Ezekiel Rahabi (1694–1771) was the chief Jewish merchant of the Dutch East India Company in Cochin, India for almost 50 years.[1] Rabbi Rahabi Ezekiel,[2] (or Ezekiel Rahabi) was from Aleppo, in modern Syria.[3] A rabbinical writer known only through his polemical Hebrew translation of the New Testament - The Book of the Gospel Belonging to the Followers of Jesus (c.1750).

The translation contains all the books of the New Testament and was translated between 1741 and 1756[4] by a certain Ezekiel Rahabi (not R'dkibi, pace Franz Delitzsch p.108) in "an uneven and faulty Hebrew with a strong anti-Christian bias."[5] Oo 1:32 reads: "Heaven is my witness that I have not translated this, God forfend, to believe it, but to understand it and know how to answer the heretics . . . that our true Messiah will come. Amen." The 1756 edition appears to be the work of two different translators - a less educated Sephardi writer (Matthew-John), Ezekiel Rahabi himself, and a more educated German rabbi (Acts-Revelation) Leopold Immanuel Jacob van Dort.[4]

References

  1. ^ Fischel, W. J. (1962). Cochin in Jewish History: Prolegomena to a History of the Jews in India. Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, Vol. 30 (1962), pp. 37-59 (23 pages), https://www.jstor.org/stable/3622533.
  2. ^ Hebrew in the church: the foundations of Jewish-Christian dialogue Pinchas Lapide - 1984 "appears as kbwd m'lt hrb rby rhby yhzql nwhw 'dn "Honored to the degree of the great Rabbi Rahabi Ezekiel, may he rest in peace."
  3. ^ Fischel, Walter J. (1967). "The Rotenburg Family in Dutch Cochin of the Eighteenth Century". Studia Rosenthaliana. 1 (2): 32–44. ISSN 0039-3347.
  4. ^ a b Commissioner, purpose, translators, copyist and age of the Hebrew New Testament of Cochin and the Quran of the Library of Congress, Mascha van Dort, professor Meir Bar-Ilan, July 2021, DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.20148.58242
  5. ^ Hebrew in the Church: The Foundations of Jewish-Christian Dialogue 1984 p76 Pinchas E. Lapide, Helmut Gollwitzer - 1984
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