Judith Olszowy-Schlanger, “The Knowledge and Practice of Hebrew Grammar Among Christian Scholars in Pre-Expulsion England: The Evidence of ‘Bilingual’ Hebrew-Latin Manuscripts,” in Nicholas de Lange, ed., Hebrew Scholarship in the Medieval World (Cambridge: CUP, 2001), 107-128 (original) (raw)
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Many of the grammatical concepts that are found in our modern textbooks of Hebrew have come down to us from the medieval grammatical tradition. These include central aspects of derivational morphology, such as the triliteral root and the derived verbal stems (binyanim), with which all students are familiar. The origin of these concepts is to be found in the writings of the Hebrew grammarians of Spain from the eleventh and twelfth centuries . The key figure in this school of grammarians was Judah ben David H · ayyūj, who, at the beginning of eleventh century, published treatises on verbs that laid the foundations of the Hebrew grammatical tradition that is still with us today.
Biblical Hebrew Grammar: The Historical Foundation
The Hebrew Bible has never been simple to understand. "What is written in the Torah how do you read it?" How to read the biblical text has been a problem since time immemorial, and the question: "How do you read it?" Seems as pertinent today as it ever was, the amoraim had a saying. "A text never departs from it simple meaning" and yet getting to that simple meaning seems such a complicated task. One medieval scholar who took seriously this adage was Ibn Janach. He in his determination to get to the simple (peshat) meaning of text was willing to raid and copy the learning of the Arabic Semitic culture around him. He copied, their methods imitated their rules (Maman, Comparative Semitic Philology in the Middle Ages, 2004, p. 10) and used their language to wrest out of the biblical text what he understood as its simple meaning, as its true meaning. His name is Rabbi Marwinas or Rabbi Ibn Janach and the culture he imitated was the Arabic one. Because he wrote in Arabic, he missed much of the credit he was perhaps due, but on the other hand he did not credit the Arab Grammarians, by name, who he imitated, with the credit they deserved and we had to wait almost a thousand years for Becker to reveal Ibn Janach's hidden sources . Perhaps as they were concealed so he was concealed. He did however credit his main Jewish source, R. David Hayyuj. This book is an attempt to look at what Ibn Janach contributed through the eyes of some English language scholars, and of course what he did not contribute.
Spinoza's Compendium of the Grammar of the Hebrew Language
parrhesia 32 · 2020 · 122-144, 2020
spinoza's compendium of the grammar of the hebrew language inja stracenski Spinoza's Compendium of the Grammar of the Hebrew Language 1 is a work that, despite the innovative spirit of its content and the ingenuity of its author, never came to shape modernity. It contains the impulse that could have changed our understanding of the Scriptures, based on no other sources than the meaning and the use of the Hebrew language. A project notably different from the Christian Hebraism of the Lutheran Reformation, as I will try to show here, it could have had groundbreaking consequences, had it ever found a scholarly audience to take it on. To be sure, the European Enlightenment shed light on the superstitions, naïve beliefs, theological dogmatism and institutional clericalism, but less on what the Scriptures teach. What followed from a religion cleared of superstitions and dog-[W]e are to consider one Jewish tradition as uncorrupt, namely the meaning of the words in the Hebrew Language. Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise VII spinoza's compendium • 123 matism after the Enlightenment, was not a new, more enlightened understanding of Scriptures, but the separation of religion from the biblical text. A religion of internality, which can tell us what a person feels, believes or reasonably thinks, but not what Scriptures teach. And a theology of historical-critical exegesis, which demonstrates great difficulty in providing historical truths with a necessity of meaning. What remained for our understanding of religion and Scriptures after the Enlightenment, were Reason and History. That is, the assumption that the universality of reason does not require a reference to a particular text. And the assumption that historical contingency reveals the complexity of a cultural history, rather than truths with a meaning of their own. Both critiques, the one of reason and the one of history, remain negatively determined in their relationship to the biblical text, without establishing a positive ground from where to discern the thoughts conveyed by the language in which the Scriptures were originally written. In what follows, I give an account of the purpose of the Compendium, and a brief answer to Steven Nadler's question of "Aliquid remanet: What Are We to Do with Spinoza's Compendium of Hebrew Grammar." 2 SCRIPTURES VERSUS ESTABLISHED RELIGION The idea to turn Scriptures against religion, i.e. the meaning of words in the biblical text against established religious doctrines, can occur only to those aware of the chasm between them. Such occurred to Luther, after having learned some Hebrew, as he famously puts it: "The Hebrew language is the best and richest language of all. … If I were younger I would want to learn this language, because no one can really understand the Scriptures without it. For although the New Testament is written in Greek, it is full of Hebraisms and Hebrew expressions. It has therefore been aptly said that the Hebrews drink from the spring, the Greeks from the stream that flows from it, and the Latins from a puddle" (Luther, Table Talk 3). What made this linguistic turn in biblical scholarship possible, was the Hebrew revival in Christian Europe, i.e. the progressive recovery of Hebraica, first by the proto-reformation in Italy (with Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino), and then by the subsequent introduction of biblical Hebrew at all main universities across the Protestant United Provinces, Northern Germany and England by the mid-sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century, the 'Christian Hebraist' was to become the new academic, a scholar that not only teaches biblical Hebrew at a university, but translates biblical texts, interprets them, and compiles grammars of biblical Hebrew. By the end of the seventeenth century, the entire corpus of 124 • inja stracenski