Eliyahu Levita, the Bachur אליהו בחור
the grammarian who showed the vowel points younger than the Talmud, and the father of the Yiddish novel
From Neustadt near Nuremberg he was carried off to Italy, and there lived a life between two worlds without leaving his own. For thirteen years he lived in the Roman house of Cardinal Egidio da Viterbo: the cardinal learned Hebrew and Aramaic from him, Levita Greek from the cardinal. His own street called him an apostate for it—wrongly: he died a Jew and lies buried in Venice.
The Masoret ha-Masoret (1538) calmly proved what had been argued for centuries: the vowel signs are not from Sinai—the Masoretes set them after the Talmud. Masters of the Masorah leaned on him, opponents cited him; the dispute over the conclusion ran another two hundred years.
And for the plain reader he did something else: he turned a chivalric romance into the Bovo-bukh—the first secular book in Yiddish, the favorite reading of Jewish homes for four centuries. The grammarian of the Masorah and the father of the Yiddish novel are one man, and that is very Italian.
Places
Related
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Masoret ha-Masoret, Venice, 1538 — the vowel points set after the Talmud; his proof
Scholarship
- The standard reference works and encyclopedias — Neustadt, Padua, Rome, Venice; c. 1469–1549
Basis: Talmud and midrash.