M
mesenja
Guest
What is your point?A Professor Joshua Seixas was hired by Joseph Smith and his associates to leach them Hebrew. They originally hired another teacher who turned out to be very unsatisfactory, but they were determined to learn the language as well as they could. So, On November 21, 1835, they agreed to send someone to New York to find a Jew who was more qualified to teach them. On January 4, 1836, however, William E. M’Lellin and Orson Hyde were dispatched to the Hudson, Ohio, to find the right person. When M’Lellin returned on January 6, 1836, he reported that he had hired a teacher who was “highly celebrated as a Hebrew scholar, and proposes to give us a sufficient knowledge during the above term to start us reading and translating the language.” (Joseph Smith, History of the Church, 2:356). It was going to cost $320 for seven weeks, to have him teach forty “scholars.” He would arrive in about 15 days. Meanwhile, the group continued to study as best they could. On February 15, according to Joseph Smith’s History, they began “translating the Hebrew language, under the instruction of Professor Seixas, and he stated that we were the most forward of any class he ever instructed for the same length of time.” (2:396). It was this same Professor Seixas who published the Hebrew grammar they used. Seixas was apparently a professor at Oberlin College.
In 1834 Joshua Seixas published a little book titled Manual. Hebrew Grammar For the Use of Beginners, by J. Sexias, 2d ed. enlarged and improved. This was the manual that was used in the Kirtland school when Seixas came to teach Hebrew to Joseph Smith and his associates in 1836. In 1981 this manual was published in a facsimile edition by the Sunstone Foundation, Salt Lake City. It carried an introduction by Louis Zucker, entitled “Joseph Smith As a Student of Hebrew.”
nauvoo.com/nauvoo_beautiful.html
By 1842 Joseph Smith most likely had touched the subject of Kabbalah in several ways and versions, even if such contacts remain beyond easy documentation. During Joseph’s final years in Nauvoo, however, his connection with Kabbalah becomes more concrete. In the spring of 1841 there apparently arrived in Nauvoo an extraordinary library of Kabbalistic writings belonging to a European Jew and convert to Mormonism who evidently new Kabbalah and its principal written works. This man, Alexander Neibaur, would soon become the prophet’s friend and companion.
Neibaur has received little detailed study by Mormon historians, and his knowledge of Kabbalah has earned only an occasional passing footnote in Mormon historical work.121 Neibaur was born in Alsace-Lorraine in 1808, but during his later childhood the family apparently returned to their original home in eastern Prussia (now part of Poland). His father, Nathan Neibaur, was a physician and dentist, who family sources claim, was a personal physician to the Napoleon Bonapart and whose skill as a linguist made him of “great value” to Napoleon as an interpreter (claims perhaps inflated by posterity). Like his father, Alexander became fluent in several languages, including French, German, Hebrew, and later, English. He also read Latin and Greek. Family tradition claims that as the first child and eldest son, his father wished him to become a rabbi, and that the young Neibaur was begun in rabbincal training. However, at age seventeen he instead entered the University of Berlin to study dentistry, and completed his studies around 1828. Sometime shortly afterwards, he converted to Christianity and migrated to Preston, England. There he established a dental practice and married in 1833. In mid-summer 1837, Heber C. Kimball, Orson Hyde, and Joseph Fielding arrived in Preston. Neibaur had been troubled by several dreams about a mysterious book, and his first question for Joseph Smith’s apostles was whether they had a “book” for him–which of course they did. He was baptized with his family the next spring. On 5 February 1841 they departed for Nauvoo, arriving in Quincy, Illinois, on 17 April. Four days later Neibaur met Joseph Smith, and on 26 April he notes in his journal, “went to work for J. Smith.” Two day later he acquired a quarter-acre lot in Nauvoo, and on 1 June moved his family into their newly complete Nauvoo home on Water Street, a few blocks from Joseph Smith’s residence.122
Where and how Neibaur first came in contact with Kabbalah remains a mystery, though a careful evaluation of his history and personal travels offers a few hints. Given his father’s position, his childhood in western Poland, his studies in Berlin and his subsequent conversion to Christianity, some contact with a reservoir of Kabbalistic knowledge among Sabbatean or Frankist Jews should be considered.123 If he did indeed undertake rabbical studies in Poland prior to his university education, he could not have avoided some exposure to the subject. That Neibaur brought a knowledge of Kabbalah to Nauvoo has been mentioned in several studies of the period. For instance, Newel and Avery note in their biography of Emma Smith, "Through Alexander Neibaur, Joseph Smith had access to ancient Jewish rites called Cabalism at the same time he claimed to be translating the papyri from the Egyptian mummies [which became his Book of Abraham]."124 That he not only knew something of Kabbalah, but apparently possessed a collection of original Jewish Kabbalistic works in Nauvoo, is however documented in material almost totally overlooked by Mormon historians
gnosis.org/jskabb3.htm
I cringe to think about it.