We are pleased to present readers with volume 23 of the journal Massorot: Studies in Language Traditions and Jewish Languages . The present volume contains nine articles focusing on diverse facets of Jewish Languages, and on the traditions and features of Hebrew reflected in the varied genres cultivated in that language. Five of the articles deal with translations. Two of them concern Bible translations into Judeo-Arabic. Moshe Bar-Asher, who has analyzed and published widely on the Western šarḥ – that is, the Jewish Maghrebi translation of the Bible – examines euphemism and language refinement "in the face of danger" with respect to the šarḥ of the Pentateuchal books of Numbers and Deuteronomy. Tamar Zewi examines alternative translations in the Judeo-Arabic Tafsīr of R. Saadia Gaon on Exodus, on the basis of the excellent manuscript of the commentary, Yevr. II C1, housed in the National Library of Russia in Saint Petersburg. Nahem Ilan discusses the Judeo-Arabic translation of the second part of the Hebrew work Pele Yo‘eṣ by Rabbi Eliezer Papo (Bulgaria, 1786–1827), composed in the middle of the 20th century by Rabbi Makhlouf Idan of Djerba. Yaffa Yisraeli analyzes the translation into the Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialect of Saqqiz (Iranian Kurdistan) of the noted piyyuṭ (liturgical poem) “Yashen al teradam,” by Rabbi Yehudah Halevy. Ora (Rodrigue) Schwarzwald offers readers a comparative analysis of six Ladino translations of the description of the lover in Song of Songs, Chapter 5, representing both the Eastern and Western Ladino traditions, from the 16th–20th centuries. Assaf Ben-Moshe draws our attention to the linguistic diversity of the Jews of Iraq by comparing the divergences between the Judeo-Arabic variety used by the Jews of ˁĀna and that used by the Baghdad Jewish community. Dalit Assouline examines the Hebrew used by Mizrahi rabbis who joined the Breslav Hasidic sect, originally of Ashkenazic origin. Efraim Hazan and Rachel Hitin-Mashiah zooms in on another genre, the epistles exchanged by rabbinic scholars concerning books. Kedem Golden deals with Hebrew poetic riddles.

We are pleased to present our readers with this double issue of Massorot , volume 21–22, published by the Center for Jewish Languages and Literatures in collaboration with the Jewish Oral Traditions Research Center. The volume contains eleven articles which testify to the varied interests of contemporary scholars in the field of Jewish languages and the Hebrew traditions of the diverse communities of the Jewish People. Five of the articles concern themselves with Bible translations in Jewish languages, four of these in varieties of Judeo-Arabic: Moshe Bar-Asher discusses the conservative features of the Sharḥ (Judeo-Arabic calque translations transmitted orally) in the Maghreb. Shay Matsa deals with the last Judeo-Arabic Bible translation from Aleppo and its author. Ibrahim Bassal scrutinizes the interplay of elements from the Tafsīr of Saadiah Gaon and the Syriac Bible tradition in a Christian Arabic Bible translation. Zahi Abbas discusses the distinctive features of Saadiah Gaon’s Judeo-Arabic Bible translation. Yaffa Israeli analyzes translations of the Book of Jonah in three different regional dialects of Jewish Neo-Aramaic, from Urmi, Saqqiz and Rawanduz. Another two articles are concerned with other aspects of Judeo-Arabic in North Africa: Paul B. Fenton discusses three Judeo-Arabic historical dirges, two from the Tafilalt region and one from Algiers. Mor Daniel analyzes the forms of the plural used in the Judeo-Arabic of newspapers published in Tunis at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Two articles in the volume deal with Jewish Romance languages: Ora (Rodrigue) Schwarzwald offers the fruit of her research into the Passover Haggadah published in Sofia in Cyrillic letters. Michael Ryzhik focuses on the linguistic features of two Judeo-Italian dramas in Latin letters. Two articles in the volume are concerned with the Hebrew language traditions of different Jewish communities: Mor Shemesh analyzes the whole plural forms of segholate nouns in the reading of the Mishnah according to the late Ashkenazi tradition. Adam Bin-Nun discusses the link between the Yemenite version of the Torah text and that of Maimonides.

We are pleased to present readers with volume 19–20 of the journal Massorot , dedicated from its inception to research on Hebrew and Jewish language traditions. The present volume contains 12 articles and a book review. They reflect the investigations of 16 researchers, since three of the articles were produced through the fruitful collaboration of two authors. Five of the articles deal with diverse aspects of Judeo-Arabic, both in the Middle Ages and the modern era. Moshe Bar-Asher focuses on disparate translations of a single Biblical Hebrew lexical item in the Maghrebian Sharḥ or literal Bible-translation tradition, and Gabriel Rosenbaum discusses the unique language of the Karaites of Egypt, a variety of Arabic containing distinctive words and expressions of Hebrew origin. Yosef Yuval Tobi analyzes Arabic poetic verses employed by grammarians and philosophers writing in Judeo-Arabic during the Middle Ages. Nahem Ilan reviews the new lexicon of medieval Judeo-Arabic (Jerusalem, 2016) by Mordechai Akiva Friedman, and Rachel Hasson offers a detailed analysis of the language of two Judeo-Arabic folktales from the Cairo Genizah. The contribution by Yehudit Henshke demonstrates the influence of spoken Maghrebian Judeo-Arabic on the Hebrew of Israeli immigrants from Morocco and their descendants. The article by Yael Reshef and Einat Gonen, too, focuses on influences on spoken Hebrew — in this instance, traces of traditional Ashkenazi Hebrew on the Hebrew spoken in Israel in the early 1960s. The volume includes English abstracts.

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.

We are pleased to present the readers with a new, double issue of Massorot , volumes 16–17, published through the collaboration of the Center for Jewish Languages and Literatures and the Jewish Oral Traditions Research Center of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The present volume offers ten articles devoted to Hebrew and Jewish language studies, some by veteran researchers, others by younger scholars. Half of them were originally presented as lectures at the Fourth International Conference of the Center for Jewish Languages and Literatures, convened to mark the 25th anniversary of the Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The theme of the conference, held in Tammuz 5770 / June 2010, was “Original Compositions and Translated Works in Jewish Languages”. The articles published in this volume deal with a range of Jewish languages, the majority of them Jewish languages of Romance stock: the articles by Shmuel Refael, Ángel Berenguer Amador, and Omer Shafran focus on Judeo-Spanish (or Judezmo, Ladino); the articles by Cyril Aslanov and Doron Modan are devoted to Jewish varieties of French; and the article by Michael Ryzhik concentrates on Judeo-Italian. Jewish Malayalam, the study of which is still in its infancy, is discussed in the article by Ophira Gamliel. Issues relating to the study of languages in contact, which frequently arise in Jewish language analysis, come to the fore in several of the articles in the present volume: the article by Esther Adamit analyzes the ways in which multiple languages influenced the selection of Jewish toponyms appearing on the title pages of Hebrew-letter works published in Europe; and the contribution by Doron Modan analyzes the influence of several European languages on the Hebrew component incorporated in a collection of communal regulations written in the language of the Jews of Bordeaux and Bayonne.Two of the articles in this volume discuss Hebrew language traditions. The article by Moshe Bar-Asher analyzes the Hebrew that emerges from tombstone inscriptions from Meknes as reflected in the volume Avne Zikkaron, by Rabbi Yosef Messas. The contribution by Ilan Eldar discusses the origins of the traditional Ashkenazic pronunciation of Hebrew. The book features article summaries in English.

Judezmo — the language also known as Ladino, Spanyolit, and Judeo-Spanish — is a Jewish language composed of Romance, Hebrew-Aramaic and Arabic, and Balkan elements, which arose in medieval Spain and evolved after the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, primarily in the Ottoman Empire. The present book is a comprehensive, university-level Hebrew-language introduction to Judezmo, as written in the traditional Rashi alphabet. It includes a structural and sociolinguistic overview of the language and the literature created in it from the Middle Ages through the modern era, a rich anthology of reading selections, linguistic analysis, exercises to reinforce the active acquisition of the language, a detailed chart of the verbal system, and a bilingual dictionary. The reading selections, presented in order of difficulty, were taken from the modern Judezmo literature and press of the past 200 years, and from the rich Judezmo oral literature — including proverbs and sayings, folk songs and ballads, stories, jokes and riddles. The reading selections introduce the reader to the captivating cultural and social world of the Judezmo-speaking Sephardim in the modern era. The linguistic analysis includes a description of the Judezmo sound system, the Hebrew-letter and Roman-letter writing systems used to transcribe it, and a morphological and syntactic analysis of the linguistic structures appearing in the reading selections, designed to provide the reader with a thorough introduction to modern Judezmo in its diverse regional and stylistic forms. The book is meant for individual study as well as group use, and assumes no prior knowledge of any language except Hebrew.

This is the first comprehensive dictionary of the Hebrew and Aramaic component of Modern Ottoman Judezmo – the traditional language of the Turkish and Balkan Sephardim, descendants of the Jews exiled from Spain in 1492. Its over 5000 entries and subentries reveal popular pronunciations of the words as well as the creative grammatical constructions, imaginative semantic innovations, and idiomatic expressions, proverbs and sayings incorporating Hebrew and Aramaic elements, which form a part of the unique Jewish subculture created by the Ottoman Sephardim. The dictionary is preceded by an overview of the Judezmo (also known as Judeo-Spanish, Ladino) language in its historical development, and an analysis of the Hebrew and Aramaic elements used by Judezmo speakers before the modern period covered by the dictionary