Stephen G. Burnett

Religion, political culture and the emergence of early modern society : essays in German and Dutch history

Urban society and Reformation Confessionalization and Second Reformation The Netherlands - the pioneer society of early modern Europe.

Christian Hebraism in the Reformation Era (1500-1660)

The Reformation transformed Christian Hebraism from the pursuit of a few into an academic discipline. This book explains that transformation by focusing on how authors, printers, booksellers, and censors created a public discussion of Hebrew and Jewish texts.

The Strange Career of the Biblia Rabbinica among Christian Hebraists, 1517–1620

This essay describes the features of the first two editions of the Rabbinic Bible, traces their use by Christian Hebraists of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and considers the use of Jewish Bible commentaries by Christian Hebraists, focusing on Sebastian Munsters annotations to his famous Hebraica Biblia. From the perspective of biblical studies, the most important feature of this work was not its innovative physical form, but its precedent-setting Hebrew Bible text. In this work Munster provided not only the Hebrew Bible text, taken from the first Biblia Rabbinica of 1517, but also his own Latin translation and a digest of annotations taken mainly from the biblical commentaries of the two Rabbinic Bible editions. The Rabbinic Bible of 1517 was a departure from previous manuscript and printed versions of the Hebrew Bible both in its physical form and in its bold claim to greater textual authenticity. Keywords:Biblia Rabbinica; biblical studies; Christian Hebraists

The Targum in Christian Scholarship to 1800

The Christian study of Aramaic and the Targums in the Middle Ages and early modern period is a chapter in the larger story of Christian Hebraism. Although church fathers such as Jerome and Augustine believed and taught that the Hebrew text of the Old Testament was worthy of study, very few Christian scholars pursued Hebrew learning until the Middle Ages. Christians who wished to learn biblical Hebrew or Aramaic faced a series of barriers that they had to overcome, above all finding an instructor. Christians justified studying the Targum because of its value for interpreting the text of the Hebrew Bible and for understanding the Hebrew language better by comparing Hebrew words and phrases with Aramaic ones. Christian Aramaic scholarship functioned as an adjunct to Hebrew scholarship from 1300-1800, and both were inducted into the service of Christian theology. Keywords: Christian Aramaic scholarship; Hebrew text; Old Testament; Targums

Press Controls and the Hebraist Discourse in Reformation Europe

The Reformation transformed Christian Hebraism from the pursuit of a few into an academic discipline. This book explains that transformation by focusing on how authors, printers, booksellers, and censors created a public discussion of Hebrew and Jewish texts.

Judaica Libraries: Imagined and Real

The Reformation transformed Christian Hebraism from the pursuit of a few into an academic discipline. This book explains that transformation by focusing on how authors, printers, booksellers, and censors created a public discussion of Hebrew and Jewish texts.

The Jews in Genoa

Illustrating the history of the Jews in Genoa and its surroundings, this volume examines 1681 to the French Revolution. There is a greater abundance of historical evidence, which portrays chiefly the destinies of the Jews in the Republic from the 16th century on, when the presence of the Jews became permanent and a regular community was established also in the capital. The historical records presented illustrate mainly the relationship between the government of the Genoese Republic and the Jews, the latters economic activities and their communal and social life. Some of the descriptions of the Jewish population in Genoa, their living conditions and occupations, allow for a close examination of the social conditions of this Northern Italian community. For a while Genoa became a haven of refuge for some of the exiles from Spain, including the historian Joseph Hacohen and members of the Abarbanel family.