Hebrew Grammar, Without Points, A.
[Judaica]. Smith, John, A.M. A Hebrew Grammar, Without Points. Designed to facilitate the study of the Scriptures of the Old Testament, in the original; and the particularly adapted to the use of those who may not have instructors. Boston: Printed by David Carisle, for John West, 1803.
Slim 8vo.; rear endpapers foxed; darkened at hinges; contemporary marbled paper-covered boards, calf spine stamped in gilt, rubbed; a fine, unsophisticated copy.
First edition of, apparently, the third Hebrew Grammar published in America; preceded by Jonis Monis’s landmark Dickdook Lashon Aaukodesh: A Grammar of the Hebrew Tongue…Boston, 1735 and Stephan Sewall’s An Hebrew Grammar, Boston, 1763. Smith, a professor of languages at Dartmouth, intended his work to be used in classrooms and it is the shortest of the three.
Oddly, Smith’s might be, by far, the scarcest of the grammars. Both Monis’s and Sewall’s had a heft and grandeur lacking from this fragile work. Indeed, when A.S.W. Rosenbach published his ground-breaking An American Jewish Bibliography in 1926, he could devote at the time an entire leaf to reproducing the title-page of Smith’s work, and he located only one copy, at the American Antiquarian Society. At this remove, we don’t think this work is either as meritorious or rare as Rosenbach suggests, but it is an interesting example of how Hebrew was introduced in America.
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