Giovanni Bernardo De Rossi

Giovanni Bernardo De Rossi (October 25, 1742 in Castelnuovo Nigra, Piedmont – March 23, 1831 in Parma) was an Italian Christian Hebraist.

In October 1769, he was appointed professor of Oriental languages at the University of Parma, where he spent the rest of his life.

In connection with this work he drew up a Dizionario Storico degli Autori Ebrei e delle loro Opere (Parma, 1802; German translation by Hamberger, Leipzig, 1839), in which he summed up in alphabetical order the bibliographical notices contained in Wolf, and, among other things, fixed the year of Rashi's birth; he also published a catalogue of his own manuscripts (1803) and books (1812).

All these studies were in a measure preparatory and subsidiary to his Variæ Lectiones Veteris Testamenti (Parma, 1784–88.

He was also interested in the polemics of Judaism and Christianity, and wrote on this subject his Della Vana Aspettazione degli Ebrei del loro Re Messia (Parma, 1773), which he defended in a pamphlet two years later; he further published a list of anti-Christian writers, Bibliotheca Judaica Antichristiana (Parma, 1800).