Overview

Jewish Books and their Readers discusses the transformative effect of the circulation and readership of sacred and secular texts written by Jews on Christian as well as Jewish readers in early modern Europe. Its twelve essays challenge traditional paradigms of Christian Hebraism and undermine simplistic visions of the unchanging nature of Jewish cultural life.They ask what constituted a 'Jewish' book: how it was presented, disseminated, and understood within both Jewish and Christian environments (and how its meanings were contested), and what effect such understanding had on contemporary views of Jews and their intellectual heritage. They demonstrate how the involvement of Christians in the production and dissemination of Jewish books played a role in the shaping of the intellectual life of Jews and Christians. Contributors are: Michela Andreatta, Andrew Berns, Theodor Dunkelgrun, Federica Francesconi, Anthony Grafton Alessandro Guetta, William Horbury, Yosef Kaplan, Scott Mandelbrote, Piet van Boxel, Joanna Weinberg Benjamin Williams.

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Reviews

This hugely impressive collection showcases the wide range and high quality of research that is currently being undertaken into the relationship between Christian and Jewish intellectual culture, and Christianity and Judaism more generally, during the early modern period. In their introduction, Mandelbrote and Weinberg emphasise the limitations inherent in the term `Christian Hebraism' and the need for an approach that does justice to the complex set of interactions involved, which combined elements of appropriation, collaboration and competition, and varied widely across different cultural contexts. The contributions published here represent an important first step towards developing such an approach. Mark Taplin, in: Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. 69.2 (2018).

Author Information

Scott Mandelbrote is Fellow, Director of Studies in History, and Perne and Ward Librarian at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge. His publications include The Garden, the Ark, the Tower, the Temple (with Jim Bennett; Oxford, 1998) and Nature and Scripture in the Abrahamic Religions (edited with Jitse van der Meer; Leiden, 2008). Joanna Weinberg, Ph.D. (1982) is Professor of Early Modern Jewish History and Rabbinics at the University of Oxford. With Anthony Grafton she published I have always loved the Holy Tongue : Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Learning (Cambridge, Mass., 2011), and with Michael Fishbane she edited and contributed to Midrash Unbound. Transformations and Innovations (Oxford, 2013).

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