The Vatican Library is becoming a bit of a haunt for Rabbi Herbert Mandl, this time by way of the University of Notre Dame.
Rabbi Mandl attended a conference at Notre Dame on May 8-10 titled “The Promise of the Vatican Library.” It was an international academic conference highlighting the holdings of the Vatican Library and opportunities for research.
The rabbi was the only Jewish person invited to the conference, which 200 delegates from the United States and Canada and another 20 from Rome attended. His wife, Barbara Mandl, accompanied him.
“My invitation came directly from the Vatican, which is rare,” Rabbi Mandl said. “They sent it by email. I’m sure I got it because I spent a month at the Vatican in October of 2013. It’s kind of cool to get an invitation directly from the Vatican. When you have 220 people invited by the Vatican from around the world, and I’m the only Jewish person invited, that is an honor. It also reflects on some of the scholarly work I’ve done in Catholic law.”
He enjoyed attending the conference, especially “spending two days with a very high-level intellectual university circle of scholars who share a common interest in Catholic literature and history with me.”
Rabbi Mandl is an expert in medieval Jewish and Catholic matrimonial law. He received a Ph.D. in medieval studies from the University of Montreal in 1981, and he teaches at Rockhurst University as an adjunct professor of theology. His doctoral dissertation was titled “The Functional Value of Evidence in Medieval Jewish and Catholic Matrimonial Law.”
He retired as senior rabbi of Kehilath Israel Synagogue in the summer of 2012, and he received an invitation that same week to study at the Vatican Library the next year.
“Then I had to do like 25 different steps — provide letters of recommendation and proof of my Ph.D.,” he said. “To this day, I don’t know how they found me or why I was invited, and I certainly wasn’t going to ask any questions.”
Rabbi Mandl said he did “a lot of listening and note taking” at the Notre Dame conference. The keynote speaker was Archbishop Jean-Louis Brugues, librarian of the Vatican Library. Other speakers included Professor Carmela Vircillo Franklin of Columbia University, Professor James Hankins of Harvard University, Monsignor Cesare Pasini, prefect of the Vatican Library, and his assistant, Ambrogio Piazzoni, vice prefect of the library.
The University of Notre Dame announced earlier this month that it and the Vatican Library had formalized an agreement of academic collaboration and exchange, the first of its kind between the library and an American academic institution, according to the university’s website. The agreement includes visits and informal exchanges of faculty, scholars, librarians and administrators; joint conferences, lecture series, art exhibitions and musical and theatrical performances; and joint research programs.
The Vatican Library (in Italian: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana) was conceived by Pope Nicholas V in 1451 and opened in 1475. It contains 80,000 manuscripts, 1.6 million books, 150,000 original drawings, 200,000 photos and 300,000 ancient coins, Rabbi Mandl said.
Organizers brought a number of the library’s holdings to the conference, the rabbi said, including Byzantine manuscripts and the Codex Vaticanus, which is one of the oldest existing manuscripts of the Greek bible (Old and New Testament), according to the book “The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption and Restoration,” by Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, published in 2005 by Oxford University Press. Numerous sources date the manuscript to the fourth century.
Rabbi Mandl hopes to report to his congregation within the next several weeks on both of his Vatican Library study experiences.
“I also want to give at least a session or two based on what this is all about to my classes at Rockhurst,” he said.
He teaches Introduction to Judaism at Rockhurst in the fall, and in the spring he teaches a seminar on Jewish and Catholic life issues, such as abortion and end of life issues.
Rabbi Mandl has an open invitation through 2018 to return to the Vatican Library to study, and he hopes to return sometime in the next year to year and a half.
“That open invitation to 2018 can also get extended very easily,” he noted.
