Jewish Books and their Readers - Aspects of the Intellectual Life of Christians and Jews in Early Modern Europe
Jewish Books and their Readers - Aspects of the Intellectual Life of Christians and Jews in Early Modern Europe
复制标题
犹太书籍及其读者 - 现代早期欧洲基督徒和犹太人的思想生活的各个方面
DOI:
10.1163/9789004318151_008
复制
发表时间:
2016
期刊:
影响因子:
--
通讯作者:
Weinberg J
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
Weinberg J
From the mid-fifteenth to the seventeenth century, Christian readers of all denominations were attracted to the study of the holy tongue and Jewish books. The stock of Talmudic and midrashic texts interspersed throughout the thirteenth-century Pugio Fidei, and the exegetical contributions of medieval commentators, in particular Rabbi Solomon (Rashi 1040–1105) and David Kimhi (Redak 1160–1235), which had provided generations of Christians with the Jewish material, was now replenished and updated. An astonishingly broad range of Hebrew and Aramaic texts was made accessible to the scholar, divine, literate man or woman. 1The variety and diversity of Hebraic expression during this long Renaissance does not lend itself to easy generalization. What is true is that most selfrespecting biblical exegetes–with some remarkable exceptions such as Erasmus–felt compelled to acquire a command of the holy tongue. The Hebrew studies of Konrad Pellikan (1478–1556), the German theologian and humanist of Basel and Zürich, were surprisingly varied, but different from that of his student, Sebastian Münster, the author of an influential tract on the Hebrew calendar and disciple of the Jewish grammarian Elijah Levita. Pico della Mirandola’s foray into the world of Kabbalah, which was facilitated by Jews and erstwhile Jews, has little in common with the way other prominent Catholics such as Gilbert Génébrard expended much intellectual energy in providing testimony from Jewish writings ranging from the Roman Mahzor (festival prayer book) to the Sefer ha-Ikarim (Book of Principles) of Joseph Albo (1380–1444). And the exploitation of Jewish tradition by converts to Christianity was not simply a story of exposing the ‘nugae’–the absurdities–of their former religion, or of attempting in the tradition of the Pugio Fidei to prove Christian truths from Jewish texts. Paulo Ricci, the Jew from Trent who converted to Christianity at the beginning of the sixteenth century, did not use the Jewish sources solely as a stick with which to beat his former co-religionists; on the contrary, they served him as a means for evaluating and justifying his