Alexander Sperber

Alexander Sperber was born in what was then the Austrian city of Czernowitz in 1897.  As a child, he learned to write German in Hebrew characters, expressing the umlauts precisely by means of diacritical modifications. He received a Gymnasium education in Vienna. In Vienna, too, he pursued learning from 1916 to 1918 at the University and at the Theological Seminary; this was continued from 1919 to 1922 at the University and at the Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin. He earned a Ph.D. at the University of Bonn in 1924. From 1925 to 1928 he resided in England for the purpose of copying manuscripts at English libraries. He left Germany in the same year in which Hitler attained power, 1933.  After a brief sojourn in British Mandate Palestine, he emigrated to the United States in 1934. His scholarly activities in the United States were centered at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York and the Dropsie College of Hebrew and Cognate Learning in Philadelphia.  In 1965 he made aliyah, and he died in Israel in 1970. His scholarly output includes editing of the Aramaic Targums and several works on the history of Biblical Hebrew grammar. On the latter subject, he wrote two books: A Grammar of Masoretic Hebrew, a General Introduction to the Pre Masoretic Bible (1959), and A Historical Grammar of Biblical Hebrew—A Presentation of Problems with Suggestions to Their Solution (1966). Both of those books are long out of print.

These three volumes contain the essays in the academic literature which Sperber later summarized in those books. In this third volume appear the following:

• Problems of the Masora (1943)

• Biblical Exegesis: Prolegomena to a Commentary and Dictionary to the Bible (1945)

• Biblical Hebrew (1948)