Review of Grafton & Weinberg, "I Have Always Loved the Holy Tongue"

BOOK REVIEW:

Anthony Grafton, Joanna Weinberg. "I have always loved the Holy Tongue": Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011. x + 380 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-04840-9.

Reviewed by Deborah Goodwin (Gustavus Adolphus College)
Published on H-Judaic (April, 2012)
Commissioned by Jason Kalman

Isaac Casaubon’s Christian Hebraism: From Margin to Center
This volume derives from the authors’ jointly presented Jackson Lectures, sponsored by Harvard University’s Department of Classics in 2008. The book bears felicitous traces of its origins in the spoken word. Joanna Weinberg and Anthony Grafton sustain a series of complex arguments, bolstered by meticulous detail and generous illustrations, with exceptional clarity and wit. Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614) was renowned as a classicist or philologist, and sometime controversialist for the cause of Reformed Protestantism. Grafton and Weinberg’s goal is to demonstrate that Casaubon was a “serious student of Jews and Judaism” (p. 4), a role heretofore unacknowledged. The authors achieve something larger: the reframing of convenient but limiting categories (“classicist,” “Hebraist”) to capture the unity of Casaubon’s scholarly and religious life. His great nineteenth-century biographer, Mark Pattison, focused on Casaubon’s achievements as a humanist and classical scholar, while deriding his study of patristics (and ignoring his study of Hebrew altogether). Weinberg and Grafton by contrast undertake to “study a classical scholar historically ... [a study that] by its nature [is] not easy to link with larger contexts, social, cultural, and religious, in which he lived and worked” (p. 9). They bring us the whole man in a series of involving, chapter-long “case studies” (p. 20; the term doesn’t do justice to the richness of argumentation and evidence presented in each chapter)

[...].

Earlier reviews are noted here.