Hebrew Grammar, An…
The Second American Hebrew Grammar
In Original Boards
[Judaica]. Sewall, Stephen. An Hebrew Grammar…and containing a specimen of the whole Hebrew language: a sketch of the Hebrew poetry, as retrieved by Bishop Hare. Boston: Printed by R. and S. Draper for the President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1763.
12mo.; complete with half-title; contemporary calf-backed marbled boards, portion of paper cover worn away. In a quarter-morocco slipcase.
First edition of the second American Hebrew grammar, preceded only by Judah Monis’s landmark Dickdook Lashon Aaukodesh: A Grammar of the Hebrew Tongue…printed in Boston nearly thirty years earlier. Although this is the only 18th century edition of Sewall’s work—the Hebrew types used in this book were destroyed by a fire in 1764—several new editions appeared in the 19th century. Rosenbach 43 (illustrated). Evans 9514.
Stephen Sewall (1734-1804), forced to leave school for carpentry in his youth, prepared himself to attend Harvard and went on to become the “finest classical scholar and the most learned in Hebrew and oriental languages” that that institution had produced in the 18th century (DAB). Upon graduating in 1761, having paid his way by teaching grammar school, Sewall succeeded Judah Monis as Harvard’s instructor of Hebrew, and supplanted Monis’s outdated text with his own in 1763. This copy bears some notes by one of Sewall’s students at Harvard in 1778, Brown Emerson, who has ascribed authorship of the volume to Sewall on the title page.
Sewall’s career at Harvard spanned over two decades, during which he was briefly librarian of the college library and was the first incumbent of the newly established Hancock professorship of Hebrew and other Oriental languages—in that capacity, he proposed that the Harvard administration cease compelling students to write Classical verse unless they harbored a particular penchant for the task, though he himself, a skilled linguist, had composed several odes in both Latin and Greek. Equally active in science and politics, Sewall was Cambridge’s Whig representative in the General Court in 1777, and as one of the 62 original members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences he published a paper on “Magnetical Observations, Made at Cambridge” in their first volume of Memoirs of the American Academy…in 1785. His manifold and diverse achievements earned Sewall, like other Harvard professors, occasional grants from the General Court of Massachusetts to supplement his meager salary.
In the fall of 1785, Sewall was relieved of his duties at Harvard. Physical ailments and emotional devastation—both his wife and infant had recently died—had rendered him virtually useless to the university during the previous several years and, as “there seemed to be no likelihood of his recovery, he was removed from his professorship by the concurring vote of the two governing boards of the college, but, ‘in consideration of his long and faithful services,” he was allowed by them thirty pounds” (DAB). Sewall survived nearly 20 years “of retired life and gradual decay,” and died in Cambridge. In his curtailed lifetime of intellectual inquiry and academic service, he published five books; An Hebrew Grammar was the first of these. The others included two studies in Latin, and two investigations of scriptural accounts.
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