Guillaume Postel

Guillaume Postel (25 March 1510 – 6 September 1581) was a French linguist, astronomer, Cabbalist, diplomat, professor, and religious universalist.

Born in the village of Barenton in Basse-Normandie, Postel made his way to Paris to further his education. While studying at the Collège Sainte-Barbe, he became acquainted with Ignatius of Loyola and many of the men who would become the founders of the Company of Jesus, retaining a lifelong affiliation with them.

Postel was adept at Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac and other Semitic languages, as well as the Classical languages of Ancient Greek and Latin, and soon came to the attention of the French court.

In 1536, when Francis I sought a Franco-Ottoman alliance with the Ottoman Turks, he sent Postel as the official interpreter of the French embassy of Jean de La Forêt to the Turkish sultan Suleiman the Magnificent in Constantinople.

Postel was also apparently assigned to gather interesting Eastern manuscripts for the royal library, today housed in the collection of oriental manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.

In Linguarum Duodecim Characteribus Differentium Alphabetum Introductio (An Introduction to the Alphabetic Characters of Twelve Different Languages), published in 1538, Postel became the first scholar to recognize the inscriptions on Judean coins from the period of the Great Jewish Revolt as Hebrew written in the ancient "Samaritan" characters.

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