Hebraist
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A Hebraist is a specialist in
Jewish, Hebrew
and Hebraic studies. Specifically, British and German scholars of the 18th and 19th centuries who were involved in the study of Hebrew language and literature were commonly known by this designation, at a time when Hebrew was little understood outside practicing Jewish communities.
The 18th-century British academy was rife with
Biblical history. Interest in the Hebrew language grew out of raging debates over the historicity of Noah's deluge and other Bible narratives, and even whether Hebrew is the most ancient language of the world taught to Adam by God
himself. Some Hebraists held posts in academies or churches, while others were strictly amateur.
Some Hebraists proposed theories that the
vowels in the text of the Hebrew Bible
, superadded to the text by the scribal tradition, were a Jewish conspiracy to mask the true meaning of Scripture. As a result, a genre of Hebraic scholarship concentrated on running the words of the Biblical text together, removing the vowels, dissecting the words in different ways, and adding alternate vowels so as to give an alternate sense to the text.
See also
- Asian studies
- Christian Hebraist
- Hebraism
- Jewish grammatical tradition
- Jewish studies
- Middle Eastern studies
- Orientalism
- Semitic studies
References
- Spector, Sheila A. "Blake as an Eighteenth-Century Hebraist." Blake and His Bibles. Ed. David V. Erdman. West Cornwall: Locust Hill Press, 1990. 179-229.
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