Isaac Abendana

The descendant of a New Christian family, Isaac Abendana was the first scholar to complete a full translation of the Mishnah into Latin. Abendana, who may have studied medicine in Leiden in 1660—although he never practiced it—arrived in England in 1662 and began to teach Hebrew at Cambridge University, where he received a bursary from Trinity College for a number of years. In addition to his teaching and his translation of the Mishnah (never published), Abendana procured Hebrew books and manuscripts for the Bodleian Library in Oxford. After leaving Cambridge, he probably lived for some time in London, where his brother Jacob was ḥakham of the Sephardic community in the early 1680s. Later Abendana settled in Oxford, where he also taught Hebrew. He and his brother were both engaged in making Hebrew books available to Christian readers, and they created ties with eminent Hebraists of the period. From 1692 onward, Abendana published annual Jewish calendars with learned essays for Christian readers. These apparently achieved significant popularity and were later published in two editions as Discourses on the Ecclesiastical and Civil Polity of the Jews (1706 and 1709).