הרב מנחם בן סרוק

Rav Menachem ben Yaakov ibn Saruk (c. 4680/920–c. 4730/970), known in English works as Menahem ben Saruq, was the Hebrew grammarian and lexicographer of the golden age in Spain and the author of the Machberet, the first Hebrew-Hebrew dictionary of the language of Tanach. He was born in Tortosa in the northeast of Spain into a family of merchants who were also talmidei chachamim, occupied with the Hebrew tongue and with piyut. His name reached Yitzchak ibn Shaprut, nagid of the Jews of Cordoba, who brought him and his household south to serve as his secretary; when his patron was niftar Menachem eulogized him and returned to Tortosa and to trade, until Yitzchak’s son Chasdai, nagid in his turn, called him back to Cordoba.

Under Chasdai he drafted the letter to Yosef, king of the Kuzarim, weaving his own name into the acrostic of the opening poem after his patron’s. Around 950–960 he published the Machberet, a lexicon of the language of Tanach and of its Aramaic, arranged by roots. The dictionaries before it — the Egron of Rav Saadia Gaon and the Risala of Rav Yehuda ibn Kuraish — were written in Judeo-Arabic; Menachem wrote in Hebrew, and that is what carried his work into the communities outside the Arabic-speaking lands. Holding that the language was chosen by Hashem and that not one letter of the text may be shifted, he refused to explain hard words by exchanging or transposing letters, or by comparison with Arabic, and he reckoned many roots as being of two letters or even one.

Dunash ben Labrat wrote a book of hasagot against the Machberet, charging that some of its explanations lean toward Karaite readings. When these reached Chasdai his favor turned: messengers were sent who burned Menachem’s house on Shabbat itself, and he was driven out of the city. In a letter of poetic protest to Chasdai — the source of most of what is known of his life — he wrote that he did not understand of what he had been accused, and he was niftar not long afterward. His talmidim Yitzchak ben Kaprun, Yitzchak ibn Gikatilla and Yehuda ben David answered Dunash in the Teshuvot Talmidei Menachem; that Yehuda ben David is Chayuj, who worked out the rule of the three-letter root followed to this day, while Yitzchak ibn Gikatilla, of the chachamim of Lucena, was the rebbi of Rav Yonah ibn Janach.

Rashi cites the Machberet often and took over much of Menachem’s grammatical approach, and Rabbeinu Tam took up his cause and wrote his Hachra’ot in Menachem’s defense against Dunash. The work has come down in nineteen manuscripts and some twenty genizah fragments, and has been printed in three scholarly editions, the last by Aharon Maman and Chananel Mirsky in 2024. A square in Tortosa, the town of his birth, carries his name.