The Meaning of Words

Marcus Jastrow and the Making of Rabbinic Dictionaries

The fall of 2003 marked the 100th anniversary of the publication of the first major English-language dictionary of rabbinic literature: A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli, and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature … With an Index of Scriptural Quotations, compiled by Marcus Jastrow, a Philadelphia rabbi and a University of Pennsylvania honorary Doctor of Literature. Jastrow dedicated his dictionary to his wife Bertha Wolfsohn, with whom he had seven children, including their son Morris Jastrow, one of the founders of Religious Studies in the United States, professor of ancient Semitic languages and Penn’s University Librarian from 1898 until his death in 1921. Marcus Jastrow died in Germantown, Pennsylvania on October 13, 1903. This exhibit at Penn fittingly celebrates the anniversary of Jastrow’s dictionary and honors the centenary of its creator for his contributions to the distinguished tradition of rabbinic learning and lexicography.

Arthur Kiron, Curator of Judaica Collections

Seth Jerchower, Public Services Librarian, Center for Advanced Judaic Studies Library.

Introduction

How do we know what words mean? What makes a definition authoritative? The modern dictionary (1) – its carefully derived etymologies (2), its hierarchically enumerated primary and secondary meanings, and its abundant literary citations of scattered historical usage – has been painstakingly compiled over the course of many centuries to respond to if not altogether answer these questions. What is known has been formatted with singular purpose and exquisite attention to detail. What is unknown or uncertain has been conscientiously omitted or else retained with a qualifying question mark. The end product of each lexical compilation, the dictionary entry, amounts to an encoded art form of presentation, concision and scholarly precision. The exact meaning of words has a book of its own: the dictionary.

This exhibit surveys a special field of dictionary-making called rabbinic lexicography (3). Rabbinic lexicography as a sub-species of dictionary-making refers to a roughly one thousand year-old corpus of literature that treats the Aramaic paraphrases of the Hebrew Bible known as Targum (4), as well as a sea of Jewish lore and legal expositions called Midrash (5) and Talmud (6). Rabbinic lexicography in a general sense can refer to successive generations of scholars, Jews and non-Jews, who have tried to understand and interpret the lexicon of post-Biblical Jewish learning. Their efforts have been complicated by the occurrence in rabbinic literature of a variety of unfamiliar loan words (e.g., from Greek, Latin, Persian, Arabic, and even Akkadian) and by the fact that Biblical and post-Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic writings were often copied without vowels (neḳudot) and accents (te’amim). Consequently, even one careless breath could alter the meaning of a sacred word. Over time, inconsistencies arose between written (ḳetiv) and spoken (ḳeri) reading traditions and among various textual witnesses; the uncertain meaning of exotic words also became increasingly problematic. To redress this situation, rabbinic scholars created new tools of exegesis (7).

The effort to extricate the words of rabbis from their literary contexts, re-arrange them alphabetically as discrete terms, define their meanings historically, and refine their modes of visual presentation evolved over many centuries. From targumic paraphrases and glossed rabbinic pages to the modern rabbinic dictionary entry, rabbinic lexicography has a complex history. It also forms a significant if often overlooked chapter in the general history of scholarship. As Solomon Schechter, a scholar of rabbinics, once put it: “dictionaries belong to that class of literature which is mostly studied but rarely quoted.”

Glossary

(1) Dictionary. < ad. med. L. dictiōnārium or dictiōnārius (sc. liber) lit. ‘ a repertory of dictiōnēs, phrases or words’ (see DICTION) in F. dictionnaire (R. Estienne 1539), It. dizionario, Sp. diccionario.] 1. a. a book dealing with the individual words of a language (or certain specified classes of them), so as to set forth their orthography, pronunciation, signification, and use, their synonyms, derivation, and history, or at least some of these facts: for convenience of reference, the words are arranged in some stated order, now, in most languages, alphabetical.

(2) Etymology. > a. OF. ethimologie, mod.F. etymologie, ad. L. etymologia, a. Gr. ΄ετυμολογία, f. ΄ετυμολόγος: see ETYMOLOGE ] 1. a. The process of tracing out and describing the elements of a word with their modifications of form and sense.

(3) Lexicography. >f. Gr. λεξικο-LEXICON + - γραφία-GRAPHY.] 1. a. The writing or compilation of a lexicon or dictionary; ‘the art or practice of writing dictionaries’].

(4) Targum. > a. Chaldee [Aramaic] targūm interpretation, f. targēm to interpret. Each of several Aramaic translations, interpretations, or paraphrases of the various divisions of the Old Testament, made after the Babylonian captivity, at first preserved by oral transmission, and committed to writing from about 100 A.D. onwards;

(5) Midrash. > a. post-biblical Hebrew midrāš homiletic commentary on Scripture (in biblical Hebrew ‘study, exposition’) < Hebrew dāraš to seek, study, expound. 1. a. A Rabbinic homiletic commentary on a text from the Hebrew Scriptures, characterized by non-literal interpretation and legendary illustration. Also: the mode of exegesis characteristic of such a commentary;

(6) Talmud. > a. late Heb. tal′mūd instruction (c 130 C.E.), f. lā′mad to instruct, teach. So med.L., F., Ger., etc. talmud. From its primary sense of ‘teaching, instruction, learning’, the word was applied to the teaching or instruction contained in a biblical text, and to the body of traditional learning possessed by a particular Rabbi; but it came to be applied distinctively to the discussion, explanation, and illustration of the body of traditional law contained in the Mishnah, and so to the concrete collection of this teaching. The term was originally applied to the Gemara, of which two recensions exist, known respectively as the Jerusalem (or Palestinian) and the Babylonian Talmud; to the latter of which the name is in strictest use confined.

(7) Exegesis. > a. Gr.’ εξήγησις, f. ’ εξηγέε σθαι to interpret, f. ’ εξ- (see εχ- prefix²) + ‘ ηγέε σθαιto guide, lead. Cf. F. exégèse.] 1. Explanation, exposition (of a sentence, word, etc.); esp. the interpretation of Scripture or a Scriptural passage. b. An explanatory note, a gloss].

Source: Oxford English Dictionary. Online version: http://dictionary.oed.com , containing the complete text of the 20-volume Second Edition, first published in 1989, with its 3-volume Additions Series, published in 1993 (vols. 1 and 2) and 1997 (vol. 3).

Life & Legacy of Marcus Jastrow

MARCUS MORDECAI JASTROW was born on June 5, 1829 in the town of Rogasen, in the Grand Duchy of Posen (Gro�herzogtum Posen), an autonomous Prussian client state in eastern Prussia (Westpreussen), into a poly-lingual environment. He grew up in a Yiddish-speaking family, in a German-speaking province, in what formerly had been part of the Kingdom of Poland before its three partitions between 1772 and 1795. Initially home-schooled in Hebrew and rabbinic studies, Jastrow graduated from a Prussian Gymnasium (high school) in the provincial capital of Posen in 1852. He then left for Berlin, the cosmopolitan center of Prussian culture, where he attended Berlin University while also being tutored in traditional rabbinics. Jastrow next pursued graduate studies at the University of Halle and was awarded a Ph.D. in 1855, at the age of twenty-six. Two years later his rabbinical ordination (originally conferred in 1853 by Rabbi Moses Feilchenfeld), was confirmed and signed by Rabbi Wolf Landau, of Dresden. In 1858, on the eve of his thirtieth birthday, Jastrow moved to Warsaw to serve as a religious leader.

Now living in Poland’s capital, Jastrow devoted himself to the mastery of the Polish language. He also identified with and was active in the Polish independence movement. His involvement led to his arrest, imprisonment and eventual exile back to Prussia. In 1863, his decree of expulsion was revoked and Jastrow anticipated returning to his pulpit in Warsaw. With the outbreak of the Polish revolution that same year, however, his Prussian passport was abruptly canceled. Forced to earn a living elsewhere, Jastrow remained in Germany where he became the district rabbi of Worms. In 1866, at the age of thirty-seven, he accepted an invitation from Philadelphia to cross the Atlantic Ocean to become the officiating rabbi of that city’s Congregation Rodeph Shalom.

Jastrow introduced a new type of religious leadership and learning to America, one heavily influenced by the academic model of the German university, the spirit and methods of historical-critical inquiry, and the religious reform of Jewish theology and ritual observance. As David Werner Amram, a scholar of early Hebrew printing and friend, put it in a memorial address “[Jastrow’s] thought was a blend of Talmudism, classicism, and modernism.” Jastrow’s arrival meant that familiarity with the best of European scholarship would now enter the mainstream of American Jewish cultural life. Indeed, Jastrow’s three major scholarly contributions – his English-Aramaic rabbinic dictionary, his role in the creation of the first English-language Jewish Encyclopedia, his contribution to the first Jewish critical translation into English of the Hebrew Bible – as well as the scholarship of his son Morris, all bear witness to this revolutionary cultural and intellectual transfer.

The Jastrow Dictionary

Marcus Jastrow published the first edition of his dictionary in two volumes over the course of the last seventeen, illness-plagued years of his life. A prefatory note dated July 1886 printed in the first volume details the plan for the complete future edition. But this single volume, covering only the first half of the Hebrew alphabet, was published, as is evident from the title page, in 1895. It may be the case that fascicles of the dictionary appeared prior to 1895 as installments of a work in progress. The complete two-volume set, however, would not appear until 1903, shortly before Jastrow’s death. In his preface to the 1903 edition, Jastrow acknowledged his scholarly debts, most notably to Jacob Levy, Alexander Kohut and to other major figures of 19th century German-Jewish scholarship. Unmentioned is the fact that the format of the Jastrow dictionary entry ultimately derives not from Jewish sources, however, but from a seventeenth-century Christian Hebraist lexicographer, Johannes Buxtorf.

Section 2

fig. 1: The second, “authorisited” [sic!], edition of the Jastrow dictionary was published in 1926 in one volume. Subsequent re-printings appeared in both two and one volume editions ( eg., 1943, 1950, 1967 in two volumes; 1971, 1985, 1996 in one volume). The 1926 edition, meanwhile, introduced a Hebrew title page opposite the English-only original, as well as two new publishers, Shapiro Vallentine & Co., in London and Choreb in New York and Berlin , attesting in part to the wider distribution and popularity of the work. The essential format of the Jastrow dictionary entry remained unchanged.

fig. 2: Among the greatest monuments to modern Jewish scholarship is the first English-language Jewish Encyclopedia, published simultaneously in New York and London between 1901 and 1906. Marcus Jastrow served on the encyclopedia’s editorial board and supervised its “Department of Talmud”; his son Morris Jastrow, Jr., also was a member of the editorial board, overseeing the “Department of Bible.” Displayed here is the title page of the decorated deluxe edition printed in 1910, specially prepared as a family gift.

Section 3

This new translation of the Hebrew Bible was designed to provide the best modern Jewish critical Bible scholarship to an English-speaking audience and to revise previous English translations that reflected christological understandings of controversial passages. So, for example, the contested word ‘almah in Isaiah 7:14 is translated as “young woman” rather than the pre-figurative “virgin.” As the preface to the 1917 edition shows, Marcus Jastrow served on the original editorial committee and prepared a translation of the Book of Job for the Jewish Publication Society of America during the first stage of the project.

Section 4

fig. 1: Morris Jastrow, Professor of Semitic Languages and Librarian of the University of Pennsylvania from 1898 to 1919, authored numerous works on Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies and helped pioneer the critical study of religion in the American university setting. Jastrow’s new translation of the Book of Job, published in 1920, is dedicated to Edgar Fahs Smith, Provost of the University of Pennsylvania and a professor of Chemistry. Curiously, Jastrow makes no mention of his father’s efforts twenty years earlier to translate the same Biblical book.

Section 5

fig. 1: Aside from his teaching, research and administrative responsibilities at Penn, Morris Jastrow also served as the co-editor, with Richard J. H. Gottheil, Columbia University ’s first professor of Jewish Studies, of a “Semitic Studies Series.” Published in this series is a glossary of words found in ancient inscriptions recovered from the extraordinary Royal Library established by Ashurbanapal, ruler of Assyria, during the 7th century B.C.E.. In his introduction to this volume, Morris Jastrow explains the lexicographical design of the glossary – how, for example, it directs the reader from each entry to the line and column number in which the word appears in the original text. Similarly, Jastrow explains that the list of ideographs displayed here (these original signs do not appear in the glossary) is arranged numerically: each number corresponds to superscripted numbers assigned to ideographs in the body of the hand-copied texts.

Advent of Rabbinic Lexicography

A systematic approach to Hebrew lexicography appears to begin sometime in the 8th century C.E. These efforts were by no means unprecedented. The Hebrew Bible itself contains traditions about the origins of specific Hebrew words and names. Early rabbinic literature—Mishnah, Tosefta, Gemarah, and Midrash—often employs etymological and grammatical interpretations of individual words as a means to achieve exegetical ends. For the Jews, the Hebrew consonants of the Bible embodied the fundamental elements of creation whose order—the Aleph-Bet (alphabet)—was designed by God. In the 7th century, a corpus devoted to the textual stabilization and authoritative transmission of the divine letters of the Hebrew Bible, the Masorah (from the Hebrew מסר, masar “to transmit, hand down”), began to appear. The Masoretes (the scholars who tried to determine the written text of the Hebrew Bible) intensively studied the formation and frequency of occurrence of the words of their received sacred writings. Jewish masoretic activity grew during the same period that Islamic scholars of Arabic and Christian scholars of Syriac (Christian Aramaic) began to investigate and classify their own respective languages. From the 7th-9th centuries, thus, the idea of the dictionary emerges as a systematic classification of the biblical lexicon into an organized inventory for consultation.

During the time of the masoretes, two sects of Judaism were consolidating. Rabbanite Jews followed the text of the Bible (Torah she-bi-khtav, the written tradition) and recognized the authority of orally transmitted traditions of interpretation (Torah she-be-‘al peh) by rabbis whose teachings were eventually collected and written down in two different recensions of what was called Talmud. About 760 C.E., the heads of the Jewish Academies in Babylonia elected Hananiah ben David exilarch, the head of Babylonian diasporic Jewry. Hananiah, however, was second in the line of succession. His older brother Anan ben David, first in line, rebelled against the academies and the proponents of the Talmud, and delclared himself anti-exilarch. Anan rejected the legitimacy of the rabbanite traditions of interpretation and instead claimed the Bible, not the rabbis and their schools, as the authoritative voice of tradition. Anan’s followers were known as Karaites (from the Hebrew קרא ḳara —“ to call out or read,” i.e., the Bible). Both Karaites and Rabbanites believed in the sacred authority of the Hebrew Bible and both sects perpetuated the masoretic tradition. Rabbanites, however, possessed an additional, and immense, literary corpus repudiated by the Karaites. The Geonim (the heads of the rabbanite academies of Babylonia) Sa‘adiah ben Joseph al-Fayyumi (882-942), and Ḥai ben Sherira (939–1038) composed the first rabbinic lexicons in the 9th and 10th centuries. Much of the evidence for this period’s activity, some of which is on display here, is known today from the recovery of medieval texts stored—disposed of—in the attic of one synagogue in Fustat, the old city of Cairo. This remarkable storehold (genizah) of fragmentary documents is known as the Cairo Genizah.

Section 1

fig. 1: This Genizah fragment is from a commentary on a piyyut, or liturgical poem, in which thirteen difficult and rare words are used. The commentator provides definitions in Arabic (the vernacular of Jews living under medieval Islam) and compares their meanings with Hebrew biblical citations. fig. 1: This Genizah fragment is from a commentary on a piyyut, or liturgical poem, in which thirteen difficult and rare words are used. The commentator provides definitions in Arabic (the vernacular of Jews living under medieval Islam) and compares their meanings with Hebrew biblical citations. fig. 2: This fragment is part of a bilingual glossary of the Bible, similar to the Kitāb Jāmi al-Alfās (“Book of a collection of words”) compiled by the Moroccan Karaite David ben Abraham al-Fasi (“one from the city of Fez”) in the second half of the 10th century. Alfasi draws on both Karaite and Rabbanite authors. While he directly cites the Karaites by their proper names, al-Fasi refers only indirectly to rabbinic sources, citing the rabbis not by name, but by their places of origin. fig. 3: The Jewish translations of the Hebrew Bible into Aramaic, or Targum, served dual purposes: they provided a relatively equivalent paraphrase of the text in the contemporary Jewish (non-Hebrew) vernacular, and they simultaneously explained and elucidated the meaning of the text to the common reader. Targum functioned, in brief, as much as a commentary as a translation. The Arabic tafsir had the same tasks. Its root (فسر F-S-R) IS the same as that of the Hebrew Pesher (פשר P-Š-R), which in the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls refers to a short running commentary that also serves as an explanation. The tafsir in this fragment contains definitions of words and terms that rarely occur in the Mishnah, and therefore can only represent an early form of rabbinic lexicographic interpretation. fig. 4: Sa‘adiah (Fayum, Egypt 882-Sura, Persia 942), served as Gaon (“leader”) of the rabbinic academy of Sura from 928 until his death, and was the first Jew called upon from outside Babylonia/Persia to serve in that capacity. One of the great rabbinic authorities of all time, whose vast knowledge encompassed Greek and Arabic scholarship, he was also one of the earliest rabbinic lexicographers—certainly the earliest whose works have survived to the present day (an earlier Gaon, Tsemah ben Paltoi [872-890] is also known to have prepared a dictionary, but nothing of the work has survived). Sa‘adiah was active in the dual role of translator and commentator. His dictionary, the ’Egron, literally “collection [of words]”, is his earliest known work, composed when the author was twenty. It contains Biblical Hebrew terms as well as obscure and difficult words found in rabbinic literature. The work is arranged in alphabetical order according to root (i.e., the base stem of the word), which Sa‘adiah believed could consist of one to five consonants. fig. 5: Sa‘adiah’s works traveled far and quickly. Within his own lifetime his Egron reached the eastern shores of Al-Andalus—Islamic Spain. Ḥasdai ibn Shaprut (915-ca. 990), one of the most influential and powerful Jewish figures of his generation, was then serving as a high official to the court of Andalusian Cordova. Among his circle was Menaḥem ibn Saruq (ca. Tolosa 910-Cordova ca. 970). Ibn Saruq’s lexicon, entitled Maḥberet (“notebook”), was modeled after Sa‘adiah’s Egron, classifying words according to their consonantal root. However, unlike the Egron, the Maḥberet concentrates only on biblical Hebrew and Aramaic (“Chaldaic”), albeit according to rabbinic interpretation. On display is the first printed edition of Menaḥem’s lexicon. Prior to its publication the Maḥberet was known only through citations by medieval commentators such as Rashi.