"I have always loved the Holy Tongue": Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship (review)

In this original, highly learned, and beautifully produced volume Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg, known for their important contributions to Renaissance scholarship and intellectual history, have teamed up to provide an innovative and provocative study of an intriguing, if often neglected, Renaissance Hebraist, Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614). The methodology they utilize, namely careful attention to Casaubon's marginal comments on books that he read (he annotated hundreds of books and wrote sixty volumes of notes), is powerful and, combined with a close and nuanced reading of his published works and a broad context, makes this a remarkable book that will have implications far beyond its immediate field.

Better known for his philological prowess and his studies of ancient Greek and Latin literature, Casaubon was also an avid reader, student, and collector of Judaica. He read works in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and even Yiddish. The analysis in the volume proceeds on a number of levels simultaneously, as the authors assess the traditional presentation of Casaubon, place him in an historical context, and scrutinize the full range of his writings. The resulting image of Casaubon that Grafton and Weinberg re-create is of an individual in formation. They point to his accomplishments and successes and well as his failures and searching. They craft a multi-dimensional human being and explore how he thought and responded to what he read and discussed.

Describing the process of his note taking, Grafton and Weinberg provide useful insights into Casaubon's thought process and methods of contextual and meaning-making reading. They point to the intricate web that connects Casaubon's thought in his published work as well as his draft publications, notes, letters (including approximately 2,500, mostly in Latin) and journal entries. Grafton and Weinberg trace his methods of reading and then move to a detailed discussion of Casaubon's study of Hebrew, a particularly useful exercise given that Casaubon taught Hebrew only briefly and was not a specialist in that field.

For Casaubon, much of his interest in Hebrew writing and Jewish thought was related to his own, internal Christian polemics—especially his criticism of Hermes Trismegistus and his attack on Pietro Galatino. Much of Casaubon's impressive Hebrew learning was enlisted in a fierce battle with Cardinal Cesare Baronio. Casaubon's critique made much of what Casaubon saw as Baronio's ignorance of Hebrew and Greek and his lack of critical acumen, as well as his shortcomings when it came to chronology and his lack of understanding of Hebrew and Jewish customs. For Casaubon, the study of late Antiquity and the early years of Christianity had important resonance for his day and required contextualization within the Jewish world of Jesus as well as his disciples and opponents. Grafton and Weinberg offer a nuanced account of Casaubon's engagement with Baronio, providing important discussion that measures the intellectual and religious climate and agenda of the time and that spills over into more personal issues of religion and attempts to convert Casaubon to Catholicism. In this context, Grafton and Weinberg provide particularly intriguing and useful discussion of Casaubon's interaction with Joseph Scaliger. Although they never met in person, the two scholars exchanged letters and engaged in discussion of key academic themes, with many of Scaliger's sensibilities serving as fodder for Casaubon's own approach and conclusions.

Like others of his time, Casaubon appears to have been engaged in a "spiritual quest, which knew no denominational boundaries" (p. 43). While the authors generally find Casaubon to be a "dispassionate" reader, even when annotating Jewish prayerbooks, they note the appearance of hidden agendas on occasion. Despite the use he made of Hebrew texts and his great engagement with them, Casaubon like other Christian Hebraists does not appear to have been "sympathetic" to the Jews or the rabbis...