Modern Judeo-Provençal as Known from Its Sole Textual Testimony: Harcanot et Barcanot (Critical Edition and Linguistic Analysis)

This study offers a linguistic description of the idiom of the Jews of the Comtat Venaissin (“Judeo-Provençal”) at the end of the 18th century, based on a critical edition of the only relevant document illustrating this language, a theatrical play in verse entitled Harcanot et Barcanot. The introduction provides a philological inventory of all known sources of “Judeo-Provençal.” The critical and variorum edition of the text, accompanied by linear glosses in English, is followed by a commentary comprising a glossary and analysis of all relevant linguistic features. It reveals, inter alia, that this language possessed words pertaining to the linguistic repertoire of French Jews since the Middle Ages; as for the phonetic features of the Jewish dialect of Provençal, their etiology is to be found in the history of the communities. The study concludes with a reassessment of the nature of linguistic variation in the dialect of the Jews of Provence.

The Twenty-Four Egyptian Days in Yiddish

The object of this study is a list of twenty-four Egyptian days in Yiddish discovered at the end of a Hebrew miscellany from medieval Ashkenaz, preserved in the Basel Universitätsbibliothek. Egyptian days are inauspicious days for bloodletting; these are listed according to the Julian calendar and sometimes identified by saint names and feast days. The list is edited and translated into English. Dates and variants of these Egyptian days are then compared with those of the only other known list of its kind, found in the earliest dated astro-medical fragment in Old Western Yiddish, from 1396–1397. A tabular comparison and descriptive commentary of the names and dates in both lists follows. Preceding this analysis, the status and knowledge of Jewish physicians in medieval Ashkenaz is addressed, as well as a brief description of Ms R IV 2, revealing its rich content and some of its codicological and paleographical characteristics.

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

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.

The Early Judeo-Persian Letter L3 from the Cairo Genizah (Cambridge University Library T-S 18J3.16)

The article presents the edition and translation of an Early Judeo-Persian (EJP) private-commercial letter that was probably written around the late 10th or early 11th century C.E. It is the best-preserved and, with 51 lines, the longest from the ca. 25 EJP documents that were found in the Cairo Genizah. It is written in a cursive form of the Hebrew script and shows typical EJP archaic and dialectal features, as compared to the contemporaneous Early New Persian works that were written in Arabic script. Today, the letter is kept in Cambridge University Library as part of the Taylor-Schaechter collection.

The Judeo-Arabic Dialect of Yefren (Libya): Phonological and Morphological Notes

The present article offers a preliminary description of the Judeo-Arabic variety spoken in Yefren (Libya), based on interviews collected from three elderly female informants. It analyzes the phonology and morphology of the dialect, attempting some sociolinguistic considerations on issues of dialect contact between Muslim and Jewish varieties of Libyan Arabic. In conclusion, the article discusses the position of Yefreni Judeo-Arabic within the context of Libyan and North African Judeo-Arabic as a whole. While belonging to the Eqa:l group of North-African Judeo-Arabic, a sufficient number of isoglosses allows us to posit the existence of two separate subgroups within Libyan Judeo-Arabic, here indicated as the Tripoli and Yefreni types.