Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 23.djvu/48

Rh Umani, Dei Umili), and, on his mother's side, of the Tappuḥim, i.e., De Pomis, to which thecelebrated author of the Lexicon Ṣemah David belonged. Rabbenu Nathan's father and grandfather, like Rabbenu Nathan himself and his brother's descendants, were, no doubt, papal court Jews (and not linendrapers, as the latest editor of the ˤArukh, by misreading and misinterpreting the somewhat hard verses of his author, contrives to show). This lucrative position furnished them with ample means not only for their noble charities to congregational institutions (a synagogue, religious bath, &c.), but also with the leisure necessary for the pursuit of Talmudic studies. Rabbenu Nathan was resh kallah (rector of the Jewish university), and unquestionably the greatest Talmudist, even as he was the poorest Hebrew poet, in Italy in the 11th and 12th centuries. As regards his teachers we know four, three of whom he attended, whilst he studied and digested the works of the fourth so well that, though personally unknown to one another, they may be justly called master and disciple. His first teacher was his own father; his second teacher, from whom Rabbenu Nathan no doubt obtained his thorough knowledge of Babylonian habits, was R. Maṣliah of Sicily, who had been a hearer of the greatest "gaon" of Pumbaditha; his third teacher was R. Mosheh b. Ya'aḳob b. Mosheh b. Abbun of Narbonne (or Toulouse; better known under the name of R. Mosheh Haddarshan); and the fourth was Rabbenu Ḥananeel of Kairwan. He owed so much to this teacher that as soon as the ˤAruhk had appeared most people took it for granted that Rabbenu Ḥananeel had lived at Rome, and accordingly called him "a man of Rome—"Ish Romi"; see MS. Brit. Mus. Add. 27,201, leaf 73b, and Tosaphoth, passim. (That Rabbenu Gershom, Rabbenu Mosheh ותלמור and others were his teachers, as Rapoport, loc. cit., asserts, is a fiction.) Rabbenu Nathan, in his ˤArukh, does not merely' explain the foreign (i.e., Aramaic, Persian, Greek, Latin, and Arabic) words occurring in the Targums, Talmuds, and Midrashim, but the subject-matter also, and thereby proves himself a doubly useful guide. In this, although he had been preceded by no less a personage than the Gaon Semah b. Paltoi (fl. 870), who also composed such an ˤArukh, Rabbenu Nathan was virtually the first, as the Gaon's work had been early lost. The assertion that the fourth of the four men captured by the Spanish admiral (see below, p. 39) was R. Nathan Habbabli, that he lived in Narbonne, and that he also composed a similar ˤArukh, rests on a misunderstanding, as the quotation in the Yoḥasin clearly shows. The passages there given under R. Nathan Habbabli are taken vertatim from the ˤArukh of our author (compare the article ותלמור &c.). That Rome has been at times called in Jewish writings "Babel," and that consequently Habbabli may mean "the Roman," is clear from the writings of the New Testament. We will only add here a few words concerning the bibliography of the book. Of the ˤArukh exist so far ten editions, the first of which came out undated, but before or about 1480. The seventh edition was enriched by the physician R. Binyamin Musaphia's Musaph, i.e., Additamenta (Musaphia was a Greek and Latin scholar), and the latest edition by Dr Kohut is now in progress. As regards the MSS. of this remarkable lexicon the best copies are to be found partly in the University Library, Cambridge (Add, 376, which has all the verses of the author and additamenta by R. Shemuel Ibn ותלמור, and Add. 471–72), and partly at the Court Library, Vienna {Cod. cvi. 1 and 2). The latter were carried off by Napoleon I. to Paris in 1809, but in 1815 were returned to Vienna.

Influence of the Talmud.—It must be admitted by every critical student of history that the Talmud has not merely been the means of keeping alive the religious idea among the Jews, but has formed their strongest bond of union. When, after the fall of the city of Jerusalem and its temple, and the expatriation of the Jews from Palestine, a goodly portion of the Mosaic law lost its application, the Talmud became the spirit which put fresh life into the letter which