De Rudimentis Hebraicis [Grammar]

REUCHLIN, JOHANNES

Thomas Anshelm

Pforzheim

1506

FIRST EDITION. Three parts in one. Latin interspersed with Hebrew. 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, extensive Latin marginalia

Benzing, 90; Adams R-383

Johannes Reuchlin (1455-1522), one of the pre-eminent Christian Hebraists of the fifteenth-sixteenth centuries, mastered Hebrew grammar and was a founder of 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 Reuchlin's 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 as a Hebrew book and thus it is paginated from right to left. Those who were new to Hebrew studies and instinctively opened De Rudimentis Hebraicis from the left were greeted by a Latin poem instructing them to begin from the other side. See Marx, Jewish History and Booklore, p. 324