Kimhi, Moses

Moses Kimhi, Kimhi also spelled Kimchi, Kimḥi, or Qimḥi, also called Remak (an acronym of Rabbi Moses Kimhi), (died c. 1190, Narbonnegrammar, Mahalakh shevile ha-daʿat (“Journey on the Paths of Knowledge”).

The elder son of the grammarian and biblical exegete Joseph Kimhi and teacher of his more renowned brother, David Kimhi, he shared with them the accomplishment of establishing Hebrew-language studies. His grammar was remarkably brief, which may account for its long popularity. It passed into Latin translation in 1508 and went into many editions for use by Christian Hebraists. He was the first to make the verb paqad (“to order”) a model for conjugation and introduced the now-usual sequence of stem forms. In the great rabbinical Bibles, his commentaries on Proverbs, Ezra, and Nehemiah are incorrectly attributed to Abraham ibn Ezra, one of the foremost Jewish scholars of medieval Spain.