Seventeenth Century
Johannes Buxtorf (d. 1629) marks a turning-point in the study of Jewish literature by Christians. He not only studied the Targum and the Talmud, but endeavored to understand Jewish history, and he was the first real bibliographer. Women showed an interest: Anna Maria Schurman, the "star of the century", in Holland; Dorothea Moore in England; Queen Christina of Sweden (d. 1689); Maria Dorothea, consort of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar; Elizabeth, daughter of Frederick of the Palatinate; Maria Eleanora, wife of Charles Ludwig of the Palatinate; Antonia, daughter of Duke Eberhard of Württemberg.
Through the influence of Buxtorf a serious attempt was made to understand the post-Biblical literature, and many of the most important works were translated into Latin. In this connection the following names may be mentioned: Coccejus (d. 1667); L'Empereur (d. 1648); Lightfoot (d. 1675); Leusden (d. 1699); and especially Surenhuis (1698), who gave a complete translation of the Mishnah; Jewish theology was studied by (Carpzov (d. 1699), Wagenseil (1705; whose letters show the care he took to gather information from both Jews and Jewesses), and Rittangel (1641); antiquities, by Samuel Bochart (d. 1667), Hottinger (d. 1667), Hyde (d. 1700), Trigland (d. 1705), Breithaupt (1707), and Johann Jakob Schudt (d. 1722). It was a time in which the Christian theologian studied Hebrew and rabbinics before taking up his specific theological study. Hackspan (d. 1659) wrote upon the value to the theologian of studying the works of the Rabbis. Their writings on the Bible were read by Schickard (1635), Hody (d. 1706), and Richard Simon (d. 1712), while catalogues of Hebrew collections were published by Plantavitius (d. 1651), Le Long (d. 1721), and Montfaucon (d. 1741). Hottinger gave this literature a place in his Bibliotheca Orientalis; Otho (1672) wrote a biographical lexicon of the Mishnah teachers; and Bartolocci's Bibliotheca Rabbinica (1675) was a worthy continuation of these bibliographical labors.
Read more about this topic: Christian Hebraists
Famous quotes related to seventeenth century:
“The general feeling was, and for a long time remained, that one had several children in order to keep just a few. As late as the seventeenth century . . . people could not allow themselves to become too attached to something that was regarded as a probable loss. This is the reason for certain remarks which shock our present-day sensibility, such as Montaigne’s observation, ‘I have lost two or three children in their infancy, not without regret, but without great sorrow.’”
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“It is as if, to every period of history, there corresponded a privileged age and a particular division of human life: ‘youth’ is the privileged age of the seventeenth century, childhood of the nineteenth, adolescence of the twentieth.”
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“Nothing in medieval dress distinguished the child from the adult. In the seventeenth century, however, the child, or at least the child of quality, whether noble or middle-class, ceased to be dressed like the grown-up. This is the essential point: henceforth he had an outfit reserved for his age group, which set him apart from the adults. These can be seen from the first glance at any of the numerous child portraits painted at the beginning of the seventeenth century.”
—Philippe Ariés (20th century)