Some seventeenth-century grammatical descriptions of Hebrew

Abstract

ABSTRACT : The first grammarians of Hebrew were living in Arabic territory, hence Jewish grammarians wrote their grammars in Arabic and according to Arabic principles of language description. Since 1506, the year when Johannes Reuchlin published his Rudimenta linguae hebraeae, grammar of Hebrew became an art practised by Christians also and was strongly influenced by the grammatical description of Latin and Greek although the Christian hebraists were very dependent on their Jewish predecessors. In the seventeenth century many grammars of Hebrew were published, mainly for religious reasons. Most grammars we know of are written by Christian authors and they were written in Latin because they were meant for academic use. Jewish grammarians wrote in their vernaculars because their works were used in Jewish schools. Both Christian and Jewish grammars have much in common: they can best be characterized as reframing traditional Judeo-Arabic grammar into the scheme of grammatical description of Latin and Greek while elements of traditional Hebrew grammar were maintained because they were considered to be correct. In this paper I will demonstrate this by presenting some grammatical works by Christian hebraists as Amama, Buxtorf and Erpenius, and some grammars by Jewish authors as Menasseh ben Israel, d' Aguilar and Spinoza.