VELTWYCK, GERARD

VELTWYCK, GERARD (d. 1555), German Hebraist and apostate. Little is known of Veltwyck's origins or early life. He was for a time the envoy of Emperor Charles V in Constantinople, and the Marrano physician amatus lusitanus , in his book In Dioscoridis… de medics materia… enarrationes (Strasbourg, 1554), mentions that Veltwyck supplied him with medicinal herbs from Turkey. Veltwyck is mainly remembered for his violently anti-Jewish Hebrew polemical work entitled Shevelei Tohu – Itinera deserti, de Judaicis disciplinis et earum vanitate (Venice, 1539), printed by daniel bomberg . The text, translated into Latin by conrad pellicanus in 1545, forms part of the manuscript (now in Zurich, Zentralbibliothek Ms. Car. 1102) containing Pellicanus' copy of guillaume postel 's kabbalistic treatise Or Nerot ha-Menorah (Candelabri typici… interpretatio), which appeared in Venice in 1548. In his Shevilei Tohu – a mixture of verse and prose – Veltwyck revealed his hostility toward the Kabbalah, which he declared to be both devoid of authority and riddled with lies and fancies. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: Steinschneider, Cat Bod, 2701; M.G. Rosenberg, Gerard Veltwyck, Orientalist, Theolog und Staatsmann (1935); F. Secret, Les kabbalistes chrétiens de la Renaissance (1964), 249; idem, in Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 26 (1964), 164; Baron, Social2, 13 (1969), 180. (Godfrey Edmond Silverman)