<Article>Faultlines in Hebrew Grammar Concerning Proper Names: :Three Grammar Textbooks of the Amsterdam Jewish Community of the 17th Century

The evolution of Hebrew grammar in the 16th century begins with Christian Hebraists such as S. Munster who translated the Hebrew grammatical works (Dikdduk) of Moses Kimhi and Elias Levita into Latin. Through the Latin translation, Christian Hebraists have transformed the medieval Jewish scholarship of Hebrew grammar to be Grammatica Hebraea, as understood in terms of Christian perception of Latin or Greek grammars, which deviates from the Jewish version of Hebrew Grammar in many respects. In this process of transformation, Munster faced a difficulty with the grammatical term שם העצם which could be interpreted in various ways because Abraham ibn Ezra taught the grammatical term to mean “proper name” whereas M. Kimhi thought of as the name of “substance” or “thing”. Accordingly, the Latin translation of שם העצם was various from nomen proprium, to nomina substantiae, nomen substantivum, nomen substantiae, as they tried to define the nature of “proper name” of human being like Abraham or Mary in distinction to that of “general noun” which also involves complications on distinguishing “thing” from “substance” or “essence”. This is because “proper name” was perceived as “personal being, ” an individual existence which signifies his or her unique character of the soul that cannot be seen in human eyes. In response to this challenge, Abraham de Balmes, a Jewish grammarian of the early 16th century, considers the proper name as a special category of name to be excluded from the list of kinds of nouns in general, whereas a Christian Hebraist of the late 16th century, Petrus Martinius canceled the tradition of discussion on the categories of nouns through the Hebrew terms like שם העצם, שם דב ר, שם תאר etc. as meaningless. The Dikdduk of 17th century in Amsterdam can be seen as a special kind of Hebrew grammar for the Jews who had been converso in Portugal as deprived of knowledge of Judaism. Isaac ben Abraham Uziel, the grammarian in exile from Fez, gave the discipline of Dikdduk to two sons of converso, Menasseh ben Israel and Isaac Aboab de Fonseca, who later became Hebrew teachers in Spinoza’s time. All those three individually wrote grammar books which certainly had effects on Spinoza and his incomplete grammatical work. In this paper, I have examined their understandings of nouns in which there is a clear division between Menasseh and Aboab/ Uziel in terms of שם העצם ; Menasseh follows Ibn Ezra so that he considers it as proper name in the list of nouns, whereas the master Uziel and his student Aboab following M. Kimhi takes the term to mean the name of “thing”. It is noteworthy that Aboab excluded “soul” from the examples while Uziel included it in them like M. Kimhi. As a phase of history of Hebrew Grammar, the 17th century was the time for the Jews in Amsterdam to renew the traditions of old Spanish דקדוק while for Christian reformers to stall Grammatica Hebraea as a standard of Hebrew grammar