JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

his work include his commentary to Genesis (Ben Shammai
et al. 2000) and his translation of the Book of Obadiah (Polliack
and Schlossberg 2001).
*Jeshua b. Judah, an influential scholar and leader of the
Karaite community of Jerusalem in the 11th century, wrote both
a short and a long commentary to the Pentateuch. His short
commentary includes also a translation of the Pentateuch. Jeshua
did not intend to produce a comprehensive translation
and commentary on the entire Bible; instead he mostly concentrated
on the legal material. Nevertheless his translation
of the Pentateuch is the second major source for study of the
Karaite tradition of translation. Jeshua’s translation seems to
rely on an already existing tradition of translation rather than
being solely his own product. Presumably, he was influenced
by the school of Karaite scholarship that existed in Jerusalem
in the 11th century (Polliack 1997).
Sharḥ. Saadiah Gaon’s monumental translation of the Pentateuch
spread quickly throughout the various Arabic-speaking
Jewish communities. It was canonized in no time and accepted
as the authoritative translation. About one-third of all
translations of the Bible into Arabic found in the Genizah are
attributed to Saadiah and attest to its great popularity and authority.
However, from the 14th century on Saadiah’s translation
was no longer clear enough to these communities, who
had lost their familiarity with the intricate subtleties of classical
Arabic. Against this background, popular translations that
incorporated features of the local vernaculars began to surface.
In a lengthy introduction for his new translation written in the
15th century in Safed, Rabbi Y. ben Susan explains that Saadiah
composed his translation in classical Arabic, a dialect no longer
understood by Ben Susan’s contemporaries, neither by the
students nor by the teachers (Doron 1985). Unlike the Yemenite
diaspora which adhered to Saadiah’s translation until our time,
other Jewish communities started creating new translations
which are referred to collectively as sharḥ (pl. shurūḥ). These
translations were geared more towards the general public in a
synagogue setting than to the scholarly oriented. They often
include large sections borrowed from Saadiah’s translations,
however, simplified both in style and language as well as in
their religious content (Maman 2000, Avishur 1998, and Bar
Asher 1998). They were composed literally, reflecting the original
Hebrew word order and they incorporated local linguistic
features. The language of the sharḥ stands between middle Arabic
and the spoken vernacular. Typically, young school children
would recite one verse of the Bible followed by its sharḥ,
or they might even alternate reciting one Hebrew word followed
by its corresponding sharḥ (Bar Asher 1998).
Some sharḥ are found in printed editions while others
are still in manuscripts. Recently scholars have been recording
oral recitations creating audible collections of sharḥ (Avishur
1988). Fragments of sharḥ manuscripts that were found
in the Genizah collections have been dated between the 14th
and the 17th centuries (Polliack 1998). While Ben Susan wrote
his sharḥ in Palestine there are many other sharḥ found in the
bible
communities of North Africa, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.
Several studies have been conducted recently concerning this
corpus. Y. Avishur has studied the Eastern sharḥ and B. Hary
concentrated on the Egyptian while M. Bar Asher, A. Maman,
O. Tirosh-Becker, and D. Doron have studied the Western
sharḥ of North Africa.
It is worthwhile to mention a few sharḥ that have been
studied lately by scholars such as the aforementioned Palestinian
sharḥ by Ben Susan, the 200-year- old sharḥ of Rabbi
Raphael Birdugo of Morocco (Bar Asher 2001), and an Egyptian
sharḥ of the Book of Esther probably from the 18th century
(Hary 1994). Others include Rabbi Mordecai Hai Dian’s
of Tunis (Doron 1991) and a more recent one, compiled by
Rabbi Joseph David Genasia (1879–1962) of Algeria (Tirosh-
Becker 1990).
In general, the sharḥ attests to the popular and vibrant
culture in which the Bible was translated into Arabic in the
pre-modern era (Polliack 1998). While some sharḥ seem to
have been adapted from Saadiah’s translations others bear
similarities to the literal pre-Saadian versions. It is reasonable
to assume that a tradition of translation that started before
Saadiah survived in the shadow of his translation mostly
as oral tradition in the private domain, in schools and synagogues,
and surfaced again in the post-Saadian era in the form
of sharḥ (Tobi 1996).
A thorough study of the language of sharḥ was undertaken
by B. Hary who worked mainly on a collection of Egyptian
manuscripts called the Cairo Collection dating to the 18th
through the 20th centuries. Hary concludes that the language
of the sharḥ shows evidence of multiglossia, i.e., that it is composed
of several linguistic layers. He further observes that
the language of the different sharḥ is not constant and can be
placed on a continuum from literary to colloquial Judeo-Arabic
(Hary 1992 and 1994). Hary suggests that the language of
sharḥ exhibits a constant tension between the intention of the
translator to convey the Hebrew text word-for-word and his
desire to be understood and to occasionally interpret the text
by substituting words, paraphrasing, and adding elements of
the local vernacular. Hary proposes that the compelling desire
to adhere to word-for-word translation even when it violates
Arabic linguistic structures stems from the motivation
to preserve the sacred Hebrew text as literally as possible and
to maintain links with a Jewish heritage in a foreign environment.
He further suggests that because of their close connection
to the Hebrew sacred texts sharḥ evolved into sacred texts
themselves. Hence they were not updated, and with time they
also became unintelligible as the dialects of the old sharḥ and
the contemporary readers grew apart (Hary 2000).
Glossaries. A special genre, glossaries and word lists, sheds
light on the roots of the tradition of Bible translation. Word
lists that were found in the Genizah are divided into three
groups. The first is a list of Hebrew words taken from a continuous
biblical segment along with their translation. These
lists when read may seem like an uninterrupted translated
ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 3 605