(IMlCIIAKL). (J.H.W.)
Jacob ben-Asheri bks-Jechiet. hen-Uri ben- Eliakim ben-Jeuudah, also called Baal Ila-Turiiri, after his celebrated ritual M-ork, was born in Germany about A.D. 1280. At the age of eighteen lie was an eye-witness of the fearful massacres of his Jewish bretli- ren, which began in Bavaria April 20, 1298, under the leadership of Rindtlcisch, and soon spread over France and Austria, and by which more than 100,000 persons were slaughtered in less than six months. The inse- curity of the lives of Jews led him to emigrate in 1303. For more than two years lie. and his familv moved from town to town, until they found a resting-place at Toledo, in Spain. Though m very straitened pecuniary circum- stances, he began at once literary labors, and as the re-
sult we have (1) A Commentary on the Pentateuch (0^"I''B minn b>), the basis of which is Nachmanides's expo- sition. "He excluded from it Nachmanides's philo- sophico-cabalistic portions, inserted in their stead re- marks of Rashi, Joseph Cara, Samuel ben-Meier, Abra- ham ben-Chija, R. Tarn, Aben-Ezra, Joseph Kimchi, Jehudah the Pious, Simon ben-Abraham, Meier of Ro- thenbiu-g, R. Asher, the father, and R. Jehudah, the brother of the author, as well as glosses of his own at the beginning of everj' Sabbatic section [see Hapiita- eah], which chiefly consist of explanations of words and whole sentences according to the herraeneutical rule called X'^IO^'^a (i. e. reducing every letter of a word to its numerical value, and explaining it bj- another word of the same quantity [see Midrash], and which he calls niN^S^S, dainty supplements), and recondite rea- sons for the critical remarks of the IMasorites upon the text (riTllDnn i^C^J-J). This work is of great impor- tance to the imderstanding of the original design of the Masorah. Such was the extraordinary popularity of the Gematrical portions of this commentary that tb.ey were detached from the exegetical part and printed in a separate form in Constantinople in 1514, in Venice in 1544, and have since appeared not only in the Rabbinic Bibles of Bomberg (Venice, 1546-48 and 15G8), of Bux- torf (Basle, 1617-19), and Frankfurter (Amsterdam, 1724-27), imder the title of iriT^n MX'^Ens r^Sp D'^IIIin ^353, but also in five editions of the Bible be- tween 1595 and 1653, and in no less than twenty differ- ent editions of the Pentateuch between the years 1566 and 1804 — whereas the exegetical part was not publish- ed till 1805 at Zolkiew, and again in 1838 at Hanover: — (2) D'^'l^bi ri"3'nS, a celebrated religious code, so named because it consists of four parts or rows, respec- tively denominated W'*'t\ HIIS, the icay of life; fl"i1i il"1, the teacher of knowledge ; ^T"n "JIX, the stone of help; and L22'i:5?2n 'Ti;}!, rte breasfylafe of justice." It treats of the ritual, moral, matrimonial, civil, and social observances of the Jews, and is, upon the whole, a very remarkable work; for a time it even supplanted the Jod Ila-Chezaha of the renownied Maimonides, and became the text-book of Jemsh Rabbins throughout the entire known world. It is indispensable to the student of Jewish antiquities, and we refer here only to the best editions that have been published of this work (Augs- burg, 1540 ; Hanover, 1610). He died in 1340. See Geiger, Wissenschaftl. Zeitung IV (Stuttg. 1839), p. 395 sq. ; Gratz, Gesch. d. Juden, vii, 346 sq. ; FUrst, Bihlioth. Jud. ii, 16 sq. ; Stemschneider, Catal. Lihr. Hebr. in Bib- lioth. Bodleiana, col. 1181 sq. ; Kitto, Cyclop. Bibl. Lit, ii, 452 sq.
Jacob ben-Chajim ben -Isaac Ibn-Adoxia, a celebrated Jewish -writer, was born at Tunis about 1470. During the persecutions of the Jews in the first half of the 16th centiu-y he was obliged to flee his na- tive country-, and he went to Italj-. After residing at Rome and Florence he removed to Venice, and engaged as corrector of the press proofs of the celebrated Bom- berg edition of the Rabbinic Bible. This work he per- formed with great ability, and he afterwards published a second edition of this Bible in four volumes folio, call- ed Bamberg's Second Rabbinic Bible (\"enice, 1524-25). The first was prepared imder the supervision of Felix Pratensis (q. v.). It contains the Hebrew text, with the Masorah, the Targums, the commentaries of several of the most noted early Jewish scholars, and copious in- troductions, etc., by the editor himself. Jacob ben- Chajim deserves especial credit for the able manner in which he labored on the Masorah (q. v.), displaying no small amount of erudition, sagacity, and patience. With the greatest of care he sifted the indigestible material ' which had gathered in the 1st and 2d centuries, and, having brought order out of chaos, he inserted it upon the margin of his edition of the Rabbinic Bible. In af-
JACOB BEN-ELEAZAR
739
JACOB EMDEN
ter life he embraced Christianity. He died about the middle of the lOth century. See Kitto, Joum. Sac. Lit. 18G3, p. 521 ; Bihl. Cyclop, ii, 453; 'Rossi, Dizion. storico (kf/U A utori Ebrei, s. v. ; Fiirst, Biblioth. Jud. ii, 17 ; Eichhorn, Einleit. in d.A.T.% 394. See Rabbinical Bibles. (J.H.W.)
Jacob ben-Eleazar, a Jewish grammarian, flourished at Toledo iu the first half of the r2th centu- ry. He distinguished himself by a work entitled "iSD D'^'i'n (the book of completion), which investigates the nature of the vowel-points of Hebrew, and also the ety- mology of proper Hebrew names ; it was freely used by Kimchi, as is proved by frequent citations. "Jacob ben- Eleazar was a sound grammarian, laid down some ex- cellent rules respecting the Hebrew syntax, and mate- rially aided the development of philology in Spain at a time when Biblical exegesis was much neglected and the study of the Talmud was paramount" (Dr. Gins- burg, in Kitto, s. v.). He was also active in the cor- rection of the Hebrew text of the O. Test., and for this purpose relied on the celebrated Codex HiUali or He- lali, one of the most ancient and celebrated Hebrew codices. It was written, according to some, at Hilla, a town built near .the ruins of the ancient Babel, and hence tlie name by which the MS. is designated ; oth- ers, however, hold that it was the production of Rabbi Moses ben-Hillel. It bears date from the beginning of the 7th century, according to Sakkuto, who in his day (circa 1500) saw a portion of the Codex, and pronounced it to be 900 years old, and cites Kimchi (Jiichassin, ed. Filipowski, Lond. 1857, p. 220) as saying in his grammar on Numb, xv, 4, that the Pentateuch of this Codex was in his day extant at Toledo. The probability is that a greater portion of it, if not the whole, was destroyed at Leon, in Spain, where it was last deposited, during the persecutions of the Jews and the destruction of all Jew- ish writings in 1197. .Jacob ben-Eleazar's correction of the text of the O.-T. Scriptures by the aid of this cele- brated Codex makes it, therefore, doubly valuable for all critical students of the Hebrew text. See Biesenthal and Lebrecht's Radicum Liber (Berlin, 1847), p. 15, 26 ; Geiger, in Ozar Nechmad II (Vienna, 1857), p. 159 sq. ; Griitz, Gesck. d. Juden, vi, 132 ; Kitto, s. v. See Manu- scripts, Biblical.