Johann Christoph Wolf was a German Christian Hebraist

Christian Hebraist

A Christian Hebraist is a scholar of Hebrew who comes from a Christian family background/belief, or is a Jewish adherent of Christianity. The main area of study is that commonly known as the Old Testament to Christians , but Christians have occasionally taken an interest in the Talmud, and...

, polyhistor, and collector of books.

He studied at Wittenberg

Wittenberg

Wittenberg, officially Lutherstadt Wittenberg, is a city in Germany in the Bundesland Saxony-Anhalt, on the river Elbe. It has a population of about 50,000....

, and traveled in Holland and England in the interest of science, coming in contact with Campeius Vitringa

Campeius Vitringa

Campegius Vitringa Sr., or Kempe Vitringa was a Dutch Protestant theologian and Hebraist. His youngest of four children was Campeius Vitringa ....

, Willem Surenhuis

Willem Surenhuis

Willem Surenhuis was a Dutch Christian scholar of Hebrew, known for his Latin translation of the Mishnah, the first of the complete work. It was published from 1698 to 1703. The son of a German-born minister, he studied at the University of Groningen, and later taught in Amsterdam..-Notes:...

, Adrian Reland, Basnage, and others. He especially occupied himself with the study of Oriental languages and literature, of which he became professor at the Hamburg gymnasium in 1712.

At this time the Oppenheimer Collection was housed at Hamburg, and Wolf determined to devote himself to a description of Jewish literature based upon this collection. His researches resulted in Bibliotheca Hebræa (4 vols., Hamburg, 1715-33), the first volume of which contains a list of Jewish authors, while the second deals with the subject matter under the headings "Bible," "Talmud," "Cabala," etc. The knowledge of Christendom about the Talmud

Talmud

The Talmud is a central text of mainstream Judaism. It takes the form of a record of rabbinic discussions pertaining to Jewish law, ethics, philosophy, customs and history....

 was for nearly a century and a half derived from Wolf's statements. Vol. iii. is a supplement to vol. i.; vol. iv. to vol. ii.

Wolf's work forms the basis of Steinschneider's catalogue of the Bodleian Library

Bodleian Library

The Bodleian Library , the main research library of the University of Oxford, is one of the oldest libraries in Europe, and in Britain is second in size only to the British Library...

, which has references to it on nearly every page. Besides this work he issued a history of Hebrew lexicons (for his doctor's dissertation; Wittenberg, 1705), and "Notitia Karæorum" (Hamburg, 1721).

Wolf was owner a big library of 25,000 volumes, books and oriental manuscripts. Among the rest, he acquired the collection of the Frankfurter councillor Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach

Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach

Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach was a German scholar, bibliophile, book-collector, traveller, palaeographer, and consul in Frankfurt am Main who is best known today for his published travelogues.-Biography:He was born in lawyer's family...

.

Selected works

• Curae philologicae et criticae in Novum Testamentum Basilee 1741.