Judeo-arabic languages and literatures: Transmission and creativity

Seminar description

This seminar aims to explore Judaeo-Arabic medieval literary sources in the eastern and western Islamic world that deal with the field of language sciences. These texts, the main centers of which were Near Eastern and Maghreb, were written in Arabic by Jewish scholars at once witnesses of and actors in the scientific development of the Arab-Islamic world. It is in this context of intellectual effervescence that Jews produced a rich literature: poetry, philosophy, religious commentaries, translations, grammars and dictionaries. Unfortunately, these texts are still not sufficiently known by the wider public, especially in their original language. Indeed, the reading of these texts sometimes requires a double competency in both Arabic language and Jewish sources. Thus, today, this literature is much better known in translation than in the original source language. 
The idea of this seminar emerged from a question: how might this corpus inform us about the Muslim and Jewish scholarly tradition in the medieval period, and what might it tell us about the great dynamics related to the circulation of knowledge in Arab culture? While this corpus is not well-studied, it enabled the dissemination of a specific Arabic grammatical tradition as in the history of Hebrew both at a linguistic and metalinguistic level. We are therefore especially interested in considering the contribution of these texts to the development of the Hebrew linguistic tradition, specifically focusing on how some concepts of Arabic grammar have been adapted in order to generate a new form of scholarly description of the Hebrew language which led to the spread of multiple linguistic tools and a structure to its development, far beyond the Judaeo-Arabic world. 

The organization of this seminar aims to initiate dynamic research on Judaeo-Arabic medieval literatures as a whole shedding light on topics tied to language and the sciences of language. The contributors are invited to deal with some of the following points :

• The development of Hebrew grammar through the Arabic linguistic thought and its impact on the history of the Hebrew language : etymology, philology, phonology, descriptions, morphology, theories of the lexicon's formation and organization, roots and stems...;
• Translations from Arabic to Hebrew and from Hebrew to Arabic: circulation, translation and transmission of knowledges, translation methodologies, neologisms, concept adaptations, semantic or morphologic calques...;
• The evolution of Hebrew poetry with at stake the adaptation of Arabic metrics, poetry as linguistic performance, formal and thematic renewal;
• Considerations of nature and specificities of the variety of Arabic of these texts (Literary Koinè, Medieval Judaeo-Arabic, Middle-Arabic...).

Seminar program

Tuesday 24th of October 2023

Nadia Vidro (nv235@cam.ac.uk)

Dr. Nadia Vidro is a cultural and intellectual historian of medieval Jews in Muslim lands, with a strong focus on Qaraism. She holds a PhD from Cambridge (under the supervision of Prof. Geoffrey Khan) and is currently a Senior Research Fellow at University College London. Her most recent projects are on the history of the Jewish calendar and the socio-historical implications of calendar diversity. In another strand of her research, Nadia studied Qaraite treatises on Biblical Hebrew grammar, focusing on the Qaraite approaches to Biblical Hebrew verbal morphology, and worked on the transmission of grammatical knowledge between the Muslim and the Jewish cultures.

Jews and the Grammar of Classical Arabic: an overview

Abstract: Medieval Jews in Muslim lands spoke and wrote Arabic. Yet did Jews study Arabic grammar as a discipline? A number of treatises on the grammar of Classical Arabic are preserved in collections of Jewish manuscripts, such as the Cairo Genizah collections and the Firkovich Collections in the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg. Some of these manuscripts are in Arabic script, others are transliterated into Hebrew characters. Although Jewish scholars could read and study works on Classical Arabic grammar penned in Arabic script, it is the Judaeo-Arabic copies that most clearly testify to Jews' active engagement with Classical Arabic grammar.
In this paper, I will present an overview of Classical Arabic grammars preserved in Judaeo-Arabic and will discuss individual grammars, some of which are well-known whereas others do not survive outside of the Judaeo-Arabic corpus. I will then try to answer more general questions, such as who was interested in learning the grammar of Classical Arabic, what kinds of grammars Jews were interested in and whether Jews only transliterated or also composed some of the grammars that we possess today.

Tuesday 14th November 2023

Maria Angeles Gallego (mariangeles.gallego@cchs.csic.es)

María Ángeles Gallego is Tenured Scientist at the Institute of Languages and Cultures of the Mediterranean and the Near East of the Spanish Council for Scientific Research of which she has been Director (2014-2019). She has worked and taught at different academic institutions including Emory University (Atlanta, USA) as Fulbright Visiting Scholar (1997-1999) and the University of Cambridge (2000 - 2002) in the United Kingdom, as Research Associate. Her field of expertise is Judeo-Arabic language and literature and, more specifically, the history of linguistic ideas. Selected publications: G. Khan, M. Á. Gallego, J. Olszowy-Schlanger, The Karaite Tradition of Hebrew Grammatical Thought in its Classical Form. 2 vols, Leiden-Boston: E. J. Brill, 2017 (2ª ed.), M. A. Gallego, El judeo-árabe medieval. Edición, traducción y estudio lingüístico del Kitab al-taswi'a del gramático andalusí Yonah ibn Ganah, Bern: Peter Lang, 2006; "The Languages of Medieval Iberia and their Religious Dimension", Medieval Encounters: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Culture in Confluence and Dialogue, 9,1 (2003), pp.105 - 137.

The "inclusive" language of the Torah: on the interpretation of the generic masculine by Abu l-Faraj Harun (11th century CE)

Abstract: Some medieval Jewish grammarians and exegetes felt the need to justify the use of the masculine gender in the Biblical text as inclusive of both men and women in those cases in which the context indicates a generic sense. Given the fact that Hebrew, just like Arabic, has differentiated masculine and feminine forms in most grammatical categories, the use of the masculine was basically interpreted as a reflection of the superiority of men over women. Within the literalist reading of the sacred text that characterizes medieval Karaite scholars, however, a more complex interpretation was advanced. In an original approach to this issue that will be examined in this presentation, Abu l-Faraj Harun ibn al-Faraj, active in Jerusalem in the 11th century C.E., contemplated the exemption of women from the fulfillment of certain obligations when the divine injunction was delivered with masculine grammatical markers unless contextual elements indicated a generic meaning. The views of Abu l-Faraj Harun will be analysed within the general framework of philosophical and grammatical theories of gender among Muslim and Jewish earlier and contemporary scholars.

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Thursday, December 7th

Jose Martinez Delgado (Professor of Hebrew Language, Department of Semitic Studies, University of Granada)
The adaptation of the Fa'aLa paradigm to the Hebrew language

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Tuesday, February 27, 2024 at PLC Room 4.05 from 16h to 17h30

Speaker: Judith Kogel (IRHT-CNRS) 
A dictionary of biblical Hebrew, the Qitsur shorashim (xiiesiècle): presentation and project for an electronic edition
 

Tuesday, March 26, 2024 at PLC in room 4.05 from 4pm to 5:30pm

lntervenor :Jonas Sibony (Sorbonne Université - CERMOM)
"Judeo-Arabic, a single appellation for various linguistic and literary phenomena"

ORGANIZATION

• Julien Sibileau (Inalco - CERMOM)
• Jonas Sibony (Sorbonne Université - CERMOM)

CONTACTS

julien.sibileau@inalco.fr; jonas.sibony@sorbonne-universite.fr