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  • What Do Christian Hebraists Have to Do with the Cultural History of Judaism?
  • Adam G. Beaver
David B. Ruderman. Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010. Pp. ix + 326.

Introduction

Johannes Buxtorf the Elder (1564–1629) was a brilliant and subtle philologist, a master of European and Oriental languages both ancient and modern.1 The son of a Westphalian minister, Buxtorf studied at Herborn, Heidelberg, Basel, Zurich, and Geneva, where he rubbed elbows with the luminaries of mid-seventeenth-century Reformed Protestantism—including Heinrich Bullinger and Théodore de Bèze—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 paraphrasi 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 [End Page 263] standard resource for Hebraists down to the nineteenth century. Yet for all this, Buxtorf was perhaps most famous among contemporaries as the source of a very different kind of access to Jewish knowledge—namely, his Juden-Schül (1603), which promised its Christian readers nearly unprecedented entrée into the homes and observances of Buxtorf’s Jewish colleagues and neighbors, describing everything 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, Jüden-Schül 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 sixteenth-century polemicists like Anthony Margaritha.2

Buxtorf, and other Christian Hebraists 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 Hebraists 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 Hebraists and kabbalists like Pico della Mirandola drown out all but a handful of Jewish celebrities from the period, like the Abarbanels, Shabbetai Ẓevi and his antagonists Jacob Emden, Jacob Sasportas, and Moses Ḥagiẓ, 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.

The prominence of these Christian authors—particularly of those who, like Buxtorf, remained willfully ignorant or ambivalent about contemporary Jewish customs in spite of their considerable interest in [End Page 264] ancient Hebrew philology—sounds a discordant note in a book so selfconsciously devoted to recovering the rich symphony of the Jewish experience in early modern Europe. This discordant note becomes even more pronounced as one reaches the book’s appendix, in which Ruderman dissects the reigning synthesis of early modern European Jewish life, Jonathan Israel’s landmark European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550–1750.3 According to Ruderman, Israel...

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