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Jacob Mantino ben Samuel

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Jacob Mantino ben Samuel (also known as Mantinus) (died 1549) was a Jewish-Italian physician, translator, and scholar.

Life

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Mantino's parents—and perhaps himself—were natives of Tortosa, Spain, which place they left at the time of the banishment of the Jews from Spain (1492). Mantino studied medicine and philosophy at the universities of Padua and Bologna. Having graduated (it is not certain from which one), he established himself at the latter place, and devoted his hours of leisure to the translation of scientific works from Hebrew into Latin. By these translations he soon acquired a high reputation, and he was befriended by the highest dignitaries of the court of Pope Clement VII.[1]

A page from 1524 Arabic-Hebrew-Latin dictionary by Jacob Mantino and Leo Africanus.

The war of 1527 compelled Mantino to leave the Pontifical States. He settled at Verona, where the new bishop, Gian Matteo Giberti, protected him. In 1528, when Giberti left Verona for Rome, Mantino decided to settle at Venice, where the Council of Ten exempted him from wearing the Judenhut. This privilege was granted him, at first for a term of several months, upon the recommendation of the French and English ambassadors, the papal legate, and other dignitaries whom he numbered among his patients. At the expiration of the prescribed term Mantino found an influential protector in another of his patients, Teodoro Trivulzio, marshal of France and governor of Genoa; the latter, urging his own services to the Venetian Republic, insisted that the council should make the exemption perpetual.[1]

The efforts of Henry VIII of England to annul the marriage with his wife Catherine involved Mantino. Building his case on the pretext that the marriage was contrary to the Biblical law, and that the dispensation obtained from Pope Julius II was invalid, Henry sent Richard Croke to Italy in order to obtain opinions favorable to his case, that will enable to relieve him from levirate duties. Croke addressed himself to Jewish as well as to Christian scholars. Pope Clement VII, in his turn, consulted Mantino, who decided against Henry. This decision created for Mantino many enemies in Venice, where Croke had won a favorable opinion from the famous physician and scholar Elijah Menahem Halfon, among others.[1][2]

Meanwhile, the Messianic dreamer Solomon Molcho, whom Mantino had energetically opposed while he was in Venice, went to Rome, followed by Mantino. Having many friends and protectors at the court of Clement VII, Mantino soon acquired great influence in Rome, which he employed in crushing Molcho. Mantino attained the zenith of his influence at the accession to the throne of Pope Paul III (1534), who appointed him his physician. This high position did not prevent Mantino from concerning himself with the affairs of the Jewish community of Rome, in whose records he appears as a member of the rabbinate, with the title "gaon." In 1544, for some unknown reason, Mantino returned to Venice, where again he was exempted from wearing the Jews' hat. Five years later he accompanied, as physician, the Venetian ambassador to Damascus, where he died soon after his arrival.[1]

Writings

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Mantino translated philosophical and medical text mainly of the Aristotelian tradition, on which he worked since the early 1520s. The books were dedicated to a few different patrons, but at least some dedications imply that choices of material were Mantino's. Some translations had first been printed separately, and others shortly after his death, along with republications of the early editions, in a 11-volume edition of Aristotle and Averroes, the most complete one of its time (Guinta brothers=Iuntas, Venice, 1550-1552).[3][4][5][6][7]

Mantino expressly worked from earlier translations, from Arabic to Hebrew, that were made in the preceding centuries by Jewish scholars,[8] although he never cited them by name. Abraham de Balmes was another important and posthumous Jewish contributor to the Giunta edition, and shortly before them Elia del Medigo made some translations into Latin. But Greek manuscripts of Aristotle's works have since been discovered and independently translated in Italy, and the texts could now be compared with Averroes' citations. This revealed that Averroes' ideas were quite removed from the original, and that his citations were corrupt (as the transmission of Aristotle to Arabic was the result of a chain with two major translations).

Mantino was among those who tried to reconcile Averroes' citations and interpretations, with the Greek Aristotle, by "fixing" and expanding the text. The editors of the Giunta edition favored this interpretative approach over the philological-humanist approach, that tended to canonize the Greek sources and dismiss the contribution of medieval commentators such as Averroes. Mantino, however, took a moderate position, and translated in a semi-humanistic style. He explained, in one of his dedications, that Averroes has been misunderstood and attacked due to "barbarous", strictly literal, medieval Latin translations.[9] Overall, the efforts did not impress later readers however;[10][11] the interest in Averroism as a systematic philosophical school dwindled shortly after the two Giunta editions.[6][7][12]

  • Paraphrasis Auerrois Cordubensis philosophorum facile: principis: de partibus & generatione animalium ... (in Latin). [Rome]: per magistrum Marcelum Silber alis Franck. 1521. [Paraphrase on "Parts of Animals" and "Generation of Animals"] (dedicated to Pope Leo X)
  • [Gersonides' supercommentary: Mantino noted at the end of this edition that he translated that too, but no edition of it is known].[13][14]
  • the long commentary on "Posterior Analytics" (book I, 1-150) [Being incomplete, it was combined with other translations in Giunta 1550, and printed alongside them in the 1562 edition.]
  • "Poetics"
  • Supercommentaries of Gersonides on Averroes’s middle commentaries on "Isagoge", "Categories", and "On Interpretation"
  • proem to book XII of Aristotle's "Metaphysics" (Giunta, vol. 8, pp. 135ff)
  • the middle commentary on Aristotle's "Physics" (books I-III)
  • the proem to the long commentary on Aristotle's "Physics"
  • the long commentary on Aristotle's "On the soul", book III, chapters 5, 36. (1521 and in Giunta 1550/2)

He also translated:

  • Averroes' medical work "Colliget" ("Kullayot")
  • Avicenna:

References

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  1. ^ a b c d  One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Singer, Isidore; et al., eds. (1901–1906). "Mantino, Jacob ben Samuel". The Jewish Encyclopedia. New York: Funk & Wagnalls.
  2. ^ Katz, David S. (1994). "The Jewish Advocates of Henry VIII's Divorce". The Jews in the history of England, 1485-1850. Clarendon Press ; Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-822912-4.
  3. ^ First edition, all volumes in the Munich Digitization Center
  4. ^ Schmitt, Charles B. (1984). "Renaissance Averroism Studied Through the Venetian Editions of Aristotle-Averroes...". The Aristotelian tradition and Renaissance universities. London: Variorum Reprints. pp. 121–142. ISBN 978-0-86078-151-6.
  5. ^ Burnett, Charles (2015). "Mantino ben Samuel, Jacob". Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy. Springer, Cham. ISBN 978-3-319-02848-4. Retrieved 2025-08-03.
  6. ^ a b Burnett, Charles (2017). "Aristotle: The Giuntine Edition". Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy. Springer, Cham. ISBN 978-3-319-02848-4. Retrieved 2025-08-03.
  7. ^ a b Burnett, Charles (2013), "Revisiting the 1552–1550 and 1562 Aristotle-Averroes Edition", in Akasoy, Anna; Giglioni, Guido (eds.), Renaissance Averroism and Its Aftermath: Arabic Philosophy in Early Modern Europe, Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, pp. 55–64, ISBN 978-94-007-5240-5, retrieved 2025-08-03
  8. ^ Steinschneider, Moritz (1852). "5575 JAKOB Mantinus (Mantino)". Catalogus librorum hebraeorum in Bibliotheca Bodleiana Jussu curatorum digessit et notis instruxit M. Steinschneider (in Latin). Berolini: Typis Ad. Friedlaender. pp. 1235–1238.
  9. ^ Hasse, Dag Nikolaus (2022). "Chapter 12: Renaissance Scholars on Why They Translate Scientific and Philosophical Works from Arabic into Latin". In Dimitri Gutas (ed.). Why translate science? documents from antiquity to the 16th century in the historical West (Bactria to the Atlantic). Leiden: Brill. pp. 689, 701–703. doi:10.1163/9789004472648_013. ISBN 978-90-04-47263-1.
  10. ^ Martin, Craig (2013). "Humanism and the Assessment of Averroes in the Renaissance". Renaissance Averroism and Its Aftermath: Arabic Philosophy in Early Modern Europe. Springer Netherlands. p. 77.
  11. ^ Piaia, Gregorio (2013). "Averroes and Arabic Philosophy in the Modern Historia Philosophica: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries". Renaissance Averroism and Its Aftermath: Arabic Philosophy in Early Modern Europe. Springer Netherlands. p. 248. ISBN 978-94-007-5240-5.
  12. ^ Dahan, Gilbert (1977). "La survie des auteurs juifs du Languedoc à travers les impressions de leurs œuvres jusqu'au XVIIe siècle". Juifs et judaïsme de Languedoc. Cahiers de Fanjeaux. Toulouse. pp. 214–215. ISBN 978-2-7089-3411-5.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  13. ^ Andreatta, Michela (2020-06-23), "Gersonides Hebraicus atque Latinus: Some Remarks on Levi ben Gershom's Works and the Reading and Book-Collecting Cultures of the Renaissance", Gersonides' Afterlife, Brill, pp. 424–425, doi:10.1163/9789004425286_017, ISBN 978-90-04-42528-6 But compare Harvey, Warren Zev (2012). "Gersonides and Spinoza on Conatus". Aleph. 12 (2): 273–275. doi:10.2979/aleph.12.2.273. ISSN 1565-1525.
  14. ^ Steinschneider, Moritz (1893). Die Hebräischen Übersetzungen des Mittelalters und die Juden als Dolmetscher: Ein Beitrag zur Literaturgeschichte des Mittelalters; meistenteils nach Handschriftlichen Quellen (in German). Berlin: Kommissionsverlag des Bibliographischen bureaus.: 144-145
  15. ^ Steinschneider, 1893: 221-222
  16. ^ Steinschneider, 1893: 158-159
  17. ^ Collated in an English translation: Arnzen, Rüdiger (2010). On Aristotle's "Metaphysics": an annotated translation of the so-called "Epitome". Averrois opera. Berlin: De Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-022001-8.
  18. ^ Steinschneider, 1893: 685-686
  19. ^ Karp, Abraham J.; Library of Congress (1991). From the ends of the earth: Judaic treasures of the Library of Congress: [essays]. Washington: Library of Congress. pp. 63-64. ISBN 978-0-8444-0681-7. p. Quoted in Passion & Compassion - Judaic Treasures, Jewish Virtual Library.: The first edition of the Guide for the Perplexed in Latin printed in bold black type throughout. A historiated initial opens each paragraph in this historically important and typographically distinguished edition. The translation, attributed to Jacob Mantino of Tortosa, was corrected and edited by Augustinus Justinianus.
  20. ^ Fontaine, Resianne (1995). Otot Ha-Shamayim: Samuel Ibn Tibbon's Hebrew Version of Aristotle's Meteorology. a Critical Edition, with Introduction, Translation, and Index by Resianne Fontaine (1st ed.). Boston: BRILL. ISBN 978-90-04-45202-2.

Further reading

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Based on the Jewish Encyclopeda's bibliography:
  • Moritz Steinschneider. The Hebrew Translations of the Middle Ages and the Jews as Transmitters... [Revised, updated, and translated by Charles H. Manekin, Y. Tzvi Langermann, and Hinrich Biesterfeldt]. Springer Netherlands. 2013–2022. doi:10.1007/978-94-007-7314-1. ISBN 978-94-007-7313-4.. Volume 1: pp. 158, 166; Volume 2: pp. 103, 108, 111, 130, 135, 173.
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