Fighting against Beasts: Arabic and Hebrew in Covarrubias’s Tesoro * Lidiar con fieras: el árabe y el hebreo en el Tesoro de Covarrubias Or Hasson Tel Aviv University, Israel ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0100-8675 * The research on which this essay is based was supported by my fellowship at the Mandel Scholion Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and its completion facil- itated by an Arnold Fellowship at the Zvi Yavetz School for Historical Studies at Tel Aviv University. A draft of this essay was presented at a seminar of the CORPI research group (CSIC) in October 2018, where I had the privilege of discussing it with Dominique Neyrod. I am grateful to Mercedes García-Arenal and the members of the group for their valuable feedback, the anonymous reviewers of Al-Qanṭara for their helpful comments and refer- ences, and Fernando Rodríguez Mediano, whose generous reading, encouragement and support made the task of writing in the midst of a pandemic possible. AL-QANTARA XLI 2, julio-diciembre 2020 pp. 477-516 ISSN 0211-3589 https://doi.org/10.3989/alqantara.2020.013 Copyright: © 2020 CSIC. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License. The present study examines the representation of Arabic and Hebrew in Covarrubias’s Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (Madrid, 1611) from a comparative perspective. Ana- lyzing the lexicographer’s ideological and meta-linguistic discourse, I reconstruct his postulates regarding the respective histories of Arabic and Hebrew, their interrelationship, and place in the history of Spanish. In light of these postulates, and taking into account the lexicographer’s access to knowledge, sources, and informants, I examine some of his etymo- logical practices, focusing on his attempts to use grammatical and lexical knowledge of Hebrew to illuminate Arabic etymologies of Spanish words. Combining the ideological and technical levels of the text, I reflect on the interplay of knowledge and ignorance in Covarrubias’s treatment of Semitic lan- guages. Este estudio examina la representación del árabe y del hebreo en el Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (Madrid, 1611) desde una perspectiva comparada. Partiendo del dis- curso ideológico y metalingüístico del lexicó- grafo, trato de reconstruir sus postulados en torno a las respectivas historias del hebreo y árabe, la relación entre sí y el papel que de- sempeñan en la historia del español tal como la narra Covarrubias. A la luz de estos postu- lados, y teniendo en cuenta los conocimientos del lexicógrafo, así como las fuentes e infor- mantes a los que recurre, examino algunas de sus prácticas etimológicas, y, en particular, sus intentos de emplear sus conocimientos de la gramática y léxico hebreos para iluminar eti- mologías arábigas de vocablos castellanos. Combinando el nivel ideológico del texto con el técnico, reflexiono sobre la interacción entre saber e ignorancia en el estudio de las lenguas semíticas en el Tesoro.