Learning Hebrew in the Renaissance: Towards a Typology

The article presents several cases of Christian scholars starting to learn Hebrew during the late Humanistic period and at the beginning of the Renaissance, extracting from a vast range of historical evidence and from a remarkable collection of autobiographical testimonies, the principal traits of the learning situation and of the relationship teacher-pupil, complicated by the religious allegiance of the participants: Jews, converted or not, and Christians did by necessity or by choice share a common learning and teaching space during several decades and were protagonists of a unique phase of the ongoing Christian-Jewish confrontation with exceptional features in comparison to the longue durée of this theological and historical confrontation. Hebrew became, during the Renaissance in several European countries, a surprising token for an embryonal mutual recognition that, against the boundaries of identitarian politics, soon met its limit, but promoted without any doubt the birth of modern Jewish Studies.