Me'ir Nativ: The First Hebrew Concordance of the Bible and Jewish Bible Study in the Fifteenth Century, in the Context of Jewish-Christian Polemics

Headnote

Abstract

Ram Ben-Shalom

Me'ir Nativ: The First Hebrew Concordance of the Bible and Jewish Bible Study in the Fifteenth Century, in the Context of Jewish- Christian Polemics

The first Hebrew concordance, known as Me'ir Nativ, was written in the city of Arles, in Provence, between 1437 and 1447. Its author, Isaac Nathan, a prominent leader of Provençal Jewry, devoted immense efforts-money, time and thought-to the project. A critical examination of Nathan's preface to the concordance reveals that he had two main goals in creating this important tool: facilitating religious polemics with Christians and encouraging Bible study in Jewish society. Here these two phenomena are analyzed in their historical and geographical context.

Because of the concordance's polemical purpose, Nathan adopted the Christian division of the Bible into books and chapters. His decision afforded the Christian system a certain legitimacy that contributed to its adoption (through the publication of Miqra'ot Gedolot) in Hebrew Bibles published to this day.

Isaac Nathan was probably the first Jewish scholar to give serious consideration to Christian interpretations of Scripture and to include those he found compelling in his Hebrew work. the preface to Me'ir Nativ is heavily influenced by the Scholastics, particularly thomas Aquinas. In his adoption of the scholastic approach Nathan resembled other fifteenth-century Jewish thinkers, especially in Catalonia and Aragon.

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The history of science has shown how ideological and religious debates have helped to advance knowledge and occasioned breakthroughs in various branches of science. I refer not only to scientific revolutions, in the Kuhnian sense, but to the improvement of scientific paradigms within existing fields, as a result of internal or external debate. Jewish Bible study, for example, developed greatly as a result of the encounter between Jewish and Islamic scholarship and as a result of internal religious debate with the Karaites.1 In Western Europe, in the twelfth century, Jewish-Christian interaction and religious debate influenced the development of the literal interpretation of Scripture among the students of Rashi in northern France and among the monks of St. Victor's Abbey in Paris.2 Jewish-Christian polemics in particular, greatly advanced the study of Scripture and contributed to a critical examination of exegesis on both sides, as well as the development of exegetical methodology that...