Christian Words Written in the Hebrew Script: Rabbi Leon Modena’s Approach to Hebrew Spelling

The Venetian rabbi Leon Modena (1571–1648) was quite right when he wrote in his autobiography that, “thanks to his books, his name will never be blotted out among the Jews or in the whole world at large, as long as the earth remains”. The increasing academic interest in Modena’s life and works emerged in the beginning of the 20th century when a collection of his letters and drafts was published for the first time by Dr. Ludwig Blau in 1905. Six years later Modena’s autobiography (in Hebrew) was published by Abraham Kahana (a new Hebrew edition was prepared by Daniel Carpi in 1985, and in 1988 the manuscript was translated into English and edited by Mark R. Cohen). Leon Modena’s personality, his theological and philosophical views, his contribution to the development of Jewish art in Italy and his poetry have been studied, for example, by Elliott Horowitz, Howard Tzvi Adelman, Natalie Zemon Davis, Yacov Boksenboim and Cyril Aslanov among others.

The aim of my research is to study Modena’s private correspondence, which, although published end edited, has received little attention of philologists. However, his letters are a very interesting and promising source of data that can shed light on the author’s philological views, on his attitude to the Hebrew language and even on the development of the Hebrew grammatical tradition in Early Modern Venice.

In the present paper I analyze Leon Modena’s letter to his son Mordecai from November 1606. Applying philological-historical method I investigate Modena’s style of writing, idioms coined by the author to describe his son’s text (for example, Modena calls Mordecai’s letter “half-man and half-goat”, because of spelling mistakes). In addition, I argue that rabbi Modena’s letter could be the first known attempt to formulate the rule about spelling loanwords in Hebrew.