Was it a non-Jew who first discovered the principles governing the ta'ame ha-miqra?

Question

I wrote to a very well respected and knowledgeable Rav regarding grammatical functions of the te'amim and the discrepancies that exist between the Sephardic and Ashkenazic systems. His response surprised me. He said the following:

"For better or worse, it was a non-Jew who first discovered the principles governing the ta'ame ha-miqra. His name was William Wickes. Here is a link to his book:

"https://books.google.com/books?id=dQEomb49VWgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=wickes+Two+Treatises+on+the+Accentuation+of+the+Old+Testament&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiVzuCxxJbNAhWBkywKHUQVAqUQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&q=wickes%20Two%20Treatises%20on%20the%20Accentuation%20of%20the%20Old%20Testament&f=false

Since Wickes wrote his book in the 19th century, there has been some progress in the field. The best recent, comprehensive book on the subject is by Mordechai Breuer in Hebrew: טעמי המקרא. The second edition of this book is still in print.

Since Wickes is in English, you might find it easier to deal with. The amount of additional material in Breuer is small."

As someone who often has an academic approach to Judaism, the answer isn't problematic for me. But I was still surprised by it. Can anyone shed light on whether Jews were really ignorant of the principles governing the te'amim until Wickes?

Answer 1

No, he didn't discover it. Wickes lived 1817-1903 with his seminal works on cantillation being published in the 1880s.

Plenty of Jewish works on cantillation exist before that, such as Mishpetei Taamim, 1808, R Wolf Heidenheim, back to works by Ben Asher and Yehuda Ibn Bilam around 1000 years ago. Rabbeinu Tam wrote a long cryptic poem about the rules of cantillation.

I can't say there isn't some rule or pattern that Wickes documented explicitly for the first time, but much of what he wrote is built on previous works. It's not like he sat down with the text of Tanakh and cracked the code from scratch.

Wickes's work is wonderfully thorough and systematic, and has set the tone for much if not all modern study of cantillation. (Reading medieval grammatical works with Wickes's system in your head is a bit like a modern mathematician reading medieval math proofs: it's there, but the terminology and set-up feels off.) It's an important work and a good resource. But a "discovery"? Not quite.