Copyright

Dotan Arad, Esther-Miriam Wagner

Published On

2025-07-22

Page Range

pp. 429–477

Language

  • English

Print Length

49 pages

PART III: LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF THE JUDAEO-ARABIC IN THE CORPUS

Chapter of: 'Wisdom and Greatness in one Place': The Alexandrian Trader Moses ben Judah and his Circle(pp. 429–477)
The Judaeo-Arabic letters of our corpus provide a significant contribution to the study of Late Judaeo-Arabic in general and of utilitarian prose in Judaeo-Arabic in particular. While the various and documentary registers of ‘classical’ Judaeo-Arabic, i.e., Judaeo-Arabic of the tenth to the fourteenth century, have been studied in greater detail and depth (see, e.g., Blau 1980b; 1981; 1988; Polliack 1997; Friedman 2016b, 933–41; Wagner 2010), Late Judaeo-Arabic from the fifteenth century onwards has yet to win the same measure of scholarly attention. This is partly due to the dearth of sources. For the period from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, scholars lack a basic corpus of utilitarian prose that would enable systematic study of the language, although we have a few studies of literary sources.1 More material is available from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and studies on epistolary material have been carried out (Khan 1991; 1992; 2006; 2013). For this reason, the publication of our fifteenth-century corpus makes a unique contribution to the number of sources available to scholars interested in Judaeo-Arabic linguistics, and we offer a linguistic analysis of notable phenomena and a summary of the epistolary formulae and style of the Judaeo-Arabic letters in this volume.

Contributors

Dotan Arad

(author)
Senior Lecturer in the Israel and Golda Koschitzki department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Bar-Ilan University
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5395-6653

Dr. Arad is a senior lecturer in the Israel and Golda Koschitzki department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry in Bar-Ilan University. Dotan has a PhD in Jewish History from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research focuses on the Jews in Egypt, Syria and Palestine during the Mamluk and Early Ottoman period. Between 2012 and 2014 he published, with Prof. Shmuel Glick and other colleagues, a series of volumes containing responsa fragments of Jewish Sages in the Ottoman Empire, from the Cairo Genizah. His current research focuses on the Judeo Arabic letters of the Karaites in the Ottoman empire and on the social history of the Damascus and Cairo’s Jews during the Ottoman Period.

Esther-Miriam Wagner

(author)
Executive Director of the Woolf Institute at University of Cambridge
https://www.woolf.cam.ac.uk/people/dr-esther-miriam-wagner

Esther-Miriam Wagner is the Executive Director of the Woolf Institute. She is a Fellow of St Edmund's College and teaches the MPhil in Middle Eastern Studies: Muslim-Jewish Relations at the University of Cambridge. Miriam has written broadly on sociolinguistics, historical linguistics of Judaeo-Arabic and Yiddish, scribal practice, and Jewish-Muslim relations in Egypt and Muslim Spain as reflected in the Genizah sources. Her books include Linguistic Variety of Judaeo-Arabic in Letters from the Cairo Genizah (2010), Scribes as Agents of Language Change (2013), Merchants of Innovations. The Languages of Traders (2016) and A Handbook and Reader of Ottoman Arabic (2021). Her work has been featured on TV and Radio programmes, such as on BBC3 The Essay, in History Magazine and in documentaries on the Cairo Genizah.