Hebrew Characters Research Articles

ON THE ARABIC IN ISRAEL

In this article an attempt is made to shed light on the unique status of the Arabic
 language, both spoken and written, in Israel. Arabic is de jure the second official language in the State of Israel, but de facto it is marginal. By 1948 Hebrew had become in fact the only official and dominant language in Israel. In the 1950s all the Jewish attempts to persuade the Arabs in Israel to write their literature in Hebrew, to learn only Hebrew or to write Arabic in Hebrew characters failed. In the summer of 2008 right-wing Jewish members of the Knesset also failed to strip Arabic of its status as an official language.

Tradition et innovation dans le codage de langues en contact dans l’idiolecte d’un marchand juif du XVIII e siècle

The encrypted language of a tradesman at the end of the xviiith century.After going bankrupt in 1776, Solomon Hyman gave to the French court his pocket-book, written in Hebrew characters, which had been travelling with him between Paris and London since 1764. He wrote in it several kinds of lists : the toyware he bought in England, the snuffboxes he had painted in Paris, the bills of exchange he received and the debts he had to pay. The language he uses is near of German, but with specific Yiddish words. The names are from English, the decoration from French and the numbers in Hebrew. Their spelling is often mistaken, because of lack of knowledge, but mainly because of his German accent. Only a few lines are in latin characters.

Jofre (Jaufre): the circulation of Arthurian romances among late medieval Catalan Jews

ABSTRACTThe Arthurian legends have long attracted scholarly attention. In contrast, research on the reception of Arthurian works among Jews during the Middle Ages has been relatively limited. This study reconstructs nearly five hundred verses of the Occitan romance Jaufre written in Hebrew script and contextualizes its reception among Catalan and Jewish audiences. It is generally believed that this Occitan-Arthurian work is related to the court of King Jaume I. However, to this day no manuscript of clear Catalan origin has been found. The fragments in Hebrew characters from Girona display some linguistic traits that clearly testify to a more Catalanized version of this renowned Occitan work. The protagonist of the romance is also referred to in Catalan, Jofre rather than Jaufre. This work is evidence of the reception of Arthurian legends among late medieval Iberian Jews, and more particularly among the Jews of Catalonia during the fourteenth century.

The Beginnings of Ladino Literature: Moses Almosnino and His Readers by Olga Borovaya

Reviewed by: The Beginnings of Ladino Literature: Moses Almosnino and His Readers by Olga Borovaya Shon Hopkin Borovaya, Olga. The Beginnings of Ladino Literature: Moses Almosnino and His Readers. Indiana UP, 2017. ISBN: 978-0-25302-552-4. Olga Borovaya's persuasive work on the beginnings of Ladino literature serves as an important corrective to the commonly-held view that this literature did not truly begin until the eighteenth century. Borovaya works from a study and close reading of Moses ben Baruch Almosnino's writings from the sixteenth century—the Crónica de los reyes otomanos and several of his letters—to argue for a much earlier start point for Ladino literature. As the author describes in the introduction, Almosnino is considered the most famous Ottoman Sephardi writer, known to both Jewish and Christian audiences. Much of his influence among Christians was due to Jacob Cansino's liberal translation of Almosnino's Crónica into Spanish in 1638, published as Extremos y grandezas de Constantinopla, although Cansino's translation effectively changed the tenor and focus of Almosnino's work to mirror the travelogues that were popular at the time. Cansino's volume was used as a resource on Ottoman history by the Austrian Orientalist Jacob von Hammer in the early nineteenth century, even [End Page 168] though Borovaya demonstrates that Almosnino's original work should not be viewed as actual history. Ottoman Jews began to use Cansino's translation at the end of the nineteenth and first quarter of the twentieth century, and therefore Almosnino's Crónica was imperfectly preserved. For Sephardic Jews, however, Almosnino's Regimiento de la vida was much more famous and respected. The 1564 edition of this work was written in Hebrew characters and was accompanied by a shorter work, Tratado de los suenyos. The work was republished in 1729 in Latin characters. Tomás Antonio Sánchez de Uribe discovered it while compiling a catalogue of rabbinic writings and ensured that Almosnino's works would continue to be known when his mostly-positive assessment of Regimiento was quoted in the Jewish Encyclopedia. Borovaya laments that very few scholars have analyzed either this author or his literary production. Apart from a biography and a few articles, mostly concerned with Almosnino's life and language, there is really only a handful of studies on Almosnino's works, one of them the volume under review. Borovaya proposes that this paucity in scholarly attention is due to the fact that Ladino literature from the sixteenth century has not been properly categorized. On the one hand, since it has been labelled as "Spanish literature," it does not typically receive analysis by Ladino scholars, but on the other, the fact that it is written in Hebrew characters prevents most Spanish scholars from accessing it. Borovaya argues that Almosnino's literature should be classified as Ladino literature. She demonstrates that Almosnino's primary audience were educated conversos who had been forced to abandon their Jewish communities in Spain and who no longer were able to communicate in Hebrew. This group needed to be reeducated in Jewish traditions as they attempted to return to their Jewish roots in Salonika and elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire. The goals of Almosnino's work, in part, were to strengthen the Jewish community's relationship with the Ottoman Empire and to help these new members of the Jewish community to integrate into their community. As Borovaya states, "Almosnino's chronicles of Ottoman sultans . . . fundamentally differ from his contemporaries' Hebrew histories of non-Jewish monarchs represented in biblical terms. What we see is a skillfully constructed political, if not propagandistic, narrative aimed at making Sephardim feel that they were living at the right time in the right place, and that they should be good Ottoman [End Page 169] subjects" (11). Since Hebrew was mostly inaccessible to this group, Ladino became the vehicle through which written communication passed. Having set out the general arguments in the introduction, Borovaya proceeds in the prologue to set the stage for Almosnino's sixteenth-century works by discussing Jewish vernacular culture prior to the expulsion from Spain in 1492. The spoken language of Jews in fifteenth-century Spain was Ibero-Romance. Their...

The Andalusi Literary and Intellectual Tradition: The Role of Arabic in Judah ibn Tibbon’s Ethical Will by Sarah J. Pearce

R&L 51.3-52.1 (Autumn 2019-Spring 2020) 251 BOOK REVIEWS The Andalusi Literary and Intellectual Tradition: The Role of Arabic in Judah ibn Tibbon’s Ethical Will Sarah J. Pearce Indiana University Press, 2017. xiv + 276 pp. $60.00 hardcover. $59.99 ebook. In The Andalusi Literary and Intellectual Tradition: The Role of Arabic in Judah ibn Tibbon’s Ethical Will, Sarah J. Pearce positions herself as a foremost scholar of medieval Iberian literary culture. This first monograph continues some of her earlier publications on the connections between the two major written languages of medieval Andalusi thinkers, Hebrew and Arabic, especially in the form of Judeo-Arabic (Arabic in Hebrew characters). In The Andalusi Literary and Intellectual Tradition, she emphasizes the concept of the cultural prestige of Arabic as expressed through a twelfth-century Hebrew letter—in the genre of an ethical will—produced by Judah Ibn Tibbon, an Andalusi Jewish émigré to southern France. Judah Ibn Tibbon’s will, however, is just the entryway into this monograph ’s focus, acting as a microcosm for understanding the status of Arabic in the minds of Judah Ibn Tibbon and other Judeo-Arabic authors more generally. Pearce’s analysis of this ethical will, along with a new translation of the primary source, reveal to modern readers the inner depths of this text and the Judeo-Arabic context of southern Europe. This book deservedly won the La corónica International Book Award in 2019, reflecting its contribution to medieval Iberian scholarship. Judah Ibn Tibbon’s biography is necessary to understand Pearce’s detailed inquiry into his letter. Born in Granada around c. 1120, Judah Ibn Tibbon fled the Almohad invasion and settled in Lunel in the middle of the twelfth century. Between 1172 and his death in 1190, he wrote this lengthy letter to his son Samuel, who was born and raised in Provence. Having left behind the Arabophone world for a southern French community with limited access to Arabic, Judah ibn Tibbon subtly weaves salient aspects of his former cultural sphere into the will, especially a preference for the written language Religion & Literature 252 of Arabic. In the ethical will, this ideal perception of Arabic emerges mainly in Ibn Tibbon’s use of biblical and philosophical sources, references to his own book habits, and poetics. Pearce presents these literary themes as collectively reflecting an agenda of Arabophone culture. Judah ibn Tibbon “uses his ethical will to transmit both Jewish and Islamic thought, assert the primacy of Arabic, and preserve Andalusi culture” (8). Judah Ibn Tibbon is known primarily as a translator, and it was his son Samuel who famously translated Moses Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed from Arabic (Judeo-Arabic) to Hebrew. Rather than treat Ibn Tibbon the writer of an ethical will as a separate entity from Ibn Tibbon the translator, however, Pearce understands the ethical will as part of an ongoing conversation with its author’s translation program. The family of Ibn Tibbonid translators tend toward literal, word-for-word translation. However, Pearce argues that Judah Ibn Tibbon performs cultural translation in unexpected ways in his work. His translation is “not one that adapts metaphors and toponyms and idiomatic expressions but is rather one that conveys the sociocultural prestige of the source language through literal translation” (37). In other words, Pearce argues that Ibn Tibbon’s use of word-for-word translations is in itself a form of cultural translation. The Andalusi Literary and Intellectual Tradition is divided into six chapters. Since the ethical will holds primacy among the monograph’s sources, the chapters appropriately center themselves around a particular aspect of the will and proceed into a discussion of its literary and cultural context. Each chapter title begins with a verse or line from the ethical will as a starting point for a discussion of Andalusi literary culture more generally. For example, the title of the third chapter reads: “‘On Every Sabbath, Read… the Bible in Arabic’: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Arabic Literature.” By using the ethical will as a conduit into literary culture, Pearce challenges the stark divides of artifacts into historical, cultural or literary categories . The ethical will, she argues, works in all three ways...

Two Iberian Cases of Intellectual Mysticism

Two Iberian Cases of Intellectual Mysticism

Predictive power of remote sensing versus temperature‐derived variables in modelling phenology of herbivorous insects

AbstractApplication of remote sensing datasets in modelling phenology of heterotrophic animals has received little attention. In this work, we compare the predictive power of remote sensing versus temperature‐derived variables in modelling peak flight periods of herbivorous insects, as exemplified by nocturnal moths. Moth phenology observations consisted of weekly observations of five focal moth species (Orthosia gothica,Ectropis crepuscularia,Cabera exanthemata,Dysstroma citrataandOperophtera brumata) gathered in a national moth monitoring scheme in Finland. These species were common and widespread and had peak flight periods in different seasons. Temperature‐derived data were represented by weekly accumulating growing degree days (GDD) calculated from gridded temperature observations. Remote sensing data were obtained from three sources: (1) snow melt‐off date from theMODISdaily snow maps, (2) greening date using theNDWIfromMODISdata and (3) dates of start, maximum and end of growing season based on theJRC FAPARproducts. Peak phenology observations of moths were related to different explanatory variables by using linear mixed effect models (LMM), with 70% of the data randomly selected for model calibration. Predictive power of models was tested using the remaining 30% of the data. Remote sensing data (snow melt‐off and vegetation greening date) showed the highest predictive power in two moth species flying in the early and late spring, whereas in the three other species none of the variables showed reasonable predictive power. Flight period of the spring species coincides with natural events such as snow melt or vegetation greening that can easily be observed using remote sensing techniques. We demonstrate the applicability of our methodology by predictive spatial maps of peak flight phenology covering the entire Finland for two of the focal species. The methods are applicable in situations that require spatial predictions of animal activity, such as the management of populations of insect pest species.

Computer aided restoration of handwritten character strokes

This work suggests a new variational approach to the task of computer aided segmentation and restoration of incomplete characters, residing in a highly noisy document image. We model character strokes as the movement of a pen with a varying radius. Following this model, in order to fit the digital image, a cubic spline representation is being utilized to perform gradient descent steps, while maintaining interpolation at some initial (manually sampled) points. The proposed algorithm was used in the process of restoring approximately 1000 ancient Hebrew characters (dating to ca. 8th–7th century BCE), some of which are presented herein and show that the algorithm yields plausible results when applied on deteriorated documents.

Lasker-Schüler's Languages: Hebrew and Hieroglyphics

Lasker-Schüler's Languages:Hebrew and Hieroglyphics Samuel J. Spinner (bio) I will begin with a quotation from Else Lasker-Schüler in its original language: Ani ben-hamelech mi-Teben sholeach lecha ethamichtav hazeh asher nifkad me-itivenichtav bichtav hakinorim hana'ale sheliri ha-ivrit Ir-Zahav: vehineni meshiv lecha et etzem hagulgoletasher beyamim avaru kavashta lema'anibamilchama: adom yifga becha hachesed ka'asher natanli linshom od: yavo-na dami alecha: (Der Malik 87) These words are Hebrew. But Lasker-Schüler did not know Hebrew. Although she famously maintained that her works were composed in Hebrew, she did not, however, claim that she knew Hebrew (Shedletzky 171). And her contention is correct: at least in the single example cited here, she did in fact write in Hebrew. While Hebrew words appear elsewhere in her works—usually as titles or captions of drawings—none of these examples is as substantial as the text cited above, from her 1919 prose work Der Malik. I will demonstrate that this text emerges from a complex of concerns that were current in Lasker-Schüler's context—the avant-garde interrogation of the relationship between word and image and the exploration of modern forms [End Page 701] of Jewish identity. In the case of Lasker-Schüler's Hebrew, and her notions of Jewish identity more broadly, these two areas—aesthetics and the "problems" of modern Jewishness—are fully enmeshed in a manner that was current among (largely) Yiddish-speaking writers and artists. While it is certainly idiosyncratic, perhaps even sui generis, for a writer to produce a text in a language she does not know, Lasker-Schüler's Hebrew was, to an extent, of a piece with figurations of Jewishness at the intersection of word and image across central and eastern European Jewish modernism. And although the scholarship largely ignores this context of Lasker-Schüler's work, I will show that attending to it can help explicate works otherwise indecipherable.1 Specifically, Lasker-Schüler developed an approach to Hebrew—as language and as script—in conversation with Jewish artists and writers (the latter typically working in Yiddish or Hebrew) whom she met in Berlin in the late 1910s and early 1920s. As a result, although Lasker-Schüler's Hebrew text is characteristically daring, it is nonetheless in accord with the efforts of a number of eastern European Jewish writers and artists who sought to demonstrate the capacities of both Yiddish and Hebrew to meet the demands of avant-garde semiotics and aesthetics without abandoning the traditions that preserved the Hebrew letter into modernity. The fact that Lasker-Schüler, unlike these other figures, could only painstakingly write a few Hebrew characters and could probably barely read them, does not make her project incompatible with the broader discourses on Jewishness in the period. Indeed, the focus in the avant-garde on the visuality of text and script meant that comprehending the semantics of a text could be, as in this case, beside the point. And so a Hebrew text that was illegible to its author and readers is not only a fascinating experiment in the creation of new modes of signification but also an attempt to elaborate new understandings of Jewish language and Jewish poetry. The visual aspect of Hebrew—the appearance of its letters—opened a space for conceptions of Jewish language to turn away from semantics and toward form; away from content and toward effect. Hebrew in German It was the Hebrew and Yiddish poet Uri Zvi Greenberg who reported, decades later, that Lasker-Schüler had once responded to his offer to translate some of her works by stating that her poems were written [End Page 702] in Hebrew to begin with (Shedletzky 171). Interestingly, Greenberg agreed with her. In a Hebrew essay written in honor of Lasker-Schüler's fiftieth birthday, published in 1924 in the Tel Aviv Hebrew newspaper Davar,2 Greenberg argued that Lasker-Schüler's poetry is an example of modern Hebrew verse (Kol Ketavav 122–29). Revising Lasker-Schüler's famous claim that she was born in Thebes, Greenberg writes that...

Elucidating mechanisms for insect body size: partial support for the oxygen-dependent induction of moulting hypothesis.

Body size is a key life history trait, and knowledge of its mechanistic basis is crucial in life history biology. Such knowledge is accumulating for holometabolous insects, whose growth is characterised and body size affected by moulting. According to the oxygen-dependent induction of moulting (ODIM) hypothesis, moult is induced at a critical mass at which oxygen demand of growing tissues overrides the supply from the tracheal respiratory system, which principally grows only at moults. Support for the ODIM hypothesis is controversial, partly because of a lack of proper data to explicitly test the hypothesis. The ODIM hypothesis predicts that the critical mass is positively correlated with oxygen partial pressure (PO2 ) and negatively with temperature. To resolve the controversy that surrounds the ODIM hypothesis, we rigorously test these predictions by exposing penultimate-instar Orthosia gothica (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae) larvae to temperature and moderate PO2 manipulations in a factorial experiment. The relative mass increment in the focal instar increased along with increasing PO2 , as predicted, but there was only weak suggestive evidence of the temperature effect. Probably owing to a high measurement error in the trait, the effect of PO2 on the critical mass was sex specific; high PO2 had a positive effect only in females, whereas low PO2 had a negative effect only in males. Critical mass was independent of temperature. Support for the ODIM hypothesis is partial because of only suggestive evidence of a temperature effect on moulting, but the role of oxygen in moult induction seems unambiguous. The ODIM mechanism thus seems worth considering in body size analyses.

The Number of the Beast in Revelation 13 in Light of Papyri, Graffiti, and Inscriptions

ABSTRACTRevelation’s portrayal of a tyrannical beast concludes with a riddle, which identifies the beast’s number as 666 (Rev. 13:18). Among the factors that complicate the interpretation of the riddle are: first, that there is a notable textual variant that reads 616 instead of 666; second, that there are differences over the appropriate method of interpretation; and third, that even those who agree about method may reach different conclusions. Many scholars find the most plausible interpretation to be that the number summarises the numerical value of ‘Nero Caesar’ written in Hebrew characters, while others find this proposal unconvincing. This article provides fresh support for the ‘Nero Caesar’ interpretation by examining recently published graffiti from the agora at Smyrna, papyri from Oxyrhynchus, Ketef Jericho, and Murabba‘at, and inscriptions from the synagogues at Sardis and Dura Europos.

Eckhart, Lost in Translation: La traduction de Sh-h-r par Yehuda Alharizi et ses implications philosophiques

Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed had a significant influence on both Jewish and Christian philosophy, although the vast majority of Jewish and Christian readers in the Middle Ages could not read the original Judeo-Arabic (Arabic written in Hebrew characters) text. Instead, they had access to the text through Hebrew and Latin translations. The article focuses on words derived from the root sh-h-r in the original text of Maimonides, first (section 1) on the understanding of Maimonides himself, where they take on two meanings; the first sense of these words is an adjective that refers to things well-known to the larger public; the second sense is that in which the opinions held by the public are opposed to the intelligibles. Second (section 2), while one of Maimonides’ Hebrew translators, Ibn Tibbon, did understand the original meaning of the words in the Guide, the other, Alharizi did not; he missed the distinction between rational understanding and generally admitted opinions. This misunderstanding changed the meaning of three important passages of the Guide. Finally (section 3) the mistranslation of Alharizi influenced the medieval philosophers that either read his translation, such as Rabbi Aaron ben Elijah of Nicomedia, or a Latin translation based upon it, such as Meister Eckhart.

Hebrew-Catalan Medieval Wedding Songs: Satirical Functions of the Hebrew Component and Other Linguistic Aspects

The Hebrew-Catalan documents of the Jews of medieval Catalonia have not been thoroughly analyzed thus far. The present article analyzes five unique wedding songs of the fourteenth–fifteenth centuries written in Catalan using Hebrew characters (edited in 1970 and 1974). In this study special attention is given to the humorous and satirical functions of the Hebrew component. This sophisticated use of the Hebrew component may imply more widespread oral traditions of parodic character related to the wedding ceremony among the Jews of Catalonia and the Iberian Peninsula. The notion of “Judeo-Catalan” is discussed in the framework of linguistic repertoire while demonstrating undocumented or rarely documented phonetic, semantic, and lexical features of medieval Catalan. The use of a different orthographic system allows for a written representation of the pronunciation of medieval Catalan, whereby the boundaries between the spoken and the written are blurred, creating a sort of a “written-spoken language.”

Distance decay is uncommon in large‐scale population synchrony of common moths: does it promote vulnerability to climate change?

Abstract Large‐scale spatial synchrony is common in population dynamics. In nearly all empirical data sets, population synchrony decays with distance. Large‐scale spatial population synchrony of 20 common moth species was studied using 367 separate light‐trap time series of 3–27 years, at 13–19 localities in southern Finland. The maximum distance between trap sites was ca 1075 km. The degree of spatial synchrony in three weather variables (daily mean and minimum temperature, and daily total precipitation) from 15 weather stations was also studied. Data were analysed with spatial non‐parametric correlation functions (Sncf). Statistically significant large‐scale spatial synchrony in population fluctuations occurred in 85% of the species (Scotopteryx chenopodiata, Eulithis populata, Chloroclysta citrata, Epirrita autumnata, Perizoma alchemillata, P. didymata, Eupithecia pusillata, Macaria wauaria, Itame brunneata, Cabera pusaria, C. exanthemata, Eilema lurideola, Rusina ferruginea, Amphipoea fucosa, Orthosia gothica, Cerapteryx graminis and Diarsia mendica), as well as in all weather variables. Spatial synchrony decreased with distance (=distance decay) in 45% of the species, and there was no indication of distance decay in the remaining species. Climate change is likely to cause an increasing frequency of extreme weather events, and insects are strongly affected by such environmental stochasticity. In combination with the high frequency of large‐scale spatial synchrony, which did not show distance decay as a rule in these data, even currently common moth species may become threatened in the near future.

Rashi’s Glosses Belaaz: Navigating Hebrew Scripture under Feudal Lanterns

Amid sporadic anti-Jewish violence whipped by a crusading frenzy, Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki (“Rashi”) composed a commentary on the Hebrew Bible that was destined to become a vast navigational aid for God’s scriptural plan. Many of Rashi’s glosses invited medieval Jews on a spiritual pilgrimage that would dispel their sense of subjugation to temporal Christian powers. From the advent of Christianity, Jewish communities increasingly steered a course between Jewish autonomy and welfare, on one hand, and accommodation of Christian and feudal strictures, on the other. Wondering whether the cataclysmic destruction of the Second Temple in 70 c.e. signaled God’s abandonment of his people, medieval Jews’ scriptural interpretations intensified the themes of survival and internal social cohesion. To guide medieval Jewry through a middle ground between a characteristically triumphant scriptural landscape and the dispiriting Christian counterpart, Rashi frequently incorporated into his glosses French terms he transliterated into Hebrew characters. This incorporation of French was both purposeful and well-informed. As a minority community in Rashi’s Troyes, Jews lived two distinct experiences: in one, they spoke vernacular French with Christian neighbors, while, in the other, they prayed and studied the Pentateuch and Prophets in Hebrew. In this setting, the laazim communicated to Jewish readers in a specialized language akin to a password or a special handshake. Yet the glosses, because they were enveloped in Hebrew commentaries and disguised in Hebrew letters, would have eluded French-speaking Christians who could not have identified fragments of their own language hiding in plain sight.

Arabic-Romance Medico-Botanical Glossaries in Hebrew Manuscripts from the Iberian Peninsula and Italy

Some late medieval bilingual and multilingual medico-botanical glossaries in Hebrew characters, preserved in the Vatican Library (in particular MSS ebr 356, 361, 365, and 417) are discussed. These lists contain Arabic and (sometimes) Hebrew medico-botanical terms, alongside numerous representatives of the various Romance dialects spoken in the regions where Jewish scholars and physicians lived and worked (the Iberian Peninsula, southern France, and parts of Italy). The main goal is to identify the Romance varieties used in these lists, because they can help indicate the lists’ origin and transmission paths.

A New Karaite-Turkish Manuscript from Germany: New Light on Genre and Language in Karaite and Rabbanite Turkic Bible Translations in the Crimea, Constantinople and Elsewhere

A Karaite manuscript in Istanbuli Turkish written in Hebrew characters has turned up in Germany lately. This article investigates the whereabouts of the manuscript and tries to place it in its historical and linguistic context. Although the manuscript was apparently written/copied in Constantinople, the Turkic language used in it has some Crimean connections. The novelty of this discovery lies in the fact that Turkish was used by the 19th century Constantinople Karaites as a literary language.

White Crucifixion and Listening to the Cockerel: Marc Chagall.

In White Crucifixion, Chagall documents the deliberate targetingof Jews inNaziGermany thatwas theprelude to theHolocaust (Figure 1). Chagall uses religious imagerywhenhedepicts Christ on the Cross as the central figure, not as the Christian savior but as a Jewishmartyr.2 Thus, Chagall brings the Crucifixion to bear on contemporary Jewish tragedy. He starkly depicts Christ’s martyrdom as a Jew whose sacrifice speaks to the unspeakable suffering of Jews brought about by Nazi ideology. Chagall was reacting to events that took place in 1938, a year that marked the renewed persecution of Jews inGermany. It beganwith the registrationandmarkingof Jewishbusinessesandwas followedby the forceduseof thenames Abraham and Sarah for men and women and the required stamping of passports with a “J.” Concurrently that June and again in August, synagogues were destroyed in Munich and Nuremberg. The destruction reached its climax on the night of November 9, 1938, Kristallnacht (Crystal Night, or Night of BrokenGlass),whenmore than7000Jewish-ownedstoresand buildings had their windows broken, when more than 1000 synagoguesweredesecrated,andwhenmore than30 000Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps, and at least 90 were killed. Historically, Kristallnacht marked the beginning of the Holocaust. InWhite Crucifixion, Chagall documents the desecration of 1938 and calls the world to witness. In this painting, light shinesdown fromabove to illuminatebothChrist on theCross and amenorah (a symbol of the Jewish faith) at the foot of the Cross. Both the head of Jesus and themenorah (an ornamentalmenorahwith6candles, 1 ofwhich is extinguished) are surrounded by a halo of light. To signify his Jewishness, instead ofa typical loincloth, Jesuswearsa fringedJewishprayer shawl with 2 black stripes across it. Rather than a crown of thorns, hewears awhite head cloth. The Roman’s traditional derogatory Latin inscription INRI (“Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews”) appearsabovehishead.Beneath it is theAramaic (a language spoken by Jews) translation Yeshu HaNotzri Malcha D'Yehudai in Hebrew characters. According to Ziva Amishai-Maisels,2 Chagall’s Aramaic spelling was a play on words because HaNotzri is more usuallyused tomean“theChristian,” rather thaneither “theNazarene” or “the man from Nazareth.”2(p139) In the Book of Acts, Nazorean is used to refer to a follower of Jesus (ie, a Christian rather than an inhabitant of a city), and in modern Hebrew, Notzrim is theword forChristian.Thus,Chagall’sAramaicdesignation indicateshis recognitionof Jesus’ importance toboth Christians and Jews. Hovering above the Cross are 4 alarmed figures inmourning (3 biblical patriarchs and 1matriarch)who express anguish at the tumult beneath them. Jesus’ left hand reaches out toward a pillaged and burning synagogue. Flames leapout todestroy theTorahark.Remnants of the pillaging are shown—a torn prayer book, an overturned chair, a lamp, a menorah, and, sadly, a burning Torah scroll. In the lower right side, a “Wandering Jew” (emblematic of the fate of the Jewish nation) is carrying a sack on his back, seeking toescape.Threebearded Jewishmenare shown in the lower left side.Onewipesawayhis tears.Anotherwears anunreadable sign (originally with the words Ich bin Jude [I am a Jew]). A third man holds a rescued Torah scroll tightly in his arms. To the far left, houses are burning. An unburied body lies among tombstones in a cemetery.Dispiritedvillagers sit in the snow; an unused fiddle lies on the ground beside them. Others seek to escape in an immobile, overcrowded boat with a Marc Chagall (1887-1985), French.White Crucifixion, 1938. Oil on canvas, 154.6 × 140 cm (607⁄8 × 551⁄16 in). Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. Gift of Alfred S. Alschuler. © 2014 Artists Rights Society, New York, NY/ADAGP, Paris, France.

'A WONDERFULL MONSTER BORNE IN GERMANY': HAIRY GIRLS IN MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN GERMAN BOOK, COURT AND PERFORMANCE CULTURE.

Human hirsuteness, or pathological hair growth, can be symptomatic of various conditions, including genetic mutation or inheritance, and some cancers and hormonal disturbances. Modern investigations into hirsuteness were initiated by nineteenth-century German physicians. Most early modern European cases of hypertrichosis (genetically determined all-over body and facial hair) involve German-speaking parentage or patronage, and are documented in German print culture. Through the Wild Man tradition, modern historians routinely link early modern reception of historical hypertrichosis cases to issues of ethnicity without, however, recognising early modern awareness of links between temporary hirsuteness and the pathological nexus of starvation and anorexia. Here, four cases of hirsute females are reconsidered with reference to this medical perspective, and to texts and images uncovered by my current research at the Herzog August Library and German archives. One concerns an Italian girl taken to Prague in 1355 by the Holy Roman Empress, Anna von Schweidnitz. Another focuses on Madeleine and Antonietta Gonzalez, daughters of the ‘Wild Man’ of Tenerife, documented at German courts in the 1580s. The third and fourth cases consider the medieval bearded Sankt Kümmernis (also known as St Wilgefortis or St Uncumber), and the seventeenth-century Bavarian fairground performer Barbara Urslerin.Krankhafter menschlicher Hirsutismus kann aufgrund unterschiedlicher Ursachen auftreten, zu denen u.a. genetische Veränderungen und Vererbung, verschiedene Krebserkrankungen und hormonelle Störungen gehören. Die moderne Hirsutismus-Forschung ist im 19. Jh. von deutschen Forschern initiiert worden. Die meisten europäischen frühneuzeitlichen Erscheinungen von Hypertrichose (dem genetisch bedingten Haarwuchs am gesamten Körper und im Gesicht) gehen auf deutschsprachige Eltern oder Förderer zurück und sind in Deutschland in den Druck gelangt. Bei Untersuchungen des Motivs des Wilden Mannes zieht die aktuelle geschichtswissenschaftliche Forschung in der Regel Verbindungslinien zwischen der frühneuzeitlichen Wahrnehmung von Hypertrichose-Fällen und Fragen der Ethnizität, ohne jedoch zu beachten, dass in der Frühen Neuzeit die Verbindung zwischen temporärem Hirsutismus und der krankhaften Verknüpfung von Unterernährung und Anorexie bekannt war. Im vorliegenden Beitrag werden vier Fälle von an Hirsutismus erkrankten Frauen neu analysiert, unter Einbezug dieser medizinischen Perspektive und unter Beachtung von Texten und Abbildungen, die meine jüngsten Forschungen in der Herzog August Bibliothek und an deutschen Archiven ans Licht gefördert haben. Die hier betrachteten Fälle betreffen ein italienisches Mädchen, das 1355 von Anna von Schweidnitz, Kaiserin des Hl. Römischen Reichs, nach Prag gebracht wurde; Madeleine und Antonietta Gonzalez, die Töchter des ‘Wilden Manns’ von Teneriffa, die in den 1580er Jahren an deutschen Höfen bezeugt sind; die bärtige Sankt Kümmernis (Wilgefortis), und die bayerische Jahrmarktkünstlerin Barbara Urslerin.

Old French into Hebrew in Twelfth-Century Tsarfat: Medieval Hebrew Versions of Marbode's Lapidary

The reception in Jewish cultures of the influential medieval lapidary by Bishop Marbode of Rennes (1035–1123), which was widely disseminated in the original Latin and in numerous translations into various vernaculars, is described. Three (possibly four) extant Hebrew lapidaries that derive from Marbode’s are identified. Two of them are shown to go back to a single, lost Hebrew translation of one of the many Old French versions of Marbode’s lapidary. Although these two redactions share only isolated sentences or phrases, their common origin was established through meticulous comparison; the comparative method applied here is one of the paper’s main contributions. It is asserted that the strong infatuation with lapidaries of medieval Jewish scholars in Northern Europe derives from their interest in biblical exegesis and in particular from their wish to identify the precious stones in the High Priest’s Breastplate. Users of lapidaries often added marginal glosses that later copyists integrated into the text itself. Hence editing such texts requires a special methodology, especially when the non-Hebrew Vorlage of a translation is extant. Inasmuch as these two lapidaries go back to a common Urfassung , they must be edited together; their juxtaposition affords invaluable insights into their genesis and subsequent transmission history. A passage describing the so-called wet compass, found in Version B and thought to be one of the oldest of its kind, was found to be a late interpolation that cannot be dated. In addition to innumerable haphazard changes, the transmission history of our lapidary involved deliberate and substantial rearrangement of the entries and a rephrasing of many of them. The goal was to enhance the lapidary’s Hebrew character and making it more attractive to its intended Jewish users. The entries on thirteen stones are edited, along with English translations and detailed historical and philological comments.