In Memoriam: Ángel Sáenz-Badillos Pérez, 1940-2013

Ángel Sáenz-Badillos Pérez was a preeminent scholar of Hispano-Hebrew literature and a contributor to La corónica. He was born in Logroño, Spain in 1940, and passed away on December 30, 2013, in Boston, near his home in Cambridge. He had an illustrious career as a philologist, Hebrew scholar, administrator, and teacher. His work spanned from Greek biblical studies to medieval Hebrew grammatology and poetry to sixteenth-century Spanish Humanism. Readers of La corónica knew him for his contributions to this publication (Brann et al. 1998; Edwards et al. 1997), but within the field of Hispano-Hebrew he was, together with his partner Judit Targarona Borrás, one of the masters of the field. Together the two did so much to advance the study of the Hebrew literature of Spain that it is difficult to imagine what it would look like today without their interventions.¹

Sáenz-Badillos was trained as a Hellenic and Semitic philologist. His preparation was remarkable. He took four licenciaturas (Philology, Berchmannskolleg, Pullach bei München, 1964; Filosofía, Complutense 1969, Filología Bíblica Trilingüe, Complutense, 1970, and Teología, Pontificia Comillas-Madrid, 1970). For these degrees he completed undergraduate theses on Heidegger (Hermeneútica 1964), the Quelle gospel (Estudio 1969), and Samaritan Midrash (El midrash 1970). He completed his doctorate only three years later in 1972, in Filología Bíblica Trilingüe (Complutense), writing a dissertation on the polyglot bibles published in Spain in the sixteenth century (Filología bíblica 1973). Like the Biblical scholars and Humanists he studied, he carried Hebrew in his toolbox for scriptural studies. Scholars such as Antonio Nebrija, who is best known for his Gramática de lengua española, were also Greek and Hebrew scholars (Nebrija himself wrote several grammars of the Hebrew language). Before the age of Modern Language Studies and Judaic Studies, Hebrew was studied in Spain as a language of scripture.

Sáenz-Badillos was the consummate engaged philologist. His command of nearly every aspect of the field was admirable and included (at least) Semitic, Romance, and Greek philology, Hebrew paleography, poetics, literary criticism, literary history, social history of the Jewish communities of Iberia, and Biblical Studies. In 2014 we tend to think that a scholar so well versed in ‘traditional’ philology would be less concerned with the more ‘cultural studies’ type of work that has come to overshadow manuscript studies and poetics in the US academy. But Sáenz-Badillos was, like others of his generation, a sensitive cultural critic who regularly, and without fanfare, included poignant and penetrating insights on the cultural history of Sephardic Jewry in his vast production of linguistic and poetic studies and translations.

There was a certain poetry to his intellectual trajectory. He began his career in Biblical studies working on the polyglot bibles edited by Spanish (Christian) Humanists. This led him to the study of grammarians in Spain, and in particular the study of Hebrew grammarians in Spain. Studying the work of these philologists lead him, as it lead them, from the Biblical to the philological to the poetic. Writers such as Dunash ibn Labrat (Tešubot 1980) and Menahem ibn Saruq (Mahberet 1986) sought to codify Biblical grammar just as their Muslim counterparts had codified Quranic usages. In so doing they were able to forge a Biblical Hebrew poetics modeled after the Arabic tradition, but enabling them to adapt Biblical Hebrew for their own poetic production (Sáenz-Badillos and Targarona Borrás, Poetas hebreos 1988; Semu’el ha-Nagid. Poemas I 1990; Literatura hebrea en la España medieval 1990; El alma lastimada: Ibn Gabirol 1992; Levin and Sáenz-Badillos, Si me olvido de ti, Jerusalén 1992; Yehudah ha-Levi. Poemas 1994; Semu’el ha-Nagid. Poemas II 1998; Sáenz-Badillos and Targarona Borrás, Poesía hebrea en al-Andalus 2003). He often wrote with a focus on the role that Jewish authors played in the broader context of the dominant culture (“Participación” 1996; Judíos entre árabes 2000; Carrete Parrondo et al...