De Rudimentis Hebraicis

REUCHLIN, JOHANNES

Thomas Anshelm,

Pforzheim

1506

FIRST EDITION. Three parts in one. Extensive use of Hebrew type. Printed from right to left, without signatures. Large woodcut arms on verso of final leaf, white-on-black device on recto. Additional half-leaf between pp.588-9, blank between pp.450-1 cut away (as usual). A wide-margined copy

Benzing, 90; Adams R-383

Johannes Reuchlin (1455-1522), one of the preeminent Christian Hebraists of the fifteenth-sixteenth centuries, mastered Hebrew grammar and was a founder the Renaissance Christian movement that sought to study Kabbalah. Reuchlin defended the Talmud and Jewish literature against the attacks of Johannes Pfefferkorn, an apostate Jew. De Rudimentis Hebraicis, a Hebrew grammar and Lexicon, was his first published book. Although it appeared two years after Pellican’s Hebrew grammar, Reuchlin’s work “is much superior and therefore considered the first important Christian work on Hebrew philology. It was influential in promoting the study of Hebrew and, as a result, study of the Hebrew Bible in the original” (Heller, The Sixteenth Century Hebrew Book, p. 17). While Reuchlin wrote De Rudimentis Hebraicis in Latin, he organized it like a Hebrew book and it is paginated from right to left; those who were completely new to Hebrew studies and instinctively opened De Rudimentis Hebraicis from the right side were greeted by a Latin poem instructing them to begin from the other side. See Marx, Jewish History and Booklore, p. 324