The Recent Study of Hebrew: A Survey of the Literature with Selected Bibliography (review)

Hebrew Studies 32 (1991) 180 Reviews THE RECENT STUDY OF HEBREW: A SURVEY OF THE LITERATURE WITH SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY. By Nahum M. Waldman. Bibliographica Judaica 10. Pp. xxi + 464. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College I Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1989. Cloth, $35.00. Dr. Waldman has done us a great service, one that very few researchers anywhere could have carried out. He has gone through thousands of scholarly books and articles dealing with the Hebrew language, which appeared mainly in the forty years up to 1986; and he briefly digests their findings in six long chapters: "Biblical Hebrew," "The Second Commonwealth and Rabbinic Hebrew," "The Masoretes," "Communal Traditions and Jewish Languages," "Medieval Grammarians and Poets," and "Modem and Contemporary Hebrew." The first three chapters overlap to a considerable extent. The book is much more than an annotated bibliography. Any Hebraist who reads through any of the chapters is sure to learn quite a few things about the language that he or she did not know before, and will have directions where to go for further study. I have profited substantially from all the chapters. Nearly all citations in the six chapters are just by the author's surname and the year of publication. Then come the full listings in a huge alphabetical bibliography (pp. 267-448), followed by an index of names (but not of titles). I find a few items in the bibliography that are, perhaps inadvertently , unmentioned elsewhere in the book. Waldman's evident purpose was not to give merely alphabetical and chronological listings, but to place each piece of scholarship in its proper context, so that we can perceive what it contributes to the advancement of knowledge. He does not claim to have included all or even a majority of the relevant publications over these forty years or so. Scholars who have published extensively will notice that some of their articles about Hebrew are not cited here. Unlike the more exhaustive bibliographical quarterly .,gC n'.,p (which arranges all the entries by subject but does not make it a policy to summarize or evaluate their contents beyond that), Waldman has limited his scope to a large but manageable selection so as to comment on each item. He deals at greater length with a few that he considers especially important. He also has the merit of mentioning many unpublished doctoral Hebrew Studies 32 (1991) 181 Reviews dissenations and even masters theses (one minor quirk is that he invariably leaves out the apostrophe in "masters"). Presumably to reduce the expense of printing, Waldman's book restricts Hebrew type to titles in the bibliography, mostly the works of Israelis. He resorts otherwise to transliterations according to the system of the American National Standards Institute. Although this misrepresents many sounds of both Biblical and Modem Hebrew, few readers will have trouble recognizing the Hebrew words in a disguise that has become familiar. Only in the treatment of phonetics-which is no minor topic for Waldman-does the absence of the original characters gravely obscure the argument (e.g., pp. 18-20); some of the authors used better transcriptions than the Institute's, and these deserve to circulate more widely. Apart from that, his discussion does justice to the most intricate and confusing subjects. Even where no reliable conclusion emerges, at least we gain from realizing the need for improved methods of analysis. Most of the fourth chapter deals with other languages: Aramaic, JudeoArabic , -Persian, -Italian, -French, Judezmo (or Ladino), and-above allYiddish . The inclusion of them is justified by their influence upon Hebrew, and vice versa; in any case I call it a bonus, not expected from the title The Recent Study of Hebrew. However, I think Waldman gives too much weight to Wexler's classification of "Jewish languages." There is now a fad among certain scholars to exaggerate the Jewish dialectal modifications of languages adopted from this or that Gentile environment. The Jewish dialects are very interesting in their own right, but none of them diverges from its Gentile source to the point of unintelligibility, as English has really and truly become a separate language from its relatives on the Continent. Waldman has been an active scholar for more than twenty...