Présentation de l'éditeur

This collection of essays treats a topic that has scarcely been approached in the literature on Hebrew and Hebraism in the early modern period. In the seventeenth century, Christians, especially Protestants, studied the Mishnah alongside a host of Jewish commentaries in order to reconstruct Jewish culture, history, and ritual, shedding new light on the world of the Old and New Testaments. Their work was also inextricably dependent upon the vigorous Mishnaic studies of early modern Jewish communities. Both traditions, in a sense, culminated in the monumental production in six volumes of an edition and Latin translation of the Mishnah published by Guilielmus Surenhusius in Amsterdam between 1698 and 1703. Surenhusius gathered up more than a century's worth of Mishnaic studies by scholars from England, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden, as well as the commentaries of Maimonides and Obadiah of Bertinoro (c. 1455-c.1515), but this edition was also born out of the unique milieu of Amsterdam at the end of the seventeenth century, a place which offered possibilities for cross-cultural interactions between Jews and Christians. With Surenhusius's great volumes as an end point, the essays presented here discuss for the first time the multiple ways in which the canonical text of Jewish law, the Mishnah (c.200 CE), was studied by a variety of scholars, both Jewish and Christian, in early modern Europe. They tell the story of how the Mishnah generated an encounter between different cultures, faiths, and confessions that would prove to be enduringly influential for centuries to come.

Sommaire

Introduction: The Mishnah between Jews and Christians in Early Modern Europe, Piet van Boxel, Joanna Weinberg, and Kirsten Macfarlane

Prelude

Humanism and the Mishnah: Paulus Fagius Edits Avot, Anthony Grafton
Some Concepts of Mishnah among 16th-Century Safedian Kabbalists, Moshe Idel

Translation and Pedagogy

The First Complete Latin translation of the Mishnah (1663-1676): Isaac Abendana and Rabbinic Erudition in Restoration England, Theodor Dunkelgrün
Isaac Abendana's German Student Theodor Dassow, the Latin translation of the Mishnah and the conversion of the Jews, Guido Bartolucci
'El sabio Jacob Abendana' and the Spanish Translation of the Mishnah, Yosef Kaplan

Commentary and Scholarship

Bringing Maimonides to Oxford: Edward Pococke, the Mishnah, and the Porta Mosis, Benjamin Williams
William Guise: the application of Arabic to the interpretation of Mishnah Zera'im, Alastair Hamilton
'Ancient Rabbis Inspired by God': Robert Sheringham's Surprising Edition of Mishnah Tractate Yoma (1648), Thomas Roebuck
Johann Christoph Wagenseil: From Scholar to Missionary, Piet van Boxel

Communities and Curricula

Between Law and Antiquarianism: The Christian Study of Maimonides's Mishneh Torah in Late Seventeenth-Century Europe, Marcello Cattaneo
The Significance of Historical Judaism and the Career of Humphrey Prideaux, Scott Mandelbrote
Cultivating Education and Piety: Menasseh ben Israel, Lay Readership, and the Printing of the Mishnah in the Seventeenth Century, David Sclar

Guilielmus Surenhusius (1664-1729)

The role of Jewish commentaries in Christian interpretation of the Mishnah in 17th century Northern Europe, Joanna Weinberg
Imagining Visually the Mishnah - From Wagenseil to Surenhuis (1674-1703), Richard Cohen
'To the advantage of the Republic of Letters'? Guilielmus Surenhusius's Projects, Plans, and Collaborations Beyond the Mishnah, Dirk van Miert
Christianity as Jewish Allegory? Guilielmus Surenhusius, Rabbinic Hermeneutics and the Reformed Study of the New Testament in the Early Eighteenth Century, Kirsten Macfarlane