Hebrewist

English

Etymology

Hebrew +‎ -ist

Noun

Hebrewist (plural Hebrewists)

1. A scholar who is expert in the Hebrew language.
   • 1856, William Grant, A Review of two sermons on the mode of Christian Baptism, page 13:

     According to Gerenius, the world renowned Hebrewist and Lexicographer, the word translated sprinkle, signifies “to spout up,” and then to sprinkle, as the result.

   • 1870, Edward Barrass, A Gallery of Distinguished Men, page 91:

     Ho was among, the best of the Hebrewists, and unequalled in his knowledge of pure theology, a skilful Biblical critic, and well versed in the sacred lore — ancient, scholastic, and modern.

   • 1940, Lee Max Friedman, Rabbi Haim Isaac Carigal:

     Stiles, the ardent Hebrewist, as President of Yale, became a potent propagandist for Hebrew study and learning.

   • 2000, Sanford F. Schram, After Welfare: The Culture of Postindustrial Social Policy, page 226:

     For an explication of the ethic of alterity as offered by the Hebrewist, philosopher, and literary theorist Emmanuel Levinas, see Shapiro, Violent Cartographies, pp. 171–209.

2. A member or descendant of a Semitic people claiming descent from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; Hebrew.
   • 1848, Melbourne Punch, page 99:

     He granted her request at once, and enfranchised the bonded Hebrewists.

   • 1918, The Dial - Volume 65, page 620:

     The battle between the Hebrewists and the Yiddishists goes merrily on, and ink flows as freely in the columns as blood but lately did on the battle fields of Europe.

   • 2013, Tudor Parfitt, Black Jews in Africa and the Americas, page 112:

     In addition to these more-or-less normative Jews, there are two further categories: the “Hebrewists,” who view themselves as pre-Talmudic Jews on the grounds that their ancestors maintained Hebraic traditions, and the “Sabbatherians,” who number more than two million and who practice a kind of Judaism while including Christian elements.

Adjective

Hebrewist (comparative more Hebrewist, superlative most Hebrewist)

1. Pertaining to the Hebrew people, language, or culture.
   • 1904, Frederick Joseph Spencer, Sunday the Seventh Day:

     We know that even among the Hebrewist tribes that when thier Temple was captured by Pompey B.C. 63, that that Sabbath was afterwards observed as a great fast day.

   • 2000, The Middle East, Abstracts and Index - Volume 25, Part 1, page 568:

     Israeli Druze intellectuals do, as the end-product of the Hebrewist system, attempt the role of observers — and hopefully mediators — in the no-man's land between the Jewish-Hebrew and Sunni-centered Palestinian peoples

   • 2004, Regev Motti, Motti Regev, Edwin Seroussi, Popular Music and National Culture in Israel, page 20:

     Viewed by the Hebrewist cultural establishment through its European “orientalist” prism (in Said's 1978 connotation), oriental Jews were perceived as premodern and “primitive.”

   • 2014, Assaf Shelleg, Jewish Contiguities and the Soundtrack of Israeli History, page 94:

     Yet it was these figures who challenged Hebrewist paradigms (and in turn a nationally committed musical historiography) by syncretizing modernist importations with Palestine's non-Western (and mostly Jewish) soundscapes.