For Hebrew Connoisseurs Only: Jewish "Auctoritates" in the Hebraist Milieu of Castile, 1516–66

• In Event: Universal Libraries, Global Bibliographies

Abstract

Hebrew in the generation after 1492 was, in Spain, a very lively subject among members of a learned elite for whom a select group of formerly Jewish converts served as teachers and passeurs de textes. My paper will examine one of the questions that should guide a systematic investigation on the interactions between those scholarly patrons and Hebraist scholars: how were Jewish authors, medieval and early modern, known in Renaissance Castile? I will explore converso Hebraist Alfonso de Zamora’s two lists of Jewish exegetes and grammarians, one unpublished and found in his personal manuscript miscellany, Leiden, UB, cod. Or. 645, ca. 1530; the other one published in his polemical epistle to the Jews of Rome (1526, included in his Hebrew grammar). I will compare those lists with contemporary libraries, particularly one once owned by Cardinal Francisco de Mendoza y Bobadilla (d. 1566), Zamora’s patron and perhaps former student at Alcalá.

Author

• Jesus de Prado Plumed, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México