Download PDF | James K. Aitken, James Carleton Paget - The Jewish-Greek Tradition in Antiquity and the Byzantine Empire-Cambridge University Press (2014).
384 Pages
The Jewish—Greek tradition represents an arguably distinctive strand of Judaism characterized by use of the Greek language and interest in Hellenism. This volume traces the Jewish encounter with Greek culture from the earliest points of contact in antiquity to the end of the Byzantine Empire. It honours Nicholas de Lange, whose distinguished work brought recognition to an undeservedly neglected field, in part by dispelling the common belief that Jewish—Greek culture largely disappeared after 100 CE. The authors examine literature, archaeology, and biblical translations, such as the Septuagint, in order to illustrate the substantial exchange of language and ideas. The Jewish-Greek Tradition in Antiquity and the Byzantine Empire demonstrates the enduring significance of the tradition and will be an essential handbook for anyone interested in Jewish studies, biblical studies, ancient and Byzantine history, or the Greek language.
JAMES K. AITKEN is Lecturer in Hebrew, Old Testament and Second Temple Studies at the University of Cambridge. He is author of The Semantics of Blessing and Cursing in Ancient Hebrew (2007), and coeditor of the Bulletin of Judaeo-Greek Studies.
JAMES CARLETON PAGET is Senior Lecturer in New Testament Studies at the University of Cambridge and a fellow and tutor at Peterhouse. He serves as editor of The Journal of Ecclesiastical History and has recently co-edited The New Cambridge History of the Bible: From the Beginnings to 600 (2013) with Joachim Schaper.
Preface, Amos Oz
I first met Nicholas de Lange at Oxford in 1969. A mutual friend introduced us. Nicholas, who was just finishing his academic studies at the time, used to wear a three-piece suit with a gold chain dangling from his belt into his trouser pocket. In the 1960s, amidst the hippie atmosphere among the students at Oxford, there was something astonishing in the pose Nicholas struck, as if he was saying to the world: I make my own way, come hell or high water.
When we began to talk, I was immediately won over by his sharp humour, his erudition, and — above all — the warmth that he exuded. He was voraciously curious (in my opinion, curiosity is one of the highest moral attributes). It was this curiosity that made him ask me, during our first meeting, what I was writing. I told him that I had just finished writing a story about the crusades. Nicholas, in his jovial enthusiasm, asked my permission to read the story.
I was forced to tell him that the story was in Hebrew. To my astonishment, Nicholas replied that he read a little Hebrew, and I was surprised, as I would be time and time again in the years to come, to discover the unexpected things Nicholas knew. I entrusted my story to him and after two or three weeks he came back to me with an English translation of one or two chapters from Unto Death. It was a translation by a virtuoso, who preserved the musical quality of the original and, wondrously, found an English equivalent for every nuance of the Hebrew text. Right there and then I was swept up by Nicholas’s enthusiasm and we both dived in to translate the story into English. It was a race of the blind and the lame, because Nicholas was not well versed in contemporary Hebrew and my own knowledge of English was halting as well. Still, we managed to give Unto Death a suit of English armour that won the hearts of many.
That’s how Nicholas and I began to collaborate, labouring together on translating My Michael and other works, until Nicholas had no need for me any more. He spread his wings and worked wonderfully well as an independent translator.
Over the years that we worked together, Nicholas became an inspiring teacher as well as a close and dear friend. I learned from him about Judaism and theology, he taught me English and something of the mysteries of the art of translation. Nicholas went on to translate Hebrew medieval poetry, and novels by A. B. Yehoshua and S. Yizhar, and by doing so he brought modern Hebrew literature closer to the English-speaking world. He is endowed with that wonderful combination of humility and boldness, without which the translator may be either a mere amanuensis, or a reckless adaptor who makes the text his own. Nicholas has the linguistic gifts of a great, inventive poet, who can conjure up crisp and enthralling parallels.
I always thought that adapting a work of literature from one language to another is like playing a violin concerto on a piano. It may be possible as long as you are careful not to make the piano sound like a violin.
Nicholas de Lange is a great musical player.
He performed wonderful feats of translation at the same time as he was teaching and writing excellent academic work. His articles and books in the history of religious thought, in Jewish studies, and in the history of the Jewish people are works of art, showing scholarly depth and theological quickwittedness, all in fluent, flowing words that enlighten the eyes of the reader. Already in his first book, Origen and the Jews (1976), Nicholas did wonders to breathe life and reality into a remote subject. In his Atlas of the Jewish World (1984), he made us see clearly what was until then faraway and abstract. His Introduction to Judaism (2000) put into words a complex and fascinating mental vista. In his scholarly articles Nicholas is always clear, precise, profound.
Our friendship has lasted now for forty years. Nicholas doesn’t walk around any more wearing a three-piece suit with a golden chain hanging from his belt. But he still treads his own, unique path, leaving wherever he goes a trail of wisdom, exuberance, love of life, inexhaustible curiosity and good cheer. He is not only a great and original thinker and a gifted teacher — to my mind Nicholas de Lange is also the greatest translator of Hebrew into the English language.
Acknowledgements
A number of people have assisted in the production of this book. For academic advice and reading of some of the chapters, special thanks go to Professor William Horbury. Ares Papangelou, Dr Garth Gilmour and Dr Alexander Panayotov have all assisted in acquiring material and publications. Monique Cuany and Dr Yaron Peleg have assisted in translating from French and modern Hebrew respectively. The fund managers of the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, have provided financial support for editing and translating. Finally, we thank Cambridge University Press for accepting this volume for publication, and for all the assistance provided by Anna Lowe, Alexandra Poreda and Laura Morris.
Introduction
James K. Aitken and James Carleton Paget
The term Jewish—Greek ‘tradition’ recognizes the continuity of a Greekspeaking Jewish world and a Greek literary engagement among Jews. It begins in antiquity, as early as the third century BCE with the translation of the Pentateuch into Greek (the Septuagint), and continues up to the period of the Byzantine Empire, where traces remain of Jewish scholarly activity in Greek and use of Greek versions of the Bible. It could be said to represent a distinctive strand within Judaism, and one that reflects a European contribution to Jewish studies, seen both in the fact that the object of study is largely Jews in or in contact with Europe, and also in the fact that it is modern European scholars who have largely contributed to the subject.’ Although this volume only covers the period up to the end of Byzantine Empire, the theme could be said to have an ongoing importance and significance afterwards among Jewish communities in Greece, even if these were largely destroyed during the Second World War.
In an academic career which has embraced a striking range of subjects within the field of Jewish studies, Nicholas de Lange has devoted much of his energy to what, for want of a better description, we might call Judaism and Hellenism, or Judaism and Greek culture, as described above. His work in this area has encompassed the ancient period, beginning with his doctoral dissertation on Origen and the Jews, published in 1976, and followed by contributions on the apocryphal books of the Bible, the Septuagint and the Greek versions. Perhaps distinctively, Nicholas has sought through a variety of publications and through the successful acquisitions of funds for two large international projects, to advance the study of Byzantine Jewry. In so doing he has built upon and extended the work of such distinguished predecessors as D. S. Blondheim, Joshua Starr and Samuel Krauss, seeking to show the scholarly world why this is a fecund and significant field, which has been undeservedly neglected.
The conviction that Byzantine Judaism has not received proper attention appears in a variety of places in Nicholas’s work, notably in the Foreword to the first number in 1987 of the Bulletin of Judaeo-Greek Studies, which Nicholas himself founded and continues to edit, and which has, through book lists, reviews and short essays, greatly advanced our understanding of Judaeo-Greek studies from the ancient to the modern period. Here Nicholas begins with a clear statement: “This Bulletin has its origins in the sense of loneliness and isolation felt by a number of scholars working the neglected field of Judaeo-Greek, and, more particularly, Judaeo-Byzantine, studies’,* and he continues by noting how, relative to the other areas of Jewish-medieval studies, this one has been sadly underrepresented. A similar concern can be found as a leitmotiv in many other places in Nicholas’s writings.
In part this interest in Byzantine Judaism arises from an attempt to combat a prejudice, held by Jewish and Christian scholars alike, which assumes that after about 100 CE, Jewish—Greek culture broadly disappeared and that by the end of the second century, possibly a little later, the majority of Jews had begun to revert to a Hebraic culture, a phenomenon that first manifested itself in the publication of the Mishnah. Although de Lange is clear that there were signs of a Hebrew revival as early as Bar Kokhbah, an interest in Greek and a concern with Greek culture continued, in his opinion, well beyond the second century.’ There are indications of this important thesis as early as his work on Origen and the Jews.* Here Nicholas is keen to highlight proof of rabbinic knowledge of Greek, already emphasized by Samuel Krauss,’ as well as evidence, hinted at in the character of the Jew, whom Origen quotes in his Contra Celsum, of what de Lange termed ‘another Judaism’, which took a strong interest in Greek classical culture and which expressed itself in the Greek language.
Hints contained in this early work at ongoing interest in Greek culture beyond the second century CE, become considerably more than that in de Lange’s later work. In this he has concentrated much of his energy on exploring evidence to support knowledge of Greek versions of the Bible, especially in the Byzantine period. Keen to contradict the view that the Christian church’s adoption of the Septuagint as its Bible led to a Jewish abandonment of that text and versions in Greek more generally, de Lange, following the work of D. S. Blondheim and N. Fernandez Marcos,‘ has uncovered evidence, much of it from the Cairo Genizah, to show that ‘Greek-speaking Jews throughout the Middle Ages made use of translations of the biblical books from Hebrew into Greek’.’ Significantly, in contrast to the use of new vernacular translations elsewhere in the medieval Jewish world, the evidence in Byzantium is remarkable since it indicates the ‘presence of a continuous tradition going back to ancient Greekspeaking Judaism’ and ‘the enduring presence of Greek Jewish exegesis within rabbinic Judaism, leaving clear marks on commentaries written in Hebrew by Byzantine rabbis’.
The attempt to advance this hypothesis of an enduring Jewish-Greek tradition is seen in a number of Nicholas’s articles relating to manuscripts from the Cairo Genizah, beginning with his publication of a bilingual glossary in 1980, and arriving at its most compendious expression so far in his Greek Jewish Texts from the Cairo Genizah of 1996. While the latter publication is not concerned exclusively with material relating to the Greek Bible and traditions of its translation, one of his more recent projects entitled Greek Bible in Byzantine Judaism, secured through a grant from the AHRC, is, its stated aim being to gather ‘evidence for the use of Greek Bible translations by Jews in the Middle Ages, and to make these texts available to scholars as a corpus’; and it promises to furnish the scholarly world with at least three volumes of text and commentary on texts betraying knowledge of the Greek versions of the Hebrew Bible.
While an interest in the Greek Bible runs as a thread through de Lange’s engagement with the subject of Judaism and Hellenism," a concern with the life and religiosity of the Judaeo-Greek communities more generally has also been prominent. This can be seen in a number of publications on the Jewish Passover as this was celebrated in the Greek world,” together with work on material other than manuscripts, such as inscriptions and medallions.’ The most recent manifestation of this interest can be seen in the European-funded project, which aims to map digitally the Jewish communities of the Byzantine Empire, and to collate all the information available about them." The project has only recently come to an end, producing an open-access online resource. This body of work considerably extends and amplifies our knowledge of Byzantine Jewry, and will become a hugely significant aid to scholars interested in the subject.
De Lange’s work, which emerges in part from an instinctive love of things Hellenic, reflected and encouraged by his study of Classics at Oxford in an atmosphere where an interest in Hellenistic as well as classical Greek was fostered, and stretching to an attachment to the modern state of Greece (Nicholas’s concern with the modern period is seen not least in the pages of the Bulletin and his own support of the synagogue at Chania in Crete), has, then, contributed greatly to the deepening and enriching of the study of Judaeo-Greek culture.
It is work taken up with wide-ranging themes relating to the nature of Jewish history and identity, characteristically based upon painstaking philological and palaeographic labour, as can be seen in his editions of texts from the Cairo Genizah. In fact it is Nicholas’s striking ability to combine the activities of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s truffle-seeker, shown through his meticulous examination of manuscripts and his profound linguistic knowledge (the fact that he is a considerable Hebraist has only served to make his contribution to Judaeo-Greek studies more profound, acute, and wide-reaching), with the flair of the Frenchman’s parachutist, evidenced in his ability to remain aware of the bigger picture,’’ which distinguishes him as a scholar of versatility and breadth, as much at home in the pithy, philological note as in the more suggestive general essay, brimming with thought-provoking observations.
One could end these introductory remarks by delineating Nicholas’s achievements in other areas of Jewish studies, both as an award-winning translator, already described by Amos Oz in the foreword to this volume; as an incisive and interestingly opinionated reviewer of numerous books on a multitude of subjects; or as an authoritative writer on the history and religion of the Jews in books which attain the highest level of what one might term, with a sense of admiration, ‘haute vulgarisation’.
That would no doubt be appropriate, but both of us as former, and in many ways current, pupils of Nicholas, want to conclude by noting his role as a teacher and leader of and participant in seminars. First we would like to draw attention to his Friday morning Hebrew readings. Conducted in an informal but always exacting atmosphere, they have been notable for, amongst many other things, their insistence on the need to place Mishnaic, Talmudic or medieval texts in their wider, often classical, setting, so reflecting again Nicholas’s concern with the Hellenic background to Jewish culture. Secondly, in these different contexts, whether the seminar room or lecture hall, one has often marvelled at the acuity of an observation or the brilliance of a connection made by Nicholas. In these settings, as much as in his written work, Nicholas shows that, even as he moves into his eighth decade, he has much more to give the world of Jewish studies.
They also give ample evidence of the generous manner in which Nicholas has always held his knowledge, keen to share information and to collaborate, the latter quality pungently displayed, inter alia, in his successful leadership of two large projects and in the section of the Bulletin dedicated to current projects being started or under way and to calls to subscribers to provide information about their most recent work. For Nicholas, then, scholarship is a collective enterprise, enriched by interaction and exchange. This concern was as present at the beginning of Nicholas’s career as it is towards its later stages. So in Origen and the Jews, resisting the temptation to conclude the work by emphasizing the polemical and rebarbative aspects of that church father’s exchange with the Jews, de Lange is more positive and sanguine: ‘At a time when Church and Synagogue find themselves drawing closer together once more in the face of a new paganism it is edifying and instructive to contemplate an era when, despite powerful antagonisms, Jews and Christians could live in close harmony and derive mutual benefit from their intercourse.”°
The chapters in this volume, all written by friends and colleagues of Nicholas, reflect the range of his contribution to Judaeo-Greek studies, in terms of both their chronological spread and subject matter (from the origins of the Septuagint to late Byzantine history) and their genre (from the general survey of a historical period or a central subject, to the more precise examination of a collection of Judaeo-Greek manuscripts).
The volume opens with a section on history. Giinter Stemberger assesses evidence for Jewish interest in Greek culture from the time of Alexander the Great to Theodosius II. In the process he tackles many of the central debates which have preoccupied scholars, from the causes of the Maccabean revolt, often conceived as a conflict inspired by cultural tensions, to the purpose of Jewish—Greek literature and to the role of Greek in rabbinic texts.
He concludes his piece by warning that the tendency to see Hellenization and assimilation as the same thing misrepresents the evidence, noting that Judaism and Hellenism were overlapping, not clashing, cultures. Steven Bowman continues the review of the historical context, covering the Byzantine period, which is conceived here as running from the time of Constantine to the fall of Constantinople. His chapters concentrates on two subjects, that of how to periodize Jewish experience in the Byzantine empire, and Jewish use of Greek. In relation to the former, Bowman argues that a traditional periodization of the history of the Byzantine empire, which roughly falls into three parts, does less justice to the Jewish experience than one which falls into two parts, running from the fourth to the mid-tenth century, and from the last third of the tenth century to the middle of the fifteenth respectively.
In his analysis of Jewish use of Greek, Bowman, following de Lange, argues strongly for evidence of ongoing interaction with the language on the part of Jews and discusses major pieces of evidence supporting this view. This section ends with a chapter from Alexander Panayotov. Drawing on his work for the Project on Jewish Communities of the Byzantine Empire, the chapter has the quality of a kind of gazetteer, gathering together extant epigraphic and archaeological evidence for Jews in the Byzantine empire to the twelfth century in the regions of the Balkans, the Aegean archipelago and Cyprus. The evidence, which is supported by relevant literary material, is often tantalizingly fragmentary, but it often shows that in the areas concerned Jews were a well-established presence in spite of the effect of anti-Jewish legislation.
Part II of the volume concerns the historiography of Jewish—Greek interaction. William Horbury discusses the legacy of de Lange’s Origen and the Jews. After placing the work in its broader historiographic context, highlighting in particular its place in the burgeoning discussion at the time of its publication of Jewish-Christian interaction, Horbury shows how the book contributes to the subject of this volume, especially in pointing up areas where Origen’s Greek reflects the language of the rabbis with whom he interacted as well as the latter’s exegetical assumptions and procedures, and ongoing interest in the Greek Bible. Origen’s work, according to Horbury, is an important witness to the Jewish—Greek tradition, a reminder ‘that debate with Jews and enquiry from them could go hand in hand, and that Jewish—Christian relations were often relations between Christians and Jews who both spoke Greek’.
This chapter is followed by a short, but suggestive, piece by Giuseppe Veltri in which changing attitudes to the study of the Jewish—Greek tradition are delineated and discussed. Veltri shows how, from the post-Reformation period, Christian scholars sought to revive the idea that Hebrew wisdom was the foundation of Greek intellectual culture but how this view came under attack at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Veltri emphasizes how scholars came to assert the superiority of the Greek tradition, seeing it as the forerunner of a universalizing Christianity. Against this background he draws attention to the interest shown by the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement in the Jewish—Greek tradition and the diverse areas in which scholars such as Zunz, Geiger and Frankel located this. This work is contrasted with Christian scholarship of the same date, which had a more circumscribed vision of Jewish Hellenism. In some ways the implication of this chapter is that de Lange stands broadly within the tradition of Wissenschaft des Judentums.
There follows a section devoted to the Jewish—Greek tradition and the Bible. James Carleton Paget re-examines the much-discussed area of the origins of the Septuagint, showing how scholars have, by and large, rejected the Letter of Aristeas as a reliable indicator of its origins, for theories which are based upon the implications of the character of the Greek used. by the translators of the Pentateuch, although many of these theories are subject to criticism. Carleton Paget concludes by suggesting that there are some indications that the original translation was collective in its inspiration, as implied by Aristeas, although involvement of a Ptolemaic monarch is probably unlikely. In a chapter which is partially complementary to Carleton Paget’s, James Aitken examines the language of the translation of the Pentateuch.
While partly sympathetic to the idea that the oddities of Septuagint Greek can be accounted for by reference to the Hebrew of which it is a translation, Aitken argues that the Greek also reflects the Koine which was prevalent at the time the translation was made, and is sceptical about the idea that the Septuagint witnesses to a Jewish form of Greek, sometimes called Judaeo-Greek. In analysing the social origins of the translators, Aitken draws attention to the way in which their Greek on occasion has a literary quality, betraying a degree of education in the Greek classics. Such ‘literary Greek is not a consistent presence in the translation, but its presence suggests that the translators had a comparable education to Egyptians who had been trained to draft administrative documents of various kinds, for in these we also have evidence of a combination of everyday and more literary Greek. As Aitken writes, “The Septuagint translators are comparable to the more skilled of these Egyptian bureaucratic scribes, having not achieved the highest level of education, but having acquired enough rhetorical skills and learned enough of classical literature to use it in their work.’
Cameron Boyd-Taylor begins his contribution by arguing that the history of the Greek Bible amongst Jews should not be described by a ‘narrative of crisis and rupture’. Rather scholars are now in a position to ‘trace a continuous history of Jewish reception (of the Greek Bible) extending from Ptolemaic Alexandria to the fall of Constantinople’. Admitting that the evidence for such a history is fragmentary, Boyd-Taylor seeks to illustrate his contention through a detailed study of the Greek glosses attributed to a source called ‘to Joudaikon’, evidence for which is found both in Codex Ambrosianus and Ra 56.
Concentrating on the glosses found in the former but confining his study to those which occur in Deuteronomy, Boyd-Taylor argues that there are enough idiosyncrasies in the translation to which the glosses give evidence to ‘point to a source independent of Christian transmission history’, and to imply the existence within Byzantine Judaism of an evolving tradition of free and colloquial translation into Greek with possibly ancient roots. Rounding off this section is a chapter by Julia Krivoruchko. She examines the question as to whether the Greek of the Constantinopolitan Pentateuch, Greek transliterated in Hebrew characters, should be taken as evidence for a medieval ‘koine’. In a detailed discussion, Krivoruchko argues that the Greek of this text, and biblical Judaeo-Greek more generally, should be seen to reflect not a common spoken Greek, but one deeply affected by the Hebrew from which it was translated: a translationese that represented nobody's mother tongue.
‘The final part of the volume consists of a range of chapters charting the Greek element within Jewish ‘culture’. The first of these, by Tessa Rajak, addresses the question of Philo’s Hebrew etymologies and what their presence in his allegorical exegesis implies about his knowledge of Hebrew. Noting that in general scholars have argued that the etymologies derive from a mooted source (often assumed to be an onomastikon) or from some evolving tradition, and so prove no knowledge of Hebrew on Philo’s part, Rajak suggests the opposite.
Arguing that the debate touches upon a bevy of important issues running from the supposed opposition between Hebraism and Hellenism to the question of Jewish identity in Alexandria, Rajak shows that none of the arguments usually arraigned against Philo’s knowledge of Hebrew as this pertains to the etymologies are decisive. True, there are no compelling arguments on the other side but scholars should be more open to the possibility that the etymologies in Philo, some of which are unique to him, and many of which are more than an adornment to his exegesis, imply a knowledge of the language of Shem on the part of this Platonizing Jew. Francis Schmidt's contribution continues the Philonic theme, here looking at Philo’s use in his exegesis of the technical term semeion, connected with Stoic thought. He shows how, in its capacity as a springboard or aphorme towards figurative interpretation, the term acts as a link connecting literal and allegorical exegesis. Schmidt notes that its usage is found in Philo’s Historica rather than his Nomothetica, something which should not surprise us.
There then follow two chapters which discuss archaeological evidence for Jews in the late antique period. In the first of these, David Noy examines the problem of identifying a building as a Jewish synagogue, noting that such identification is normally demonstrated through finding a Jewish inscription in situ or evidence of a distinctive piece of Jewish iconography, such as a menorah or lulav. Even where, however, such evidence is forthcoming (and that is the case only after 100 CE), Noy notes that ambiguity can still exist. He proceeds to examine four sites which have been held to be Jewish synagogues (Delos, Ostia, Apamea and Mopsuestia), showing how fragile the evidence for such an identification in fact is and suggesting that there is no such thing as a distinctive Jewish architecture.
Because the Jews in classical and late antiquity were not a separate or homogenized group, tracing them through archaeology can never be an exact science. Instead, the shared patterns of architecture and decoration, produced in many cases by the same artisans and workshops, provide room for doubt about what is or is not a synagogue, doubt which only exists as a result of a material culture which was not fundamentally different for pagans, Christians and Jews.
In a piece devoted to the epigraphic footprint of Jews in the ancient world, Pieter van der Horst, after a review of the historiography of this subject, discusses the multiple ways in which inscriptions both complement, and especially, supplement, our knowledge, of Jewish life in the ancient and Byzantine worlds. So, inter alia, they give us information about the extent of the diaspora, Jewish names, the average age of death, and the existence of a Judaism which seems unaffected by rabbinic Judaism. Most importantly, perhaps, the inscriptions, the majority of which are preserved in Greek, contradict the view that Jewish culture expressed in that language ended in the first century CE as was once uncritically contended.
Philip Alexander examines the question of rabbinic attitudes to Greek, especially the Greek Bible. In a general discussion of Rabbinic attitudes to translation he notes a spectrum of opinions, but a clear view that no translation was deemed as equivalent of the Hebrew original. He then shows how, by and large, rabbinic knowledge of Greek was limited, and that this in part accounts for the relative absence of knowledge of the Greek Bible in literature associated with the Rabbis. But he also highlights evidence of a growing negative attitude to the Greek Bible on the part of the Rabbis and argues that this was strongly influenced by the rise of Christianity with its reliance upon the Septuagint in particular. He is clear, however, that the Rabbis may have attempted to influence the western diaspora through the Greek recension associated with Aquila, which he tentatively ascribes to their patronage.
He also asserts that there is evidence of Greek-speaking communities in the medieval west who, though rabbinized, retained some knowledge of Aquila and Greek versions, which they used to gloss the original evidence of a murky world of what he takes to be uneasy contact between Hellenism and Judaism. In the next contribution, Gideon Bohak shows how investigation of evidence relating to magic reveals different types of encounters between Hebrew (and, more rarely, Aramaic) and Greek, including both bilingual and trilingual texts and texts that use one writing system to transliterate phrases in the other language. He argues that this material elucidates such subjects as the use of the Hebrew Bible among the Jews of the diaspora in the Roman Empire, and the transliteration of biblical verses in Greek letters as practised by these Jews, as well as opening up questions of intercultural relations especially as these occurred at what Bohak terms ‘ground level’.
Wout van Bekkum’s contribution on piyyutim is partly an attempt to elucidate the origins of a form of religious Jewish poetry which may have been influenced by developing forms of the same amongst Christians.
Probably emerging in Palestine in the fifth century, this literary form, whose name may derive from the Greek word for a poet or poetry (poiétés or poiésis respectively), was probably the product of cantor poets. Van Bekkum examines a piyyut, written by the possibly late fifth-/early sixthcentury poet Yehudah. Providing his own translation, van Bekkum plays up the importance to the poet of biblical allusion, the way in which he interacts freely with the biblical tradition, and evidence that the poem possessed didactic and instructional aspirations. But van Bekkum is also clear that the work had a literary purpose, and, more importantly, a wider audience in mind, giving us a vital insight into the ethos of the Byzantine Jewish communities for which the poems were written. ‘Piyyut as poetry deserves to be explored and studied as one of the major literary expressions of Judaism and Jewish existence over the course of many centuries, he concludes.
The final Chapter in the collection, by Judith Olszowy-Schlanger, discusses fourteen fragments from the Cairo Genizah taken from nine different Hebrew codices, all of which are palimpsests in Hebrew. These are written over what would seem in the main to be Christian Greek texts of various kinds, ranging from passages taken from the New Testament to martyrological texts to hexaplaric ones. OlszowySchlanger argues that the script of the palimpsests is a distinctive sub-type of the oriental square script, which may well pre-date most of the texts held in the Genizah. She concludes tentatively, on the basis of the Greek sub-text, that the palimpsests are from Egypt, and reflect a multilingual setting in which Greek played an important part.
‘These chapters can only serve as the beginning of a more comprehensive analysis of the subject of Jews and Greek ‘culture’. The hope is, however, that they touch upon many of the main themes relating to that subject and act as a springboard for further study and engagement with a vitally important aspect of Judaica.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق