Hebrew Characters Research Articles

Pickles, Hiccups, and an Upside-Down Gloss: Two Fragments of Judeo-Arabic Medical Treatises in the Stanford University Collections

Abstract: This article reconstructs the history of two fragments in the Stanford University Collections. Although they once belonged to different manuscripts, they share much in common: both were copied in the western Mediterranean sometime around the fourteenth century, both contain excerpts of Arabic medical treatises transliterated into Hebrew characters, both contain marginal glosses in other languages (Latin in the one case; Hebrew and Romance vernaculars in the other), and both were subsequently reused as book bindings. Thanks to the insights gleaned from tools both old and new (the latter ranging from multispectral imaging to Twitter), the fragments together attest to the circulation of knowledge from Iran to Iberia, the material frameworks that enabled exchanges across religious and linguistic divides, and the violent dismemberment of manuscripts and communities alike in the closing decades of the Middle Ages.

Two Judeo-Spanish ‘Marrano’ hymns in the liturgy of the Jews of Cochin

The liturgy of the Jews of Cochin, Kerala, is extant in several manuscripts, the oldest dating back to the end of the seventeenth century. Among the Hebrew pieces, we find two compositions in Old Spanish written in Hebrew characters, Alto dio de Abraham and Todos kiriados . Here we provide for the first time an edition of these texts (from MS. Roth 33 of the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds and MS. Or. 2242 of the Cambridge University Library). A philological analysis reveals that these two texts – a supplication paraphrasing Psalm 121 and a translation of a medieval Hebrew pizmon, Kol bĕruʾe – are orally transmitted versions of prayers belonging to the liturgy of the Hispano-Portuguese New Christians. A comparison with their European counterparts and the study of the linguistic peculiarities of these Indian versions show influences from Portuguese and Malayalam. In the context of the history of Jewish and Marrano migrations to the Malabar Coast, these texts represent an important vestige of a Judeo-Iberian heritage within Indian Jewish culture.

The genome sequence of the Hebrew Character, Orthosia gothica (Linnaeus, 1758).

We present a genome assembly from an individual female Orthosia gothica (the Hebrew character; Arthropoda; Insecta; Lepidoptera; Noctuidae). The genome sequence is 1,065.1 megabases in span. Most of the assembly is scaffolded into 37 chromosomal pseudomolecules, including the Z sex chromosome. The mitochondrial genome has also been assembled and is 15.38 kilobases in length. Gene annotation of this assembly on Ensembl identified 13,691 protein coding genes.

A Macaronic Hebrew-Greek-Turkish Poem from the First Printed Karaite Prayerbook, Venice 1528

Abstract In this short article we publish, with translations, a macaronic Hebrew cum Middle Greek religious poem, accompanied by a refrain in Ottoman Turkish, all written in Hebrew characters and fully vocalized. The text comes from a Karaite prayerbook printed in Venice in 1528 on behalf of the Constantinople Karaite community. This poem and its origins played a role in different manipulations of Karaite identities and history during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Humanism, Transculturalism and Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Jews

This article explores the evidence for Transculturalism and Humanism, in the early modern sense of the concepts, amongst Jews of the Ottoman Empire. In the first part of the article, attention is paid to the growing numbers of humanist European travelers to the Ottoman Empire and their relations with Istanbul Jews. The second section of the article is concerned with Ragusa, part of the Ottoman orbit since the fifteenth century. Here, attention is paid to Didacus Pyrrhus, member of an Ottoman Jewish family and the only great Jewish Neo-Latin poet of his age. The third section focuses on Ottoman Cairo and the discoveries and identifications of fragments of works for the theatre in Spanish in Hebrew characters. They attest to an interest in humanist texts. Finally, by way of conclusion, the article examines a specific case of cultural transfer and common ground between Christian humanists and Jewish traders.

The genome sequence of the setaceous Hebrew character, Xestia c-nigrum, (Linnaeus, 1758).

We present a genome assembly from an individual male Xestia c-nigrum (the setaceous Hebrew character; Arthropoda; Insecta; Lepidoptera; Noctuidae). The genome sequence is 760megabases in span. Most of the assembly is scaffolded into 31 chromosomal pseudomolecules, including the assembled Z sex chromosome. The mitochondrial genome has also been assembled and is 15.3 kilobases in length.

Blake’s Hebrew Calligraphy

The exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum of William Blake’s World: “A New Heaven Is Begun” (Sept. 2009-Jan. 2010) provided an opportunity to examine closely Blake’s Hebrew calligraphy. Three works in the exhibition contain errors in forming Hebrew characters; some are deliberate to create clever visual illusions.

Herbivory in a changing climate-Effects of plant genotype and experimentally induced variation in plant phenology on two summer-active lepidopteran herbivores and one fungal pathogen.

With climate change, spring warming tends to advance plant leaf‐out. While the timing of leaf‐out has been shown to affect the quality of leaves for herbivores in spring, it is unclear whether such effects extend to herbivores active in summer. In this study, we first examined how spring and autumn phenology of seven Quercus robur genotypes responded to elevated temperatures in spring. We then tested whether the performance of two summer‐active insect herbivores (Orthosia gothica and Polia nebulosa) and infection by a pathogen (Erysiphe alphitoides) were influenced by plant phenology, traits associated with genotype or the interaction between these two. Warm spring temperatures advanced both bud development and leaf senescence in Q. robur. Plants of different genotype differed in terms of both spring and autumn phenology. Plant phenology did not influence the performance of two insect herbivores and a pathogen, while traits associated with oak genotype had an effect on herbivore performance. Weight gain for O. gothica and ingestion for P. nebulosa differed by a factor of 4.38 and 2.23 among genotypes, respectively. Herbivore species active in summer were influenced by traits associated with plant genotype but not by phenology. This suggest that plant attackers active in summer may prove tolerant to shifts in host plant phenology—a pattern contrasting with previously documented effects on plant attackers active in spring and autumn.

Joseph and His Two Wives: Patterns of Cultural Accommodation in the Judæo-Persian Tale of Yusof and Zoleykhā

Abstract The Tale of Yusof and Zoleykhā appears as part of a religious epic poem, the Bereshit-nāma (Book of Genesis), by the fourteenth-century Judæo-Persian poet Shāhin. Composed in 1358–59, in classical Persian with an admixture of Hebraisms and written in Hebrew characters, this tale was enormously popular within Persian-speaking Jewish communities and was frequently copied on its own. The paper focuses on two episodes from this story: Yusof’s marriages to Zoleykhā and to Osnat (Asenath). Shāhin was active in the late Il-khanid and early post-Mongol periods, when new forms of patronage of literary and artistic production emerged seeking to blend different cultural worlds. The poet indeed fashioned unique amalgams of Jewish and Perso-Islamic traditions, both in form and content. The two episodes constitute small case studies for exploring Shāhin’s diverse array of sources and for determining the thematic and structural ramifications of this fusion. The paper pinpoints how Shāhin accommodated and adapted Jewish and Islamic materials and demonstrates that, though Jewish, the poet firmly ensconces himself in a Persianate cultural sphere.

The Trilingual Prayer Copied by Avraham Firkowicz: The First Hebrew, Judeo-Slavic, and Crimean Judeo-Turkic Trilingual Text

Abstract This article presents a unique trilingual (Hebrew, Turkic, and Slavic) religious literary work from the personal archive of Avraham Firkowicz (National Library of Russia, St. Petersburg). The text, containing 129 lines (verses) in Hebrew characters, is written in Firkowicz’s own hand. Its author has not been reliably identified, but it is assumed that he could be a Karaite Jew from Łuck / Lutsk (Wolhynia, present-day Ukraine) with a good speaking-level knowledge of Slavic and Turkish (e.g., Joseph-Solomon Lutski or Mordechai Sultanski). The language of the Turkic version is a variety of Crimean Judeo-Turkic with many Turkish (Oğuz) features; the language of the Slavic version is based on standard Russian of the early 19th century with Church Slavonic, Ukrainian, and Polish elements.

Traces of Late Medieval Jewish Scotism: A Catalan Translation in Hebrew Script of De distinctione predicamentorum by Petrus Thomae

Abstract Jewish-Christian intellectual relations in late medieval Spain are discussed in light of a curious fragment in Hebrew script from the Vatican Library. The fragment contains an unknown translation from Latin to Catalan (in Hebrew characters) of the work of the Catalan Franciscan monk Petrus Thomae, De distinctione predicamentorum. This translation is also compared with Thomae’s Tractatus brevis de modis distinctionum as it demonstrates an intermediate version between these two works by Petrus Thomae, though it resembles the first more closely. These traces invite a discussion on the existence of “Jewish Scotism” among the Jews of Catalonia, and after the expulsion, among their descendants, who probably made their way to Italy. The text is among the latest evidence of the use of Catalan in Hebrew characters on the cusp of the sixteenth century.

Judeo-Arabic Orthographies: Insights from a Fifteenth-Century Šarḥ

Abstract Judeo-Arabic is a religiolect that developed as a result of the great Arab-Islamic conquests during the 7th century. This linguistic variety shares some of those features common to Neoarabic dialects; nonetheless, it preserves its own uniqueness, such as the almost absolute use of Hebrew characters and the occurrence of Hebrew and Aramaic lexical and grammatical elements within the texts. The writing system of Judeo-Arabic was affected by the socio-political changes that occurred during its development. In particular, Judeo-Arabic was subjected to a dramatic change during the 15th century, as a result of the increasing isolation of the Jews. In this period the so-called ‘Hebraized’ orthography became more prevalent and turned out to be representative of the šurūḥ, i.e. Judeo-Arabic translations of Hebrew sacred texts. In this contribution, we will focus on the issue of Judeo-Arabic graphic adaptation, through the linguistic analysis of an unpublished manuscript from the 15th century containing a šarḥ. Peculiarities and potential inconsistencies are discussed according to the wider and renowned Judeo-Arabic orthographic classification.

Rendering the Divine Name in Romans 10:13

The Tetragrammaton has great significance in Judaism and Christianity. Hebraist George Howard has proposed a theory of New Testament documentary origins. On the basis of early Septuagint/Old Greek (LXX/OG) manuscript findings, Howard has suggested that the Tetragrammaton has played a part in the transmission history of the New Testament. The New Testament writers, according to Howard, would have retained the Tetragrammaton in their Old Testament citations. With the success of the Gentile mission, uninformed copyists replaced the Tetragrammaton with the Greek word κύριος [Lord]. The result was that passages that applied only to YHWH were now applied in error to both the Lord God and the Lord Jesus Christ so that the high Christology of the New Testament was, in part, artificially elevated through scribal corruption. A detailed response is in order to evaluate the validity of Howard’s thesis. As a test case, the LXX/OG quotation from Joel 2:32 (3:5) in Romans 10:13 is examined to determine the proper referent of the linked word Lord . Contextual and grammatical indicators point to Jesus as the ‘Lord’ in the passage. Combined with documentary evidence, the Tetragrammaton thesis fails to convince. The final section of research applies the findings to two Divine Name Bibles, and the suitability of the Tetragrammaton in anglicised or Hebrew characters, as a translation option, is evaluated.

Grammars of Classical Arabic in Judaeo-Arabic

Abstract This article presents an overview of medieval Classical Arabic grammars written in Judaeo-Arabic that are preserved in the Cairo Genizah and the Firkovich Collections. Unlike Jewish grammarians’ application of the Arabic theoretical model to describing Biblical Hebrew, Arabic grammars transliterated into Hebrew characters bear clear evidence of Jewish engagement with the Arabic grammatical tradition for its own sake. In addition, such manuscripts furnish new material on the history of the Arabic grammatical tradition by preserving otherwise unknown texts. The article discusses individual grammars of Classical Arabic in Judaeo-Arabic and tries to answer more general questions on this little known area of Jewish intellectual activity. An analysis of the corpus suggests that Jews who copied and used these texts were less interested in the intricacies of abstract theory than in attaining a solid knowledge of Classical Arabic. Court scribes appear to have been among those interested in the study of Classical Arabic grammar.

El descubrimiento de la primera traducción impresa en ladino de <em>Pirqué Abot</em> (Salónica, hacia 1570)

Entre 1552 y 1965 se publicaron muchas traducciones de Pirqué Abot (ʻTratado de los Padresʼ) en ladino, en caracteres hebreos o latinos, en las ciudades del Imperio oto­mano, denominadas orientales, así como en las ciudades de Italia, Ámsterdam y Londres, consideradas occidentales. La primera traducción aljamiada conocida es la versión de Venecia de 1601, publicada por la imprenta de Giovanni di Gara. Investigaciones ante­riores han demostrado que la versión de Venecia de 1601 se asemeja mucho más a las versiones posteriores publicadas en el Imperio otomano, especialmente en Salónica, que a las publicadas en Italia, Ámsterdam y Londres. Recientemente se ha rescatado, entre los documentos de la Guenizá de El Cairo, una versión de Pirqué Abot publicada hacia 1570 en la imprenta de Yosef Yaabets en Salónica. Al comparar la versión de 1601 con la recientemente descubierta, se observa que no sólo son casi idénticas, sino que de hecho la versión de Venecia se basa en la versión de Salónica. Otros textos publicados en Venecia en el mismo período corroboran esta conclusión. Esta edición en ladino es ahora considerada como la más antigua que se conoce.

Critical Edition of a Fragment of Ramon Llull's Centum Formae in the Introductorium Magnae Artis Generalis

Critical Edition of a Fragment of Ramon Llull's Centum Formae in the Introductorium Magnae Artis Generalis Ilil Baum This appendix accompanies the essay by Ilil Baum, "Jewish Lullism around the Expulsion A Spanish-Catalan Fragment in Hebrew Characters from Ramon Llull's Introductorium Magnae Artis Generalis," JQR 110.3 (2020): 553–573. The following critical edition presents a late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century fragment from the Vatican Library (MS Vat. ebr. 375, ff. 50r–51r), written in Catalanized Castilian in Hebrew script. It contains seventeen philosophical definitions that I identify as part of Ramon Llull's lists of centum formae (hundred forms) in his Introductorium magnae artis generalis (Introduction to the great general art; also known as Liber de universalibus, The book of universals). The edition is meant to make this material accessible to researchers interested in the study of Jewish-Christian intellectual relations in the Iberian Peninsula, particularly with regard to the reception of the work of Ramon Llull. It includes a reproduction of the Hebrew text, a transcription and critical edition with comparison to the known Latin manuscripts in the footnotes, and an English translation. Editorial Criteria I have interfered with the texts as little as possible. I have also tried to represent the visual appearance of the manuscript as closely as possible. Hence, I have tried to maintain the spaces between the rows and parts of the sentences. I have marked the definitions in bold, as these are highlighted in the original fragment by a stretched line between two arrows ←→ above each definition (except that of infinity). In order to facilitate [End Page A1] the reading of the translation, I have preferred a consecutive form of translation, wherein the rows of the original fragment are separated by a sign. The English translation is quite literal in order to maintain the original language as much as possible.1 The purpose of the transcription into Latin characters is to reflect the rendition of the Hebrew text as closely as possible, without making it unreadable. Some evident mistakes by the copyist that could confuse the reader are corrected in the edition, followed by an explanatory footnote. In other cases, I have preferred to maintain the original "errors," while commenting on them in the footnotes. Graphic signs used in the edition of the text: • [abcd] Square brackets mark doubtful readings. When the reading is even less clear a question mark is also added abcd[?]. • (abcd) Parentheses include some interpretative proposals lacking in the text, including the elaboration of abbreviations. In the English translation, these are used for additions that improve the sense of the text. • Additions in the manuscript above the line are inserted as \bcd/. • Hebrew elements are marked with italics. • Forms that are exceptional for medieval Catalan and medieval Castilian or that might cause reading confusions are indicated in the footnotes. Among these are the forms with initial h-. No accents are added. Capital letters are added according to modern Spanish. All punctuation signs are my own additions, as the Hebrew text generally lacks any punctuation marks. The Hebrew manuscripts, like other medieval Catalan and Castilian manuscripts, in many cases agglutinate words or else misdivide them. The agglutinated words are separated by the interpunct sign (·). Some concrete remarks regarding the transcription of the consonants are due: Since the matrix language seems to be Castilian rather than Catalan, [qwa] and [qwo] are transcribed as cua, cuo (for example, cual, cuando etc.), and not as qua, quo as in Catalan texts. The sound [g] is transcribed as g before a, o, u, and gu before e and i. Since the use of the apostrophe (or rafe) with gimel and peh is not systematic, I have interpreted it either as g, p or rather j, f, according to the context. Bet and consonantal vav are transcribed as b and v, respectively. Samekh is transcribed as c (before e, i) and ç (before a, o, u). Tsade is attested only in a couple of occurrences at the end of the word. These are also transcribed by ç. Shin is generally transcribed by s (equivalent to s [End Page A2] and intervocalic -ss-in medieval Castilian and medieval Catalan). The text supplies many...

Jewish Lullism around the Expulsion: A Spanish-Catalan Fragment in Hebrew Characters from Ramon Llull's Introductorium Magnae Artis Generalis

Jewish Lullism around the Expulsion: A Spanish-Catalan Fragment in Hebrew Characters from Ramon Llull's Introductorium Magnae Artis Generalis

Hungarian coins – Hebrew letters

Hungarian coins bore Latin inscriptions from the earliest times. Only in the nineteenth century did German-language, and during the 1848–1849 War of Independence, Hungarian-language legends appear. It is thus curious to find a group of thirteenth-century Hungarian coins bearing Hebrew letters (but not text!). Hebrew letters on Hungarian coins were first noted in the nineteenth century by Sámuel Kohn in his studies of the Hungarian Jewish history, and in some type-descriptions by László Réthy. Nonetheless, they only arose as a subject of research in the 1970s following the publication of a paper by Gyula Rádóczy drawing attention to them. Rádóczy systematically went through their various types, identified each Hebrew character, and attempted to link them with the initials of chamber counts known from written sources. He reached the conclusion that the ‘alef/aleph’ (א) was linked with Altman, the ‘chet’(ח) with Henoch, the ‘teth’ (ט) with Theka and the six-pointed star with Samuel. Soon, the investigation was joined by Sándor Scheibert and Lóránt Nagy, the latter attempting to date late Árpád-era coins relying on Rádóczy’s findings. Later, several papers tried to clarify the issue and determinate the persons of Jewish birth who could be linked with the coins.

Scribal Traditions in Documentary Arabic: From the One Imperial Standard Language to the One (Jewish) Language for Transnational Communication (from the Seventh to the Twelfth Centuries)

Scholars generally read Documentary Arabic according to the norms of Standard Arabic, the constructed ideal language of Abbasid literati. But this essay shows that the nonstandard features of Documentary Arabic were not spontaneous creations by the unlearned but rather scribal traditions carefully transmitted from one generation to the next. Umayyad Documentary Arabic was first and foremost the language used by state officials to display, in public, the authority of the Muslim state and, secondarily, the insider language that the small Arabic elite used to communicate on business and private matters. Given the nature of this elite, it is not surprising to find that this language was fairly uniform. Abbasid Documentary Arabic was the language used to display and administer the authority of the many loosely interacting and for the most part rival rulers but mainly became the language of choice that learned people used to communicate on business and private matters as well as in academic exchange. To mark provenance and affiliation, scribes most probably used not only whole words and formulas and distinctive scripts and layouts but also minor variants in orthography, form, and government. The Arabic of Fatimid Documentary Judeo-Arabic documents found in the Geniza is, this analysis demonstrates, nothing more than mainstream Fatimid Documentary Arabic, albeit continuously transliterated from Arabic into Hebrew characters. Geniza documentary materials must therefore be read as part of a continuous tradition of Arabic derived from state administration rather than as a Jewish sociolect or a variant of standard Arabic.

Erudizione de’ confusi by Yedidya ben Moshe Recanati, a Late Renaissance Italian Translation of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed

In 1581, Yedidya ben Moshe Recanati—who lived in San Marino and Pesaro, in the North‑eastern regions of Italy—wrote an Italian translation (in Hebrew characters) of the Guide of the Perplexed, based on the Hebrew version by Samuel Ibn Tibbon. According to his words in the introduction, this work was destined for Jewish students who, thanks to the translation of difficult words and expressions of Maimonides’ book, could address Jewish and especially non‑Jewish scholars, in order to have further explanations, in particular on scientific matters. Yedidya Recanati was a brilliant and prolific scholar, though almost completely unknown; actually, his rich literary production—biblical exegesis, epistolography, lexicography and translations from and into Hebrew, besides scattered Halakhic response has never been printed. The translation of the Guide, whose title is Erudizione de’ confusi, is the evidence of the persistent importance of Maimonides’ work within Italian Judaism, even in a period of growing defiance toward rationalistic philosophy.