(Samuel Sewall). An Hebrew Grammar.

(AMERICAN JUDAICA).

R. and S. Draper

Boston

1763

FIRST EDITION. Contemporary notations.

Goldman 172; not in Singerman.

One of just two Hebrew grammars printed in the Americas before the nineteenth century. Three years earlier, the 26 year-old Sewall, considered the ablest American classical scholar of his day, had succeeded the 77 year-old Judah Monis. Sewall’s grammar was printed “for the Honorable and Reverend, the President and Fellows of Harvard-College. For the Puritans who founded Harvard in 1636, Hebrew was the most essential of all subjects and was a course requirement. However “when Harvard students mounted a demonstration against compulsory Hebrew classes in 1807, they not only gathered and burned all the Hebrew grammars at the College, but moved on to the University printing office where they tried to destroy all the fonts of Hebrew type” (see R. Gross and M. Kelley, History of the Book in America (2010). For more on Hebrew study in Colonial America, see S. Goldman (ed.), Hebrew and the Bible in America (1993), especially T. Siegal’s contribution, “Professor Stephen Sewall and the Transformation of Hebrew at Harvard.”