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Johann Albrecht Widmanstetter (1506–1557), humanist and privy councillor to popes and kings, has remained an enigmatic figure among Christian Hebraists whose views were little understood. This study leverages Widmanstetter's remarkable collection consisting of hundreds of Jewish manuscripts and printed books, most of which survive to this day. Explore in the first half the story of Jewish book production and collecting in sixteenth-century Europe through Widmanstetter's book acquisitions, librarianship, and correspondence. Delve into his unique perspective on Jewish literature and Kabbalah as the latter half of the study contextualizes the marginal notes in his library with his published works.
Fusing high scholarship with high drama, Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg uncover a secret and extraordinary aspect of a legendary Renaissance scholar’s already celebrated achievement. The French Protestant Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614) is known to us through his pedantic namesake in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. But in this book, the real Casaubon emerges as a genuine literary hero, an intrepid explorer in the world of books. With a flair for storytelling reminiscent of Umberto Eco, Grafton and Weinberg follow Casaubon as he unearths the lost continent of Hebrew learning—and adds this ancient lore to the well-known Renaissance revival of Latin and Greek. The mystery begins with Mark P...
Includes Part 1A: Books and Part 1B: Pamphlets, Serials and Contributions to Periodicals
How the Jewish culture war over Kabbalah began The Scandal of Kabbalah is the first book about the origins of a culture war that began in early modern Europe and continues to this day: the debate between kabbalists and their critics on the nature of Judaism and the meaning of religious tradition. From its medieval beginnings as an esoteric form of Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah spread throughout the early modern world and became a central feature of Jewish life. Scholars have long studied the revolutionary impact of Kabbalah, but, as Yaacob Dweck argues, they have misunderstood the character and timing of opposition to it. Drawing on a range of previously unexamined sources, this book tells the ...
Further Studies in the Making of the Early Hebrew Book addresses a variety of aspects of the early Hebrew book often treated in a cursory manner. The essays encompass book arts, printing-places and printers, and unusual book varia.
The Reformation transformed Christian Hebraism from the pursuit of a few into an academic discipline. This book explains that transformation by focusing on how authors, printers, booksellers, and censors created a public discussion of Hebrew and Jewish texts.
This book examines how Johannes Buxtorf's works helped to transform seventeenth-century Hebrew studies from the hobby of a few experts into a recognized academic discipline. The first two chapters examine Buxtorf's career as a professor of Hebrew and as an editor and censor of Jewish books in Basel. Successive chapters analyze his anti-Jewish polemical books, grammars and lexicons, and manuals for Hebrew composition and literature, including the first bibliography devoted to Jewish books. The final chapters treat his work in biblical studies, examining his contribution to Targum and Massorah studies, and his position on the age and doctrinal authority of the Hebrew vowel points. The chapters on anti-Jewish polemics and the vowel points will interest Jewish historians and Church historians.
"In 1538, a partnership of Jewish silk makers in the city of Bologna published a book entitled Sefer òHasidim, a compendium of rituals, stories, and religious instruction that primarily originated in medieval Franco-Germany. This book tells the story of how these men came to produce such a book"--