Langues et littératures judéo-arabes médiévales : Transmission et créativité - Judeo-arabic languages and literatures: Transmission and creativity

Descriptif du séminaire

Ce séminaire a pour objectif d’explorer les sources littéraires judéo-arabes médiévales d’orient et d’occident musulman qui concernent le domaine des savoirs sur le langage. Cette littérature, dont les centres principaux sont la Mésopotamie et l’Andalousie (et dans une moindre mesure la Palestine et l’Afrique du Nord), est celle des érudits juifs de langue arabe, à la fois témoins et acteurs de l’émulation scientifique du monde arabo-musulman. C’est dans ce contexte propice à l’épanouissement intellectuel que des Juifs ont produit une immense littérature : poésie, philosophie, commentaires religieux, traductions, grammaires et dictionnaires. Si ces productions sont encore peu connues du grand public, elles le sont encore moins dans leur langue d’origine. En effet, cette littérature est souvent perçue comme difficile d’accès tant elle exige, pour être convenablement approchée, le cumul de certaines compétences telles qu’une excellente connaissance de la langue arabe mais aussi des spécificités des littératures savantes juives. Pour ces diverses raisons, la grande majorité de ces textes est bien plus connue en traduction (quand ces traductions existent) qu’en versions originales.

L’idée de ce séminaire est née d’une interrogation : comment ce corpus peut-il éclairer les traditions savantes arabes et juives à l’époque médiévale, et que nous dit-il sur les grandes dynamiques relatives à la circulation des savoirs ? Ce corpus a laissé un héritage singulier sur la tradition grammaticale arabe comme sur l’histoire de l’hébreu, tant sur le plan des réalités linguistiques que sur les représentations métalinguistiques. On s’interrogera notamment sur les modalités selon lesquelles ces textes ont contribué au développement de la pensée linguistique hébraïque, d‘abord en ce qu’ils ont appliqué le savoir grammatical de l’arabe à une description savante de l’hébreu, résultat qui a permis d’offrir des outils et une structure à son développement, bien au delà du monde judéo-arabophone. 
La mise en place du séminaire a pour objectif d’initier une dynamique de recherche autour des littératures médiévales judéo-arabes dans leur ensemble en mettant l’accent sur les problématiques liées au langage ainsi qu’aux savoirs sur celui-ci. Les intervenants sont ainsi invités à développer l’un des points suivants : 

• le développement de la grammaire hébraïque du point de vue de l’histoire des théories linguistiques et son impact sur l’histoire de la langue : terminologie, étymologie, philologie, morphologie,  théories sur la formation et l’organisation du lexique, racines et schèmes…; 
• les traductions de l’arabe vers l’hébreu et de l’hébreu vers l’arabe : traduction des savoirs, transmissions des savoirs, méthodologies de la traduction, néologismes, phénomènes de calques sémantiques ou morphologiques…;
• l’évolution de la poésie hébraïque : enjeux de l’adaptation de la métrique arabe, la poésie comme performance linguistique, le renouveau formel et thématique;
• réflexions sur la nature et les singularités de l’arabe de ces textes : koinè littéraire ? Judéo-Arabe médiéval ? Moyen-Arabe ? Dialectalisation ?; 

Seminar : Judeo-arabic languages and literatures : Transmission and creativity

This seminar aims to explore Judaeo-Arabic medieval literary sources in the eastern and western Islamic world that deal with the field of language sciences. These texts, the main centers of which were Near Eastern and Maghreb, were written in Arabic by Jewish scholars at once witnesses of and actors in the scientific development of the Arab-Islamic world. It is in this context of intellectual effervescence that Jews produced a rich literature: poetry, philosophy, religious commentaries, translations, grammars and dictionaries. Unfortunately, these texts are still not sufficiently known by the wider public, especially in their original language. Indeed, the reading of these texts sometimes requires a double competency in both Arabic language and Jewish sources. Thus, today, this literature is much better known in translation than in the original source language. 
The idea of this seminar emerged from a question: how might this corpus inform us about the Muslim and Jewish scholarly tradition in the medieval period, and what might it tell us about the great dynamics related to the circulation of knowledge in Arab culture? While this corpus is not well-studied, it enabled the dissemination of a specific Arabic grammatical tradition as in the history of Hebrew both at a linguistic and metalinguistic level. We are therefore especially interested in considering the contribution of these texts to the development of the Hebrew linguistic tradition, specifically focusing on how some concepts of Arabic grammar have been adapted in order to generate a new form of scholarly description of the Hebrew language which led to the spread of multiple linguistic tools and a structure to its development, far beyond the Judaeo-Arabic world. 
 
The organization of this seminar aims to initiate dynamic research on Judaeo-Arabic medieval literatures as a whole shedding light on topics tied to language and the sciences of language. The contributors are invited to deal with some of the following points : 

• The development of Hebrew grammar through the Arabic linguistic thought and its impact on the history of the Hebrew language : etymology, philology, phonology, descriptions, morphology, theories of the lexicon’s formation and organization, roots and stems…;
• Translations from Arabic to Hebrew and from Hebrew to Arabic : circulation, translation and transmission of knowledges, translation methodologies, neologisms, concept adaptations, semantic or morphologic calques…;
• The evolution of Hebrew poetry with at stake the adaptation of Arabic metrics, poetry as linguistic performance, formal and thematic renewal;
• Considerations of nature and specificities of the variety of Arabic of these texts (Literary Koinè, Medieval Judaeo-Arabic, Middle-Arabic…).  

Programme du séminaire

Tuesday 24th of October 2023

Nadia Vidro (nv235@cam.ac.uk)

Dr. Nadia Vidro is a cultural and intellectual historian of medieval Jews in Muslim lands, with a strong focus on Qaraism. She holds a PhD from Cambridge (under the supervision of Prof. Geoffrey Khan) and is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the University College London. Her most recent projects are on the history of the Jewish calendar and the socio-historical implications of calendar diversity. In another strand of her research, Nadia studied Qaraite treatises on Biblical Hebrew grammar, focusing on the Qaraite approaches to Biblical Hebrew verbal morphology, and worked on the transmission of grammatical knowledge between the Muslim and the Jewish cultures.

Jews and the Grammar of Classical Arabic: an overview

Abstract: Medieval Jews in Muslim lands spoke and wrote Arabic. Yet did Jews study Arabic grammar as a discipline? A number of treatises on the grammar of Classical Arabic are preserved in collections of Jewish manuscripts, such as the Cairo Genizah collections and the Firkovich Collections in the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg. Some of these manuscripts are in Arabic script, others are transliterated into Hebrew characters. Although Jewish scholars could read and study works on Classical Arabic grammar penned in Arabic script, it is the Judaeo-Arabic copies that most clearly testify to Jews’ active engagement with Classical Arabic grammar.
In this paper, I will present an overview of Classical Arabic grammars preserved in Judaeo-Arabic and will discuss individual grammars, some of which are well-known whereas others do not survive outside of the Judaeo-Arabic corpus. I will then try to answer more general questions, such as who was interested in learning the grammar of Classical Arabic, what kinds of grammars Jews were interested in and whether Jews only transliterated or also composed some of the grammars that we possess today.

Tuesday 14th November 2023

Maria Angeles Gallego (mariangeles.gallego@cchs.csic.es)
 
María Ángeles Gallego is Tenured Scientist at the Institute of Languages and Cultures of the Mediterranean and the Near East of the Spanish Council for Scientific Research of which she has been Director (2014-2019). She has worked and taught at different academic institutions including Emory University (Atlanta, USA) as Fulbright Visiting Scholar (1997-1999) and  the University of Cambridge (2000 - 2002) in the United Kingdom, as Research Associate. Her field of expertise is Judeo-Arabic language and literature and, more specifically, the history of linguistic ideas. Selected publications: G. Khan, M. Á. Gallego, J. Olszowy-Schlanger, The Karaite Tradition of Hebrew Grammatical Thought in its Classical Form. 2 vols., Leiden-Boston: E. J. Brill, 2017 (2ª ed.), M. A. Gallego, El judeo-árabe medieval. Edición, traducción y estudio lingüístico del Kitab al-taswi’a del gramático andalusí Yonah ibn Ganah, Bern: Peter Lang, 2006; “The Languages of Medieval Iberia and their Religious Dimension”, Medieval Encounters: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Culture in Confluence and Dialogue, 9,1 (2003), pp.105 – 137.
 
The "inclusive" language of the Torah: on the interpretation of the generic masculine by Abu l-Faraj Harun (11th century CE)
 
Abstract: Some medieval Jewish grammarians and exegetes felt the need to justify the use of the masculine gender in the Biblical text as inclusive of both men and women in those cases in which the context indicates a generic sense. Given the fact that Hebrew, just like Arabic, has differentiated masculine and feminine forms in most grammatical categories, the use of the masculine was basically interpreted as a reflection of the superiority of men over women. Within the literalist reading of the sacred text that characterizes medieval Karaite scholars, however, a more complex interpretation was advanced. In an original approach to this issue that will be examined in this presentation, Abu l-Faraj Harun ibn al-Faraj, active in Jerusalem in the 11th century C.E., contemplated the exemption of women from the fulfillment of certain obligations when the divine injunction was delivered with masculine grammatical markers unless contextual elements indicated a generic meaning. The views of Abu l-Faraj Harun will be analysed within the general framework of philosophical and grammatical theories of gender among Muslim and Jewish earlier and contemporary scholars.

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Thursday 7th December

Jose Martinez Delgado (Professor of Hebrew Language, Department of Semitic Studies, University of Granada)
The adaptation of the Fa'aLa paradigm to the Hebrew language

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Mardi 27 février 2024 au PLC salle 4.05 de 16h à 17h30

 
Intervenante : Judith Kogel (IRHT-CNRS) 
Un dictionnaire d'hébreu biblique, le Qitsur shorashim (xiiesiècle) : présentation et projet d'édition électronique

 

Mardi 26 mars 2024 au PLC en salle 4.05 de 16h à 17h30 

lntervenant :Jonas Sibony (Sorbonne Université - CERMOM)
"Judéo-arabe, une même appellation pour divers phénomènes linguistiques et littéraires"

Mardi 23 avril au PLC en salle 4.05 de 16h à 17h30

Intervenante : Friederike Schmidt (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich / Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages)

"Sahl ben Maṣliaḥ and language: A few notes on his Bible commentary and what it can tell us about his take on language, grammar, and translation."

Abstract

Sahl ben Maṣliaḥ (10th c. CE, Jerusalem) was an exegete, scholar of law, and activist defending and promoting the Qaraite interpretation of Judaism. Given the centrality of the Bible and its correct philological interpretation, it is nogreat wonder that he also authored a work on grammar. This work, mentioned in Judah Hadassi’s Eshkol ha-Kofer(12^th c. CE), is not extant.

His commentary on the Torah, however, contains grammatical explanations which can give us a rough idea of the terminology he uses and the concepts behind it. In my talk I will present some of my findings and will also addobservations on his style of translation and his take on language in general.

Short bio
 

Friederike Schmidt is currently working on an edition and translation of Sahl ben Maṣliaḥ’s (10th c. CE) commentary on Genesis as well as on her dissertation, entitled The Genesis Commentary of the Qaraite Sahl ben Maṣliaḥ (10^th c.): The Story of Joseph at the LMU Munich. She holds an MA in Arabic studies with minors in religious studies and political science as well as another MA in interpreting (Arabic, German), both from the University of Leipzig. Before starting her work on Qaraite exegesis she taught Modern Standard Arabic and was involved in several research projects, mainly with a focus on manuscript studies.

Since 2021 she is the teacher for Classical Judeo-Arabic at the Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages.

ORGANISATION

• Julien Sibileau (Inalco - CERMOM) 
• Jonas Sibony (Sorbonne Université - CERMOM)

CONTACTS 

julien.sibileau@inalco.fr ; jonas.sibony@sorbonne-universite.fr