Plantavit de la Pause, Jean°
PLANTAVIT DE LA PAUSE, JEAN°
PLANTAVIT DE LA PAUSE, JEAN ° (Plantavitius ; 1576–1651), French Hebraist. Born into an aristocratic Protestant family, Plantavit was brought up in Nîmes and became pastor of Béziers. In 1604 he converted to Catholicism and later became bishop of Lodève. He left a detailed account of his Hebrew teachers, who included the erudite and prolific convert Philippe d'Aquin (born Mordecai Cresque de Carpentras, c. 1575–1650), Leone *Modena, Abraham Jedidiah Shalit of Ferrara, Elisha Mazzal-Tov of Modena, Jacob b. Moses Senior of Pisa, and Solomon b. Judah Ezobi of Carpentras. One of the outstanding Christian Hebraists of the age, Plantavit spent 30 years preparing his monumental Thesaurus synonymicus Hebraico-Chaldaico-Rabbinicus (Lodève, 1644–45), which gave the Latin equivalent of Hebrew and Aramaic terms, appropriate biblical references, and a wealth of synonyms. He also published Florilegium Biblicum and Florilegium Rabbinicum (both Lodève, 1645), in the latter of which he records his gift of a copy of the Zohar to his master, Philippe d'Aquin.
bibliography:
F. Secret, Les kabbalistes chrétiens de la Renaissance (1964), 336–7.
[Godfrey Edmond Silverman]