A “White Spot” in History of Linguistic Thought: the Jewish Grammatical Tradition

The history of the Jewish grammatical tradition is represented very scantily in Russian linguistic historiography, because, due to objective causes, many Jewish linguistic sources, as well as publications by foreign colleagues on the topic, were inaccessible to Soviet and Russian scholars. The aim of the study is to fill this gap and justify the reasons why this tradition deserves much more attention from researchers than it has received so far. The material for the research consists of Russian academic publications and coursebooks on the history of linguistic thought. The study proves that the Jewish linguistic thought is an independent tradition, which is of interest to researchers. The authors also raise the issue of its insufficient coverage in Russian academic literature. The study uses the method of comparative study of various Russian academic publications on the history of linguistic thought correlating the obtained data with material from foreign works and with ancient and medieval Jewish sources. General results: 1) today about three quarters of the existing Russian academic literature on the topic do not even mention the Jewish grammatical tradition, and those works and coursebooks that do are based on incomplete and/or inaccurate data; 2) the Jewish linguistic thought is always presented in Russian linguistic historiography as depended on two other traditions: the Arabic one and the Christian Hebraistics. As a result, there could be made an incorrect assumption that the Jewish grammatical tradition per se is not relevant for study; 3) the Jewish grammatical tradition should be considered an independent page in the history of linguistic thought, without dissolving it into the Arabic tradition.