Global Philology: An International Lecture Series

Title: Arabic in Hebrew Characters, Jews in the Medieval Islamic World, and the Philology of the Judaeo-Languages

Speaker:Marina Rustow, Princeton University

Moderator: Martin Kern, Princeton University

Time: 21:00-22:30 (GMT+8), November 16, 2022.

Zoom Meeting ID: 922 3991 6850 (Code: 1111)

Zoom Link:

https://zoom.us/j/92239916850?pwd=MnhBaGxZY1ZpQ3BGMWovRHR1U0h2QT09

Introduction to the Speaker:

Marina Rustow is the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East at Princeton University. She is a 2015 MacArthur Fellow and a 2022 recipient of the Haskins Medal from the Medieval Academy of America. Rustow’s research focuses on ephemeral documents from Egypt between 1000 and 1300, including personal letters, correspondence of long-distance traders, legal deeds, government records, lists, accounts and doodles. Many of such documents survived in the Cairo Geniza, a cache of manuscripts preserved in a medieval Egyptian synagogue and an invaluable source of information on a neglected period in the history of the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean basins. Rustow directs the Princeton Geniza Lab, a collaborative research project aimed to decipher and digitize documents from the Cairo Geniza. Her books include The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (2020) and Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (2008).

Lecture Introduction:

Between 650 and 950, Arabic replaced Aramaic as the lingua franca of the Middle East. Until 1300, an estimated 90% of Jews worldwide lived in the Islamic world and spoke Arabic. But when they wrote Arabic, they wrote it in Hebrew script. Nineteenth-century European scholars coined the term Judaeo-Arabic to describe this phenomenon. The first translation of the Hebrew Bible into Arabic, by Saʿadya Gaʾon (882–932), was into Judaeo-Arabic; the great medieval philosopher Moses Maimonides (1138–1204) wrote The Guide of the Perplexed in Judaeo-Arabic.

Linguists who study Judaeo-languages tend to think of them as distinct from ambient languages. But while this is true of the two major Judaeo-languages of the early modern and modern periods — Ladino and Yiddish — it is not true of medieval Judaeo-Arabic. This lecture will reflect on some of the assumptions embedded in the “Judaeo” prefix and compare them with how medieval Jews themselves viewed Arabic in Hebrew characters.