Jewish Books and their Readers: Aspects of the Intellectual Life of Christians and Jews in Early Modern Europe, ed. Scott Mandelbrote and Joanna Weinberg

Abstract

This collection of essays has its origins in the European Seminar on Advanced Judaic Studies held at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies in 2012. As the editors, Scott Mandelbrote and Joanna Weinberg, explain in their brief introduction, the volume seeks to ‘undermine traditional paradigms of so-called Christian Hebraism’ and to ‘challenge simplistic visions either of the unchanging nature of Jewish cultural life or of its isolation from or hostility to the intellectual influences of Christian society’ (p. 1). Perhaps inevitably, the contributions cluster around the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though some do occasionally look earlier or later; similarly, and again as one might expect, they tend to focus especially on Italy and Germany. The twelve contributions to the volume are arranged under five sub-headings. The first pair of chapters appears under ‘Manuscript, Print and the Jewish Bible’. Mandelbrote examines the early modern reception of the so-called Letter of Aristeas, a Greek text written by an anonymous Jew, most probably some time between 200 and 100 bce. This text appeared in numerous Latin and vernacular (especially Italian) editions: interest initially lay in its ideas about kingship, but in due course this shifted to the information it provided about the origins of the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament), before that also waned and it returned to being a primarily Jewish text again. Alessandro Guetta examines the use made of the Italian translation of the Bible made by the Florentine humanist Antonio Bruciolo (d. 1566) by Italian Jewish communities: paradoxically, while this text found its way onto the Index because of its alleged Protestant sympathies, Guetta finds evidence of its use in a series of Jewish works of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.