If there is an origin myth for modern scholarship on Second Temple Judaism, one of its protagonists is no doubt the Scottish adventurer James Bruce (1730–1794), widely celebrated as the man who “rediscovered” 1 Enoch. The manuscripts that he brought from Ethiopia to Europe were key catalysts for academic interest in the Judaism of this so-called “intertestamental” period, thanks to the no less heroic philological labors of men like Richard Laurence (1760–1838), August Dillmann (1823–1894), and R. H. Charles (1855–1931). During the summer of 2019, scholars of ancient Judaism and early modernity gathered to revisit this tale of “rediscovery” and explore what it hides, erases, and elides. In the wake of that lively event in Florence, organized by Gabriele Boccaccini as the 10th Enoch Seminar, further collaborative discussions continued, culminating in the SVTP volume Rediscovering Enoch? The Antediluvian Past from the Fifteenth to Nineteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2023)—edited by the early modern historian Ariel Hessayon, together with Boccaccini and myself.
At the heart of the volume is a reconsideration of Bruce. His Enoch manuscripts have been much used, celebrated, and cited in scholarship on Second Temple Judaism but rarely considered in their own 18th-century European and Ethiopian contexts. In a groundbreaking pair of articles, Hessayon painstakingly reconstructs what we can know about Bruce and his Enoch manuscripts and their fate after his death, detailing the ambivalence surrounding Bruce at the time. Ted Erho shows the importance of attention to these manuscripts as early modern material objects, comparing them to other Ethiopian manuscripts containing 1 Enoch. Among Erho’s groundbreaking results is the revelation of the degree to which Bruce's commissioning of manuscripts shaped the title and form of we call 1 Enoch—far from simply “discovered” as is.
To particularize the European trajectory of 1 Enoch’s modern reception is also to be pushed to consider 1 Enoch in its continually vital Ethiopian contexts. Elena Dugan exposes the oft-told tale of the European "rediscovery" of 1 Enoch as a narrative that erases the agency of Ethiopian scribes, tracing the rhetoric of this erasure in the writings of scholars like Charles and its effects on questions that we still ask—and don't ask—about the Parables of Enoch in particular. Bob Hall takes up a test-case from the Parables to demonstrate the fascinating workings of this scribal creativity as evident in the manuscript tradition. Daniel Assefa and Ralph Lee further challenge us to see the vitality of Enochic traditions from within the Ethiopian tradition, with Assefa highlighting a wealth of liturgical and other Uriel traditions, while Lee maps the engagement with different parts of 1 Enoch (esp. Apocalypse of Weeks) within Ethiopian commentaries.
Of course, Ethiopia is not the only locale in which interest in Enoch continued to flourish into modernity. Another central context—with which we could have filled a whole other volume--is the Slavonic one, here kaleidoscopically explored by Florentina Badalanova Geller. In addition, Enoch’s afterlives spanned the writings of Muslims and Jews in the Ottoman empire. Past scholarship on Enoch in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam has tended to focus on tracing continuities and common motifs. Countering this tendency, Kameliya Atanasova explores early modern Sufi traditions on their own terms, while Shaul Magid looks to the distinctive questions that spark and inspire discussions of Enoch in the Zohar and Lurianic Kabbalah.
Unsettling received narratives about Bruce's 1773 "rediscovery" of 1 Enoch also opens up new perspectives on what came before in Europe and North America. Never before analyzed, to our knowledge, are the neglected Italian commentaries here discussed by Boccaccini and the earliest English translations and synopsis as collected by Hessayon in the Appendix. In both cases, what becomes clear is the earlier impact of George Syncellus’ excerpts of 1 Enoch, which were published already in 1606 by Joseph Scaliger. Such materials, in turn, shed fresh light on the some of the most famous settings in which Enoch was discussed prior to Bruce and apart from the text of 1 Enoch: Giulio Busi looks to Christian Hebraicism, with a focus on Pico, and Tobias Churton, reconsiders Masonic traditions.
The rhetoric of “rediscovery” may evoke a sudden change, but our evidence for Enochic texts and traditions in Europe and North America is far more complicated. Euan Cameron focuses on the Christian theological stakes, reminding us that the recovery of this-or-that text wouldn't necessarily mean openness to its ideas—offering thus a fascinating tour of medieval and early modern ideas of angels in particular. Jared Ludlow explores Enochic texts and traditions in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormonism), including before the full impact of knowledge of 1 Enoch in North America. Francis Borchardt offers a delightful analysis of William Blake's Enoch illustrations as windows onto the figure and the book as imagined largely apart from the full text of 1 Enoch, with theoretical consequences for our understanding of "text" and "author" more broadly.
Why should anyone care about Enoch's early modern reception? Our volume’s introduction further explores this question with an eye to history of scholarship on Second Temple Judaism, Reception Studies, Material Philology of so-called “pseudepigrapha,” and the shifting uses of the past in early modernity. Likewise, connecting this volume to the renaissance of research on the reception of Enochic texts and traditions since the discovery of the Aramaic Enoch fragments among the Dead Sea Scrolls, my own piece questions the assumption of a medieval "loss" or "ban" of Enochic books that makes possible the triumphant tales of “rediscovery” that we scholars so love to tell. As in the early modern contexts explored by Boccaccini and others, so too already in the Middle Ages: the imagination of Enoch and his books was quite often inspired by the preservation and circulation of excerpts.
This dynamic highlights yet another area to which we hope our volume contributes—namely, to the new perspectives in research on Second Temple Judaism emerging from a renewed focus on the materiality of manuscripts and the mechanics of textual transmission. Old tales of “rediscovery” have found new appeal in the wake of more recent finds like the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hammadi codices. But, as a result, it can be difficult to see them as stories—which, as Eva Mroczek has elsewhere shown, function to valorize the modern scholar and resound with the appeal of hidden secrets revealed. Part of what is overlooked in the process is the premodern vitality of imagined books, lost books, and “books known only by title.” What Liv Lied and others have demonstrated for the Jewish and Christian past more broadly, we here see through the lens of Enoch—taken up but never quite wholly forgotten.