Elias Levita and the Masoret ha-Masoret of 1538

In 1538 a small book in Hebrew was printed at Venice under the title Masoret ha-Masoret, “The Tradition of the Tradition”. Its author was Elijah ben Asher ha-Levi, known to Christian scholars of his own day as Elias Levita and to Jewish readers by the nickname Bahur, a German-born grammarian who had spent most of his working life in Italy. The book set out to explain the Masorah, the body of notes in which medieval scribes had recorded the spelling, vocalisation and accentuation of the Hebrew Bible, and to make its terminology and abbreviations intelligible to readers who encountered them in the newly printed Rabbinic Bibles. In the course of that explanation Levita advanced an argument that was to provoke one of the longest controversies in the history of biblical scholarship: that the vowel points and accents of the Hebrew text were not given at Sinai, nor fixed by the men of the Great Assembly, but had been devised by the Masoretes of Tiberias some time after the completion of the Talmud.¹ The book was reprinted at Basel in the following year and again at Sulzbach in 1771, was later translated into German, and was cited for more than two centuries by Jewish and Christian writers on both sides of the question. In 1867 Christian David Ginsburg published the Hebrew text with an English translation, a biography of the author and extensive notes, and his edition remains the most accessible route to the work for English readers.²

This article describes the life of Levita and the setting in which he wrote, the structure and purpose of Masoret ha-Masoret, its argument about the vowel points, and its later reception. The controversy that followed is treated more fully in the article on the vowel-point controversy, and the printed Rabbinic Bibles that formed Levita’s immediate context are discussed in the articles on Daniel Bomberg’s Venice press and on Jacob ben Hayyim and the Second Rabbinic Bible. The present article concentrates on the book itself and on what it reveals about the state of Masoretic learning in the first half of the sixteenth century.

From Neustadt to Padua

Levita was born at Neustadt, near Nuremberg, in 1468 or 1469. The date is inferred from his own statement, in a work of his old age, that he was eighty years old in 1548; Ginsburg accepted 1468, while Gérard Weil, whose study of 1963 remains the fullest modern biography, preferred 1469.³⁴ Little is known of his early education beyond the fact that he was trained in the traditional curriculum of the Ashkenazi communities of southern Germany, in which the study of the Bible, its Aramaic translation and the Talmud occupied a central place. At some point in his youth he moved south across the Alps, as many German Jews did at the end of the fifteenth century, and settled in the Venetian territories of northern Italy.⁵

By 1504 Levita was teaching Hebrew grammar at Padua, and he seems already to have acquired a reputation as a teacher. He also began to write, producing commentaries on earlier grammatical works and, in a quite different vein, a Yiddish romance in verse, the Bovo-Bukh, adapted from an Italian chivalric tale, which became one of the most widely read works of early Yiddish literature.⁶ In 1509 Padua was captured and sacked in the War of the League of Cambrai. Levita lost his house and his possessions, and, in his own words, went into exile “at the head of the exiles”, making his way to Rome.⁷ He later recalled the episode in the autobiographical passage of his introduction to Masoret ha-Masoret, where it forms part of his explanation of how he came to teach Christians.⁸

Rome and Cardinal Egidio da Viterbo

In Rome Levita sought out Egidio da Viterbo, the prior general of the Augustinian order and from 1517 a cardinal, who was among the most learned Christian students of Hebrew and of the Kabbalah in Italy. According to Levita’s own account, the cardinal asked who he was, and Levita replied that he was the German grammarian who had spent his life in the study of grammar and Scripture. Egidio received him into his household. Levita lived there for many years, teaching the cardinal Hebrew and receiving in return the support that allowed him to pursue his own work.⁹¹⁰ In the introduction to Masoret ha-Masoret he wrote that the cardinal had been his pupil for about ten years without interruption; elsewhere he spoke of thirteen years in Egidio’s household, and Ginsburg explained the difference as the distinction between the years of formal teaching and the whole period of residence.¹¹

The association gave Levita access to manuscripts, to patronage and to a circle of Christian Hebraists. It also exposed him to criticism from within the Jewish community. In the same introduction he records that there was “a great outcry” against him, and that some rabbis would not receive him because he had taught the Law to a Christian, citing a verse of the Psalms to the effect that the nations do not know God’s judgements. Levita answered that his teaching had been a means of making the Hebrew language and its grammar known and respected, and that he had taught only grammar and the plain sense of Scripture.¹² The defence is characteristic of the man and of his work. Throughout his career he regarded grammar as a discipline with its own integrity, which could be shared with any serious student, and much of his output was intended for readers who were not Jews.

It was during the Roman years that Levita produced his first major grammatical works. His grammar Sefer ha-Bahur was printed at Rome in 1518, and it was followed by other treatises on Hebrew morphology and on the irregular forms of the language.¹³ These works were taken up quickly by Christian scholars. Sebastian Münster at Basel translated and republished several of them, and Levita’s grammars became standard tools for the teaching of Hebrew in the universities of the Reformation and the Catholic Reform alike.¹⁴

The sack of Rome and the move to Venice

The second great disaster of Levita’s life came in May 1527, when the troops of Charles V sacked Rome. The cardinal’s household was broken up, and Levita lost most of his books and many of his manuscripts, including work in progress.¹⁵ He moved with his family to Venice, which was then the principal centre of Hebrew printing in Europe. There he found employment as a corrector of the press for Daniel Bomberg, the Christian printer from Antwerp whose editions of the Talmud and of the Rabbinic Bible had transformed the availability of Hebrew texts.¹⁶ The work brought Levita into daily contact with the problems of producing an accurate printed Hebrew Bible, and with the Masorah that Bomberg’s editor Jacob ben Hayyim had arranged around the biblical text in the Rabbinic Bible of 1524–1525.

Ben Hayyim’s achievement had been to collect the Masoretic notes from many manuscripts and to set them out, corrected and expanded, in the margins and at the end of a printed Bible. The result was a monumental work of reference, but it was also difficult to use. The notes were written in a dense technical language, full of abbreviations and conventional terms, and they presupposed a knowledge of Masoretic method that few readers possessed. Levita’s experience at the Bomberg press convinced him that a guide to the Masorah was needed, and Masoret ha-Masoret was written to meet that need.¹⁷

The Masorah before Levita

The Masorah that Levita set out to explain had grown up over several centuries. In the medieval codices of the Hebrew Bible it appears in two principal forms. The small Masorah, written in the side margins beside the lines of text, consists of brief notes, often no more than a letter or two indicating the number of times a word occurs in a particular form. The large Masorah, written in the upper and lower margins, gives fuller lists, citing the passages in which a word or form occurs so that a scribe could check his copy against them. In addition, collections of Masoretic lists circulated as independent works. The most important of these, known from its opening words as Okhlah we-Okhlah, is a compilation of lists of words arranged by their peculiarities, and Levita knew and described it.¹⁸ The great codices of the Tiberian tradition, such as the Leningrad Codex and the Aleppo Codex, carry an extensive Masorah of this kind.

By the sixteenth century, however, the Masorah had become a field in which few were expert. The notes had been copied many times, often without understanding, and errors had entered them. Different manuscripts contained different notes, and the same note might appear in different forms. Jacob ben Hayyim had attempted to bring order to this material in the Second Rabbinic Bible, and he complained in his introduction of the difficulty of the task and the state of the manuscripts. Levita’s guide was intended to complement that edition by supplying the knowledge needed to use it. It was not itself an edition of the Masorah, but a manual of its principles, and in this respect it was without precedent in printed form.¹⁹

The purpose and plan of the book

The book opens with three introductions. The first is a poem, in which Levita describes the work and its aims in rhymed Hebrew verse. The second, in prose, contains the autobiographical passage already mentioned and an account of the circumstances in which the book was written. The third is a long essay on the Masorah itself, on the Masoretes and on the origin of the vowel points and accents.²⁰²¹ The body of the work is then divided into three parts, to which Levita gave names drawn from the account of the giving of the Law at Sinai. The first two parts are called the First Tables and the Second Tables, and each consists of ten sections. The third part is called the Broken Tables, alluding to the first tablets of the Law that Moses broke, and deals with the abbreviations and technical terms of the Masorah.²²²³

The First Tables deal with the most frequent subjects of the Masoretic notes, above all the distinction between full and defective spellings, that is, the presence or absence of the letters that mark vowels in the consonantal text. Levita explains how the Masoretes counted and recorded such spellings, how their lists were organised, and how a reader should interpret a note that a given word occurs a certain number of times with a given spelling. The Second Tables deal with other categories of Masoretic notes, including the distinction between what is written and what is read, the ketiv and qere, and the notes recording unusual features of the text.²⁴ The subject of what is written and what is read is treated at length on this site in the article on Ketiv and Qere.

The Broken Tables are in effect a glossary. Levita lists the abbreviations and technical terms of the Masorah, explains their meaning and gives examples of their use. For a reader of the Rabbinic Bible, this part of the book was perhaps the most immediately useful, since it allowed the notes in the margins to be decoded. Levita insisted that the Masorah was not an arbitrary collection of remarks but a systematic body of knowledge, and that its terms had precise meanings that could be learned.²⁵

Style and language

Levita wrote Masoret ha-Masoret in a Hebrew that combines the technical vocabulary of the grammarians and Masoretes with the rhymed prose that was a favoured literary form among Hebrew writers of the period. The first introduction is entirely in verse, and parts of the prose introductions are written in rhyming phrases, a feature that Ginsburg noted in his translation and that sometimes led Levita to adapt quotations for the sake of the rhyme.²⁶ The body of the work is plainer. Levita explains each category of note with examples drawn from the biblical text, and he is careful to distinguish what he has found in manuscripts, what he has learned from earlier authorities and what he regards as his own conclusion.

The personal tone of the introductions is unusual in a technical work. Levita speaks of his misfortunes, of the loss of his books, of the criticism he faced and of his age and failing strength. He presents himself as an old man who has spent his life in the service of the Hebrew language and who wishes to leave behind a guide that will preserve his knowledge for others.²⁷ These passages have made the book an important source for his biography, and Ginsburg drew heavily on them in the life of Levita that prefaces his edition.²⁸

The argument about the vowel points

The third introduction contains the argument for which the book became famous. Levita considered the question of the age of the vowel points and accents. It was widely held among Jewish scholars of his time, and was to be held by many Christian scholars later, that the points had been given to Moses at Sinai with the consonantal text, or that they had been fixed by Ezra and the men of the Great Assembly. Levita rejected both views. He argued that the points and accents were not mentioned in the Talmud or the Midrashim, that the rabbis of the Talmudic period discussed the reading of words in ways that implied an unpointed text, and that the names of the vowels and accents were not Hebrew but derived from Aramaic, suggesting a later origin.²⁹³⁰

His positive conclusion was that the points had been invented by the Masoretes of Tiberias after the close of the Talmud. In Ginsburg’s translation, Levita wrote that before the invention of the points it was possible to read without them by habit, and that this situation “continued till the time after the close of the Talmud”, which he dated to the year 486 after the destruction of the Second Temple. After that, he continued, “the sacred tongue began gradually to disappear, till the time of the Massorites, who are the men of Tiberias”.³¹ He then quoted Jonah ibn Janah and Abraham ibn Ezra in support of the view that the sages of Tiberias were the most expert in the pronunciation of Hebrew, and Ibn Ezra’s statement that from them “we have received all our vowel-points”.³²

Levita was careful to say that the late origin of the points did not diminish their authority. The Masoretes, in his view, had recorded the traditional pronunciation of the text with great accuracy, and the points represented a reliable tradition of reading even if the signs themselves were a later invention. He did not argue that the vocalisation was arbitrary or that it could be altered at will. His argument concerned the history of the signs, not the validity of the tradition they recorded.³³ This distinction was not always observed by later readers, and it was precisely the question of authority that made the argument so contentious.

The argument was not entirely new. Medieval scholars had occasionally observed that the vowel signs were not mentioned in the Talmud, and some had suggested that they were a later addition. Levita’s contribution was to gather the evidence systematically, to present it in a work of wide circulation and to draw a clear conclusion. His argument was also given particular force by his reputation as the leading Hebrew grammarian of his time and by the use of his works in Christian universities.³⁴

Reception among Jewish scholars

Among Jewish readers, Levita’s view met both acceptance and opposition. Some scholars accepted his historical argument while maintaining the authority of the Masoretic vocalisation. Others rejected it, holding that the points were of ancient origin and that Levita had underestimated the evidence for them. The most important Jewish response in the sixteenth century came from the Italian scholar Azariah de’ Rossi, whose work Me’or ’Enayim discussed the question at length and argued for a greater antiquity of the vowel signs, while acknowledging the force of some of Levita’s points.³⁵ The debate among Jewish scholars continued into the following centuries, but it never acquired the confessional intensity that it was to acquire among Christians.

Reception among Christian scholars

Among Christian scholars the question became entangled with the theological controversies of the Reformation. Protestant theologians had made the authority of Scripture in its original languages a central principle, and some of them came to regard the vowel points as part of the inspired text. If the points were a late human invention, it could be argued, the meaning of the Hebrew text depended on a fallible tradition, and Catholic controversialists did in fact use Levita’s argument to support the claim that Scripture required the interpretation of the Church. Protestant scholars were therefore divided between those who accepted Levita’s historical conclusion and those who defended the antiquity of the points.³⁶

The most famous defence of the antiquity of the points came from the Basel Hebraists Johannes Buxtorf the elder and his son Johannes Buxtorf the younger. The elder Buxtorf’s Tiberias of 1620 argued against Levita’s view, and the younger Buxtorf continued the argument against the French Protestant scholar Louis Cappel, whose Arcanum punctationis revelatum, published anonymously in 1624, had accepted and extended Levita’s conclusions.³⁷ The controversy continued for much of the seventeenth century and was reflected in the confessional documents of some Reformed churches. Ginsburg’s edition of 1867 included a survey of this controversy, and the article on the vowel-point controversy on this site discusses it in more detail.³⁸

In the longer term, Levita’s view prevailed. The discovery and study of medieval manuscripts with different systems of vocalisation, including the Babylonian and Palestinian systems described in the articles on Babylonian vocalisation, and the evidence of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are unpointed, confirmed that the vowel signs were a medieval development. Modern scholarship places the development of the Tiberian system in the second half of the first millennium AD, in broad agreement with Levita’s conclusion, although the details of the process are understood far better than they could have been in the sixteenth century.³⁹

The Book of Remembrance and other Masoretic work

Masoret ha-Masoret was not Levita’s only work on the Masorah. For many years he worked on a concordance of the Masoretic notes, which he called Sefer ha-Zikhronot, the Book of Remembrance. He refers to it in Masoret ha-Masoret as a larger work in which the material summarised in the guide would be set out in full.⁴⁰ The concordance was never printed in his lifetime and has not been published as a whole, but manuscripts of it survive, and Elodie Attia has studied Levita’s handwriting in them as evidence for his methods of work.⁴¹ The project shows that Levita’s interest in the Masorah extended beyond the explanation of its terms to the systematic organisation of its contents, a task that was taken up again by later scholars, including Ginsburg himself in his great edition of the Masorah.

Levita’s experience at the Bomberg press is also reflected in a short notice to the reader that accompanies Masoret ha-Masoret. In it he explains that Bomberg was printing the Hebrew Bible with the chapter divisions used in Christian Bibles, and that he himself had followed the same practice in citing biblical passages, including the division of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles into two books each.⁴² The notice is a small but revealing witness to the influence of the printing press on the presentation of the Hebrew Bible. The chapter divisions, which had originated in the Latin Bible of the thirteenth century, were adopted in Hebrew Bibles through the work of printers and concordance makers, a process discussed on this site in the article on chapter and verse.

Ginsburg’s edition also records that Levita’s work on the concordance had been encouraged by a French patron, Georges de Selve, bishop of Lavaur, who was among the Christian scholars with whom Levita corresponded. The connection is a further illustration of the network of Christian patronage that sustained much of Levita’s work after he left Rome.⁴³

Isny and the last years

In 1540 Levita accepted an invitation from the Protestant pastor and Hebraist Paul Fagius to come to Isny in Swabia, where Fagius had established a Hebrew press. Levita was then more than seventy years old. At Isny he saw several works through the press, including the Tishbi, a dictionary of words found in rabbinic literature but not in the Bible, and the Meturgeman, a lexicon of the Aramaic of the Targums, together with other works prepared with Fagius.⁴⁴ The collaboration was a further instance of Levita’s willingness to work with Christian scholars and of the importance of his work for the Protestant study of Hebrew.

Levita returned to Venice in the following years and continued to work there until his death in 1549. Ginsburg recorded that he died, as he had wished, at Venice, aged about eighty-one, and was buried in the Jewish cemetery.⁴⁵ His grammars, lexicons and Masoretic works continued to be printed and translated for generations, and his name became a fixture in the bibliographies of Hebrew studies.

Editions and translations

The first edition of Masoret ha-Masoret was printed at Venice in 1538. A second edition followed at Basel in 1539, and a third, based on the earlier printings, at Sulzbach in 1771.⁴⁶ In preparing his English edition, Ginsburg collated these three editions and noted their differences in detail. He observed that the Basel and Sulzbach editions contained errors and omissions not found in the first edition, and that the Sulzbach edition in particular had altered certain passages, including Levita’s references to his Christian pupils, which were softened or omitted.⁴⁷ The comparison is itself a small study in the transmission of a printed text, showing how a work could be changed, sometimes deliberately, in the course of reprinting.

A German translation was published in the eighteenth century, in connection with which Ginsburg names the Protestant theologian Johann Salomo Semler.⁴⁸ Ginsburg’s own edition of 1867 provided the Hebrew text, an English translation on facing pages, a long biographical introduction and extensive notes on the sources and later reception of the work. It has been reprinted in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and is freely available in digitised form.⁴⁹

The book's place in the study of the Masorah

Masoret ha-Masoret occupies a pivotal position in the history of Masoretic studies. Before Levita, the Masorah had been transmitted primarily in manuscripts and studied by scribes and specialists within the Jewish community. The printing of the Rabbinic Bible with Ben Hayyim’s Masorah made the notes available to a much wider readership, including Christian scholars, but it did not make them intelligible. Levita’s guide supplied the key. It explained the purpose of the Masorah, its methods and its terminology, and it did so in a form that could be used by any reader with a knowledge of Hebrew.⁵⁰

The book also marked a change in the way the Masorah was understood. Levita treated it as a historical phenomenon, the work of identifiable scholars in a particular period, rather than as a timeless tradition. His argument about the vowel points was the most conspicuous expression of this historical approach, but the same approach is evident throughout the work, in his discussion of the different Masoretic traditions, his recognition of variations between manuscripts and his attention to the development of Masoretic terminology.⁵¹ In this respect Masoret ha-Masoret can be seen as one of the first works of critical scholarship on the transmission of the Hebrew Bible.

The influence of the book on Christian Hebraism was considerable. Through the use of the Hebrew original by Christian scholars who could read it, and through the summaries and citations of those scholars, Levita’s explanations became the basis of Christian understanding of the Masorah for more than a century. The debates about the vowel points ensured that the book was read and cited even by those who disagreed with it. Ginsburg’s English edition of 1867 introduced it to a new readership in the nineteenth century, and his notes, which drew on the intervening three centuries of scholarship, made the edition a work of reference in its own right.⁵²⁵³

Assessment

Elias Levita was a scholar whose career spanned the worlds of Ashkenazi learning, Italian Jewish culture and Christian humanism, and whose work served readers in all three. Masoret ha-Masoret was the product of a lifetime of grammatical study and of years of practical experience at the Bomberg press. It explained the Masorah to readers who had never been trained in it, and it argued, on historical and linguistic grounds, that the vowel points and accents were a medieval invention of the Masoretes of Tiberias.⁵⁴

The argument provoked a controversy that lasted for centuries and that engaged some of the most learned scholars of early modern Europe. Its conclusion, in its essentials, has been accepted by modern scholarship. Levita’s insistence that the late origin of the signs did not diminish the reliability of the tradition they recorded has also been vindicated, since the study of the Tiberian Masorah has shown how carefully the Masoretes preserved the reading tradition they inherited. The book remains a landmark in the history of the study of the Hebrew Bible, and a reminder of the role played by the printing press, and by the scholars who worked in its service, in the transmission of the biblical text in the early modern period.⁵⁵

Notes

1. Christian D. Ginsburg (ed. and trans.), The Massoreth ha-Massoreth of Elias Levita (London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1867). ↩
2. Christian D. Ginsburg (ed. and trans.), The Massoreth ha-Massoreth of Elias Levita (London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1867). ↩
3. Ginsburg, “Life of Elias Levita”, in Massoreth ha-Massoreth, pp. 1–84, on his birth at Neustadt and the date implied by his own statement that he was eighty years old in 1548. ↩
4. Gérard E. Weil, Élie Lévita, humaniste et massorète (1469–1549) (Leiden: Brill, 1963). ↩
5. “Elia Levita”, Grokipedia. ↩
6. “Elia Levita”, Grokipedia. ↩
7. Ginsburg, “Life of Elias Levita”, pp. 1–84, on Levita’s lectures in Padua in 1504 and the sack of Padua in 1509; Levita’s own account in the second introduction, in Ginsburg’s edition. ↩
8. Levita, second introduction, in Ginsburg’s edition. ↩
9. Levita, second introduction, in Ginsburg’s edition. ↩
10. Weil, “Rome”, in Élie Lévita, pp. 71–110. ↩
11. Levita, second introduction, in Ginsburg’s edition. ↩
12. Levita, second introduction, in Ginsburg’s edition. ↩
13. Weil, “Grammaire et lexicographie”, in Élie Lévita, pp. 248–285. ↩
14. “Elia Levita”, Grokipedia. ↩
15. Ginsburg, “Life”, on the sack of Rome in May 1527 and the loss of Levita’s manuscripts. ↩
16. Ginsburg, “Life”, on Levita’s employment as a corrector of the press for Daniel Bomberg at Venice. ↩
17. Levita, first introduction (in verse) and second introduction, in Ginsburg’s edition. ↩
18. Levita, Massoreth ha-Massoreth, “First Tables” and “Second Tables”, in Ginsburg’s edition. ↩
19. Levita, first introduction (in verse) and second introduction, in Ginsburg’s edition. ↩
20. Levita, first introduction (in verse) and second introduction, in Ginsburg’s edition. ↩
21. Levita, third introduction, in Ginsburg’s edition. ↩
22. Levita, Massoreth ha-Massoreth, “First Tables” and “Second Tables”, in Ginsburg’s edition. ↩
23. Levita, “The Broken Tables”, in Ginsburg’s edition. ↩
24. Levita, Massoreth ha-Massoreth, “First Tables” and “Second Tables”, in Ginsburg’s edition. ↩
25. Levita, “The Broken Tables”, in Ginsburg’s edition. ↩
26. Levita, first introduction (in verse) and second introduction, in Ginsburg’s edition. ↩
27. Levita, second introduction, in Ginsburg’s edition. ↩
28. Ginsburg, “Life of Elias Levita”, in Massoreth ha-Massoreth, pp. 1–84, on his birth at Neustadt and the date implied by his own statement that he was eighty years old in 1548. ↩
29. Levita, third introduction, in Ginsburg’s edition. ↩
30. Levita, third introduction, in Ginsburg’s edition. ↩
31. Levita, third introduction, in Ginsburg’s edition. ↩
32. Levita, third introduction, in Ginsburg’s edition, quoting Jonah ibn Janah and Abraham ibn Ezra. ↩
33. Levita, third introduction, in Ginsburg’s edition. ↩
34. Ginsburg, with Ginsburg’s notes on Azariah de’ Rossi and the Buxtorfs. ↩
35. Ginsburg, with Ginsburg’s notes on Azariah de’ Rossi and the Buxtorfs. ↩
36. Ginsburg (survey of the controversy over the vowel points after Levita). ↩
37. Ginsburg (survey of the controversy over the vowel points after Levita). ↩
38. Ginsburg (survey of the controversy over the vowel points after Levita). ↩
39. “Elia Levita”, Grokipedia; Weil, Élie Lévita. ↩
40. Levita, second introduction, in Ginsburg’s edition, and his references there to the “Book of Remembrance”. ↩
41. Elodie Attia, “L’écriture d’Élie Lévita dans les manuscrits du Sefer ha-Zikhronot”, Bibliologia (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), pp. 263–278. ↩
42. Levita, “Information for the reader”, in Ginsburg’s edition (on Bomberg’s adoption of the Christian chapter divisions). ↩
43. Ginsburg, “Life of Elias Levita”, in Massoreth ha-Massoreth, pp. 1–84, on his birth at Neustadt and the date implied by his own statement that he was eighty years old in 1548. ↩
44. Weil, “Isny”, in Élie Lévita, pp. 133–151. ↩
45. Ginsburg, “Life”, on Levita’s death at Venice in 1549. ↩
46. Ginsburg, introduction to the edition and notes on the editions of Venice 1538, Basel 1539 and Sulzbach 1771. ↩
47. Ginsburg, introduction to the edition and notes on the editions of Venice 1538, Basel 1539 and Sulzbach 1771. ↩
48. Ginsburg, introduction to the edition and notes on the editions of Venice 1538, Basel 1539 and Sulzbach 1771. ↩
49. Christian D. Ginsburg (ed. and trans.), The Massoreth ha-Massoreth of Elias Levita (London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1867). ↩
50. Levita, first introduction (in verse) and second introduction, in Ginsburg’s edition. ↩
51. Levita, third introduction, in Ginsburg’s edition. ↩
52. Christian D. Ginsburg (ed. and trans.), The Massoreth ha-Massoreth of Elias Levita (London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1867). ↩
53. Ginsburg, introduction to the edition and notes on the editions of Venice 1538, Basel 1539 and Sulzbach 1771. ↩
54. Levita, third introduction, in Ginsburg’s edition. ↩
55. “Elia Levita”, Grokipedia; Weil, Élie Lévita. ↩