Obj. ID: 40579
Jewish printed books  De accentibus, etorthographia..... by Johannes Reuchlin, Haguenau, 1518

This text was prepared by William Gross:

This is the earliest example of printed Jewish music, and the final work of one of the preeminent Christian Hebraists of the time, Johannes Reuchlin (1455 – 1522). A renowned jurist, statesman and humanist classics scholar, Reuchlin mastered Hebrew and was a founder of the Renaissance Christian movement that sought to study Kabbalah. He was a prestigious and vigorous defender of the Talmud and Jewish literature in the Battle of the Books (against the apostate Jew, Johannes Pfefferkorn). Reuchlin’s work De Accentibus contains the earliest printed Hebrew music: a transcription of the biblical Hebrew cantillation. The score reads, along with the Hebrew, from right to left. It may have been notated by Johann Boeschenstein, a wandering Christian Hebraist born in Esslingen, who was devoted to the study of Jewish liturgy. The work was published by Thomas Anshelm, who had printed Reuchlin’s first Hebraist works at Pforzheim and Tübingen, and had recently established a new press in Hagenau. Anshelm’s Hebrew fonts were the first Hebrew fonts cut in Germany.
REUCHLIN, Johann (1455-1522). De Accentibus et Orthographia Linguae Hebraicae. Hagenau: Thomas Anselm, February 1518. 4° (246 x 177mm). In Latin and Hebrew. Title with large woodcut of Reuchlin's coat-of-arms, 3 pages printed in red and black, 9 pages with woodcut musical staves and notes, large woodcut printer's device on final leaf.
IRST EDITION OF THE EARLIEST EXAMPLE OF HEBREW MUSIC PRINTING. Reuchlin was the first of several 16th and 17th-century Hebraists to take an interest in scriptural cantillation: his transcriptions have been of prime importance in recent researches to asses the amount of deviation that has taken place in systems of Hebrew cantillation over the last 2,000 years. As a cabalistic scholar, Reuchlin was also doubtless drawn to the subject by contemporary hasidic theories of angelic harmony and 'secret melodies' with symbolic meanings, as well as by the current interest in ancient languages. Adams R-380; Groves New Dictionary of Music and Musicians, London: 1980, IX, pp.612-632.