At some point in the seventeenth century, some gathered manuscript loose papers, written in Hebrew, Aramaic, Spanish, Latin, Spanish in Hebrew script and some testimonial Greek, made their way into the Leiden Library collection. Though cataloguing all these papers as a bound volume under a Legatum Warnerianum shelfmark (Warner F 65) helped to draw the conclusion that these papers had made a whimsical journey through Istanbul to reach the Netherlands, the available evidence seems to point out to a much better known path: from Habsburg-ruled Castile to the Habsburg-ruled Low Countries.

In my lecture I will outline the life and professional career of Alfonso de Zamora (ca. 1476-ca. 1545), a born Jew who converted to Roman Catholicism around 1492, worked as a Hebrew and Aramaic editor in the team of the Complutensian Polyglot Bible (printed from 1514 to 1517), as a Hebrew professor at Salamanca (ca. 1510-1511) and Alcalá de Henares (1512-ca. 1545) universities, authored around six printed or manuscript books, and copied and glossed around 40 manuscripts.

My aim is to present the evidence I have gathered by studying and examining ms. Or. 645, the Leiden Zamora Miscellany, which can now be properly described as the single most important document on the personal and professional life of a leading Hebraist in his generation, who also was an important precedence in the most fruitful presence of a Spanish Hebraist in the Low Countries: Benito Arias Montano in Plantin’s Antwerp, whilst working as editor of the Antwerpian Polyglot Bible which followed the path of the Complutensian Polyglot, for which Alfonso de Zamora had first been hired as a trained philologist. Through the peculiar ways of scholarly serendipity, this lecture is also testimonial to the continuity of the scholarship of Scaliger fellows as once there was a continuity of scholarship from Alcalá to Antwerp, then to Leiden.