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This chapter addresses the discrepancies between writing, reading, listening, and performing in two Jewish genres: biblical verse and early synagogue poetry. The continuities (scriptural canonicity, diglossia, tensions between constraint and play) are obvious. The poetics, by contrast, difffer. If we want to understand this variance, we must examine what happens in the dialogue between the scribe and his empty scroll, between the cantor and his perplexed congregation. How did they juggle the disparate privileges of sound and meaning, of private understanding and communal experience? As we shall see, in the silence that preceded the sound, and in the sound that followed, the poet’s inner and outer speech articulated diffferent poetics – sometimes disrupting, sometimes reinforcing the conventions of the holy Hebrew tongue.

This contribution offers a comparative perspective on the Prague Haskalah as a movement in its own right, by briefly analysing another tradition that, like Prague, has often been presented as deeply indebted to the project of the Berlin Maskilim: the Dutch Jewish Enlightenment, which flourished during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Contrary to common opinion, which has always emphasized the German origins of the ‘Dutch Haskalah’, this ‘Haskalah’ was not imported from Berlin but had been inspired first and foremost by contemporary Dutch (Christian) enlightened discourse. Of course one Jew’s Dutch Enlightenment was not the other Jew’s Dutch Enlightenment. To illustrate this, the article briefly compares four ‘enlightened’ publications, i.e. historical biographies, by four prominent Dutch-Jewish intellectuals who operated in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Their varying treatments of Judaism’s role in (universal) history serve to illustrate the complexity of enlightened experience in the Netherlands, where the Jews had received civic equality as early as 1796, thus facing the challenge of building new communal infrastructures and forging a new, at least partly Dutch identity.

ArgumentThe Ashkenazi grammars of Hebrew written between roughly 1600 and 1800 fill a modest and largely forgotten shelf in the Jewish scholarly library. At first sight, especially when compared with the medieval Jewish and contemporary Christian Hebrew traditions, they seem to lack technical sophistication. As this paper hopes to demonstrate, however, this apparent lack of sophistication was not so much an intrinsic flaw as a deliberate choice. For the earliest Ashkenazi textbooks were not about studying grammar, but about teaching Hebrew. By adapting the existing descriptive models to the needs of the classroom and the gemeyne leytn (ordinary people), Jewish scholars and teachers in such cities as Prague, Wilhelmsdorff, and Amsterdam hoped to find and instruct new audiences. Depending on context and target audience, they either relied on Hebrew, Yiddish, or on an intricate interplay of the two for maximum success and efficiency. It was this innovative combination of didactic simplification and functional bilingualism that allowed them not only to reach a new readership, but also to equip that readership to henceforth read their Bible and prayers with unprecedented autonomy.

A Universal Art. Hebrew Grammar Across Disciplines and Faiths reflects on medieval and early modern Hebrew linguistics as a discipline that crossed geographic and religious borders and linked up with a plethora of scholarly activities, from Judaeo-Arabic Bible translations to the Renaissance search for the holiest alphabet. This collection of articles presents a cross-section of new research avenues on Hebraism, Karaite, Rabbanite and Christian, with an emphasis on the transmission of linguistic ideas through time and space among different communities, cultures and religious currents. The resulting picture is one of intrinsic variation and dynamic growth as opposed to the linear paradigm of development, culmination and stagnation current in the historiography of Hebrew linguistics.

A Universal Art. Hebrew Grammar Across Disciplines and Faiths is a collection of articles on pre-modern Jewish and Christian approaches to Hebrew linguistics and the transmission of grammatical knowledge between cultures, religions and disciplines.

A Universal Art. Hebrew Grammar Across Disciplines and Faiths is a collection of articles on pre-modern Jewish and Christian approaches to Hebrew linguistics and the transmission of grammatical knowledge between cultures, religions and disciplines.

The antiquarian passion for oriental alphabets, before and beyond the interest for languages that are written with these letters, peaks in Europe shortly before phase of geographic expansion, which marks the beginning of modernity around conventional date of 1492. The polymath describes then, according to a traditional model, the history of the invention of the alphabet, with the usual reference to classical sources, already collected long before him for a humanistic readership in Polydore Vergili's De inventoribus rerum . Due to a curious but not a seldom phenomenon of serendipity, the quest for a common and therefore unique alphabet, identified by many with the shape of Hebrew letters, brought during Renaissance to the discovery of a stunning plurality of alphabets. The beginning of Miqne Avram considers nature of Hebrew and its constitutive elements and presents a meditation by de Balmes, on the blueprint of Platonic Cratylus, on the superiority of Hebrew. Keywords: De inventoribus rerum ; Hebrew letters; oriental alphabets; Platonic Cratylus; Renaissance; traditional model