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German Christian Contributions to Jewish Law*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2014

Haim H. Cohn

Extract

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I have chosen for my subject some of the contributions made to Jewish law — in its widest sense — by German Christian scholars of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. Some sixty years or more ago I became acquainted with the writings of John Selden, the 17th century English lawyer, parliamentarian and antiquarian, whose books on the Uxor Hebraica and De successionibus ad legem Ebraeorum, and De synedriis, were a revelation to me: for a non-Jewish scholar of that period to be capable of delving into biblical, talmudical and post-talmudical sources and to compare them with other ancient systems of law, was an unexpected feat. It is not only the impeccable command of Hebrew and Aramaic that excites wonder: it is also a sincere and genuine endeavour to comprehend and describe the workings of Jewish law objectively and without religious bias. We shall see that not all theologians always succeeded in suppressing their innate prejudices; there were even a good many who conducted their Judaistic research for hostile purposes (and with those I shall not deal). Even of Selden it was said that he had voiced now and then some antisemitic remarks, but there is no trace of any personal animus in his books on Jewish law.

Type
Articles
Information
Israel Law Review , Volume 33 , Issue 4 , Autumn 1999 , pp. 733 - 742
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and The Faculty of Law, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 1999

References

* This paper was presented at an International Colloquium held in Jerusalem in March, 1998.

I wish to acknowledge the debt I owe Professor Nahum Rakover whose Multilingual Bibliography of Jewish Law (Jerusalem, 1990) was of great assistance to me in preparing this paper. The fact that I have had to rectify some errors that crept into his book does not derogate from its usefulness. I further wish to express my gratitude to Dr. Christian Wiese, of the Steinheim Institute for German-Jewish History in Duisburg, for having supplied me with some biographical data which were not available to me here.