Band 3, Heft 2

The Santa Barbara Bible (University of California, Santa Barbara, University Library MS BS 75 1250) was first introduced to scholarship in 1971 by Santa Barbara professor Larry Ayres. In the years since that pioneering study, art historians have advanced our knowledge of the place and date of the Bible’s production. Adding to that an understanding of commercial manuscript production in thirteenth-century Paris, the present article comes as close to clarifying the creation of this lovely book as current evidence allows.

In the Spring of 1869, the Cambridge University Library acquired a medieval Hebrew Bible, first written in 13 th -century Spain and decorated and annotated by various hands in subsequent centuries. The manuscript contains what many consider the earliest record of a Jewish reader of Christian chapter divisions of the OT. This article uncovers the story of that manuscript’s discovery by Solomon Marcus Schiller-Szinessy (1820–1890), the first practicing Jew formally appointed to an academic position at that university. It studies Schiller-Szinessy’s published and unpublished descriptions of the manuscript, and it reconstructs his understanding of its history of transmission and reception. It places this story in the distinct but connected contexts of Victorian interests in Rabbinics and in the Massorah, Henry Bradshaw’s renewal of the Cambridge University Library, the development of bibliography as a genre of historical scholarship in the Wissenschaft des Judentums , and the late 19 th -century understanding of distinct medieval and early modern chapters in the history of Jewish and Christian biblical traditions, their transmission, reception, mutual encounter and critical study. Finally, the essay takes this case study to reflect on the effect of Jewish emancipation on the academic study of the Hebrew Bible.

Three woodcut illustrations by different artist in early editions of Martin Luther’s German Bible depict the 1529 Siege of Vienna by Ottoman Turks under Suleiman I as the fulfillment of the prophecy of “Gog and Magog,” the biblical destroyers in both the Book of Ezekiel and the Apocalypse. A marginal annotation also associates Gog and Magog with the historical Tartars and the legendary Red Jews. This article examines the images in light of their historical and theological contexts. It uses Luther’s theology, as it developed in the wake of the siege, to interpret the illustrations, and the illustrations to explain Luther’s theology, specifically his sola scriptura doctrine. A curious but often overlooked detail in one of the images is reinterpreted: a crescent moon atop the spire of St. Stephen’s Cathedral. This detail is puzzling since the siege failed and the Turks never entered the city. The Islamic symbol where it does not belong can be read as the artist’s subtle condemnation of the Catholic faith. This interpretation aligns with Luther’s polemical attacks on both Islam and Catholicism and his association of the two.

Johannes Dietenberger (ca. 1475–1537), native of Frankfurt am Main, university-trained Doctor of Theology, and Dominican friar, served as prior in Frankfurt and Koblenz during the 1525 Urban Revolt of the German Peasants’ War and the early Protestant Reformation, respectively. Like Martin Luther, Dietenberger translated the Bible into the vernacular German after consulting recently published Greek and Hebrew biblical texts; however, unlike Luther he produced a translation that remained true to the Latin Vulgate and the traditional teachings of the Catholic Church. Dietenberger aimed to counter those parts of Luther’s translation which contradicted Catholic tradition, and at the same time to provide a translation whose language was less coarse and offensive. Still, there were more commonalities between the translations of Luther and Dietenberger than earlier research in controversial theology assumed. Overshadowed by the famous Wittenberg reformer and slandered by polemical Protestant scholarship of previous centuries, Dietenberger and his Bible translation have never received the scholarly attention they deserve. This article represents an attempt to correct the oversight.

Reading scripture in the vernacular forged a unique discursive community in colonial New England, just as it had in post-Reformation England and elsewhere. But just as important were the many ways the bible functioned as a physical object imbued with special power, serving as talisman as much as text. In the colonial context, missionary activity among New England Indians introduced both aspects of scripture to indigenous communities, which in their turn, endowed it with meanings of their own. This essay first reviews the role of the Bible as physical object among the English colonists, before turning to its reception, rejection, and uses among New England’s Algonquian peoples. Examining bibles as items of material culture in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut reveals the creativity and creolization inherent in the introduction of the Bible to this colonial context. The intellectual, practical, and talismanic properties of the Bible so familiar to the English were cast into new relief in the colonial contest between Europeans and Indians, between literate and oral cultures, and between these vastly different religious systems.