Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/98

 92 Hebrew Words in Gryphius Horribilicribrifax THE HEBREW WORDS IN GRYPHIUS ' HORRIBILICRIBRIFAX Perhaps the most interesting scene, from the purely philological point of view, in Andreas Gryphius' " Scherzspiel, " the "Horribili- cribrifax, " written between 1648 and 1650, 1 is that between Rabbi Isaschar and Frau Antonia, with which the third act is concluded. As is to be expected, the Jewish rabbi and money-lender, Isaschar, is made to speak a sort of Judaeo-German, of a higher order, to be sure, in which there is a smattering of no small number of terms either directly borrowed or adapted in a Germanized form from the Hebrew. The source of Gryphius' Hebrew knowledge is not far to seek; for during his schooling in Fraustadt, 2 he received the foundations for the vast classical erudition which he displays in his writings erudition which included a familiarity not only with Latin and Greek, but also with Hebrew, Chaldaean, Polish, and Swedish. It is the purpose of this brief paper to explain each of the Hebrew terms or derivatives which occur in the scene in ques- tion, with conjectures as to a few obscure, hitherto unexplained, expressions. For the sake of convenience, the terms are here numbered successively. 1) Madda }?"]>-" knowledge" is a late Old Testament noun from the root "yada" "to know" (JH^). It occurs in Second Chronicles 1,12. 2) Missekenim ethbonan pl3fiN D^plD "I am wiser than old men. " This is a direct quotation from Psalms 1 19, 100. 3) Lo jaden velo jabinu. The second of these four words has been improperly edited (Tittmann, in his edition of the play for his "Dramatische Dichtungen von Andreas Gryphius," published as volume 4 of Goedeke and Tittmann's "Deutsche Dichter des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts, " and which I had before me in the pre- paration of this paper, admits, in his notes to this scene, that some 1 Palm, in his article on Gryphius in the "Allgemeine Deutsche Biographic/ ' X 78, states that the play was at least planned in this period, and written either during these two years or shortly after 1650. For unknown reasons, the comedy was not published until 1663. 2 In 1631, after the death of both of his parents, Gryphius had been sent by a paternal uncle to the school of his native city, Glogau, where he remained until a destructive conflagration forced him, along with many others, to flee for their lives. It was then that he went to Fraustadt, a city at that time part of Poland, where it is very likely that he came into contact with Polish Jews (Poland was the most important center of Jewry in the world during the sixteenth and seventh centuries.)