Hebrew Scholarship and the Medieval World.

• Author: Harvey, Steven
• Position: Book Review

Edited by NICHOLAS DE LANGE. Cambridge: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2001. Pp. xiv + 247. $59.95.

There is an ambiguity in the title of the present volume: does the book concern the Hebrew scholarship of the medievals? or contemporary Hebrew scholarship on the medieval world? or perhaps contemporary scholarship on the medieval Hebrew world? Unfortunately, the ambiguity arises not only from the title, but also from the editor's failure to convey to the contributors the meaning he intended. The result is that instead of a collection of "specially commissioned contributions by leading scholars ... who study the place of Hebrew scholarship in the Middle Ages" (p. i), we have fifteen separate studies that have little to bind them all together. Of the fifteen studies--most of which are quite good--four concern poetry, three grammar, two liturgy, one lexicography, one biblical exegesis, one polemics, one Karaism, one Byzantine Hebrew writing, and one the ars memorativa. Of these studies, four survey the recent literature, at least four indeed focus on Hebrew scholarship in the medieval period, and one--Irene Zwiep's suggestive chapter on Profiat Duran on the art of memory--makes the case for the Latin scholarship of a fourteenth-century Hispano-Jewish thinker (cf. Colette Sirat's evidence for the Latin influence on Gersonides in her chapter on the introductions of medieval Jewish exegetes to their Biblical commentaries). Adena Tanenbaum's comparative study of twentieth-century English translations of medieval Andalusian Hebrew poetry evaluates one area of modern Hebrew scholarship of the medieval period, and Wout van Bekkum's account of Spanish-Hebrew dirges from the fifteenth century--replete with fine translations of hitherto unpublished qinot of MS Firkovitch 165--is itself a rich illustration of contemporary Hebrew scholarship of this period. One of the articles, the late Michael Weitzman's interpretation of the opening paragraphs of the Aramaic Qaddish prayer, deals neither with Hebrew nor medieval scholarship. It may be added that two of the specially commissioned contributions are translations of earlier conference lectures (cf. chapter nine [Joseph Yahalom] with the author's 1997 lecture, published in Siyyon ve-Siyyonut, ed. Z. Harvey et al. [Jerusalem, 2002], 21-30; and chapter ten [Masha Itzhaki] with the author's 1999 lecture, published in Abraham ibn Ezra, savant universel, ed. P.J. Tomson [Brussels, 2000], 53-59).

The first chapter of...