HALAKHOT YESODE HA-TORAH
Moses Maimonides (1135-1204)
Amstelodami: Apud Guiliel and Iohannem Blaev, 1638
BM497.7 M3 1638

Editor Willem Vorstius, or Vorst, was the son of Dutch Calvinist theologian Conrad Vorst, and a significant Hebraist. Vorstius was a friend of Menasseh Ben Israel. As a Christian, Vorstius was impressed by Maimonides, although he could not accept all of his ideas. Vorstius used Johann Reuchlin’s De Arte Cabbalistica (1517) as a basis for some of his commentary here. The text of Maimonides is Book I of Mishne Torah, first printed in the fifteenth century, and often reprinted. Part 2 of this edition is the Latin translation of Ro’sh Emunah, and contains detailed notes on two chapters only (XIII, and XIV, where some Hebrew is quoted). In his preface Vorstius wrote that the most recent edition of the text printed since the Council of Trent omitted certain passages in chapters XII and XIV, supplied, he claimed, from a Venetian edition (possibly the Giustiniani edition of 1547). The Maimonides text is his introduction to his magnum opus, Mishne Thorah, a systematization of Jewish theological thought. The work heavily influenced Spinoza’s metaphysics. In Hebrew and in Latin.