Johann Stephan Rittangel (Latin : Rittangelius) (1606 – 1652) [1] was a German controversial writer and Christian Hebraist.
He was born at Forscheim near Bamberg. It is stated that he was born a Jew, became converted to Roman Catholicism, then became a Calvinist, and lastly joined the Lutheran Church. He became professor of Oriental languages at Königsberg. [2]
Rittangel visited the Netherlands and England in 1641–2. He taught Hebrew in Amsterdam, where he dressed like a rabbi, but others found him hard to place. [3] He obtained a Hebrew manuscript of the Sefer Yezirah through the Mennonite merchant Gerebrand Anslo, for translation into Latin. [4] He was in London in late 1641, meeting Comenius and John Dury. [5] His English contacts were interested in his direct knowledge of the Karaites, [6] and the Samuel Hartlib papers contain an account by Rittangel of them. Johann Moriaen of the Hartlib Circle saw to the publication of the Yezirah translation in Amsterdam in 1642. [4] Rittangel's knowledge of the Karaites was reported to be from a visit in 1641 to a community at Trakai, according to Mordecai ben Nissan. [7]
Rittangel died at Königsberg in 1652. [2]
Rittangel issued a number of translations of Hebrew works: [2]
His posthumous work Bilibra Veritatis was written to substantiate the claim that the Targums prove the doctrine of the Trinity. This is also the subject of his Veritas Religionis Christianæ (Franeker, 1699). [2]
Saʿadia ben Yosef Gaon was a prominent rabbi, gaon, Jewish philosopher, and exegete who was active in the Abbasid Caliphate.
Sefer Yetzirah is a book on Jewish mysticism. Early commentaries, such as the Kuzari, treated it as a treatise on mathematical and linguistic theory as opposed to Kabbalah. The word Yetzirah is more literally translated as "Formation"; the word Briah is used for "Creation". The book is traditionally ascribed to the patriarch Abraham, although others attribute its writing to Rabbi Akiva or Adam. Modern scholars have not reached consensus on the question of its origins. According to Rabbi Saadia Gaon, the objective of the book's author was to convey in writing how the things of our universe came into existence. Conversely, Judah Halevi asserts that the main objective of the book, with its various examples, is to give to man the means by which he is able to understand the unity and omnipotence of God, which appear multiform on one side and, yet, are uniform.
John Pell was an English mathematician and political agent abroad. He was made Royal Chair of Mathematics at Orange College by the Prince of Orange, and was under the patronage of Sir Charles Cavendish. He was also a compeer and correspondent of René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes.
Manoel Dias Soeiro, better known by his Hebrew name Menasseh or Menashe ben Israel, was a Jewish scholar, rabbi, kabbalist, writer, diplomat, printer, publisher, and founder of the first Hebrew printing press in Amsterdam in 1626.
Isaac Israeli ben Solomon, also known as Isaac Israeli the Elder and Isaac Judaeus, was one of the foremost Jewish physicians and philosophers living in the Arab world of his time. He is regarded as the father of medieval Jewish Neoplatonism. His works, all written in Arabic and subsequently translated into Hebrew, Latin and Spanish, entered the medical curriculum of the early thirteenth-century universities in Medieval Europe and remained popular throughout the Middle Ages.
Jacob ben Reuben was a Karaite scholar and Bible exegete of the eleventh century. He wrote a brief Hebrew language commentary on the entire Bible, which he entitled Sefer ha-'Osher, because, as he says in the introduction, the reader will find therein sufficient information, and will not need to have recourse to the many voluminous commentaries which the author himself had consulted. The book is, in fact, merely a compilation; the author's explanation of any given passage is frequently introduced by the abbreviations or ; and divergent explanations of other commentators are added one after the other and preceded by the vague phrase. It is, in fact, chiefly an extract of Yefet ben Ali's work, from whom Jacob borrowed most of his explanations as well as the quotations from various authors, chiefly on the Pentateuch. But Jacob also drew upon later Karaite authors, the last of whom is Jeshua ben Judah, who, so far as is known, flourished about 1054. This date points to the second half of the eleventh century as the date of composition of the Sefer ha-'Osher.
Jeshua ben Judah, also known as Abu al-Faraj Furqan ibn Asad, was a Karaite Jewish scholar, exegete, and philosopher who lived in the eleventh-century in the Abbasid Caliphate, in Lower Mesopotamia or in Jerusalem.
David ibn Merwan al-Mukkamas al-Rakki was a philosopher and controversialist, the author of the earliest known Jewish philosophical work of the Middle Ages. He was a native of Raqqa, Mesopotamia, whence his surname. Harkavy derives his byname from the Arabic "ḳammaṣ", interpreting it as referring to his asserted change of faith. This is uncertain. The name is written "אלקומסי" in Masudi's Al-Tanbih, in a Karaitic commentary to Leviticus, and in a manuscript copy of Jefeth's commentary to the same book, and is perhaps a derivative from the city of Ḳumis in Taberistan. Another Karaite bears the name "Daniel al-Ḳumisi," and in Al-Hiti's chronicle this name is also spelled with a ẓade.
Judah ben Barzillai (Albargeloni) was a Catalan Talmudist of the end of the 11th and the beginning of the 12th century. Almost nothing is known of his life. He came of a very distinguished family, on account of which he was not seldom called "ha-Nasi" (the prince), a title of honor borne also by his descendants in Barcelona.
Yom-Tov Lipmann ben Solomon Muhlhausen was a controversial Talmudist, kabalist and philosopher of the 14th and 15th centuries. His religious and scholarly career and influence spanned the Jewish communities of Bohemia, Poland, Austria and various parts of Germany, and his dispute with the principles of Christianity left a lasting imprint on the relations between Christianity and Judaism.
Jacob ben Nissim ibn Shahin was a Jewish philosopher and mathematician who lived in Kairouan, Tunisia, in the 10th century; he was a younger contemporary of Saadia. At Jacob's request, Sherira Gaon wrote a treatise entitled Iggeret, on the redaction of the Mishnah. Jacob is credited with the authorship of an Arabic commentary on the Sefer Yeẓirah.
Johann Moriaen was a German alchemist and early chemist, known as an associate of Samuel Hartlib. He was active in recruiting for Hartlib's network of intellectuals, the Hartlib Circle, and communicating with them. He was a convinced pansophist.
John Dury was a Scottish Calvinist minister and an intellectual of the English Civil War period. He made efforts to re-unite the Calvinist and Lutheran wings of Protestantism, hoping to succeed when he moved to Kassel in 1661, but he did not accomplish this. He was also a preacher, pamphleteer, and writer.
Adam Boreel was a Dutch theologian and Hebrew scholar. He was one of the founders of the Amsterdam College; the Collegiants were also often called Boreelists. Others involved in the Collegiants were William Ames, Daniel van Breen, Michiel Coomans, Jacob Otto van Halmael and the Mennonite Galenus Abrahamsz de Haan.
Isaac ben Abraham of Troki, Karaite scholar and polemical writer (b. Trakai, Grand Duchy of Lithuania, c. 1533; d. Trakai, c. 1594.
The Hartlib Circle was the correspondence network set up in Western and Central Europe by Samuel Hartlib, an intelligencer based in London, and his associates, in the period 1630 to 1660. Hartlib worked closely with John Dury, an itinerant figure who worked to bring Protestants together.
Johannes Rulicius (1602–1666) was a German Protestant minister.
Cyprian Kinner was a Silesian educator and linguist. He has been described as the bridge between the projects of 17th-century Europe concerned with a universal language, and those concerned with a philosophical language. He has also been called a pioneer of faceted classification.
Johann Cloppenburg (1592–1652) was a Dutch Calvinist theologian. He is known as a controversialist, and as a contributor to federal theology. He also made some detailed comments on the moral status of financial and banking transactions.
Shlomo ben Afeda Ha-Kohen or Solomon Afeda Cohen (1826–1893) was a Karaite Jewish hakham of the 19th century considered the last of the Karaite sages of Constantinople.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain : Singer, Isidore; et al., eds. (1901–1906). The Jewish Encyclopedia . New York: Funk & Wagnalls.
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