(Samuel Sewall). An Hebrew Grammar.

(AMERICAN JUDAICA).

R. and S. Draper, for the Honorable and Reverend the President and Fellows of Harvard-College

Boston

1763

Rosenbach 43 (illus.); Goldman 172.

One of just two Hebrew grammars printed in the Americas prior to the nineteenth century. Stephen Sewall (1734-1804) was professor of Hebrew at Harvard and one of the leading Oriental scholars of his day. He succeeded Judah Monis as instructor in Hebrew at Harvard in 1761, a position Sewall held for more than twenty years. - This is the second Hebrew grammar produced in America, preceded only by Monis’s Hebrew grammar published in 1735. For more on Hebrew studies 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.”