Examination of Rabbinic Commentaries on Moses

...rarer if they were also imbued with the literature of the Christians in their manner. But lest that happen, and lest they become softened, they are forbidden by the exotic Talmud a collection of ancient rabbinic writings, in tractate Sotah a tractate of the Talmud, folio 49, from learning Greek, in which, indeed, it was established that the chief authors of the Gentiles wrote. Our author, however, was also skilled in Arabic, into which many philosophical works had already been translated, and from there, I believe, he first began to be wise; which also happened to Maimonides Moses ben Maimon, a preeminent Sephardic Jewish philosopher; who, almost alone among their own people, progressed so far that they caught a scent of common trifles. Ben-Ezra Abraham ibn Ezra, a medieval Jewish biblical commentator lived to his seventy-fifth year, a longevity not rare in this people, since they live sparingly and do not cut their lives short prematurely with immoderate luxuries, as some of our own do: although untimely studies and anxieties also accelerate death for some, yet he himself is said to have retained his vigor to the end. I ought now, after these two more celebrated Doctors of the Hebrews, also to add something about the secondary ones; but because that learned Phoenix of Hebraism, Buxtorf Johannes Buxtorf, a 17th-century Christian Hebraist, has already occupied himself with doing this in his recently praised Bibliotheca Rabbinica Rabbinic Library, I do not wish to contemplate a new Iliad after this Homer. Let the benevolent Reader supply from there whatever may seem to be missing here; and let him pray with me to GOD, that He might deign to lead these wandering little sheep, once uniquely His own, now miserably dispersed and bleating here and there through the deserts of the whole world, back to the blessed fold of CHRIST; and that He might propagate this language of truth more widely among us every day, so that it may be a happy instrument of our salvation, and, when it pleases Him, of their conversion. AMEN.