Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/281

the medium of teaching and literature. Throughout Hebrew had retained its place as a liturgical language; there had been synagogue liturgies in Greek, but those belonged to a much earlier period. The revival of Hebrew produced a neo-Hebrew which does not preserve a line of historical continuity with the ancient Hebrew. For some time Hebrew had been a dead language in the East, and it had never spread as a living speech to the West. But this artificial revival, which has more than one parallel in history, was not so difficult a feat as it sounds at first. The vernacular speech of the Spanish Jew was Arabic, and philologically Arabic is very nearly a dialect if not of Arabic, yet at least of a proto-Arabic, which shows many close parallels with Hebrew. Of course at that time the true philological relations were not understood: influenced by theological prepossessions the Jew rather tended to regard Arabic as a derivative of Hebrew; yet the kinship was obvious, and in the early translations made from Arabic to Hebrew it is not uncommon to find that most of the words are translated in such a way that the same root-form is used as in the original. Secondly, it was not only the case that Hebrew "came easily" to those who knew Arabic, but there had been serious philological studies by Jehudh Chayyug, David Kimchi, and others which had emphasized this close kinship, and had indeed adapted all the rules of Arabic grammar to the use of Hebrew; it was therefore possible to compose and even to speak a tolerable Hebrew by the con-