A book that floored me in 2011 was “I Have Always Loved the Holy Tongue”, by Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg. The subtitle gets at the subject field—Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship—but does less to suggest the book’s drama and style. Princeton professor Grafton is as gifted a writer as he is a historian—something you know if you’ve read his illuminating book about footnotes—and Weinberg is a preeminent Hebraist at Oxford. Each contributed his or her expertise, and together they’ve done nothing less than reconstruct a lost chamber in one of the major Renaissance minds. Isaac Casaubon is only quasi-remembered today for having bequeathed his name to the dry old scholar character in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, but Casaubon the man was deeply passionate in both learning and life (he vigorously wooed a printer’s daughter and is said to have fathered 18 children by her). Born of French-Swiss Huguenot refugee stock (like Rousseau), he eventually settled in England, and did as much as anyone in the 16th and early 17th centuries to establish the model of intellectual rigor that we continue to associate with ‘serious scholarship.’ He was a classicist primarily, and as such both a linguist and a historian, who made earth-clearing strides in those disciplines, and specifically in bringing them together. What’s less known, and indeed was virtually unknown before now, is the depth of Casaubon’s interest in Hebrew texts and historical Jewish culture. To excavate this by-no-means-insignificant aspect of his thought, Grafton and Weinberg summon a dauntlessness of research that would earn a nod of respect from the master himself. Many of their extensive primary sources are tiny, deciphered marginal notes from Casaubon’s books and copybooks (which they tracked down in libraries all over Europe), as well as obscure Latin correspondence with his academic friends and foes. They find a thinker fascinated with Jewish language and history at a time of near-ubiquitous anti-Semitism, when Jews themselves were forbidden from living in England, and when any Christian writing on ancient Judaism had to follow a distorted, villainizing narrative, no matter what the facts said. In this book, we find Casaubon struggling to subvert those obstacles, but also hobbled by them, in that his own ideas about Jews could lead him into error.

So thorough a reassessment of Casaubon that it also serves as an introduction to him and his world… [It] is full of wonderful details that help carry the reader along… ‘I Have Always Loved the Holy Tongue’ reveals Casaubon’s character, his relationship to his time and to his work on the past, his search for truth and his search for God, with more nuance, depth and coherence than his biography does, in half as many pages. It also restores his personal agency by revealing his sense of purpose and the rewards of his lifelong quest.

Valuable studies of Renaissance Hebraism have proliferated… But in their splendid new book, Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg direct our attention to a figure whose name is virtually absent from all of the earlier accounts: Isaac Casaubon, the great Huguenot scholar, who lived from 1559 to 1614…Grafton and Weinberg sparkle as they recreate for us a world in which great scholars formed passionate lifelong attachments to colleagues they would never meet…Grafton and Weinberg amply demonstrate that Casaubon’s Hebrew studies should be given pride of place in his intellectual biography—and that this fact reveals something important not only about Casaubon himself, but also about the phenomenon of Christian Hebraism more broadly… [An] extraordinary book…These two superb scholars have pooled their considerable talents to conjure for us a world of such immense and varied learning that it is bound, in Montesquieu’s words, to ‘astonish our small souls.