He assisted Bernard Fischer in revising the Buxtorf lexicon, and was for several years a director of schools in his native town.
Nathan and Calasio arranged the words according to the Hebrew roots, the derivatives following simply according to the order in which they occur in the Hebrew books; the Buxtorfs, father and son, introduced order into the derivatives by a grammatical classification of the verbs and nouns.
The "Meïr Netib," with its complete introduction, was first published at Venice (erroneously under the name of Mordecai Nathan) in 1523; in 1556 it was published at Basel by Buxtorf, but with only a part of the introduction.
The majority of the books described he knew at first hand; the description of the others he borrowed from the works of Buxtorf and Giulio Bartolocci (from the latter only in the first part).
Buxtorf |
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.