Paul Paradis (date of birth unknown) is a descendant of the Jewish Meshulam family, known in Venice by the nickname " Del Banco ". He converted to Catholicism in 1528, adopting the name of his godfather Lodovico Canossa, ambassador to the King of France and Bishop of Bayeux (Secret). In 1531, following Agacio Guidacerio and François Vatable, he became the third reader of Hebrew at the Collège Royal founded in 1530 by King François I, which later became the Collège de France. His entry into the Collège de France was probably thanks to the support of Marguerite de Navarre, the king's sister, , to whom he is said to have given Greek and Hebrew lectures. The appointment of Hebrew and Greek lecturers to the Collège Royal took place against a backdrop of the creation of colleges of biblical languages, which in most cases were a reaction against the reluctance of the Catholic Church and the universities, more specifically the faculties of theology, to accept the return to the sources advocated by the humanists and Reformers. Paradis's lectures were popular, and he drew large audiences. The king was particularly fond of him, as evidenced by his salary and naturalization in 1536. In 1534, he announced a lecture on the book of Proverbs, which was cited in a complaint lodged against four royal readers (the three Hebrew readers and Pierre Danes, Greek reader) by the Paris Faculty of Theology, via their dean, Noël Béda. The complaint alleges infringement of the competence of theology professors to interpret biblical texts, and calls into question the Latin translation used by the Catholic Church. For the members of the theology faculty, it was a matter of defending " their " Bible and the Church's Bible against the interference of philologists or the humanities. Obviously, the king could not accept that his college should be controlled by the theological faculty, and the dean had to withdraw the complaint.
Paradis left few writings. In 1534, one of his pupils, Joannes Fraxino, published a dialogue between two of his audiences, Martial Gouveia and Matthieu Budé, son of Guillaume Budé, the king's librarian, on how to teach and read Hebrew under the title Pauli Paradisi, Veneti, Hebraïcarum Litterarum Regii interpretis, de modo legendi hæbraïce, dialogus. It is a playful and sometimes humorous introduction to Hebrew phonetics. In 1539, Paul Paradis translated an apocryphal text from the 10th or 11th century " la Chronique de Moïse ", probably based on the Sefer Hayyashar (Abraham, 11 -22). The manuscript, probably written by Paradis himself, is entitled " La vie et la naissance du prophète Moyse traduicte de haebreu en françoys " (translation reprinted with notes by Abraham, 46-74). Paradis probably died in 1549 (Lefranc, 180), leaving a natural child named Charles, whom the king legitimized.
