Consider the Sheqel: Coin-Shaped Chapters in the History of Humanist Judaic Scholarship

• In Event: Antiquarianism and Ethnography in the Early Modern World II

Abstract

The sheqel, an ancient Jewish coin, circulated throughout early modern Europe. Brought back from Levantine travels (by Guillaume Postel), acquired in Europe from Mediterranean merchants (by Benito Arias Montano) or received as gifts (by Andreas Masius), the sheqel joined glittering numismatic collections from Venice to Paris and from Antwerp to Madrid. Engraved and printed onto the printed page, as in the ‘Apparatus Sacer’ to the Antwerp Polyglot Bible, the sheqel reached far corners of the learned Christian world. This paper will explore several different ways in which humanists read their sheqalim: from evidence of the ancient shift in Hebrew script to the excavation of Rabbinic law (such as the Talmudic treatise Sheqalim, studied in depth by John Selden, or Maimonides’ Hilchot Sheqalim, translated into Latin in 1718), the antiquarian study of the sheqel served as a vital chapter in the Christian ethnography of the world of the Gospels.

Author

• Theodor W. Dunkelgrün, University of Cambridge