Massorot

We are pleased to present the readers with volume 18 of Massorot, published through the cooperation of the Center for Jewish Languages and Literatures and the Jewish Oral Traditions Research Center of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The present volume contains nine articles and a review (with additional notes) of an unpublished Hebrew–Yiddish dictionary. 

The contributions include work by established authorities in the field of Jewish language research, as well as the fruit of younger researchers who have recently joined their ranks. The diversity of the scholarship in the present volume is to be seen in the wide variety of languages discussed, the varied linguistic and literary topics analyzed, as well as the diverse periods in which the sources studied were produced. 

In his article, Moshe Bar-Asher analyzes the Romance component in the varieties of Judeo-Arabic spoken in recent generations in Ksar Es-Souk, Morocco. Chava Turniansky focuses on the Hebrew component in literary Yiddish as an indicator of the level of traditional education of the writers incorporating it in works they composed in the second decade of the 18th century. 

Michal Held examines reflections of spoken Judeo-Spanish woven into the weave of a contemporary Hebrew novel. Ilil Baum analyzes the use of the productive suffix -ad̠a in Judeo-Spanish as compared with the use of its cognates in non-Jewish languages of Ibero-Romance stock. 

Hanoch Gamliel argues in his article that some of the lĕ‘azim (or Old Judeo-French explanatory elements) adduced in Rashi’s commentary on the Torah should be understood as examples of grammatical categories rather than as lexical correspondents.

Two of the articles in the present volume deal with problems of translation. Michael Ryzhik examines how the Hebrew names of birds and fowl appearing in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 were rendered in Judeo-Italian Bible translations from the 15th and 16th centuries. Shay Matsa focuses on the linguistic characteristics of a modern Arabic translation of the Passover Haggadah produced in 2003 by a Jew from Syria, examined in the light of personal observations made to the author by the translator himself. 

Ora (Rodrigue) Schwarzwald compares the linguistic features of two texts in Ladino composed by the same author, Rabbi Meir Benveniste of mid-16th-century Salonika. 

Efraim Hazan presents and analyzes a letter of friendship in Hebrew verse from Morocco; the numerical value of the Hebrew letters of each stanza (except one) is 654, corresponding to the Hebrew year ([5]654 = 1894) in which the letter was written. 

The closing article focuses on an unpublished Hebrew–Yiddish dictionary written by Meir Berger in the 1970s. This article includes an introduction by Berger’s former student, Chava Turniansky, and personal notes by his son, Yitzhaq Berger. These are followed by Yitskhok Niborski’s review of Berger’s dictionary, in which it is compared with the 1960 Hebrew–Yiddish dictionary of Mordechai Tsanin. Niborski’s review was translated from Yiddish into Hebrew by Moshe Taube.

The book features article summaries in English.