ALASTAIR HAMILTON

scholar was facilitated by the invention of printing in the middle of the

fifteenth century and its application, at a relatively early stage, to Hebrew
texts.15 The centre of Hebrew typography was Italy, and in 1488, in the
town of Soncino near Mantua, a fine edition was printed of the Massoretic
text of the Old Testament. 16
In comparison with this swift advance, largely the work of the Jewish
communities, the knowledge of Hebrew among Christian scholars lagged
behind. The man usually regarded as the pioneer of what is now known as
Christian Hebraism, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, was in fact very far
from sharing the philological objectives of Manetti or Valla. Although he
did comment on certain parts of the Bible, especially on_ Genesis and the
Psalms, and although he occasionally cast a philological eye 'at the Hebrew,
Greek and Latin texts, his deeper aim was to examine the Jewish Cabbalah,
the medieval texts supposed to contain the more hidden doctrines of the Old
Testament, 17 and to demonstrate the compatibility of Jewish and Christian
revelation. Like Manetti, Pico learnt his Hebrew from Jews and Jewish
converts to Christianity. His first encounter with Hebrew philosophy was at
the University of Padua in the early 1480s, where he studied under the
Jewish Averroist Elijah del Medigo. His true study of Hebrew, however,
actually started later in the decade under the tuition of the convert Flavius
Mithridates. 18
The numerous observations on the ~abbalah scattered throughout Pico's
writings, above all the idea that it coulelbe reconciled with Christianity, lie
at the beginning of the movement now called Christian Cabbalism. Pico was
followed by the German Johannes Reuchlin, himself an outstanding Greek
scholar, who was again primarily interested in the Cabbalah, but who
assisted future students of Hebrew by publishing a grammar and dictionary
in 1506. He was the first Christian to do so. The opposition which his
commitment to Hebrew studies, and to the cause of the Jews, encountered
illustrates the degree of prejudice which still had to be overcome. But it was
thanks to Reuchlin that Christian Hebraism spread beyond the Italian
borders and, owing to an ever wider group of practitioners, starting with
Sebastian Munster in Basel, improved in the course of the sixteenth
century. 19 ~--- .
How deep Pico''s - or indeed Reuchlin's - knowledge of Hebrew went is
still open to doubt. It certainly fell far short of that of converted Jews. The
first great product of biblical scholarship to be attributed to a combination
of the new philological methods of the Renaissance and the kno}Vledge of
Hebrew carp.e-from another country which, like Italy, could c~ll(o~the
services of(j:_e'Ys converted to Christianity( Spaj,ri). The University \>(..i\Icala
was founded by the archbishop of Toledo 'an(j/primate of Spain, ~al

I06