New Religion - Christian Hebraism





















"I have always loved the Holy Tongue": Isaac Casaubon,
the Jews and a forgotten chapter in Renaissance scholarhip
Anthony Grafton; Joanna Weinberg
Harvard, 2011
296.092 C336g


'Fusing high scholarship with high drama, Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg uncover a secret and extraordinary aspect of a legendary Renaissance scholar’s already celebrated achievement. The French Protestant Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614) is known to us through his pedantic namesake in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. But in this book, the real Casaubon emerges as a genuine literary hero, an intrepid explorer in the world of books. With a flair for storytelling reminiscent of Umberto Eco, Grafton and Weinberg follow Casaubon as he unearths the lost continent of Hebrew learning—and adds this ancient lore to the well-known Renaissance revival of Latin and Greek."  -publisher


"In the new story told by these two eminent authorities, Casaubon remains the great Hellenist known to Pattison, but he becomes much more. He is now a pioneering student of Hebrew texts and a Christian ascetic who turned Hellenic and Hebrew philology into Protestant piety...The book underlines the importance of late antiquity and early Christianity, which until recently, were not very visible in Anglophone scholarship: Grafton and Weinberg go far to reveal the roots of this exciting field."
--Brian Copenhaver, University of California, Los Angeles

Benjamin on the Novel vs Storytelling- Information - the novel-information as debased

 From the storyteller:  [this was written in the 1930s, amazing] Every morning, news reaches us, from around the globe.  And yet we lack rem...