Nathan Hanover

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Nathan ben Moses Hannover , also Nathan Nata or Neta, Hebrew נתן נטע הנובר, (born around 1610 ; died July 14, 1683 ) was a Jewish scholar and historian who fled the devastating pogroms in the context of the Khmelnyzky uprising of the Ukrainian Cossacks and rural population against the Polish rule from Poland and became a chronicler of these pogroms.

He may have been born in Krakow . Hanover was living with his wife in Isjaslav ( Volhynia ) as a Talmud teacher when his village, like hundreds of other Jewish communities, was destroyed as part of the Khmelnytskyi uprising in 1648, with most of the residents being murdered. Numerous Poles and Catholic clergy were also killed, and over 100,000 people were murdered. Although the uprising was directed against Polish rule, extensive pogroms took place against Jews (motivated by the administrative posts that many Jews had with the Poles and their role in the trade and as tax hunters of the Polish nobles). The pogrom was of decisive importance for the Jews of Eastern Europe (see History of the Jews in Poland ). The surviving Jews in the area fled in large numbers from Poland to Western and Central Europe. Hanover fled to Venice via Prague, Germany and the Netherlands, where he studied Kabbalah with Ḥayyim Cohen, Moses Zacuto and Samuel Aboab. In 1662 he became rabbi in Iași (Jassy). According to some information, he last lived in Italy and died there. According to other sources, he was a judge ( Dayan ) in Hungarian Brod , where he died of Turkish soldiers in the war between the Habsburg Empire and Turkey.

He became known for his book about the pogrom he experienced, Jawen Mezulah (Yeven Mezulah) , published in Hebrew in Venice in 1653. The title comes from Psalm 69 ( (I sink into) deep mud ).

In addition to the atrocities of persecution, the book also describes the life of the Jews of that time in Eastern Europe and also addresses the social causes of the rebellion. It was translated into Yiddish in 1687, into German and into Russian, French, Polish and English in 1720.

Several other works come from Hanover. His Kabbalistic prayer book Sha'are Ẓiyyon , which was first published in Prague in 1662, was also known among Ashkenazi Jews . The work was put on the index in 1755 by the Roman Catholic Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith .

Fonts

  • Editions by Yeven Metsulah:
    • Nathan Hanover: Jawen Mezulah , German by Benjamin II. , Foreword Meyer Kayserling , Hanover 1863 ( adapted from the French translation by J. Lelewel). Benjamin II also published the French translation by Daniel Levy in 1855
    • Abyss of Despair (Yeven Metzulah) , English translation by Abraham Mesch, Bloch Publishing, New York 1950

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Jewish Encyclopedia. She quotes a letter from Jacob Aboab to Unger based on Johann Christoph Wolf , Bibliotheca Hebraica, Volume 3, No. 1728. He is said to have died in Piove di Sacco afterwards
  2. Marvin J. Heller The seventeenth century hebrew book , Brill, Leiden 2011
  3. Hebrew edition at archive
  4. Nâthân ben Môseh Hanover. In: Jesús Martínez de Bujanda , Marcella Richter: Index des livres interdits: Index librorum prohibitorum 1600–1966. Médiaspaul, Montréal 2002, ISBN 2-89420-522-8 , p. 648 (French, digitized ).