Abstract

Spinoza's Compendium of Hebrew Grammar has not been well served by scholarship. Serious studies of it are few and far between, and it has generally been ignored by philosophers, including seasoned Spinoza scholars. In fact, I am willing to bet that most people would be surprised to learn that Spinoza wrote a Hebrew grammar.Even Spinoza's closest friends did not know what to make of this work, composed most likely in the early 1670s, just after the publication of the Theological-Political Treatise. When they put together Latin and Dutch editions of his unpublished writings soon after his death in 1677, the inclusion of the Compendium was apparently an afterthought—it...