Judeo-Arabic Language and Linguistics

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.

The publication of this Vol I of  "Diwan al-Malhun in Moroccan Judeo Arabic" is an attempt to highlight a submerged side of Moroccan heritage. The Malhun  Moroccan Judeo Arabic reflects the tolerance of the country  of ATLAS.
After the decline of the Moroccan Jewish heritage due to the large emigration of  a great number of the Jews of morocco for multiple reasons, its a moment in time to save what can be saved  from this important element of Moroccan heritage. The malhun  in Moroccan Judeo Arabic has reached a new life in the context of the idea of return (virtual and physical) of jewish youth to the Land of the sun: Morocco. The malhun is an open school of Moroccan Arabic dialect and is also a big encyclopedia of Moroccan identity in his large concept.
This recompilation of Malhun text is a contribution in the promising reading of our Moroccan heritage in the vast context of the new Moroccan constitution of 2011.

[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.

Conceptions of eloquence in Arabic, as well as the Muslim theological tenet of the inimitability of the Qur'an, shaped Jewish views of writing in Arabic as well as their approach to the interpretation of the Bible. In this article I demonstrate innovative Karaite approaches to biblical exegesis, which center on revealing the structure and organizing principles of the biblical text. I propose that these exegetes were striving to demonstrate the well-organized (or so they claimed) nature of the biblical text, and that this desire emerged from their internalization of "Arabic Composition 101" -- that is, currently reigning norms of composition in eloquent Arabic, and their  belief that their scriptural text surely attained this ideal of composition.

The present study gives the editio princeps of a qīnah, a dirge in Judeo-Arabic written in Hebrew script, referring to the slaughters of the Jews perpetrated in Noto and Modica (Sicily) in 1474. The qīnah, published here for the first time in full transcript and translation, is found within the Ms. Parmense 1741 (formerly De Rossi 570), preserved in the Palatine Library in Parma, and included in a Siddūr, a book of daily Jewish prayers, supposedly copied in Noto in the late 15th century (folios 299v-300r). Three aspects render this dirge particular and unique: firstly,
the fact that it was evidently composed in Sicily, or in any case by Sicilian Jews; secondly, the language in which it is written, namely Sicilian Judaeo-Arabic; and finally, the topic of the second part of the elegy, which explicitly refers to events that took place in Sicily.

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.

Saadya Gaon's magisterial translation of the Torah was preceded by earlier, literal, and decidedly awkward Judeo-Arabic translations. In this article I discuss Saadya's decision to compose a new translation, via an analysis of his own introduction to the translation as preserved in a Geniza fragment and published by Haggai Ben-Shammai, and in light of contemporaneous Muslim polemic against existing Jewish Bible translations.

Le parler judéo-arabe de Fès (Maroc) est une déclinaison de l’arabe fassi dont la culture spécifique et le mode de vie des locuteurs engage un renvoi vers la culture juive et se réfère constamment aux corpus de références de celle-ci (Bible hébraïque, Talmud etc.). En cela, nombre de mots hébreux et araméens s’immiscent dans la langue. Ces apports apparaissent majoritairement à l’écrit ou dans la langue des lettrés. Pourtant, une quantité plus modeste d’entre eux, mots hébreux ou pseudo-hébreux, s’intègre dans la langue parlée courante des hommes comme des femmes du quartier juif. Coupés de leur étymologie, ces mots sont utilisés par les locuteurs juifs arabophones qui ne savent souvent plus qu’ils ne sont pas d’origine arabe ou berbère. Puisqu’ils évoluent indépendamment de leur corpus d’origine, à l’intérieur d’un système linguistique d’adoption, leur emploi se contextualise et leur sens se modifie. Les mots sont prononcés selon les dynamiques phonologiques du vieil arabe de Fès et certains véritables néologismes se forment sur des racines hébraïques. Ces mots n’ont le plus souvent jamais été utilisés dans ces sens ou sous ces formes en hébreu et puisqu’ils sont ici totalement intégrés à l’arabe dialectal, quelle que soit leur étymologie, ce sont objectivement des mots arabes. En voici un exemple :
- ḥāmēṣ : nom hébreu du pain levé, proscrit lors de la fête de Pessah. Etymologiquement, ḥāmēṣ signifie « aigre, amer ». Il est en lien à l’arabe classique ḥāmiḍ, « aigre », darija ḥāmǝḍ. Dans le parler arabe des Juifs de Fès, il peut s’utiliser dans son sens hébreu comme dans l’énoncé : f-pisāḥ, ḥrām naklō l-ḫǝbz u kǝll ma howa ḥāmēṣ, « lors de la fête de Pessah, il nous est interdit de manger du pain ou tout ce qui est (contient) du ḥāmēṣ ». Mais une fois son intégration faite dans la langue parlée, il devient au Mellah un adjectif courant dont le sens s’est élargi puisqu’il est utilisé comme synonyme de ḥārām / ḥrām et signifie alors « illicite d’après la loi mosaïque », comme illustré dans l’exemple suivant ḥāmēṣ ‘lēya nǝšrǝb ǝš-šrāb. Il va même se re-substantiver : ‘ămlọ ‘lēh ḥāmēṣ, « ils l’ont mis en quarantaine ».

The 11th century Karaite Abu al-Faraj Harun reveals  his broad reading practices via the way he employs the Arabic term majaz, "non-literal usage." In this paper I examine his uses and applications of the term in his biblical exegesis and demonstrate their ties to a broad variety of genres of Arabic literature. Eleventh-century Karaites like Abu al-Faraj Harun had gone well beyond the circumscribed literary world of tenth-century Karaite scholars, and

The current paper aims at presenting and comparing Yefet Ben Ali’s Translation and Commentary on the Book of Job in the version transmitted in the twenty-four manuscripts written in Hebrew characters with the only manuscript written in Arabic characters, with the aim of showing linguistic differences between the two. As will be shown below, the choice of writing the translation and commentary in Hebrew or in Arabic letters affected certain linguistic characteristics of the text.

Translations of Hebrew and Aramaic sacred texts into Jewish languages, religiolects, and varieties have been widespread throughout the Jewish world. This volume is a study of the genre of these translations, known as the šarḥ, into Judeo-Arabic in Egypt in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The study places Judeo-Arabic along the Jewish linguistic spectrum, traces its history and offers insights to the spoken variety of Egyptian Judeo-Arabic, which set it apart from other Arabic dialects. The book also provides a linguistic model of the translation of the sacred texts. Rather than viewing the translation as only verbatim, the study traces in great detail the literal/interpretive linguistic tension with which the translators struggled in their work.

Like all Jewish languages, Judeo-Arabic dialects borrowed numerous terms from Hebrew and Aramaic. Many studies have already been conducted on modern North-African Judeo-Arabic, some concerning specifically Judeo-Moroccan dialects, in their written or oral forms. This study intends to offer a systematic analysis of how the Hebrew component of Judeo-Arabic in Fez behaves in terms of phonological and phonetical adaptation and to look in particular for regularities in that adaptation.

The article examines the methods of rendering personal names and place names in the Samaritan version of Saadya Gaon's translation of the Pentateuch in MS BL OR7562. The examination is based on examples from Genesis 11 to Exodus 1, which are part of the first hand stage in the manuscript. The renderings are compared to those found in various manuscripts and printed editions of Saadya Gaon's translation of the Pentateuch in Hebrew and Arabic script, in the Samaritan Arabic translation of the Pentateuch, given in two different versions, the old one and its later revision, in Shehadeh's edition, and in pre-Saadyan Arabic translations.

Handbooks often explain the use of the Hebrew alphabet for the writing of the judeo-languages (the local vernaculars used by the Jews in the Diaspora, and in Palestine, too) as a phenomenon of identitarian religious enclavization and preservation of a graphic system that rabbinic tradition had sacralized. Such a view can be problematised, but also enriched by some examples and their related considerations taken from the social history of Jewish communities.

Medineli yahudi şair Ebû ‘Afek Hz. Peygamber’in Medine’ye geldiği günlerde, yüz yirmi yaşına ulaşmış olan, son derece yaşlı bir adamdır. Ancak Hz. Peygamber’i ve destekçilerini (Ensârı) kendi şehrindeki insanların işlerine müdahale eden, istenmeyen kişiler olarak görmektedir. İslam düşmanlığı söz konusu olduğunda, lafını esirgemeyen birisidir. Hatta İslam Peygamber’ini rahatsız eden bazı incitici beyitler dahi nazmetmiştir. Aynı zamanda halkını, Hz. Muhammed’in ve yeni dininin aleyhinde örgütlemeye çalışmıştır. Onun amaçlarından birisi, Hz. Muhammed’in el-Hâris b. Suveyd b. Sâmit için verdiği ölüm kararını onaylamadığını ilan etmektir. Keza kentlerine dışarıdan gelen bir yabancı olarak gördüğü Hz. Muhammed’i takip ettikleri gerekçesiyle Medine sakinlerini kınamış, Hz. Peygamber’e karşı isyan başlatmaya çalışmıştır. Onun şiirleri, toplumun düşünce dünyasını değiştirmek amacıyla kullanılan şiirsel tahrîdlere (yani kışkırtmalara) bariz bir örnektir. Tüm bunlara binaen Hz. Muhammed, şairin etkisiz hale getirilmesi için gönüllü olabilecek birisini aramış ve “Bu iğrenç [adamı], benim için kim [etkisiz hale getirecek]?” sözlerini buyurmuşlardır. İslamiyet’i benimsemiş olan Sâlim b. ‘Umeyr, bu vazifeyi uhdesine almak için öne çıkmış ve bir gece Ebû ‘Afek uyuduğunda, gizlice şairin evine girerek onu bir kılıç darbesiyle öldürmüştür. Bu olay İslam tarihçileri tarafından kaydedilmiştir.

A Jewish poet of Medina, Abû ‘Afak was a very old man reaching one hundred and twenty years when Muhammad arrived in Medina. He perceived the Prophet and his associates (ansâr) as unwelcome interlopers in his city. He was vocal about his hostility to Islam, and even composed some stinging verses that annoyed the Islamic Prophet. He also tried to rally his people against Muhammad and his new religion. One of his purposes was to show his disapproval of Muhammad’s death warrant for al-Hârith b. Suwayd b. Sâmit. He also reproached the inhabitants of Medina for following an alien, Muhammad. He was trying to incite rebellion against the Prophet. His poetry was a clear instance of the use of poetical tahrîd (incitement) to rally public opinion. Therefore, Muhammad sought the service of a volunteer assassin, saying, “Who will [deal with] this pestilent [man] for me?”. Sâlim b. ‘Umayr, a convert, stepped forth to do the job. One night, when Abû ‘Afak slept, Sâlim crept in and killed him with one blow of his sword. This event was recorded by Muslim historians.

The objective of this paper is to explore the quranic words that are almost no longer used by educated people such as Arabic teachers, university professors or even by intellectual peoples, but they are still very common in everyday use among the regular population in the southern gilit dialect area such as farmers, herdsmen, retail dealer etc. Based on a filedwork research, I have collected the quranic words that are currently used by regular people in this gilit-dialect area. I have then written the verses in which these words occur with examples of use from the southern dialect area for each word.

This volume consists of an edition of the Arabic translation and commentary on the book of Job by one of the preeminent litterateurs of the Karaite “Golden Age” (10th–11th centuries), Yefet ben ʿEli ha-Levi. Yefet’s complete translation and commentary on Job, published for the first time, provides fascinating insight into the history and development of exegetical thought on this book, both among the Karaites as well as the Rabbanites. In preparing this edition, all extant twenty-five manuscripts have been consulted, most of them from the Firkovitch Collection. Their length varies from 1 to 340 folios and in total they contain ca. 2,850 folios.