Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

December 9, 2019

North America’s First Hebrew Textbook, and the Italian Jewish Convert to Christianity Who Wrote It

Dickdook with Judah Monis.

Devoted as they were to the unmediated reading of the Bible, and of the Old Testament in particular, many Puritans of 17th- and 18th-century New England were interested in learning Hebrew, which for a time became a standard subject of study at both Harvard and Yale. Rachel Wamsley describes the man who made possible the Hebraist aspirations of many early Americans, and his Dickdook Leshon Gnebreet: A Grammar of the Hebrew Tongue [in modern transliteration, Dikduk l’shon ivrit], the first of its kind produced in the colonies:

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