Elijah Levita

Elia Levita (13 February 1469 – 28 January 1549), (Hebrew: אליהו בן אשר הלוי אשכנזי) also known as Elijah Levita, Elias Levita, Élie Lévita, Elia Levita Ashkenazi, Eliyahu haBahur ("Elijah the Bachelor") was a Renaissance Hebrew grammarian, scholar and poet. He was the author of the Bovo-Bukh (written in 1507–1508), the most popular chivalric romance written in Yiddish. Living for a decade in the house of Cardinal Egidio da Viterbo, he was also one of the foremost tutors of Christian notables in Hebrew and Jewish mysticism during the Renaissance.

Born at Neustadt near Nuremberg, to a family of Levitical status, he was the youngest of nine brothers. During his early manhood, the Jews were expelled from this area. He then moved to northern Italy, and in Padua in 1504, he wrote the 650 ottava rima stanzas of the Bovo-Bukh, based on the popular romance Buovo d'Antona, which, in turn, was based on the Anglo-Norman romance of Sir Bevis of Hampton.

By 1514 he was living in Venice, where he wrote two scathing satirical pasquinades. That same year he moved to Rome, where he acquired a friend and patron, the Renaissance humanist and cardinal Egidio da Viterbo (1471–1532) of Viterbo, in whose palace he lived for more than ten years. Levita taught Hebrew to Egidio, and copied Hebrew manuscripts—mostly related to the Kabbalah—for the cardinal's library. The first edition of Levita's Baḥur (Rome, 1518) is dedicated to Egidio, to whom Levita dedicated his Concordance (1521).

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