The quarrel at Cordova: how Hebrew got a grammar

Begin with what did not exist. Before the tenth century Hebrew had no grammar—not in the sense that it was spoken wrongly, but that no one had described how it is built. Nor was there a dictionary covering the whole Bible. And without that, interpreting a verse by the meaning of its word hangs in the air: one cannot check what a word means if one does not know what root it comes from.

The impetus came from outside. The Arabic grammarians had by then taken their own language apart to its foundations, and the Jewish scholars of the caliphate saw that the same could be done with theirs. The first was Judah ibn Quraysh in the Maghreb, who compared Hebrew with Aramaic and Arabic.

The quarrel. At Cordova, under Hasdai ibn Shaprut, worked Menahem ben Saruq—who wrote the Mahberet, the first complete dictionary of the language of the Bible, and wrote it in Hebrew itself. Then Dunash ben Labrat came from the Maghreb, a student of Rav Saadia, and issued a critique of that dictionary—sharp, and dedicated to the same Hasdai. The patron turned at once: Menahem was thrown out of his house, by his own account on the Sabbath, beaten and imprisoned. The letter he wrote Hasdai survives; it contains no pleading but an argument that the patron had acted contrary to the law.

The substance of their quarrel was how the root is built, and in substance neither of them was right.

The solution. It was found by the beaten man's student. Judah Hayyuj showed that the Hebrew root always has three letters, and that the appearance of short roots arises because alef, he, vav and yod drop out in certain positions. It looks like a small thing and it is a turning point: from here the language could be described.

The code. A generation later Jonah ibn Janah, a physician who had left Cordova for Zaragoza after the Berber siege, wrote the Kitab al-Tanqih—a complete grammar and a dictionary of more than two thousand roots in one book. He stands on Hayyuj and corrects him—and for that quarrels with Samuel ha-Nagid, vizier of Granada, who held that Hayyuj was not to be corrected.

What came of it. All later interpretation of the Bible by the plain sense. Ibn Ezra, Radak, the whole Spanish school stand on these four. And, incidentally, versification: Dunash carried the Arabic metre into Hebrew verse, and after him Ibn Gabirol, Judah ha-Levi and Moses ibn Ezra all write so.

And one page that survived by chance: to Dunash's wife is ascribed a poem on his departure—the only known medieval Hebrew poem written by a woman. She has no name.