Landau, J: Study of Hebrew, Its Past and Future

Excerpt from The Study of Hebrew, Its Past and Future: An Inaugural Lecture

Christian; for Hebrew is, as I am going to prove in the course of this lecture, a language which ought to be studied with equal zeal and zest by every cultured person. I shall, therefore, treat my subject to-night not from an exclusively Jewish but from a general literary and historical point of View.

I need fear no contradiction when I apodictically state that the Bible today is the moral and Spiritual possession of the whole civilised human race, and to a certain extent. Even of its half-civilised members. For this we undoubtedly have to thank the great revolution headed by Martin Luther and the great British and American Bible societies. It is true that sporadic attempts at Bible translations had been made at different periods during the Middle Ages. We know of. A complete French translation which dates from the middle of the thirteenth century, and of John Huss's vernacular translation which he produced at great per sonal sacrifice for his followers. But those translations were doomed to oblivion. They shared the tragic fate of their authors. The dictum of the Catholic Church prevailed, thatthe mysteries of the Bible ought to be kept from the people and disclosed only to the initiated clergy. Luther's translation was the first to force its way into the cottages of the poor as well as into the palaces of princes. And he was soon followed by others, who were encouraged by his example and suc cess, a success which was due in no small measure to Gutenberg's invention, to the aid of the printing press, which helped to distribute those translations in large numbers.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.