How Much Arabic Did Joseph Kaspi Know?

Cyril Aslanov How Much Arabie Did Joseph Kaspi Know? It has been said that Joseph Kaspi had but scant knowledge of Arabic.1 An examination of Kaspi's lexicographic work Sarsot ha-kesef and some of his Bible commentaries, however, shows that this prolific author , who flourished in Provence in the first half of the fourteenth century (ca. 1280-1347) had a sound command of Arabic. He was not only a reader of Arabic philosophy in the original (al-Ghazâlï and Averroes). Even when he was reading a Hebrew translation of a work originally written in Arabic, he seems to have kept the Arabic original in sight, as indicated by his criticism of the translation of the Guide of the Perplexed.2 Kaspi also used his knowledge of Arabic language in a creative way in order to justify some of his Hebrew etymologies. Although Judeo-Arabic grammarians and lexicographers had already applied this comparative method,3 Kaspi contributed some new examples Colette Sirat, La philosophie juive au moyen âge (Paris: C.N.R.S, 1983), p. 356. Shlomo Pines, "Joseph Ibn Kaspi's and Spinoza's Opinions on the Probability of a Restoration of the Jewish States" (Heb.), Iyyun 14 (1963): 292-294. On the pioneers of the comparison between Hebrew and Arabic, see Pinchas Wechter, Ibn Barun's Arabic Works on Hebrew Grammar and Lexicography (Philadelphia: Dropsie College, 1964); René Samuel Sirat, "La comparaison linguistique entre Aleph 2 (2002)259 of his own. We should also note that several forms or words mentioned by him come from vernacular Arabic. Lastly, even where Kaspi does not explicitly mention an Arabic word, his analysis of expressive reduplication on a phonetic, morphological, and syntactic level is obviously marked by a deep knowledge of the Arabic language and metalanguage. We shall illustrate each of these aspects of Kaspi's command of Arabic on the basis of his major lexicographic treatise Sarsot ha-Kesef according to its best manuscript, MS Paris BN Hébr. 1244. This will, I hope, refute the accepted opinion that Kaspi worked only on second-hand Arabic material. Kaspi's Concern for Etymology Like earlier Judeo-Arabic grammarians, Kaspi was aware of the genetic kinship between Hebrew and Arabic. In Sarsot ha-kesef4 he asserts that "Arabic is of the same kind as Hebrew" (nnyn Jion ??p ?-???). Moreover, in his commentary, Misneh kesef5 Kaspi compares the kinship between Hebrew and Arabic to that between Provençal (Kaspi's vernacular) and French.6 The relationship between the two languages allows Kaspi to use Arabic to help reconstruct the motivation of the primeval convention on which the Hebrew language is based. Although most of his parallels between Hebrew and Arabic are highly fanciful, the fact that he resorted to Arabic to explain obscure Hebrew etymologies suggests that Arabic was almost more available to him than was Hebrew itself. Recall that Kaspi considers Hebrew to be "a lost language," because there was no way to know how it was spoken in the biblical age.7 Follow this logic, Arabic, spoken in his time by millions of Muslims, Jews, and Christians, was better known than Hebrew, making it suitable for the reconstruction of forgotten meanings of the sacred tongue. His perception of Hebrew through the lens of Arabic is most obvious in his 260 Cyril Asiano ? glosses of difficult words of the Bible. Thus, in Sarsot ha-kesef and in the commentary cAsarah kelei kesef? the rare word manon 'storerooms'10 is glossed first as ptan, which represents the singular UjLa mahzin 'storeroom' (or perhaps the plural (jjLi-? mahàzïn), and then as rMKtaVK, i.e., reveals that, for Kaspi, Hebrew was the glossed lemma (the explicandum) and Arabic the glossing language (the explicans). When he explained Hebrew by means of Arabic, Kaspi did not necessarily quote his Judeo-Arabic predecessors. Some of the etymologies he proposes are not attested before him. Thus, the Hebrew word nnn 'district'11 is analyzed as a combination of the morphemic letter -n with a root deduced from the Arabic word Jy^- hawz 'basin'. This ability to recognize the morphological boundary between semanteme and morpheme in an Arabic word (also displayed by the alternation between the...