The status of Hebrew in Friedrich Schlegel's Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe paper asks why Friedrich Schlegel classified Hebrew and Arabic as ‘mechanical’, i.e. non inflectional, languages in his Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier rather than include them among the ‘organic’ languages of divine origin. The classification is puzzling because of the inflectional structure of Semitic languages and because a Catholic thinker would be more likely to argue for the divine origin of Hebrew. The paper argues that, contrary to the suggestions of several scholars, Schlegel's classification of Hebrew and Arabic did not result from anti‐Semitic motives. Schlegel relied on Johann David Michaelis's theory that case endings in Arabic were artificial. Schlegel concluded from this theory that all inflection in Semitic languages was artificial. The exclusion of Hebrew from the ‘organic’ languages served two important ideological purposes: 1) It supported the idea that the ancient Hebrews had remained isolated from the general degeneration of Oriental religion and philosophy and kept their monotheism pure: 2) The romantic concept of the organic as an integrated whole meant that ‘organic’ languages had to be a genetic group. Hebrew could not fit into this group, because it was not genetically related to Sanskrit.