Without a doubt one of my favorite books is a three-volume work called
Lingua Sacra written by
David Levi (1742-1801) and published beginning in 1785. It is part Hebrew grammar, part dictionary, and part Encylopedia. Levi possessed great learning, and
Lingua Sacra is unusual, but highly pleasing mixture of traditional Jewish learning and modern European scholarship (modern=18th century). For example, it includes copious quotations from works like the
Aruch and
Sefer Yuchasin, as well as the
Shulchan Aruch and Talmud. In the latter case, many of these quotations are quite possibly provided for the very first time in English translation. He also included transliterations in English of these passages - he calls them from the Gemara, not Talmud - which give an interesting guide to his pronunciation. It also includes a very handy 85-page English-Hebrew dictionary - as opposed to the lexicon proper, which is exhaustive of entries on the gamut of Biblical Hebrew, Aramaic as well as Rabbinic Hebrew, and ordered by Hebrew. What is special about this dictionary is that it is 18th century English. Thus, "
צבי" does not appear under "Deer" but under "Roe, Roebuck"; "
אף" is not "even" but "Yea,
adv."
Levi himself was a one-man whirlwind of literary activity - a lonely Jewish one in late 18th century England. He translated the Chumash, multivolume sets of
machzorim in the Sefardic and Ashkenazic rites. He also translated the
siddur, wrote
Lingua Sacra and a whole host of polemical pamphlets against Deism. He did this on the sidelines, as he was a hatmaker by trade.
I noticed that at the end of every letter in the lexicon part of
Lingua Sacra (which is most of it) there are little Hebrew couplets for each one. Since I am pretty sure no one has ever called attention to them, I conveniently collected them, and here they are:
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