The Mishnaic Moment: Jewish Law among Jews and Christians in Early Modern Europe

This collection of essays treats a topic that has scarcely been approached in the literature on Hebrew and Hebraism in the early modern period. In the seventeenth century, Christians, especially Protestants, studied the Mishnah alongside a host of Jewish commentaries in order to reconstruct Jewish culture, history, and ritual, shedding new light on the world of the Old and New Testaments. Their work was also inextricably dependent upon the vigorous Mishnaic studies of early modern Jewish communities. Both traditions, in a sense, culminated in the monumental production in six volumes of an edition and Latin translation of the Mishnah published by Guilielmus Surenhusius in Amsterdam between 1698 and 1703. Surenhusius gathered up more than a century's worth of Mishnaic studies by scholars from England, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden, as well as the commentaries of Maimonides and Obadiah of Bertinoro (c. 1455-c.1515), but this edition was also born out of the unique milieu of Amsterdam at the end of the seventeenth century, a place which offered possibilities for cross-cultural interactions between Jews and Christians. With Surenhusius's great volumes as an end point, the essays presented here discuss for the first time the multiple ways in which the canonical text of Jewish law, the Mishnah (c.200 CE), was studied by a variety of scholars, both Jewish and Christian, in early modern Europe. They tell the story of how the Mishnah generated an encounter between different cultures, faiths, and confessions that would prove to be enduringly influential for centuries to come.

About the Author

Piet van Boxel was Fellow librarian of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and Curator of Hebraica at the Bodleian Libraries. He is Honorary Fellow of the Bodleian Centre for the History of the Book. Kirsten Macfarlane is Associate Professor of Early Modern Christianities at the University of Oxford and an Official Fellow and Tutor at Keble College. Before this, she was a Title A Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge University, and completed her BA (2012), MSt (2014), and DPhil (2017) at Lincoln College, University of Oxford. She has held visiting fellowships at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Houghton Library, Harvard, and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Joanna Weinberg was Professor of Early Modern Jewish History and Rabbinics at the University of Oxford and Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. She is Hebrew lecturer at Exeter College, Oxford, and Honorary Fellow of the Bodleian Centre for the History of the Book.