Rahabi Ezekiel

For the rabbi of Cochin who revived Judaism among Bene Israel Jews of India, see David ben Ezekiel Rahabi.

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, Walter J. (1962). "Cochin in Jewish History: Prolegomena to a History of the Jews in India". Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research. 30: 37–59. doi:10.2307/3622533. ISSN 0065-6798.
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. 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