Eighteenth Century
The first half of the 18th century contains the names of three important scholars. Jacques Basnage knew no Hebrew, but his L'Histoire de la Religion des Juifs was the first attempt at a complete presentation of the history of Judaism. The Entdecktes Judenthum of Eisenmenger (d.1704) exhibits a mass of Jewish learning. Johann Christoph Wolf (d. 1739), who, with the help of the Oppenheimer library, was able to produce his Bibliotheca Hebræa, which laid the foundation for all later works in Hebrew bibliography.
Johann Christian Georg Bodenschatz (d. 1797), though not a scholarly Hebraist, gave an accurate account of Jewish ceremonials. By the side of these stand Bashuysen (d. 1750), the translator and printer of Hebrew books; Reland (d. 1718), the first to use Talmudic material for the study of the geography of Palestine; the bibliographers Unger (d. 1719) and Gagnier (d. 1720), who gave Wolf his information regarding the manuscripts in the Bodleian; J. H. Michaelis (d. 1738) and Mai (d. 1732), who compiled a catalogue of the Uffenbach library; Baratier (d. 1740), the youthful prodigy, who wrote on Benjamin of Tudela; Mill (d. 1756), who treated rabbinical exegesis; and Wähner (1762), who described Hebrew antiquities. Biagio Ugolini (1744) is said to have been a converted Jew, and therefore finds no place here. Especial mention should be made of Ezra Stiles, the learned president of Yale College (1778), certainly the most learned Christian student of post-Biblical Jewish literature that America has produced.
Read more about this topic: Christian Hebraists
Famous quotes related to eighteenth century:
“F.R. Leavis’s ‘eat up your broccoli’ approach to fiction emphasises this junkfood/wholefood dichotomy. If reading a novel—for the eighteenth century reader, the most frivolous of diversions—did not, by the middle of the twentieth century, make you a better person in some way, then you might as well flush the offending volume down the toilet, which was by far the best place for the undigested excreta of dubious nourishment.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“Our age is pre-eminently the age of sympathy, as the eighteenth century was the age of reason. Our ideal men and women are they, whose sympathies have had the widest culture, whose aims do not end with self, whose philanthropy, though centrifugal, reaches around the globe.”
—Frances E. Willard 1839–1898, U.S. president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union 1879-1891, author, activist. The Woman’s Magazine, pp. 137-40 (January 1887)