Giovanni Bernardo De Rossi e la letteratura araba

Albeit mainly a Hebraist, De Rossi also developed an interest in other Semitic languages, in particular Arabic and Syriac. Leaving aside his first, naïve experiments, inspired by an outdated Renaissance polyglotism, his main contribution to Arabic studies consists in a Dizionario storico (‘Historical Dictionary’) in which he presented his Italian readership with a clever, smart, and updated tool to navigate medieval Arabic literature. The Dictionary stands out for De Rossi’s appreciation of the Qur’an’s aesthetic dimension, a result of his life-long intimacy with the pages of the Old Testament. In addition, he is the author of a dissertation in which he demonstrated the existence of the Paganini edition of the Qur’an, which at his time was dismissed as a baseless legend.