This volume presents twelve scholarly chapters by Prof. Ilan Eldar, discussing ancient Hebrew vocalization methods and reading traditions (pronunciation and configuration) among Jewish communities, especially among ancient Ashkenazi communities. These chapters have been published over the years as separate essays, and are compiled here for the first time. This volume contains the following chapters: Chapter 1: The Palestino-Tiberian Vocalization Chapter 2: The Vocalization of the Passover Haggada in Mahzor Vitry Chapter 3: The Sources of the Hebrew Reading Traditions in the Middle Ages Chapter 4: The Research of Oral Reading Traditions of Hebrew Chapter 5: The Hebrew Reading Traditions of the Baghdadi Community Chapter 6: Doublets in the Language Traditions of Hebrew Chapter 7: The Pre-Ashkenazi Reading Tradition Chapter 8: The Sources of Ashkenazi Reading Tradition Chapter 9: Vocalization Systems and Pronunciation Traditions of Hebrew Chapter 10: The Contribution of Prof. Shlomo Morag to the Study of the Hebrew Language Heritage of the Yemenite Jews Chapter 11: Neologisms in the Piyyutim of the Ashkenazi Mahzorim Chapter 12: Post-Biblical Forms in the Ashkenazi Tradition as Reflected by the Vocalization of the Worms Mahzor

The eighteen studies presented here originated in a symposium held at Yale in 2014, attended by scholars from Europe, Israel, and North America. The papers approach the subject of Mishnaic Hebrew from many different angles and directions, including grammar, from morphology to syntax to pragmatics; the relationship between the literary dialect and epigraphic evidence; manuscripts; questions of language contact, lexicography, social history, and medieval traditions; and the problem of translating Mishnaic Hebrew into modern languages. The contributors to this volume are among the leading scholars in the field and the collection represents both the current state of research and the cutting edge of future work. This volume includes the following essays: Chanan Ariel | Deviations from Mishnaic Hebrew Moshe Bar-Asher | Problems in the Description of the Morphology of Mishnaic Hebrew Elitzur A. Bar-Asher Siegal | Towards a Reconsideration of the Tense-Aspect-Mood System of Tannaitic Hebrew Gabriel Birnbaum | Phonological and Morphological Studies in MS Antonin 262 (Mishnah Seder Teharoth) Steven E. Fassberg | The Language of the Bet Amar Papyrus in Light of Other Judean Desert Documents Steven D. Fraade | The Innovation of Nominalized Verbs in Mishnaic Hebrew as Marking an Innovation of Concept Aaron Koller | The Social and Geographic Origins of Mishnaic Hebrew Aharon Maman | Rabbinic Hebrew in the Eyes of Medieval Hebrew Philologists Emmanuel Mastey | Cases of Semantic Variation in Mishnaic Hebrew: The Verbs hillek and qaras Michael Ryzhik | The Language of the Mishnah from the Late Manuscripts to the Printed Editions Bernard Septimus | The Face of Shame: Between Palestinian Blushing and Babylonian Blanching Rivka Shemesh-Raiskin | Towards a Description of Halakhic Give-and-Take Conversations in the Mishnah Nurit ShovalDudai | Identical Lemmata of Greek and Latin Loanwords in the Historical Dictionary of the Hebrew Language: Classes and Criteria Ruth Stern | The Noun haluq and Its Variant Forms in Rabbinic Hebrew Daniel Stokl Ben Ezra | The Mishnah into French: Translation Issues Ofra Tirosh-Becker | The Relative Pronoun Se- Rabbinic Hebrew as Reflected in Karaite Sources Doron Ya'akov | The Relation between Maimonides and the Yemenite Tradition in Mishnaic Hebrew Alexey (Eliyahu) Yuditsky | qosin and qorpayot To view the other volumes please press here

This volume contains the following essays: Yitzhak Avishur | Names of Jewish Holidays in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic Ilan Eldar | The Hebrew of Dutch Sepharadim in Seventeenth Century Amsterdam David M. Bunis | The Iberian Judeo-Arabic Roots of the Ladino Bible-Translation Tradition Joshua Blau | Remarks on the Biblical Dictionary of David Alfasi Joshua Blau and Joseph Yahalom | The Typology of Palestinian Vocalization Systems Preserved in Manuscripts from the Last Quarter of the First Millennium Dror Ben-Arié | Miqneh Abram of Abraham de Balmes: A New Reading of a Sixteenth Century Hebrew Grammar in the Light of Hebrew and Latin Treatises Nasir Basal | On the Comparison between Languages in Tafsīr al-̓Alfāẓ by ̓Abū al-Faraj Hārūn: Comparisons to Rabbinic Hebrew and Aramaic Moshe Bar-Asher | The Limitations of Orthography, Script, and Morphology: A Problem of Mishnaic Hebrew Grammar Elitzur Bar-Asher | Siegal Rhetorical Questions in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic Yochanan Breuer | Rabba and Rava, ’Abba and ’Ava - Spelling, Pronunciation, and Meaning Chanoch Gamliel | Lexical Definitions in Menaḥem’s Maḥberet and Rashi’s Commentary Santiago García-Jalón | Manuscripts that Preceded the Introductiones of Alfonso de Zamora Aron Dotan | The Double Pronunciation of the Ancient Resh Jonathan Howard | Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek: The List of Languages in Me’or ‘Ayin and the Transmission of Diqduqe ha-Miqra Yehudit Henschke | On the Language of the Musta‘arabi Jews of Peqi‘in: between Jewish Arabic and Local Arabic – A Look at the Names of the Holidays Doron Yaakov | Remarks on a Verbal Form in the Yemenite Tradition of Mishnaic Hebrew Geoffrey Khan | The Pronunciaton of Dageš in the Tiberian Tradition of Biblical Hebrew Asher Laufer | Contemporary Realizations of Qameṣ: The Pronunciation of Qameṣ before a Ḥaṭef-Qameṣ José Martinez Delgrado | The Making of Accumulative Lists in the Maḥberet of Menaḥem ben Saruq Hananel Mirsky | The Maḥberet Menaḥem According to the Critical Edition of Sáenz-Badillos Yosef Ofer | Two Masoretic Notes about Words Vocalized with a Qameṣ and Their Metamorphosis Steven E. Fassberg | Perfect Third Masculine Singular בעו and Related Forms in Samaritan Aramaic Yona Sabar | Hebrew in the Shadow of Neo-Aramaic: Mizraḥi Hebrew as Reflected in the Report of a Kurdish Hakham Traveling in Kurdistan in 1932 Moshe Kahan | The Transformation of Ellipsis from an Exegetical Rule to a Logical Theorem in Kaspi’s Work Michael Ryhzik | Orthographic Differences between Orders of the Mishnah in MS Kaufmann Yael Reshef | Distinctive Lexical Features in the Written Hebrew of the Revival Period Ora (Rodrigue) Schwarzwald | The Common Denominator Principle in the Formation of Israeli Hebrew Joseph Chetrit | Representations of the Jewish Community and Communal Ethos: A Socio-Pragmatic and Linguistic Analysis of a Hebrew Elegy by R. Shemuel Haliwa (Meknes, 1790) Joseph Tedghi | Neologism and Rare Forms in the Spiritual Works of the Sages of Morocco Ofra Tirosh-Becker | Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic of Bar Mitzva Homilies from Ghardaïa English Abstracts

The Stage as a Temporary Home : On Dzigan and Shumacher's Theater (1927-1980) has been designated as the winner of the prestigious Shapiro Award for 2019 for the best book in Israel Studies The Stage as a Temporary Home takes us through the fascinating stages in the life and career of the duo Shimen Dzigan and Isroel Shumacher , over the course of half a century - from the beginning of their work at the Ararat avant-garde Yiddish theater in Łodz, Poland, and to their Warsaw theater, where they produced bold, groundbreaking political satire. The book further discusses their wanderings through the Soviet Union during the Second World War and their attempt to revive Jewish culture in Poland after the Holocaust, and finally describes their arrival in Israel, first as guest performers and later as permanent residents. Despite the restrictions on Yiddish actors in Israel, the duo insisted on performing in their own language and succeeded in translating the new Israeli reality into unique and timely satire. In the 1950s, they voiced a political and cultural critique of a kind that was not heard on any of the Hebrew stages. After they parted ways, and following the death of Shumacher in 1961, Dzigan continued to perform on his own and with other Israeli artists until his death in 1980 . The book is based on rare recordings, transcriptions, programs, personal diaries, letters, photographs, oral testimonies, and critical articles, all of which come together to create the first critical portrait of this extraordinary duo. The book also examines their art, the connection between theater and politics, and the complex relationship between majority culture and minority language . The study includes several valuable indexes: of titles of programs and plays, of the artists who participated in them, of writers and the drafts they wrote, of actors and the programs in which they participated, and a general name index. The book also includes a facsimile of the manuscript Der Nayer Dybbuk [The New Dybbuk]. Click here for the English edition, published by De Gruyter in collaboration with Magnes Press

Most of the nineteen essays presented in this book deal with tongues and traditions of Maghreb Judaism. The communities of Morocco are a central topic in this collection as well as essays dealing with documents from the Ghardaïa community in south Algeria. This collection also offers extensively studied records of practices and actions of other communities in the area. Most of the chapters are based on manuscripts and records from the collection of Jewish North-African manuscripts at the Yale University library. The first two parts of the appendix are dedicated to four Masoretes. Bar-Asher based quite a few of his researches on their spoken and written Masoretic texts.

Sefer B'rit ha-Menuḥa is an anonymous Kabbalistic book from the late 13th century or the beginning of the 14th century. The content of the book is best described by the alternative name - "The Book of Lights," given to it due to its central descriptions of the journeys of Israel in the desert, and the images of the vowels of the Name of God, that are portrayed as journeys of divine lights. The treatise describes the complete set of divine theosophical and angelologic powers in a coherent system, in order to relate and unite each name of an angel with its source, and to allow magic acts by the application of the full cosmological and divine unity. This eclectic critical annotated edition provides, for the first time, a clear and coherent text from the book's forty four manuscripts and eight previous prints (from 1648 till recent), presents supplements and relics of the book from additional manuscripts, along with an early treatise by the same unknown author - Sefer ha-Gevura (Book of Enhancement) .

Prof. Ilan Eldar's study of linguistics and reading theory in the Middle Ages is brought to you in this publication. These twenty articles, written over thirty-three years and published in scientific journals, memorial publications and jubilee volumes, include unpublished texts from manuscripts and Genizah segments and deal with a variety of historiographical and linguistic issues: The beginnings of the glottology of the Hebrew language; The study of the Hebrew language among Jews of Germany, Italy, Spain, Yemen and France; Methods of structure and editing of dictionaries, derivation systems, concept of triliteral root, division of verbal stems, vowel length and substitution of letters.

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.

The book is intended to be used by Hebrew speakers as an updated linguistic introduction for the phonology and morphology of the Hebrew language. It is an enlarged and updated second edition of the "Grammar of Mouth and Ear" that was written and published in 1947 by the same author while kept in a British detention camp for the underground movement in former Palestine. The present edition includes the topics that have been dealt with in the original book, but with modern approach according to progress in linguistics and general science, with new explanations that could appear in modern time.

This book, stemming from a PhD dissertation under the advising of Prof. Moshe Bar Asher, offers a description of the traditional Hebrew of the Jews of southern Yemen. The description is based on a lengthy and intensive field work consisting of recording their reading of biblical, rabbinic, and liturgical literature. As S. Morag's The Hebrew Language Tradition of the Yemenite Jews (Jerusalem, 1963) focuses mainly on central Yemen, especially the city of Sanaa, the study of the southern Yemen phonological tradition remained a desideratum, which the current book aims at fulfilling. Thus, the first part of the book includes addenda et corrigenda to the description of the southern Yemen phonological system. One major innovation in this regard is the different pronunciations of the holam, along with several phonological matters missing in Morag's book, such as the principles of the mobile shewa and the primary and secondary accents (the ga'aya). The second part consists of a description of the traditional reading of the Mishna in southern Yemen, including a very meticulous comparison to the mainstream tradition of central Yemen, and to some other non Yemenite traditions. In chapter 2, some phonological matters concerning the Tiberian Hebrew are discussed, such as the conditions for gemination (doubling), different issues related to the gutturals, and the principles of the dagesh lene in the bgdkpt consonants. The largest chapter of this book, chapter 3, consists of a detailed description of over 1200 Mishnaic nominal forms as realized traditionally. Organized alphabetically, this list includes post-biblical nouns, biblical nouns pronounced differently in their Mishnaic occurrence, and inflections of biblical nominal forms not attested in the Bible. The entries offer oral information based on six main informants and vocalized manuscripts from southern Yemen. Every entry has been compared to the data available from reliable informants, existing recordings, vocalized manuscripts and printed editions from central Yemen, along with other circumstantial. evidence. The material was systematically compared to other linguistic traditions, such as the Babylonian, and to almost all the vocalized manuscripts and printed editions ever used in southern Yemen. In chapter 4, several topics are discussed with regard to the traditional reading of the Mishnah: Various participle forms, the punctuation of relative ש, pausal forms, the definition of nominal forms, ketiv and qere in Mishnaic reading, and the like. The database analysis reveals that the southern Yemen tradition is certainly a Yemenite one, correlating very well with the central Yemen tradition. Yet, in some details it rather correlates with ancient traditions of Mishnaic Hebrew on the one hand, and with vocalized printed editions, including mistakes and inconsistency, on the other. A fundamental outcome of this work is that the Yemenite Rabbinic Hebrew tradition should be examined within its regional backdrop and variations. Needless to say, that this work has been a rescue mission of a tradition not extensively recorded and of which the number of individuals familiar with is rapidly decreasing. This work, based on recordings and vocalized manuscripts from southern Yemen, ensures that the memory of this tradition is perpetuated for future generations. Introduction The Research on the Language Traditions The Research on the Yemenite Tradition The Research on the Southern Yemenite Tradition The Communities in this Paper Shar'ab Aden The Jews of Southern Yemen and the Printed Books Research Methods The Corpus The Informants Presentation of the Results and an Analysis Phonology in the Reading of the Bible Preface The Sound System The Consonants The Vowels Stress in the Reading of the Bible Primary Stress Secondary Stress Secondary Stress in Closed Syllables Gemination Furtive Patah Phonology in the Reading of the Mishnah Gemination ר Gemination in אהח"ע Gemination in In shva and in מ in shva י Gemination in מה Gemination after Gemination of Dehik The Influence of the Gutturals The Vocalization of a Prefix before a Guttural The Gutteral Vowel Furtive Patah Changes in Verbs with Gutturals The Vocalization of Definiteness before Gutturals and before ר Fricative and Plosive בגדכפ"ת Letters Plosive בגדכפ"ת Letters Not Following the Tiberian Tradition Fricative בגדכפ"ת Not Following the Tiberian Tradition Analysis and Conclusions Stress in the Reading of the Mishna The Noun in the Tradition of Mishnaic Hebrew Some Participial Forms The Vocalization of the Relative Pronoun ש The Vocalization of ובכ"ל in Pretonic Position Pausal Forms Participles with First Person Pronouns Feminine Participles with Object Suffixes Absolute Forms in Construct State Construct Forms in Absolute State Joining של to the Following World Second Person Suffixes Definiteness of Nouns Ketiv and Qere in the Reading of the Mishna The Southern Yemenite Tradition – A Summary Phonetics The Reading Tradition of Mishnaic Hebrew Some Notes on Noun Morphology Characteristics of the Southern Yemenite Tradition Insights on the Central Yemenite Traditions Conclusive Remarks Bibliography and Abbreviations Index of Words