The Light of the Eyes. (Reviews).

Azariah de' Rossi, The Light of the Eyes

Ed. and trans. Joanna Weinberg. (Yale Judaica Series, 31.) New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001. Iii + 802 pp. $120. ISBN: 0-300-07906-0.

A Hebrew antiquarian miscellany first published in 1573, The Light of the Eyes systematically compares Jewish, classical and Christian texts. The book stands out among the modest spate of sixteenth-century Jewish historical works as neither a chronicle nor a historical narrative, but a collection of studies about diverse topics from antiquity. The author, Azariah de' Rossi (ca. 1511-77), was a teacher and sometime censor of Jewish books who knew Hebrew, Aramaic, Italian, and Latin.

The Light of the Eyes, divided into three parts of unequal length and varied contents, draws from a wide variety of Jewish and foreign sources. The short first part, "The Voice of God," is an account, including the author's eyewitness testimony, of the earthquake in Ferrara in 1570. The earthquake fortuitously provided the occasion for him to write the second part, "The Splendor of the Elders," a Hebrew translation of the Letter of Aristeas. Away from his ruined home, de' Rossi met a Christian scholar who asked him to use Jewish sources to clarify obscurities in the Letter's account of the way that Hellenistic Jewish scholars translated the Hebrew Bible to Greek. The biblical and rabbinic terminology in de' Rossi's Hebrew makes evident "the latent Jewish elements of the text." At the same time, he elucidates many passages through reference to Josephus and Eusebius, whom earlier Jewish scholars had rarely mentioned.

The third and longest part of The Light of the Eyes, "Words of Understanding," arranges miscellaneous studies into four sections. After discussing Philo's writings, de' Rossi explains why the Hebrew and Greek texts of the Bible differ and compares ancient rabbinic statements with astronomical conceptions and geographical discoveries of his time. The second section considers the way Jews should treat contradictory or unreliable statements in ancient rabbinic writings. He concludes that rabbinic statements that do not affect behavior, such as stories and preaching, do not have authority equal to legal statements, which ultimately derive from revelation. Throughout the book de' Rossi demonstrates the testing of historical veracity. He applies the method, for example, to the story of the gnat that fatally pecked at Titus' brain, in divine retribution for his destroying the Temple (chap. 16). After comparing the story with Suetonius, Eusebius, Cassiodorus, and Petrarch, de' Rossi concludes, "The fact is that all t his information makes it quite clear that our rabbis' story about Titus never happened neither in its entirety nor in part." Instead of historical event, the story is a rhetorical invention to teach the lesson that "the haughty and insolent ... receive their due punishment by means of the smallest of His creatures."

The third part of The Light of the Eyes recalculates Jewish chronology since creation and, as a result, invalidates Jewish and Christian messianic predictions. The fourth part compares accounts of the Temple by Aristeas, Philo, Josephus, and medieval Jewish and Christian commentators and discusses omens, ancient coins, Hebrew language and poetry.

What was the purpose of writing The Light of the Eyes? Weinberg acknowledges that an apologetic impulse is one unifying feature of the book, but to define the purpose of the work as nationalistic or apologetic would be "attractive but also reductive." De' Rossi frequently cites classical and Christian sources without apologetic intent, evidently because his mental life reflexively drew upon all the sources available to him. For his tombstone inscription, for example, he translated to Hebrew the classical Latin inscription that Cardinal Contarini had chosen for his own monument. Weinberg judges the purpose of the book to be, as de' Rossi announced, to determine the historical truth behind various ancient writings; de' Rossi is, then, to be found in the details.

The precise and versatile learning that was required to translate, edit, and thoroughly annotate the immense corpus of specialized studies in de' Rossi's book is comparable to what its original author achieved in the sixteenth century. Readers of the often elusive Hebrew will generally be grateful for the clear and consistently dignified English translation, as well as for the thorough annotation and the interpretations implied in the translation. The apparatus connects the book firmly to its textual and historical settings through thousands of indispensable footnotes and an extensive index of sources. In the translation and annotation Weinberg responds fittingly to the extensive scholarship that has accumulated around de' Rossi's book. This translation manifests the far-ranging scholarship that produced the book in the sixteenth century and the answering labor that has now brought it into English.