compilations of Jewish bibliographies by Conrad Gesner, the Buxtorfs, and Jean Plantavil de la Pause. These bibliographies were instrumental in directing Christian Hebraists to important sources and compilations of Jewish texts, and they provided guidance for collectors of Judaica. Burnett analyzes the personal collections of major Christian Hebraists such as the Buxtorfs, Scaliger, Casaubon, Reuchlin, and L'Empereur. As he points out, knowing which Jewish books scholars owned is critically important for understanding their work (162–3). There is the same concentration on biblical and philological works in these personal collections as in university and public collections of Judaica. Across all these collections there is a set of forty-two Judaica books that basically compose the Christian Hebraist canon (see table 4.12).
The Christian Hebrew book market is the subject of chapter 5. As Burnett shows, this market and the printers and book sellers involved in it grew over the Reformation period, but Catholic censorship after 1550 together with the effects of the Thirty Years' War disrupted normal channels of book distribution and resulted in northern European presses dominating Christian Hebraist printing: northern Europe produced 87.5% of all Hebrew imprints (192). Although scholars have questioned the effectiveness of Catholic censorship in recent years, Burnett concludes that it “succeeded to a degree in isolating Italy and Spain from the mainstream of European intellectual culture” (194). By 1660 96.4% of Christian Hebrew books were produced in northern Europe (197). What is interesting and reinforces the increasing separation of Christians and Jews during the Reformation period is that “the vast majority of Christian Hebrew presses used non-Jewish type setters and compositors to produce Hebrew books” (204). The development of more efficient means of book advertising in the form of sales lists, book fair catalogues, and book seller catalogues increased the market for Christian Hebraica.
Burnett presents a fuller discussion of “Press Controls and Hebraist Discourse in Reformation Europe” in his final chapter. He concludes that Catholic censorship was much more effective than censorship among Protestants and effectively limited Catholic Hebraism (223). The mere possession of forbidden texts was taken as evidence of heresy (224), and Catholic bookmen were required to swear before a bishop and an inquisitor that they would not sell books prohibited on the Index, nor would they knowingly admit any person suspected of heresy into their guild (228). Such severe measures had their effect: “While recent scholars have rightly questioned the overall effects of these lists of banned books in Catholic Europe, the Roman and Spanish Indexes did have a noticeable impact upon Christian Hebraist scholarship in southern Europe” (225). Burnett points out that when the Catholic Church replaced outright prohibition with decrees allowing for the expurgation of texts, this caused a “nightmare” for Italian Jews, causing them “grief off and on for the next two hundred years,” especially in connection with the Talmud (230).
In his conclusion, Burnett sums up the arguments presented in the body of his book. The seeds planted by medieval and Renaissance Christian Hebraists flourished in the Reformation period as the biblical text became a central issue in confessional polemics. Christian Hebrew scholarship after 1560 increasingly reflected the needs of the various confessional churches, and censorship was correlated with a growing concern with heresy and Judaizing, issues that concerned the Catholic Church more than the Lutheran, Reformed, or Anglican. The book ends with three important appendices. The first lists Christian Hebraist authors from 1501–1660; the second, Christian Hebraist printers and publishers during the same period; and the third, Hebrew book production in terms of typesetting and type.
Stephen Burnett has written a book of great erudition based on dogged, painstaking research. It is a marvelous accomplishment and sets the gold standard for research in the field of Christian Hebraism for a long time to come.
