nauvoo

Continuing with the theme of place names, I've done a little research on 'Nauvoo'. In 1945, Fawn M. Brodie published a biography of Joseph Smith in which she says:

'The name sprang fresh out of his fancy, and though a few of his pedant followers were troubled that the word was not listed in their Hebrew dictionaries, most of the Saints were pleased with the choice. "Nauvoo" had the melancholy music of a mourning dove's call and somehow matched the magic of the site.'

It seems that Brodie was wrong to say that the word 'sprang fresh out of [Smith's] fancy'. It really is a Hebrew word. From what I can gather, if there's anything strange about it, it's the fact that it's transliterated using Sephardic conventions. And this is because that was the system used by Smith's Hebrew teacher, Joseph Seixas. Here is an excerpt from the relevant page of Seixas' grammar. (I 'borrowed' it from a site on Mormon apologetics.)



Seixas seems to have been an interesting character. I found an article about him in a 1993 edition of the journal, Jewish History. It's by Shalom Goldman and the introduction gives something of his life:

In the roster of prominent American Jewish apostates of the early ninteenth century Joshua/James Seixas (1802-1874) remains something of an enigma. His contemporaries, both Jewish and Christian, differed widely in their descriptions of his religious convictions and affiliations. We find him described by Jews as a convert to Christianity and by some Christians as a 'devout Jew.' Evaluations of his ability as a teacher of Hebrew and a scholar vary widely, and the researcher in search of the biographical details of Seixas' life is confronted with conflicting and confusing data. For his life was a restless one. Seixas moved around the United States in search of employment and professional satisfaction and one is struck with the feeling that the subject of our investigations deliberately obscured the details of his personal life.