Johann Buxtorf Gives a Hebrew Lesson to Philippe Duplessis-Mornay

CHAPTER 6 Crossroads in Hebraism: Johann Buxtorf Gives a Hebrew Lesson to Philippe Duplessis-Mornay

Joanna Weinberg

From the mid-fifteenth to the seventeenth century, Christian readers of all denominations were attracted to the study of the holy tongue and Jewish books. The stock of Talmudic and midrashic texts interspersed throughout the thirteenth-century Pugio Fidei, and the exegetical contributions of medieval commentators, in particular Rabbi Solomon (Rashi 1040–1105) and David Kimhi (Redak 1160–1235), which had provided generations of Christians with the Jewish material, was now replenished and updated. An astonishingly broad range of Hebrew and Aramaic texts was made accessible to the scholar, divine, literate man or woman.1 The variety and diversity of Hebraic expression during this long Renaissance does not lend itself to easy generalization. What is true is that most self- respecting biblical exegetes – with some remarkable exceptions such as Erasmus – felt compelled to acquire a command of the holy tongue. The Hebrew studies of Konrad Pellikan (1478–1556), the German theologian and humanist of Basel and Zürich, were surprisingly varied, but different from that of his student, Sebastian Münster, the author of an influential tract on the Hebrew calendar and disciple of the Jewish grammarian Elijah Levita. Pico della Mirandola’s foray into the world of Kabbalah, which was facilitated by Jews and erstwhile Jews, has little in common with the way other prominent Catholics such as Gilbert Génébrard expended much intellectual energy in providing testimony from Jewish writings ranging from the Roman Mahzor (festival prayer book) to the Sefer ha-Ikarim (Book of Principles) of Joseph Albo (1380–1444). And the exploitation of Jewish tradition by converts to Christianity was not simply a story of exposing the ‘nugae’ – the absurdities – of their former religion, or of attempting in the tradition of the Pugio Fidei to prove Christian truths from Jewish texts. Paulo Ricci, the Jew from Trent who converted to Christianity at the beginning of the sixteenth century, did not use the Jewish sources solely as a stick with which to beat his former co-religionists; on the contrary, they served him as a means for evaluating and justifying his

1 On women studying Hebrew see Philip Ford, ‘Camille de Morel: Female Erudition in the French Renaissance’, in (Re)Inventing the Past: Essays on the French Renaissance in Honour of Ann Moss, ed. Gary Ferguson and Catherine Hampton (Durham, 2003), pp. 245–59.

152 Weinberg own Christianity.2 And his Latin translations of the two tractates of the Mishnah, Berakhot and Sanhedrin – though unsatisfactory in the eyes of the rigorous Hebrew reader John Selden – provided the tyro to rabbinic studies with an accurate translation accompanied by helpful glosses.3 He did graft his new religious identity onto the rabbinic text, however. The tractate of Berakhot ends with Rabbi Natan’s notable pronouncement, ‘It is time to act for the Lord’. But Ricius lengthened the ending to incorporate the words, ‘To him [i.e. to the Lord] and to the queen of heaven and propitious virgin should be given per- petual praise, glory and honour’.4 In 1555, Johannes Isaac Levita who had undergone multiple conversions, now in his Catholic phase, published a bilingual edition of the Ruah Hen.5 According to Colette Sirat, this treatise, wrongly attributed to Judah ibn Tibbon, provided one of the best introductions to Jewish philosophy for the average person; it contains an encyclopaedic discussion of the sciences and draws on Maimonides, Averroes and Avicenna.6 In fact, Sirat’s judgement on this short philosophical monograph had already been articulated by no less a scholar than Johann Reuchlin, who in his De arte cabbalistica had asserted that ‘our young men’ were reading Ruah Hen in order to acquire knowledge of the physi- cal world.7 Johannes Isaac translated the text into Latin, and in a second print- ing published it together with the popular Maimonidean letter against astrology. If Christians were already reading the text in Reuchlin’s time, by the

2 See Paulus Ricius, Sal federis (Pavia, 1507) and the discussion of Bernd Roling, ‘Maimonides im Streit der Konfessionen: Die “Statera prudentum” des Paulus Ritius und die christliche Neuelektüre des Maimonides im 16. Jahrhundert’, in Gottes Sprache in der philologischen Werkstatt, Hebraistik vom 15 bis zum 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Giuseppe Veltri and Gerold Necker (Leiden, 2004), pp. 149–68. 3 See Gerald J. Toomer, John Selden: A Life in Scholarship, 2 vols (Oxford, 2009), 2, p. 444. Ricius never translates the tetragrammaton, apparently adhering to Jewish custom prohibiting the articulation of the ineffable name. 4 Paulus Ricius, Talmudica novissime in latinum versa periocunda commentariola (Augsburg, 1519), sig. k3r. Ricius translated other rabbinic texts including the popular passages about the Messiah and the messianic age from Chapter 10 (Helek) of Sanhedrin. 5 On Johannes Isaac, see Theodor Dunkelgrün’s chapter in this volume. Symon Foren wrote a MSt dissertation (Oxford, 2014) on Johannes Isaac’s translation of Ruah Hen. Ofer Elior’s wide-ranging doctoral study of the Ruah Hen is to be published by Yad ben Zvi press (Jerusalem). See Ofer Elior, Ruah Hen as a Looking Glass: The Study of Science in Different Jewish Cultures as Reflected in a Medieval Introduction to Aristotelian Science and in its Later History (PhD diss., Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, 2010.) 6 Colette Sirat, ‘Le livre Rouah Hen’, Proceedings of the Sixth World Congress of Jewish Studies, 4 vols (Jerusalem, 1977–80), 3 (1977), pp. 117–23. 7 Johannes Reuchlin, De arte cabalistica libri tres Leoni x dicati (Hagenau, 1517), bk. i, fol. 2r.