Johannes Buxtorf II

He succeeded his late father in the chair of Hebrew at the university; he gained an almost equal reputation, in the same domain, and was considered a chip off the old block.

Buxtorf was also engaged in the sale of Hebrew books; among his purchasers being the commercial representative of Cardinal Richelieu, Stella de Tery et Morimont, who occasionally sojourned at Basel, and Johann Heinrich Hottinger at Zurich, with whom Buxtorf was on terms of close friendship.

Buxtorf corresponded not only with Jacob Roman and Leon Siau of Constantinople (the latter of whom afterward embraced Christianity and became physician-in-ordinary to a Transylvanian prince), but with the teacher Solomon Gai, and with the friend of the latter, Florio Porto of Mantua, both of whom were commissioned by Buxtorf to purchase Hebrew books in Italy; with the learned rabbi Menahem Zion Porto Cohen of Padua, whom Buxtorf did not treat in a very friendly manner; with Manasseh b. Israel; David Cohen de Lara of Hamburg; Jacob Abendana of Amsterdam, for whose "Miklol Yofi" he wrote an approbation; Isaac Abendana, brother of the foregoing; Joseph Delmedigo, with whom he was personally acquainted; and many others.

Nineteen years after the death of his father he became involved in a controversy with Louis Cappel regarding the antiquity of the Hebrew vowel-signs; and although the question was one purely historical, it nevertheless contained a substratum of dogma, and in a number of polemical writings was conducted with great intensity and bitterness on both sides.

Rich biographical material on Buxtorf the Younger may be found in his unpublished correspondence, and also in that addressed by him to Hottinger (which is preserved in the public libraries at Basel and Zurich).