Hebrew Poetry Transformed, or, Scholarship Invincible between Renaissance and Enlightenment

Abstract

During the 1470s and 1480s, a Sicilian Jewish convert to Christianity known as Flavius Mithridates made a long tour of the universities of France and Germany. According to a later report by Johann Reuchlin, Mithridates delivered well-attended lectures on a subject that united the new study of Hebrew with the revival of pagan antiquity: the poetic form of biblical Hebrew verse. This topic, in Mithridates's hands, became a variety of comparative literature, for he insisted that he had discovered in the poetic books of the Hebrew Bible-Job, the Psalms, the Lamentations of Jeremiah, and so on-a formal system akin to that of ancient Greek, featuring 'accents' (tonoi), 'quantities' (chronoi), 'breathings' (pneumata), and 'exceptions' (pathemata). But once Mithridates's lectures were over, Reuchlin wrote, his hearers admitted that they had understood nothing he said; in retrospect, they abandoned both the teacher and his doctrines as completely obscure. Mithridates, meanwhile, returned to Italy 'having accumulated a large heap of money'.

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