Sometime in the 10th century, a gifted Jewish poet named Dunash ibn Labrat came to Cordoba from North Africa, after some years of study in Baghdad. He soon became embroiled in a fierce controversy over the structure of Hebrew roots with another prominent Hebrew poet and scholar, Menachem ben Saruk. Tamar Marvin tells their stories, and explains why this abstruse dispute was taken so seriously by their contemporaries:
Hebrew and Arabic are cognate languages. Arabic, however, was considered by the dominant Muslim culture to be the superior of all languages, uniquely pure and beautiful as it was used in the Quran. [Moreover], there was a fierce contest over the precise transmission of the biblical Hebrew corpus unfolding between Karaite and rabbinic Jews. [The former sect denied the authority of the Talmud and rabbinic tradition.] And if that weren’t enough, the actual meanings of biblical words had very real halakhic and cultural implications.
The rise of a literature of Hebrew grammar grew out of the achievements of the Masoretes [biblical scribes] in the 9th and 10th centuries and their elaborate system of encoding grammatical information into the Masoretic markings, including vowel points and cantillation marks. The first Hebrew dictionary and the first systemic linguistic treatise both came from the pen of [the Baghdad-based sage] Saadya Gaon. After him, medieval Hebrew linguistics flowered for a relatively brief time in Muslim Spain before being transmitted, though little transformed, into Hebrew-literate Christian Europe. The achievements of the Sephardi grammarians continue to reverberate in modern Hebrew.
Menachem ben Saruk holds the distinction of writing the first Hebrew-Hebrew dictionary: that is, one in which the definitions are given in Hebrew, as opposed to Arabic, like his colleagues’ offerings. . . . Dunash attacked Menachem for wrongful interpretations of words which, Dunash maintained, could lead people to mistakes in halakhic observance and even to heresy. The bitterness of the accusations has led to the question of whether Dunash was implicitly calling out Menachem as a Karaite.
Read more on Stories from Jewish History: https://trmarvin.substack.com/p/the-sefardi-grammarians-and-their-484