Menahem ben Saruq

Menahem ben Saruq (c. 920 to 970) left Tortosa, in northeastern Spain, for Córdoba near the mid-tenth century, becoming Hasdai's private secretary. He wrote Hasdai's letter to the ruler of the Khazars, but later fell out of favor and composed a long poem lamenting the abuse he had suffered.1

One of Menahem's greatest achievements was the Mahberet ('notebook'), a pioneering Hebrew dictionary that defined biblical words in Hebrew rather than translating them into another tongue such as Arabic. Written in Hebrew, it had wide impact as the main source of philological instruction for those who did not know Arabic, especially in Christian Europe, where Rashi and his grandson Jacob Tam relied on it. Its enduring fame rests on showing that Hebrew is a language governed by coherent, discernible rules.2

Menahem and Dunash disagreed about adapting Arabic rules to Hebrew poetry. Menahem held that Arabic standards could not be laid over Hebrew, since biblical poetry shows no discernible meter and should be the model; Dunash concluded, from the close linguistic kinship of the two languages, that Arabic poetry could and should serve as the model, and devised a technique for imitating Arabic quantitative meter in Hebrew. In the end Dunash's approach came to dominate secular (and some liturgical) poetry in medieval Spain.3