Judaeo-Arabic

The study of the Samaritan version of Saadya Gaon’s translation of the Pentateuch (the tafsīr), mainly based on MS London BL OR7562, shows that a Saadyan version in Arabic Characters was adopted by the Samaritans and adapted to the Samaritan Hebrew Pentateuch. The transmission of this version in MS London BL OR7562 continued after the early Samaritan Arabic translation of the Pentateuch and perhaps also its later revision had already been created, since many of their translations were preserved in MS BL OR7562, mixed with its Saadyan basic text. As MS London BL OR7562 also contains numerous words and phrases paralleled only in Christian Arabic translations of the Pentateuch and Saadyan adaptations, mainly related to the Peshitta tradition, it is reasonable to assume that these were the sources of this Samaritan Saadyan version and possibly also of the other Samaritan Arabic translations. The Samaritan version of Saadya’s translation of the Pentateuch also reveals some parallels to tenth- and eleventh-century Karaite translations and it contains prominent Aramaic and Islamic vocabulary, unfamiliar in other versions of Saadya’s tafsīr.

מספר "אלכאפיה אלעאבדין" - המספיק לעובדי ה' - של רבי אברהם, בנו יחידו של הרמב"ם, אבדו חלקים רבים. הפרק העוסק במלאכת הוצאה בשבת הועתק על ידי נינו, ר' דוד ב"ר יהושע הנגיד, בגליונות חיבורו של רבי יעקב אמאשטי להלכות שבת. הגליונות לוקטו, צורפו לכדי פרק שלם, ולהם נלווה זיהוי של קטע מהגניזה הקהירית.
רבי אברהם מתבסס על דברי אביו בחיבוריו השונים, מפרש אותם ומוסיף עליהם.

כולל משנה תורה לרמב"ם לפי עדי נוסח מבית מדרשו שבמצרים,

פירוש רבי יעקב אלאמאשטי, הנדפס ברמב"ם פרנקל תחת "פירוש קדמון ממצרים", כשבס"ד זכינו להכפיל את כמותו מכתבי יד אחרים;
אסופת "קול נגידים" ובה פירושים וחידושים ממשפחת הרמב"ם הנגידים, בהם שרידי פירושו של מחותנו, רבי חננאל בר שמואל, ראשון מפרשי המשנה תורה, ועוד;
ובסופו מהדורות של שיעור הרמב"ם, ושרידי "המספיק לעובדי ה'" לרבי אברהם על הלכות שבת.

[English abstract after the French]

Apprenons quelques mots de turc:
un glossaire arabo-turc de la Genizah du Caire
Cet article traite d'un carnet de comptes en judéo-arabe qui a probablement appartenu à un agent consulaire en Egypte Au début du 17ème siècle. Il contient des listes de produits achetés et toutes sortes de relevés comptables. Mais, quelques pages sont en fait un glossaire arabo-turc rédigé en caractères hébraïques. Nous avons ainsi la preuve de l’intérêt certain que portaient les Juifs de l'Empire ottoman pour la langue turque, un intérêt d'ordre culturel et économique.
Par le passé, la thèse dominante préconisait que si les Juifs ottomans parlaient le ladino et l'arabe, ils ne parlaient pas le turc. Cependant, des recherches publiées ces dernières décennies ont montré que les Juifs vivant dans l’Empire ottoman participaient de façon active à la scène culturelle turque et possédaient, du moins pour beaucoup d'entre eux, une maîtrise indéniable de la langue turque. C’était surtout vrai pour les hommes. Cette constatation, que nous mettons ici en exergue, vient renforcer la thèse soutenue par d'autres articles et révèle donc l'intérêt des Juifs pour la langue turque, et ce, non seulement parmi la classe supérieure dont les médecins, les Juifs de Cour par exemple, mais aussi parmi la

This article discusses a Judeo-Arabic accounting book composed by a Jew who, it appears, served as an agent of one of the European consuls in Egypt. The accounting book, which seems to have been written in early 17th century, contains primarily lists of products bought by the agent and various other accounting notes; however, some of its pages contain a unique text – an Arabic-Turkish glossary composed by the agent, written in Hebrew letters. This glossary reflects the interest displayed by the Jews of the Ottoman Empire in the Turkish language, an interest driven by both cultural and economic motives. In the past the accepted assumption has been that the Jews of the Empire spoke only Ladino or Arabic and had no command of Turkish. Studies published in the past few decades have disproven this assumption and exposed the deep involvement of the Jews of the Empire in Ottoman culture, and the command many of them – primarily men – had over the Turkish language. The finding discussed in this article joins previous findings on this topic, and teaches us that the interest in the Turkish language was not limited to member of the Jewish elite (doctors, courtiers, etc.), but can also be clearly identified amongst members of the Jewish middle class.

בספר זה מופיעה מהדורה ביקורתית של תרגומו ופרשנותו של רב סעדיה גאון לספר אסתר, שנכתבה בערבית-יהודית. מהדורה זו, מלווה בהקדמה ובתרגום ללשון הקודש, הערות ועיונים, ובהם מושם דגש על השפעתו פרשנותו של רס"ג על הבאים אחריו, בפרשנות המקרא ובהלכה.
רס"ג קרא לספר זה "כתאב אלאינאס באלגלוה" - ספר הליווי הגלות, והוא כולל בו דיון נרחב אודות דרכי התנהגותה והתמודדותה של האומה היהודית במצבי משבר, בצילן של מלכויות מצליחות ותחת עול גזירות שונות. לצד דיונים יסודיים אלו, מלווה רס"ג את המגילה בתובנות מקוריות רבות, בתחום הפרשנות, ההגות וההלכה.
המקור הערבי מבוסס על מהדורתו של מיכאל וקסלר, The Book of Conviviality in Exile.

While recent scholarship on Middle Arabic recognizes a spectrum of varieties from which authors might draw in their compositions, there is still a tendency to place the ends of the spectrum of linguistic features which any Middle Arabic author might employ as dialectal on the one hand and a homogeneous Classical Arabic on the other. In this paper, I challenge the contours of this spectrum by contextualizing the language of a thirteenth-century Judaeo-Arabic text from Egypt-the 'Commentary on the Sayings of the Fathers'-within previously and contemporarily attested literary and performative traditions, drawing especially on Quranic reading traditions, as well as vocalized Judaeo-Arabic and Christian texts. I highlight important parallels between these traditions and features attested in this text. I conclude that to properly understand the linguistic choices that authors made, we must avoid anachronisms about the range of linguistic variation available to composers, and assumptions about the prestige associated with those variants.

My sincere thanks to Edgar Xavier (https://independent.academia.edu/EdgarXavier2) for kindly pointing out some errors of fact in this paper. On page 70, the Herald is incorrectly identified as an Indonesian Catholic newspaper. The newspaper is Malaysian. And, of course, Kuala Lumpur (as mentioned in footnote 49), is the capital city of Malaysia - not Indonesia. So the phrase in parenthesis at the end of the second paragraph on page 70 should read "(an Arabic loanword in Malay [Bahasa Melayu])".  Again, sincere thanks to Edgar for his close reading of the paper and his taking the trouble to point out these errors.

Jonathan

The Cairo Genizah has shown its importance as a fruitful source for the study of both liturgical and secular Hebrew poetry. Yet, although the Cairo Genizah also contains hundreds of poetry fragments written in the Arabic language, its Arabic and Judaeo-Arabic poetry has hitherto received inadequate attention in research literature. This article explores some of the Genizah's Arabic poems written in both Hebrew and Arabic script, which are held at the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Collections of Cambridge University Library. The article concludes with a discussion about the importance of the Cairo Genizah to the study of Arabic literature and poetry, and Islamic studies in general, as well as a source for the study of the dissemination of knowledge within medieval Muslim and Jewish elites.

בספר זה מופיעה מהדורה ביקורתית של תרגומו ופרשנותו של רב סעדיה גאון לספר איכה, שנכתבה בערבית-יהודית. מהדורה זו, מלווה בהקדמה ובתרגום ללשון הקודש, הערות ועיונים, ובהם מושם דגש על השפעתו פרשנותו של רס"ג על הבאים אחריו, בפרשנות המקרא ובהלכה.
רס"ג קרא לספר זה "כתאב אכ'לק" - ספר המידות, והוא כולל בו דיון נרחב אודות עשרים מידות הנפש, מעלותיהן וחסרונותיהן.

This dissertation is based on a number of unpublished Judaeo-Arabic manuscripts written by the indigenous Karaite Jews of Egypt who lived in the Jewish Quarter of Cairo during the early modern era. These 17th- through 19th-century manuscripts, all of which seem to have been copied from earlier archetypes, display narratives about Biblical and Qurᵓānic prophets in poetry and prose. The narratives are adaptations of Jewish and Islamic sacred folklore, Biblical and Qurᵓānic exegetic material and medieval Arabic poetry which seem to have been transmitted orally before acquiring their present shape. Whereas the material exhibits features typical for the spoken variety employed in Cairo today and the normative language of Classical Arabic, the texts also hold many remnants of medieval Arabic linguistic features which have fallen out of contemporary spoken or literary use, or which can be considered non-standard or pseudo-correct.
This dissertation argues that Arabic vernacular features were initially adopted by the Jewish community during times of prosperity and a high level of rapprochement between Jews and Muslims, then, at a later stage during times of hardship, became maintained and fossilized in the dialect of the Jews. Many of these features appear to have been preserved by the Jewish Egyptian community, mainly due to its initially strong social, cultural and linguistic integration into society towards the peak of the so-called Islamic golden age around the 11th and 12th centuries, and later its equally strong segregation from the overall society when under Mamlūk and Ottoman rule, a situation which seems to have persisted until the days of Muḥammad ᶜAlī in the early-19th century. For this reason, whereas old features have fallen out of use in the variety of the overall society in Cairo, it is natural to believe that some of these have been preserved in the oral and literary heritage of the indigenous Karaite Jewish community.
Moreover, this dissertation discusses how language features such as these prove to correspond to dialects which are historically and demographically relevant to that of Cairo, as well as to waves of migration and other significant societal changes which have taken place in Egypt and Cairo since the Islamic conquest and until early modern times. As the title indicates, it attempts to identify and reconstruct historical and demographical layers of the Arabic language employed all through this period in Egypt, predominantly in Cairo, and to offer possible explanations for the emergence and development of particular written and spoken features — of a particular medieval vintage.

*Winner of the 2022 BIAJS Annual Book Prize*

In the first few centuries of Islam, Middle Eastern Christians, Muslims, and Jews alike all faced the challenges of preserving their holy texts in the midst of a changing religious landscape. This situation led Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew scholars to develop new fields of linguistic science in order to better analyse the languages of the Bible and the Qurʾān. Part of this work dealt with the issue of vocalisation in Semitic scripts, which lacked the letters required to precisely record all the vowels in their languages. Semitic scribes thus developed systems of written vocalisation points to better record vowel sounds, first in Syriac, then soon after in Arabic and Hebrew. These new points opened a new field of linguistic analysis, enabling medieval grammarians to more easily examine vowel phonology and explore the relationships between phonetics and orthography. Many aspects of this new field of vocalisation crossed the boundaries between religious communities, first with the spread of ‘relative’ vocalisation systems prior to the eighth century, and later with the terminology created to name the discrete vowels of ‘absolute’ vocalisation systems. This book investigates the theories behind Semitic vocalisation and vowel phonology in the early medieval Middle East, tracing their evolution to identify points of intellectual contact between Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew linguists before the twelfth century.

You can support open access publishing by downloading this book for free from Open Book Publishers: https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0271

This book aims at contributing to better understand a divination technique, Geomancy, that enjoyed great popularity during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The volume focuses on the complexity of this science and the mysteries of its origins, noting the great scope of its expansion and the richness of its texts as a source for the social history. The volume offers the transcription of unpublished manuscripts both in Hebrew and Arabic script, with a Spanish translation. A description of other Arabic Geomancy treaties in Hebrew script that have survived in several collections of Judaeo-Arabic manuscripts is also available in this book.

Jewish History (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10835-019-09322-6):
Special Issue on the Cairo Geniza.

The Cairo Geniza has proved to be a fascinating trove of information on all aspects of Jewish life in the medieval and early modern period, magic being one of them. Hundreds of manuscripts, in different states of conservation, testify to the interest of Jews in composing and copying magical manuals, as well as producing amulets, curses, or attempting to harness the supernatural in order to achieve earthly aims. This essay introduces the reader to Geniza magical texts and provides some guidelines for reading these documents.

Vol. 1 (A–C): “Aaron ben ʿAmram”; “Aaron Ḥakīmān”; “Aghmātī, Zechariah ben Judah”; “Alī ben Sulaymān”; “Bar Satya, Joseph ben Jacob”; “Baradānī, Joseph al-”; “Baradānī, Naḥum al-”; “Ben Berechiah Family”; “Ben Yijū, Abraham.”

Vol. 2 (D–I): “Daniel ben Eleazar b. Hibat Allāh”; “Daniel ben Ḥasday”; “Daniel ben Samuel ibn Abī ʾl-Rabīʿ ha-Kohen”; “David ben Boaz”; “Dunash (Abū Sahl) ben Tamīm”; “Eleazar ben Ḥalfon ha-Kohen”; “Ḥananel ben Ḥushiel”; “Ḥananel ben Samuel”; “Ḥushiel ben Elḥanan”; “Ibn al-Barqūlī Family”; “Ibn al-Majjānī Family”; “Ibn al-Shūwaykh, Isaac ben Israel”; “Ibn Bundar, Ḥasan, Abū ʿAlī (Japheth)”; “Ibn Jāmiʿ, Samuel ben Jacob”; “Ibn Sughmār Family.”

Vol. 3 (J–O): “Japheth (Abū ʿAlī Ḥasan) ben Eli"; “Jeshua ben Elijah ha-Levi”; “Josiah ben Jesse”; “Judah ben Eli (ʿAllān)”; “Judah ben Joseph of Qayrawān”; “Kohen Ṣedeq ben Joseph Gaon”; “Levi (Abū Saʿīd) ben Japheth”; “Nathan ben Ḥananiah.”

Vol. 4 (P–Z): “Salmon ben Jeroham (Sulaym ibn Ruḥaym)”; “Shabīb ben Jacob”; “Tanḥum ben Joseph ha-Yerushalmi”; “Wahb ibn Yaʿīsh al-Raqqī.”

The present contribution offers an analysis of the first Jewish Arabic text ever discovered in the undertext of a Sinaitic palimpsest: a previously unknown Karaite Arabic translation of Genesis and Exodus (undertext of Sinai gr. 930). Translated directly from Hebrew, the newly discovered Arabic version is written in Arabic script (the handwriting seems to date to the tenth or early eleventh century) and displays numerous similarities to known Karaite translations: by Yefet ben ʿEli (fl. 960–1003), Yeshuʿah ben Yehudah (fl. 1030-1070), and others. Both the translation and the manuscript seem to be of North African (or, possibly, Egyptian) origin or, alternatively, to have been produced by a North African or Egyptian expatriate living elsewhere (e.g., in Jerusalem). This old Jewish parchment manuscript may have been put on sale – with its writing already scraped and the leaves separated – and the Monastery of Mount Sinai or a Christian dealer acting on its behalf may have purchased it in either Egypt or Jerusalem with the aim of reusing the old parchment for its own needs.

The question was simple: should the Hebraist Zionist movement in Ottoman Palestine invest in publishing a newspaper in Arabic and, if yes, should it be communitarian Jewish or general in its topics? What began as yet another obscure intra-Zionist deliberation gradually crystallized into what I argue merits the label of the earliest, explicitly Ashkenazi–Mizrahi ethnic controversy. This is with the smallest risk of the superimposition in hindsight of the terms and signifiers usually associated with Israel’s post-1971/Black-Panthers era onto the Ottoman period. Lasting between 1909 and 1913, the spirited exchange regarding the Arabic newspaper involved two dozen writers, mainly of the Sephardi–Mizrahi Haherut newspaper, and about one third of ethnic Ashkenazim writing elsewhere. It was nonetheless October 1911 that encapsulated the peak of the controversy, mainly due to writing by Mizrahi intellectual and activist Dr Shimon Moyal (1866–1915) and Ashkenazi intellectual and activist Dr Avraham Ludvipol (1865–1921). My decision to let primary texts speak for themselves at greater length than is customary results from my conviction that – in this case – extensive recourse to source material can convey best to twenty-first-century readers why the exchange is effectively “the mother” of all ensuing Mizrahi–Ashkenazi ethnic controversies. While clear definition for what constitutes such a controversy is provided, I close by offering a sample of views about the Arabic newspaper by four prominent Ashkenazi Zionists.

The article investigates three Genizah fragments of parts of
Saadya Gaon’s translation of the Pentateuch that contain Karaite
renditions and alternations. The largest and most important of
them is the Genizah fragment St. Petersburg, RNL, Yevr.-Arab. I
1753, which contains vestiges of Gen. 7-18; 32-44; Exod. 3-5; 9-19;
23-30; 39. Special attention is also given to alternate readings in
the latter that have parallels both in Ms. St. Petersburg, RNL,
Yevr. II C1 (~ 1009-1010, copied by Samuel ben Jacob), the earliest
comprehensive manuscript of Saadya Gaon’s translation of the
Pentateuch known to us, and in translation units of Saadya’s
exegesis of Exodus. An appendix following the article provides
a critical edition of the three Genizah fragments, including an
indication of the Karaite vestiges and comparative notes.

This article edits a Judaeo-Arabic letter written in the early phonetic Judaeo-Arabic spelling from the Taylor-Slechter Collection with the siglum T-S 13J8.7. This letter, which is a personal letter on paper from a merchant whose goods have been stolen from his shop adds to the small corpus of letters in this early orthography. Besides this Judaeo-Arabic letter, the paper also contains Hebrew and Aramaic abbreviated liturgical citations. Besides an edition of the text with translation and reproduction of the photos, this paper also discusses the question of whether it is useful to think of archaic features in letters such as these as being due to Classical Arabic influence.

This paper compares three 9th-10th century translations of the frame story of the book of Job, namely the Rabbinical Judaeo-Arabic translation of Saadia Gaon, the Karaite Judaeo-Arabic translation of Yefet b. Ali and a Christian translation by Tūmā al-Fusṭāṭī. Whereas Saadia’s translation is fully available in a critical edition, the other two translations are available only in manuscripts. First the three translations of the verses of the frame story are given. Then a comparison of various syntactic and lexical aspects of these translations is made. Finally, based on this comparison, some conclusions on the tendencies of each translation and the relationships with the source and target languages are given.

This dissertation is based on a number of unpublished Judaeo-Arabic manuscripts written by the indigenous Karaite Jews of Egypt who lived in the Jewish Quarter of Cairo during the early modern era. These 17th- through 19th-century manuscripts, all of which seem to have been copied from earlier archetypes, display narratives about Biblical and Qurᵓānic prophets in poetry and prose. The narratives are adaptations of Jewish and Islamic sacred folklore, Biblical and Qurᵓānic exegetic material and medieval Arabic poetry which seem to have been transmitted orally before acquiring their present shape. Whereas the material exhibits features typical for the spoken variety employed in Cairo today and the normative language of Classical Arabic, the texts also hold many remnants of medieval Arabic linguistic features which have fallen out of contemporary spoken or literary use, or which can be considered non-standard or pseudo-correct.
This dissertation argues that Arabic vernacular features were initially adopted by the Jewish community during times of prosperity and a high level of rapprochement between Jews and Muslims, then, at a later stage during times of hardship, became maintained and fossilized in the dialect of the Jews. Many of these features appear to have been preserved by the Jewish Egyptian community, mainly due to its initially strong social, cultural and linguistic integration into society towards the peak of the so-called Islamic golden age around the 11th and 12th centuries, and later its equally strong segregation from the overall society when under Mamlūk and Ottoman rule, a situation which seems to have persisted until the days of Muḥammad ᶜAlī in the early-19th century. For this reason, whereas old features have fallen out of use in the variety of the overall society in Cairo, it is natural to believe that some of these have been preserved in the oral and literary heritage of the indigenous Karaite Jewish community.
Moreover, this dissertation discusses how language features such as these prove to correspond to dialects which are historically and demographically relevant to that of Cairo, as well as to waves of migration and other significant societal changes which have taken place in Egypt and Cairo since the Islamic conquest and until early modern times. As the title indicates, it attempts to identify and reconstruct historical and demographical layers of the Arabic language employed all through this period in Egypt, predominantly in Cairo, and to offer possible explanations for the emergence and development of particular written and spoken features — of a particular medieval vintage.

Abstract
Intertextuality refers to the textual space where texts intersect and new (hyper)texts emerge. It is the shaping of a text’s meaning by other (inter)texts present in it. As a literary device taking forms like allusion, quotation, pastiche, translation, etc., it depends on the presupposition of the presence of intertexts (or hypotexts) in (hyper)texts and on the reader’s recognition of such presence. For the recognition of intertexts, authors usually rely on shared cultural knowledge with the reader. The presence of intertexts in a text can either open it to interpretations or direct the reader towards a one in particular. If such recognition can possibly be missed intraculturally, the possibility is doubled when the reading is intercultural, as in translation. To minimize the loss of the intertextual context of the source text (ST), translators adopt certain translation strategies (such as analogous intertexts, paratextual devices, and exegetical translation) that ensure such context is relayed into the target text (TT) and recognized by the target reader. While the semantic equivalence can neutralize the linguistic difference, relaying the intertextual relations in the ST remains the daunting problem encountered by the translator.
I argue in this dissertation that intertexts, particularly Quranic references, in the Arabic novel are a source of semantic density and pose a considerable challenge to the translator. Since semantic equivalence alone does not guarantee that the ST intertextual relations are maintained in the TT, a synthesis of other translation strategies is required to relay the ST intertextual relation into the TT. Drawing on Kristeva’s (1986) ‘vertical intertextuality,’ Fairclough’s ‘manifest intertextuality’ (Momani et al., 2010), Derrida’s ‘iterability’ and ‘citationality’ (Alfaro, 1996), Bakhtin’s ‘reaccentuation’ or ‘double-voicing’ (Kristeva, 1986), I opted for paratextual devices to ensure that the TT reader will capture those relations. Bracketed explanations were used extremely economically to avoid producing an enlarged translation.

The Syriac and Hebrew theories of relative vocalisation depend on comparisons between different amounts of phonetic openness and backness during the pronunciation of vowels. These principles appear in the grammatical work of Jacob of Edessa (d. 708), most notably in his tractate On Persons and Tenses, as well as Dawid bar Pawlos’ (f. c. 770-800) fragmentary grammar and his scholion on bgdkt letters. It also appears in early Masoretic homograph lists and the terminology in the Tiberian Masora magna and parva. Remnants of it can even be seen in Judaeo-Arabic Masoretic treatises. Altogether, these sources suggest that there was contact and intellectual exchange between Syriac grammarians and Hebrew Masoretes sometime around the eighth century, just as they began shifting from relative to absolute vocalisation. Their shared principles of relative vocalisation formed the basis of later phonological analyses of vowels and the placement of the vowel points in both Syriac and Hebrew. This is Chapter 3, §1 of "Points of Contact: The Shared Intellectual History of Vocalisation in Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew" freely available here: https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0271