Yehuda ibn Quraysh יְהוּדָה אִבְּן קֻרַיְשׁ

Of Tāhert (today's Tiaret in Algeria), tenth century. His Risāla (רסאלה, "Letter") is an Arabic epistle addressed to the Jewish community of Fes, rebuking them for having stopped the public reading of the Targum: the Aramaic versions, he says, are indispensable for understanding the many Aramaisms in the Hebrew text of Scripture.

Out of that pastoral premise grows something far larger. To prove the necessity of Aramaic, Ibn Quraysh constructs the first systematic comparative Semitic philology: Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic descend from a common source and obey the same phonological laws. He compares roots, demonstrates regular consonantal correspondences, and explains obscure passages of Scripture through Arabic and Aramaic—doing precisely what European scholarship would begin to do eight centuries later.

A general point about the Maghreb belongs here. The medieval Jewish learning of North Africa rarely enters the general narrative: there is an unbroken line from Qayrawān and Fes to Spain, and Isaac Alfasi, who left Fes for Lucena, is its best-known but not its only segment. Ibn Quraysh is another: the linguistics out of which the Spanish school of grammarians grew.

The first edition of the Risāla was by J. J. L. Bargès and D. B. Goldberg, Paris, 1857.