What Do Christian Hebraists Have to Do with the Cultural History of Judaism?

Abstract

What Do Christian Have to Do with the Cultural History of Judaism? David B. Ruderman. Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010. Pp. ix + 326.INTRODUCTIONJohannes Buxtorf the Elder (1564-1629) was a brilliant and subtle philologist, a master of European and Oriental languages both ancient and modem.1 The son of a Westphalian minister, Buxtorf studied at Herbom, Heidelberg, Basel, Zurich, and Geneva, where he rubbed elbows with the luminaries of mid-seventeenth-centuiy Reformed Protestantism-including Heinrich Bullinger and Theodore de Beze-while mastering the languages of biblical exegesis, especially Hebrew. Settling in Basel, where he became university professor of Hebrew, Buxtorf quickly sifted, collated, translated, and published his way to the pinnacle of the European Republic of Letters, revolutionizing the discipline of Christian Hebraism with a stunning array of learned bibles, dictionaries, concordances, and commentaries in Near Eastern languages. While his Biblia Hebraica cum paraph rosi Chaldaica et commentariis rabbinorum (1618) introduced a wide readership of Orientalists and exegetes the Hebrew text of the Bible, the Aramaic of the Targums, and an impressive array of medieval Jewish commentaries, his Tiberias, sive commentarius Masoreticus (1620) offered fellow specialists an uncommonly sophisticated insight into the historical context in which the masoretic text of the Bible was produced. Even without his greatest academic work, the posthumous Lexicon Chaldaicum, Talmudicum, et Rabbinicum (1632), which pioneered a new form of biblical concordance, Buxtorf would likely have remained a standard resource for down to the nineteenth centuiy. Yet for all this, Buxtorf was perhaps most famous among contemporaries as the source of a veiy different kind of access to Jewish knowledge - namely, his Juden-Scbul (1603), which promised its Christian readers nearly unprecedented entree into the homes and observances of Buxtorf's Jewish colleagues and neighbors, describing eveiything from the Passover seder to the rituals surrounding circumcision and menstruation. Unfortunately, in this arena, at least, Buxtorf was rather less distinguished than in his philological studies: as contemporaries quickly observed, JiidenScbiil is essentially a pastiche in which the morsels of trustworthy ethnographic knowledge Buxtorf had acquired from Jewish collaborators are far outweighed by textual tradition and Christian fantasy, not entirely unlike the libelous accounts of Jews and Judaism penned by sixteenthcentuiy polemicists like Anthony Margaritha.2Buxtorf, and other Christian like him-including not only well-known figures like Johannes Reuchlin but also the obscure Dutch Orientalist Wilhelm Surenhusius-play a significant role in David Ruderman's Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History. They figure prominently, for example, in two different chapters, the first on the impact of print on Jewish learning (Christian and Their Judaic Publications in chapter 3, Knowledge Explosion) and the second on Jewish converts to Christianity (The Conflicting Loyalties of Christian Hebraists in chapter 5, Mingled Identities). While page counts are always a crude measure of significance, it is hard to overlook the considerable space dedicated to Christian Judaica: on a per capita basis, Christian and kabbalists like Pico della Mirandola drown out all but a handful of Jewish celebrities from the period, like the Abarbanels, Shabbetai Zevi and his antagonists Jacob Emden, Jacob Sasportas, and Moses Hagiz, the Luzzattos, or Spinoza. And the profile of Hebraizing Christians rises still further if one includes a second group of major importance to Ruderman: the conversos, who (as mentioned above) are the subject of their own chapter in large part because of their role as intermediaries between Jewish and Christian communities and cultures. …