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JÓZSEF ZSENGELLÉR
HEBREW AS THE SOURCE OF COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY
OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
In his book The Search for the Perfect Language, Umberto Eco (1932-2016) em¬
phasizes that the incontrovertible idea of Hebrew as humanity’s primordial
language before the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel changed dur¬
ing the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He states that “not only do the
interpreters wish to go back to the text in its original version, but they do it
with the conviction that the original and holy language of scripture was the
only one capable of expressing its sacred truth." So we are in the middle of a
period when Hebrew was studied because it was one of the three holy languages
of the Bible, because it was the only language expressing the truth of Scripture,
and because it was the first language of mankind.*
During the sixteenth century Christian Hebrew scholarship was born as an
academic discipline.° The Humanist motivation for a return to the sources of
the Christian faith resulted in different activities. Chairs of Hebrew language
were founded at several European universities. Hebrew presses, which emerged
to supply Jewish interests, supplied the needs of Christian customers. Jew¬
ish experts were willing to instruct interested Christian pupils. All of these
impacts together “made Hebrew education possible for greater numbers of
Christian scholars than ever before” as Stephen Burnett remarks.®° He writes
further on:
“Johannes Reuchlin and the two Buxtorfs, father and son, provided the intellec¬
tual foundation for these developments by producing scholarly aids in the form of
grammars and dictionaries of Hebrew of far higher quality than had been available
previously and above all by publishing a Latin language manual to introduce Chris¬
tian students to the intricacies of the Masorah. Thanks to his exposure to Arabic,
Louis Cappel could conceive of a Semitic language that did not require vowel points
to be read and understood. Albert Schultens, also a student of Arabic, revolutionized
the practice of comparing Hebrew with other Semitic languages by proposing that
3 Ecco, Umberto, The Search for the Prefect Language, Oxford, Blackwell, 1995, 75.
4 WAKEFIELD, Robert, On the Three Languages, 1524, trans. G. Lloyd Jones, New York, Bing¬
hampton, 1989, 72.
5 BuRNETT, Stephen G., Christian Hebraism in the Reformation Era (1500-1660). Author, Books,
and the Transmission of Jewish Learning, Leiden, Brill, 2012, 49-91.
° BuRNETT, Stephen G., Later Christian Hebraists, in M. Saebg, (ed.), Hebrew Bible / Old Testament.
The History of Its Interpretation. Vol. 2. From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, Gottingen,
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008, 785-801., especially 786-7.
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