ר' משה קמחי

Rav Moshe Kimchi (c. 4887/1127 – c. 4950/1190), known by the acronym the Ramak and appearing in English works as Moses Kimhi, was a grammarian, a commentator on Tanach and a paytan. He was the eldest son of Rav Yosef Kimchi and the elder brother of Rav David Kimchi, the Radak. He was born in Spain and lived in Provence in the south of France, a region drawn into the orbit of Sefardic Jewry. After his father’s passing he raised his younger brother David and taught him, and it was he who set David on the path of commentary he would follow.

Like his father he explained Tanach along the lines of the peshat, resting on grammar and drawing at times on the philosophy of his day; the commentaries that reached us are those on Mishlei, Iyov, Ezra and Nechemiah. In dikduk he wrote Sechel Tov and, above all, Mahalach Shevilei HaDaat, whose opening words spell out his name — a primer on the foundations of grammar and the conjugation of the verb.

In theory the Ramak built on Judah ben David Chayuj (an 11th-century pioneer of Hebrew linguistics) and those who came after him: the three-letter root, the division between whole and weak roots, the sorting of the verb by person, tense, gender and number. His originality lay in how he taught. Where earlier grammarians summed up the rules of conjugation in formulated statements, he laid out worked paradigms arranged separately by gizrah, and that became the standard way of teaching the inflection of the verb and the noun. The order of the binyanim he fixed — kal, nifal, piel, pual, hifil, hufal and hitpael — is the order in use to this day, as is his choice of a single model root for the noun patterns. These points were absorbed into the Michlol of his younger brother the Radak and spread further from there. Mahalach was the first Hebrew grammar ever printed, at Mantua in 5248/1488, went through at least twenty editions, and in the first half of the sixteenth century served as the favored handbook for the study of Hebrew among scholars outside the Jewish world.