ELIAS LEVITA , Jewish grammarian, was born at Neustadt on the Aisch, Bavaria. He preferred to call him self "Ashkenazi," the German, and bore also the nickname of "Bachur," the youth or student, which latter he gave as a title to his Hebrew grammar. Before the end of the 15th century he went to Italy, living first at Padua, then (I 5o9) at Venice, going in 1 513 to Rome, where he found a patron in the learned general of the Augustinian Order, the future cardinal Egidio di Viterbo, whom he helped in his study of the Kabbalah. The storming of Rome by the Constable de Bourbon in 1527 compelled Elias to go to Venice, where he became corrector in the printing-house of Daniel Bom berg. In 1541 and 1542 he lived at Isny, S. Wurttemberg, where he published several of his writings in the printing-house of the learned pastor Paul Fagius. The last years of his life he spent at Venice. Levita furthered the study of Hebrew in Christian circles by his activity as a teacher and by his writings, his works on Hebrew grammar (Bachur, a text-book, 1518; Harkaba, an anno tated dictionary of irregular word-forms ; a Table of Paradigms ; Pirke Elijahu, a description—partly metrical—of phonetics, and other chapters of the grammar, 152o; his earliest work, a Com mentary on Moses Kimhi's Hebrew Grammar, 1508) being clear and methodical. Amongst his other writings is the first dictionary of the Targumim (Meturgeman, 1541) and the first attempt at a lexicon in which much of the treasure of late Hebrew language was explained (Tishbi, explanation of 712 new Hebrew vocables, as a supplement to the dictionaries of David Kimhi and Nathan b. Yehiel, 1542). Scientifically most valuable, and of original impor tance, are the works of Levita on the Massora; his Concordance to the Massora (Se f er Ziklironot completed in the second revision 1S36), and Massoreth Hamasoreth (1538; Eng. tr. by Chr. D. Ginsburg, London, 1867). Of his other writings may be mentioned his commentary on Kimhi's Grammar and Dictionary (in the Bomberg editions his German translation of the Psalms (1545) and the Baba-Buch (more properly Buovobuch, a German recension of the Italian novel Historia di Buovo d'Antona, 15o8).
See Y. Levi, Elia Levita and seine Leistungen als Grammatiker (Breslau, i888) ; W. Bacher, "E. Levita's wissenschaftliche Leistungen" in Z. d. D. M. G. xliii. (1889) , p. 206-272.