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Middle Eastern & South Asian Studies

Benjamin Hary
Egyptian Judeo-Arabic Translations of Sacred Texts

Benjamin Hary, Associate Professor of Hebrew, Arabic and Linguistics
Emory University

Jewish varieties and religiolects share an important literary genre of verbatim translation of sacred
religious Hebrew/Aramaic texts into the various Jewish religiolects (¡ar' in Judeo-Arabic, taytsh in
Yiddish, ladino in Judeo-Spanish, ¡ar> in Judeo-Neo-Aramaic, etc.). The translations include among
others, the Bible, the Siddur, the Passover Haggadah, Pirke <Avot, and more.

Judeo-Arabic, which has been written and spoken in various forms by Jews throughout the Arabic-speaking world, is characterized, among other things, by this genre, which began to develop in the fifteenth century with the aim of replacing Saadia Gaon’s translations from the tenth century. Data for this paper come from three Egyptian Judeo-Arabic texts: ¡ar· of Genesis (ms. HB 15, Anneneberg), ¡ar· of Esther (ms. 1302, Ben-Zvi Institute) and Judeo-Arabic Passover Haggadah (mss. 3, 74, 91 and 93, the Cairo Collection). I have recently critically edited these manuscripts as part of my forthcoming two-volume book on Egyptian Judeo-Arabic ¡ar·. In the paper I analyze the translation method of the ¡ar· by illustrating the linguistic tension there as characterized by the literal translation from Hebrew into Judeo-Arabic, i.e., every word in Hebrew has a Judeo-Arabic equivalent coupled with similar word order on one hand, and the author's wish to be understood and to interpret the text on the other hand. I term this tension as literal/interpretive tension, and I set a linguistic model by which we can examine how this tension works in the text. I also show how this tension is connected to Jewish identity and how the desire to translate verbatim was so pressing that Judeo-Arabic writers were willing to change the Arabic structure in order to preserve the sacred Hebrew text as literally as possible. This was related to education and pedagogical philosophy, as well as to the role Judeo-Arabic had in maintaining Jewish identity in Diaspora minority communities. In a Diaspora where Jews have been threatened with assimilation, sacred texts represent a partial way of preserving Jewish identity against difficult odds.