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CHRISTIAN HEBRAIC ACTIVITY extended to all areas of Jewish learning, and developed, sometimes in tandem with Jewish authors, new approaches to analyzing and working with rabbinic literature. Some of the great efforts are in the nascent period of comparative philology. Assessing the lexicon of the Talmud, scholars realize that many of the words in rabbinic Hebrew and Aramaic derive from other languages, such as Greek, Latin, and Persian, and derive from earlier contacts between Jewish and non-Jewish cultures. Early comparative Semitic dictionaries are another development, in which Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic, and Ethiopic are identified as members of a larger family of languages. The expansion of the polyglot Bible, culminating in England in 1657 with the publication of Bryan Walton’s nine-language edition, spawns the development of multi-lingual dictionaries, concentrating less on the genealogy of words, but more on their cross-cultural usage. Finally, aids such as dictionaries of abbreviations and guides to Hebrew letter writing are developed as aids for the Christian scholar working in the field of rabbinic literature.
David Cohen de Lara (ca. 1600-1674), was Haham (chief Rabbi), of the Sefardic Hamburg Jewish Community, as well as lexicographer. His ‘Ir David, dedicated to Johannes Silvius de Tulingen, Swedish ambassador to Germany, is a lexicon of the non-Hebrew and non-Aramaic loanwords found in rabbinic literature; it is really a prodromus to his greater Keter Kehunah = Lexikon Thalmudico-Rabbinicum, the leading work in this field, next to the ‘Arukh and Buxtorf's Lexicon Rabbinicum. This work, on which he was engaged for forty years, shows de Lara’s familiarity with the Greek and Roman classics as well as with the Church Fathers and the Christian philologists. De Lara corresponded with different Christian scholars, among whom Johann Buxtorf the younger, who thought highly of him and his work. Edmund Castell.
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Edmund Castell (1606-1685) was professor of Arabic at Cambridge. The Lexicon Heptaglotton (the “seven language” dictionary) Castell claimed to have spent eighteen years, from sixteen to eighteen hours a day on this work, and cost him £12,000. He was unable to find subscribers to this work, however, and in 1667 was condemned to debtors’ prison.
Johann Christoph Wolf.
Bibliotheca Hebraea, vol. 2.
Hamburg & Leipzig, Christian Liebezeit, 1715-33.
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Embedded deep in the magnum opus of Wolf (Wernigerode 1683-Hamburg 1739) are two lists of Hebrew lexicographers, Jewish and Christian respectively. As Wolf himself points out in his footnote, the work had been taken from a history of Hebrew lexicons that he had submitted for his doctoral dissertation (Rath Sifrai Shirshaim, sive Historia lexicorum Hebraicorum, Wittenberg: 1705).
Johann Buxtorf.
Institutio epistolaris Hebraica.
Basel : Conrad Waldkirch, 1610.
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Buxtorf's Institutio Epistolaris Hebraica, although not a dictionary per se, was printed to guide Christian Hebraists in the then contemporary rabbinic epistolary styles. The work contains over one hundred letters, partly supplied with vowels, translations into Latin, and furnished with explanations of select words. Many letters were taken from the earlier epistolary guides, such as the Megillat Sefer (Venice, 1552), Iggarot Shelomim (Augsburg, 1603), and the Ma‘ayan Ganim (Venice, 1553). However, some of the letters reflect Buxtorf’s own correspondence with rabbis of his time.
