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Families enroll their children in Luxembourg's Liberal Talmud Torah because they are committed to continuing Jewish tradition and teaching their children how to be Jewish. These families are also deeply attached to liberal modernity and its ideals of free choice and autonomy – ideals that appear to clash with those of Jewishness. Hebrew and Hebrew literacy become key sites through which families resolve this tension. By reframing Hebrew proficiency as requiring decoding but not comprehension students contribute to Jewish continuity and simultaneously maintain a vision of themselves as modern progressives. This reframing is initially frustrating for students as Hebrew literacy practices conflict with schooled expectations for language and literacy; yet students eventually take up and find meaning in these new forms.

Our goal is to collect the sounds of Hebrew and to make them accessible for linguistic studies and cultural heritage preservation. Our presentation is focused on the pipeline we have developed and on two main tools that we have developed for it: 1. A Hebrew sound parser and 2. The database platform.

While Jewish angelology has been explored from a variety of perspectives, angels in Jewish magic have received less attention. This paper applies computational methods to explore angelic nomenclature and function in a corpus of Jewish magical texts derived from the Cairo Genizah. Paper presented at theADHO Digital Humanities Conference 2023, in Graz, Austria.

The author argues that the Paulian Bible, and particularly the translation of the Gospels and Psalms, uses only seemingly “modern language”, as its text in many cases borrows full phrases from the Millennium Bible. This creates a certain linguistic hybrid, mixing colloquial language and a “Polish biblical style” already established by tradition. This thesis is illustrated by numerous examples based on to the analysed text. Another issue is the theoretical and practical validity of the very fact of relying on modern language, and indeed on colloquial language in the translation of the Scriptures. From a theoretical point of view, this clearly contradicts the tradition set by St. Jerome’s Vulgate, whose translational language violated the canons of Ciceronian Latin (i.e., the language that sounded natural to the educated audience of the time), in an effort to be as faithful to the original as possible. Jerome juxtaposed it with the syntactic structures of Hebrew, resulting in a certain new quality, still perceived long afterwards as a “beneficial linguistic dissonance” (a formulation coined by Berman), also leading to an expansion of the resources of the target language. This principle was adopted in later Catholic translations of the Bible, including Father Jakub Wujek translation, and only rejected by the new Protestant tradition inaugurated by Martin Luther. From a practical point of view, however, one may inquire about the pastoral effectiveness of using such language and reaching out to the Protestant tradition in a situation where the Protestant churches of Europe are emptying, despite the proposal of “easified Christianity”., Autor niniejszego artykułu stawia tezę, iż w Biblii Paulistów, w szczególności zaś w tłumaczeniu Ewangelii i Psalmów, zastosowano tylko pozornie „język współczesny”, gdyż jej tekst w wielu wypadkach zapożycza pełne frazy z Biblii Tysiąclecia. Powstaje w ten sposób pewna hybryda językowa, mieszająca język potoczny i już utrwalony tradycją „polski styl biblijny”. Tezę tę ilustrują liczne przykłady oparte o analizowany tekst. Kolejną poruszaną kwestią jest teoretyczna i praktyczna zasadność samego faktu sięgania po język współczesny, a w istocie po język potoczny w przekładzie Pisma Świętego. Z teoretycznego punktu widzenia jest to jednoznacznie sprzeczne z tradycją wyznaczoną przez Wulgatę św. Hieronima, którego przekładowy język naruszał kanony łaciny cycerońskiej (a więc języka naturalnie brzmiącego dla ówczesnego wykształconego odbiorcy) w trosce o jak największą wierność wobec oryginału. Święty Hieronim zderzał łacinę ze strukturami składniowymi języka hebrajskiego, w wyniku czego powstała pewna nowa jakość, odbierana jeszcze długi czas później jako„dobroczynny zgrzyt językowy” (sformułowanie A. Bermana), prowadzącyrównież do poszerzenia zasobów języka docelowego. Ta zasada została przyjęta w późniejszych katolickich przekładach Biblii, w tym w przekładzie ks. Jakuba Wujka, i odrzucona dopiero przez nową tradycję protestancką zainaugurowaną przez Marcina Lutra. Z praktycznego natomiast punktu widzenia wolno zadać pytanie o duszpasterską skuteczność używania takiego języka i sięganie do tradycji protestanckiej w sytuacji, gdy kościoły protestanckie Europy pustoszeją mimo propozycji „chrześcijaństwa ułatwionego”.

Same but different – XRF study of inks from 13-14th centuries Torah scroll Ms Erfurt 7 (Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Preussicher Kulturbesitz, Ms. Or. fol. 1216) is a thirteenth century Torah scroll from the famous Erfurt collection kept at the Berlin State Library. Multiple corrections, reinking, and three replacement sheets testify to intense ritual use of the scroll. The scroll was investigated in order to compare the ink used in the original and replacement sheets, both for the main text and for corrections. Finally, we answered the scholarly question of whether there was a special practice of writing God’s name. The first survey was performed on-site with a portable XRF spectrometer on a selection of spots, and later it was complemented with XRF scans of several paragraphs of interest with an imaging spectrometer, after permission was granted to bring the scroll to the laboratory. In the presentation, we will show how material analysis of inks can contribute to scholarly research on manuscript and compare what can be achieved on-site with spot analysis, and what questions can be addressed only with use of a scanning device., The research for this project was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany's Excellence Strategy – EXC 2176 'Understanding Written Artefacts: Material, Interaction and Transmission in Manuscript Cultures', project no. 390893796. The research was conducted within the scope of the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC) at Universität Hamburg in collaboration with the Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung (BAM).

This thesis argues that the theological interpretation of Genesis 2–4, which describes a pristine world corrupted by evil, derives from a cosmological model and accompanying ideas of what constitutes goodness and badness that is anachronistic to the original context of the Hebrew Bible and instead arises from the reception of the material in the Hellenistic period. By comparing ideas and images from ancient Near Eastern literature that resemble those appearing in Genesis, we argue that Genesis presents a cosmology and system of values wherein an eternally pre-existing undesirable state of negation (“chaos”) is pushed to the periphery of a manufactured desirable condition of order and harmony, which in turn is threatened by an undesirable corruption from within (“evil”) and thereby under constant threat of collapsing back into nothingness unless perpetually sustained by the combined efforts of humans and gods. Within this cosmology and axiology, which is shared with the literature of the ancient Near East, Genesis presents a subversive narrative that discusses where true order in the world might be found. We argue that the Primordial History provides a deconstruction of various institutions of order found throughout the rest of the ancient Near East, especially those favoured by Israel’s Babylonian conquerors, in order to promote the Israelite covenant with Yahweh as the desirable alternative. Each institution in turn is presented as valuable and useful yet also insufficient to produce and sustain order. The pericope of Genesis 2–4—"the account of the heavens and the earth”—deconstructs the institutions of agriculture and civilization, specifically by demonstrating that, in contrast to the presentation of comparative literature, their acquisition is insufficient to elevate humans out of a state of negation, and further demonstrating that the pursuit of cultural achievement is insufficient to produce the nearest possible human approximation of eternal life.

The term Dead Sea Scrolls is used in two senses, general and specific. In a general sense, it designates Hebrew, Aramaic, Nabatean, Greek, and some Syriac and Arabic texts discovered in various places along the north-west shore of the Dead Sea in the mid-twentieth century and later. Keywords: archives and documents; Judaism; religious history

A growing interest in discourse markers has given rise to a number of studies on languages as diverse as English (Edmondson 1981; Ostman 1981; Schourup 1982; Erman 1987; Schiffrin 1987; Brinton 1990; Fraser 1990; inter alia), Japanese (Onodera 1994), Spanish (Cortes 1991; Briz 1993; Schwenter 1996; Portoles 1998; inter alia), Hebrew (Maschler 1994, 1997), and many others. These studies analyze a variety of functions served by discourse markers in natural conversations. This paper examines the use of the deverbal marker vamos 'well' (literally, 'we go') in utterances that require mitigation (Fraser 1980) in Peninsular Spanish. The purpose is to establish systematic contexts of the use of vamos within discourse. To achieve this, natural conversations have been used. Let us first compare the canonical (1a) and the noncanonical (1b) meanings of vamos.

The concepts of literacy and illiteracy are fluid; their meanings vary according to sociocultural-political trends and language ideologies. Reflections of literacy workers about their involvement in national literacy campaigns are a source of data for such fluctuations. This paper analyzes the recollections of Israeli former soldier-teachers from the time of the campaign, and additional data collected decades later in personal interviews. Close attention to discourse strategies used in both sets of data demonstrates how changes in the structure of society, and the public discourse of identity, affect the cluster of meanings along the continuum of literacy-illiteracy.

Hebrew is usually written without vowel points, which can make it a challenge for some readers to decipher. This is especially true of medieval Hebrew, which can have nonstandard grammar and orthography. The present paper tested four AI tools to add vowel points to an unpublished medieval Hebrew translation of the Lord’s Prayer. The vocalization tools tested were ChatGPT-3.5, ChatGPT-4, DoItInHebrew, and Dicta. ChatGPT-3.5 freely changed the text, even rewriting some phrases and adding an entire sentence. The vowels ChatGPT-3.5 provided for its rewritten Hebrew text were also full of errors. ChatGPT-4 did a moderate job with only three errors, and it also modified the orthography. One of ChatGPT-4’s errors was not trivial because it involved a word that it made up. When challenged on this word, ChatGPT-4 corrected it by inventing another word, which it claimed was a “rare form” and for which it provided a fictitious derivation. When challenged on this second made-up word, it replaced the word from the original text with a word from an entirely different root. The vowels inserted by DoItInHebrew produced a gibberish text. In contrast, Dicta provided near perfect vocalization with only one genuine error but like ChatGPT-4 modified the orthography of the matres lectiones (letters that function as vowel helpers in unpointed texts). Dicta’s interface made it easy to correct the vocalization although it required advanced knowledge of Hebrew. ChatGPT-3.5 and DoItInHebrew are useless for vocalizing historic Hebrew texts whereas Dicta can be a powerful tool but requires someone with expertise in Hebrew grammar to verify and correct the vocalization. ChatGPT-4 can be a useful tool although it tends to fabricate words and definitions and then lie to cover this up, making it counterproductive.

Letter migrations between words in reading aloud (e.g., reading “cane love” as “lane love” or “lane cove”) are known to result from a deficit in the visual-orthographic analysis and characterize attentional dyslexia. In spontaneous speech, individuals with impairment in the phonological output buffer may show migrations of phonemes between words. The purpose of this study was to examine whether migrations between words in reading aloud can also result from a deficit in the phonological output buffer, to explore the characteristics of migrations resulting from orthographic input and from phonological output deficits, and to examine methods to distinguish these two sources. Using tasks of reading aloud of lists of 92–182 word pairs, we identified 18 adults and adolescents with developmental dyslexia who made between-word letter migrations in reading aloud, significantly more than age-matched controls (372 adults, 26 7th-graders and 44 4th–5th-graders). To distinguish between the orthographic input and phonological output sources for these migrations, we administered a test assessing orthographic input without spoken output (written semantic decision on 140 migratable word pairs) and a repetition test of 36 auditorily presented migratable word pairs, assessing spoken output without orthographic input (as well as nonword repetition and 3 span tests). These tests indicated that the migrations in reading aloud of 10 of the participants with dyslexia resulted from an orthographic input deficit—they made migrations not only in reading aloud but also in written word pair comprehension, but not in word pair repetition. For the other 8 participants, the migrations resulted from a phonological output deficit: they made migrations in reading aloud and in word pair repetition, but not in comprehension, and had limited spans and made errors in nonword repetition. We identified several differences between the two types of between-word errors: first, the individuals with attentional dyslexia made omissions of a letter that appeared in the same position in the two words, but the phonological output buffer group did not make such omissions. Second, the groups differed in the origin of migration: orthographic input migrations involve letters that are orthographically adjacent, whereas phonological output migrations involve phonologically adjacent phonemes: phonemes that have just been spoken or that are prepared together in the phonological buffer for production. Migrations from the line below and from 2 lines above the target occurred only in the orthographic input group. This study thus indicates that between-word migrations in reading aloud can result not only from attentional dyslexia, but also from a phonological output buffer deficit, and offers ways to distinguish between the two.

Populism and civilizationism have transformed the politics of many countries. Many scholars consider them the biggest challenges to democracy since the rise of fascism and communism in the first half of the last century. The close affinity between populism, civilizationism, and rightwing politics has also been analyzed and recognized in many countries from Turkey to India to the US. However, there are three areas that distinguish the appearance of civilizationism in Israel. First, in contrast to many other countries, civilizationism in Israel is not a new phenomenon. It has been an essential part of Israeli nationalism or Zionism since the early 20th century. Second, unlike many countries, Jewish civilizationism in Israel is an article of faith for all major Israeli political parties. It is not a slogan raised only by the rightwing, conservative part of the political spectrum. Finally, one observes an affinity between civilizationism and populism. Civilizational rhetoric is the mainstay of populist leaders, such as Trump, Erdogan, etc. In Israel, populism and civilizationism have no special relationship as civilizationism is mainstream politics. All politicians, populists and non-populists, have to pay homage to Jewish civilizationism; otherwise, they will not succeed. This paper analyzes the Israeli founding fathers’ statements, the Declaration of Independence, Israeli state symbols, the revival of the Hebrew language, the Law of Return, the first debate in the Knesset, and the more recent Nation-State Law to demonstrate how Jewish civilizationism is old, mainstream, and not exclusively populist.

While the field of heritage language (HL) bilingualism has grown substantially in recent years, no studies have considered heritage Hebrew speakers dominant in American English. Expanding HL studies to new language pairs is crucial to understand the generalizability of prior findings across diverse linguistic contexts. In the current study, we assess 40 adult participants (16 M, 24 F) and present an overview of their lexical abilities, as derived from a quantitative and qualitative analysis of performance on the Multilingual Naming Test (MINT) and a narrative elicitation task. We consider target accuracy, types of non-target responses, and cross-linguistic influence in the form of code-switching and calquing. Participants’ non-target responses indicated a strong grasp of Hebrew root-pattern word formation and creativity in the face of lexical gaps. Code-switching and calquing patterns in the narratives suggest that the dominant English is the clear framing language, from which speakers draw resources directly or indirectly. Although this linguistic blending leads to innovative lexical formations that would not be found in standard monolingual speech, the speakers’ overall message is still understandable. We conclude that heritage Hebrew speakers are able to clearly communicate complex thoughts in their HL while relying on their dominant language to fill lexical gaps.

Katolik Kilisesi 16. yüzyılda Reform hareketlerine bir cevap olarak Hıristiyanlık inancı açısından sakıncalı görülen kitapların yasaklanması ve sansürden geçirilmesine önem göstermiştir. Bu çerçevede Index adı verilen listelerle yasaklı kitaplar ilan edilmeye başlanmış diğer taraftan da sansür komisyonları kurularak kitaplardaki sakıncalı ifadeler basılmadan önce çıkarılmış, basılanların da üzeri mürekkeple çizilmiştir. İtalya’nın farklı şehirlerinde sansür komisyonlarında genellikle Hıristiyanlığı kabul eden Yahudi dönmeleri istihdam edilmiştir. Bunun temel sebebi, bu dönmelerin İbranice bilgileri ve Yahudi dinî literatürüne olan aşinalıklarıdır. Bu sansürcülerin başında da Domenico Yeruşalmî gelmektedir. 1555 yılında Kudüs’te doğan Domenico, 1578/9-1588/9 yılları arasında İstanbul’da Sultan III. Murad’ın özel hekimi olarak görev yapmıştır. İstanbul’dan İtalya’ya giden Domenico, 1593 yılında Venedik’te Hıristiyan olmuştur. Domenico hem sansür kitabı hazırlamış hem de Yeni Ahit’i İbraniceye tercüme etmiştir. Domenico’dan günümüze gelen en önemli çalışma, sansür el kitabı olarak hazırladığı Sefer ha-Zikuk’tur. 1596 yılında Mantua’da sansür komisyonunda görevliyken hazırladığı bu eser, sansür tarihinin en ilginç örneklerinden biridir. Domenico, bu eserin girişinde sansürcüler için takip edilmesi gereken ilkeleri listelemektedir. Bu ilkelerde Hıristiyanlığa yönelik tahkir ifadelerinin silinmesi veya değiştirilmesi belirtilmektedir. Ayrıca reenkarnasyon gibi Kilise açısından sapkın olarak kabul edilen düşünceler de bu listede yer almaktadır. Domenico, bu eserinde yüzlerce eserin isimlerini ve basıldıkları yerleri vererek hangi sayfa ve hangi satırdaki hangi kelimenin silineceğini belirtmektedir. Bazı eserler farklı basım yerleri dikkate alınarak tekrar edilmiştir. Domenico’nun sansürcü olarak imzasının yer aldığı pek çok eser günümüze ulaşmıştır. Bu eserler incelendiğinde Domenico’nun kendisinin belirlediği esaslara uymada titiz olmadığı görülmektedir. Bu makalede Domenico’nun yaşam hikâyesi, Hıristiyan oluşu ve Sefer ha-Zikuk’un içeriği hakkında bilgi verilecektir., In the 16th century, in response to the Reform movements, the Catholic Church emphasized banning and censoring books deemed objectionable in Christianity. In this framework, banned books were announced with lists called Index; on the other hand, censorship commissions were established, offensive statements in the books were removed before they were printed, and the printed ones were scratched out with ink. In censorship commissions in different cities of Italy, the employees were generally Jews who converted to Christianity. The main reason for this is their knowledge of Hebrew and their familiarity with Jewish religious literature. Domenico Yerushalmi is one of these censors. Born in Jerusalem in 1555, Domenico lived in Istanbul between the years 1578/9-1588/9. He served as Sultan Murad's private physician. Domenico, who went to Italy from Istanbul, converted to Christianity in Venice in 1593. He both prepared a censorship book and translated the New Testament into Hebrew. The most significant work of Domenico is Sefer ha-Zikuk, prepared as a censorship handbook. This work, which he prepared while he was on the censorship commission in Mantua in 1596, is one of the most interesting examples in the history of censorship. In the introduction to this work, Domenico lists the principles for censors. These principles specify the deletion or modification of insulting statements against Christianity. In addition, thoughts considered heretical for the Church, such as reincarnation, are also included in this list. In this work, Domenico gives the names of hundreds of Hebrew works and the places they were printed, indicating which word on which page and which line will be deleted. Some works have been repeated considering different publication places. Many works that include Domenico's signature as a censor have survived. When these works are examined, it is seen that Domenico was not meticulous in complying with the principles set by himself. Giving information about the life story of Domenico and his conversion to Christianity, this article examines the content of Sefer ha-Zikuk.

Adopted by the United Nations in 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the most widely translated document. However, versions in 419 languages are not conceived as translations but equivalences, alternate embodiments of identical tenets. The Bible has been rendered into numerous languages, but the Hebrew and Greek originals possess authority that English, Bengali, and Xhosa derivatives do not. The Bible is translated, but the UDHR is, through the theology of international governance, transubstantiated into multiple tongues. No version has priority; each is equally valid, transparent, and interchangeable. The utopian premise is not only that all humans possess inalienable rights but also that all languages express the same principles. The document’s title, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, might seem a solecism, a misplaced modifier. Surely, it is human rights that are universal, not the declaration. However, the UN insists that all versions (at least in the original official languages) are equally binding. It rejects Whorfian notions that particular languages enable particular thoughts and embraces languages as neutral tools whose specific manifestation is irrelevant. Arguments against imprisoning writers in Burma could appeal equally to the authority of either the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or la Déclaration universelle des droits de l’homme or Всеобщую декларацию прав человека or la Declaración Universal de Derechos Humanos or 世界人权宣言. Rather than the Babelian myth of an Ur-Sprache before hubris scattered us into mutual unintelligibility, the UDHR endorses a Chomskyan belief that all languages can express the same thoughts. Yet differences among versions of Article 1 (“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”) are not trivial; dignity is incommensurable with Würde, αξιοπρέπεια, dignidade, waardigheid, or достоинства. The UDHR is a translingual text shaped by the languages of framers and translators.

The purpose of the article is to examine the Hebrew (im)politeness marker bevakasha ‘please’ (the prefixed preposition bϵ ‘in’ + the noun bakasha ‘request’) in order to account for its present-day polysemy. The analysis of bevakasha, a hitherto neglected marker by both synchronic and diachronic investigations, is based in this article on corpora documenting the various stages of the Hebrew language. The findings illustrate a change in the contexts in which the marker has been used throughout history, i.e. from religious texts and letters of authoritative ruling to secular, casual contexts, from authoritative to egalitarian relationships, from first person to second- and third-person's benefits and further to argumentative contexts. The article concludes that the change in contexts has led to pragmatic expansion and a reanalysis of the marker which gave rise to the meaning of (im)politeness and to a shift in the power balance between the speaker and the addressee. Furthermore, the study suggests that the grammaticalization path of bevakasha has been motivated by a changing orientation towards the various components of the speech act, i.e. speaker, hearer and discourse.

In the 16th century, in response to the Reform movements, the Catholic Church emphasized banning and censoring books deemed objectionable in Christianity. In this framework, banned books were announced with lists called Index; on the other hand, censorship commissions were established, offensive statements in the books were removed before they were printed, and the printed ones were scratched out with ink. In censorship commissions in different cities of Italy, the employees were generally Jews who converted to Christianity. The main reason for this is their knowledge of Hebrew and their familiarity with Jewish religious literature. Domenico Yerushalmi is one of these censors. Born in Jerusalem in 1555, Domenico lived in Istanbul between the years 1578/9-1588/9. He served as Sultan Murad's private physician. Domenico, who went to Italy from Istanbul, converted to Christianity in Venice in 1593. He both prepared a censorship book and translated the New Testament into Hebrew. The most significant work of Domenico is Sefer ha-Zikuk, prepared as a censorship handbook. This work, which he prepared while he was on the censorship commission in Mantua in 1596, is one of the most interesting examples in the history of censorship. In the introduction to this work, Domenico lists the principles for censors. These principles specify the deletion or modification of insulting statements against Christianity. In addition, thoughts considered heretical for the Church, such as reincarnation, are also included in this list. In this work, Domenico gives the names of hundreds of Hebrew works and the places they were printed, indicating which word on which page and which line will be deleted. Some works have been repeated considering different publication places. Many works that include Domenico's signature as a censor have survived. When these works are examined, it is seen that Domenico was not meticulous in complying with the principles set by himself. Giving information about the life story of Domenico and his conversion to Christianity, this article examines the content of Sefer ha-Zikuk.

Journal of Child Language Acquisition and Development - JCLAD

У статті висвітлено розвиток єврейських приватних двомовних початкових шкіл з мовами викладання їдиш та іврит у міжвоєнній Польській державі. Стверджено, що вагома роль у розвитку світського іврито-їдишомовного шкільництва належала Єврейській соціалістичній робітничій партії «Робітники Сіону» та заснованому з ініціативи членів цієї партії Товариству з підтримки єврейського шкільництва та єврейської культури. З’ясовано, що через складність освітніх програм двомовних єврейських шкіл, обмежене фінансування, протидію з боку владних кіл партійцям і членам товариства не вдалося створити розгалужену мережу цих навчальних закладів. The article highlights the activities of the Jewish Socialist Workers’ Party «Poale Zion» (Workers of Zion) in the 1920s and 1930s, which aimed at forming a network of bilingual private Jewish educational institutions with Yiddish and Hebrew as languages of schooling. It is argued that in the interwar Poland the development of Jewish schooling was hampered by a number of factors, such as piecemeal implementation of international and domestic regulations on minority schooling by the Polish authorities; assimilation policies of the Polish government; attempts at undermining the position of Jewish community in the economic and educational spheres; and linguistic heterogeneity of the Jewish population. Public Jewish primary schools with Polish as the language of instruction were not popular, as they allegedly provided unsatisfactory schooling and were criticized by the Jewish community as an attempt at assimilation. As a result, in the 1920s and 1930s Jewish political parties and culture and education associations joined in for the sake of development of private Jewish educational institutions. The research shows that an important role in the establishment and support of bilingual schools with both Hebrew and Yiddish used in schooling, belongs to the Jewish Socialist Workers’ Party «Poale Zion» and to Shul-Kult (school and culture organization), founded through the influence of the Party and supported by it. It was with the help of the Party and Shul-Kult members that primary schools with Yiddish and Hebrew languages of teaching were established, in-service teacher training courses were organized, and courses for the illiterate population were organized. In addition, public universities, libraries, theatres, museums, orphanages, etc. were established. The party members published and distributed textbooks, academic and pedagogical journals in Yiddish, Hebrew and Polish. In the Shul-Kult educational institutions, the main emphasis was placed on the study of the Yiddish language and Judaic subjects, as well as on the proper mastery of Hebrew and Hebrew literature. This was meant to contribute to the establishment of national consciousness and preservation of the national identity of the Jewish youth. However, due to the complexity of the curriculum, limited funding, and opposition from the Polish ruling circles, the party members failed to create an extensive network of bilingual primary schools with Yiddish and Hebrew as languages of instruction.

Conference report: Bibles and Scholars: a Tribute to Paul Kahle and Gérard Weil, Aix-en-Provence, 9–12 June 2022

The article describes the study of Hebrew by Alexander Arguelles, one of the outstanding polyglots of our time. The monitoring results demonstrate that the polyglot himself is not always aware of his effective strategies of learning the language. For example, the active use of sensory-motor input of new language information was identified as one of the unconscious language acquisition strategies.

This study investigates the emergence of the ending in Hebrew personal names. All available epigraphic evidence is first gathered and then assessed. This source of information is essential to understand when the ending came into use and gained currency and to locate this phenomenon in an absolute chronology. The appearance of the short form receives here a socio-historical explanation. The author believes, in fact, that the shift from the ending to its shorter version should be read against the backdrop of the Assyrian domination during the second half of the eighth century and the seventh century BCE. More specifically, the deportation into the land of Israel of foreign groups of people contributed to the assimilation of the theophoric element in Hebrew names to the hypocoristic ending -īya, attested all over the Ancient Near East.

This article deals with nominal phrases which are similar to appositions in their form (glída vanil) and sometimes parallel to construct states (glidat vanil) in their function (both exam ples meaning ‘vanilla ice cream’). These phrases are termed here juxtapositions. The article examines the semantic relationship between construct states and juxtapositions with identical components, whether they constitute opposition, synonymy or complementary distribution. The corpus is based primarily on Web data and other contemporary sources, but a diachronic view is provided as well. The article describes a number of domains in which juxtapositions are prevalent. These include expression of quantities, as in recipes (giv’olim ’aspragus) (asparagus stalks); commercial catalogue item listings such as xultsa géver (a man’s shirt; a kind of shirt); and colloquial emotional expressions like ’aruxa zva’a (lit. a horror meal, ‘a dreadful meal’). Other domains are described as well.1

This article addresses an under-studied phenomenon in the lived experience of Palestinian students in Israeli universities as seen from a spatial perspective. Specifically, it analyses the everyday spatial experiences of Palestinian students on the Mount Scopus Campus of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Situated in a contested space amid Palestinian villages, the campus's architecture and prominent location are intended to project power and symbolic domination over the surrounding Arab environment. The study analyses the narratives of fifteen Palestinian students from this campus, underscoring the dialectical relations between their feelings of alienation and estrangement, on the one hand, and practices of resistance and subversion on campus, on the other. Moreover, the analysis reveals how, through their daily spatial behaviours, Palestinian students challenge the settler-colonial landscape-production that the Israeli authorities attempt to impose.

The present study examines the extent to which sociohistorical and political contexts influence the language attitudes of Israeli-Druze students to Hebrew as L2 and to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) in Arabic-speaking schools. It is a pioneer explorative research study that compares students’ attitudes toward diglossia and L2. Using the Foreign Languages Attitudes and Goals Survey (FLAGS), the attitudes of second, fifth, and ninth graders in two different Druze schools were assessed. The results indicate a positive attitude towards L2 Hebrew, not only for instrumental purposes but also for integration into Israel’s multicultural society. The positive attitude to L2 Hebrew is greater in older students, while the attitude to MSA becomes more negative among older students. Their low motivation to learn cultural heritage MSA may contribute to an understanding of how to teach it better or differently, as well as how to encourage future generations to learn it.

This essay provides a comprehensive survey of two centuries of scholarly debate regarding the extent to which Kohelet, the author of the book of Ecclesiastes, was influenced by currents of Greek philosophy and literature. This essay first considers Kohelet’s possible Hebraic, Babylonian, and Egyptian sources of influence, before moving on to address its main topic. It surveys the broad spectrum of scholarly debate on this issue, and explores the strength and plausibility of each position on this spectrum. Finally, it concludes that while no certain conclusions can be reached, the evidence seems to reject the more extreme ends of this spectrum of opinion, while at the same time underscoring the uniqueness and irreducability of Kohelet’s worldview.

From Sagracao do alfabeto, 2009, by Leonor Scliar-Cabral, to A verdadeira historia do alfabeto e alguns verbetes de um dicionario, 2012, by Noemi Jaffe, the letter constitutes a collection of poetic and narrative possibilities. By conceiving the letter as a minimal unit of meaning, the writers are inscribed in a tradition of authors who see in the micro, the magnitudes of the multiple. Scliar-Cabral extracts from the Hebrew alphabet numerous lyrical reverberations, transforming letters into poetry, eclipsing the sense of the unique by expanding the connotations of the letters. Jaffe, in turn, in prose, redefines the meaning of the notion of history by proposing an unusual linearity for each letter of the Latin alphabet. This communication will analyze these two literary paths of Brazilian Literature in the context of contemporary Jewish texts.

It is attested, historically, that in the first centuries of the Common Era, Enochian literature was widely used among Christians, mainly the book of I Enoch, but also, in a more discreet way, the writings of II Enoch and III Enoch (this the least exercised influence). The official position in Western Christianity, which decoded I Enoch's writing from the list of useful literature to Christian religiosity, was given at the Council of Laodicea (4th century) which stated that the only names of angels recognized as sacred would be that of Michael, Gabriel and Raphael, removing I Enoque (who quotes several names of angels) from the West Christian exegetical scenario for centuries. Among the Jews literature was quite influential until the end of the first century Council of Jamnia, which considered only as sacred writings for religion those produced on the borders of the Holy Land in the Hebrew language, marginalizing I Enoque originally written in Aramaic. However, the same did not happen in some regions of the East where Christianity continued to use the book of I Enoque. Starting from the prism that Islam is a monotheistic religion that in its birth exchanged intensely with Judeo-Christian literatures, the article points to a plausible influence of the book of I Enoque in the construction of the Islamic apocalyptic taking as comparative basis the book The Scale of Mohammed. The article is bibliographic in nature and is structured on the comparative method, aiming to present narratological confluences between the writings.

This article presents contemporary Judeo-Spanish poetry for children in the context of the postvernacular mode (when the language is not used any more in everyday communication) of the language. It discusses the poetry collections of three authors who have published Judeo-Spanish poems in the twenty-first century: Ada Gattegno-Saltiel, Avner Perez, and Sarah Aroeste, as well as the project Yeladino, which is an anthology of Judeo-Spanish translations of Hebrew poems. It analyses the books and projects in terms of their subject matter, language, and poetic devices, as well as the relation of some of them with music, theatre-music performance, and educational activities. The paper raises the question of audience of this poetry, allowing for the fact that nowadays there are no children learning Judeo-Spanish as their first language, and that the language itself is considered severely endangered. The paper states the presence of the dual address in these books, i.e. to children and adults, both on the level of implied and real audience.

Este artigo apresenta dois escritores amazônicos descendentes de judeus sefarditas que, embora não judeus, atestam a sua origem judaica. Márcio Souza e Rogel Samuel não explicitam a temática judaica em seus textos, mas manifestam a sua ancestralidade hebraica em contextos não ficcionais.

From 1961‐1965, the Medical School of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem taught four cohorts of medical students from developing countries, mostly African. This article explores the program through the theory of hospitality. First, we find that hospitality is constructed and enabled by international interests. Second, those interests build a status which has unexpected consequences that reveal sorts of hosts, welcoming and xenophobic. Third, as an outcome of the international structure of student exchange, the guests' response to the terms of hospitality was mitigated by their privileged status as international medical students. On the one hand, they appreciated Israel as a model of post‐colonial state‐building; on the other, they criticized the racist reactions to their presence.

This article comparatively analyses the Hebrew and Chinese modern literature produced during the rise and fall of the communal movements in the two countries, respectively known as the Kibbutz move...

Samuel Miklos Stern (SMS) was the pioneer of the modern study of both Arabic and Hebrew muwashshaḥāt (a genre of stanzaic lyric poetry). This paper gives an overview of Stern’s ground-breaking cont...

Alongside his career as a scholar of Arabic and Islam, S.M. Stern contributed many important studies to the Hebrew literature of the medieval Arabic realm, most of them grounded in manuscript resea...

Parents of autistic children are routinely advised to raise them monolingually, despite potential negative effects of monolingualism and no evidence of harm from bilingualism. There is, however, limited research on this topic. This study explored experiences and perspectives of educational practitioners (‘practitioners’) and parents of Hebrew–English bilingual autistic children on bilingualism and monolingualism. Using interpretative phenomenological analysis, we explored the experiences of 22 parents and 31 practitioners using both oral and written interviews. The analysis revealed that religious continuity is a crucial factor in bilingual decision-making. Unexpectedly, both practitioners and parents felt that having to adopt a monolingual approach was unjust, in line with conceptions of forced monolingualism. This article recommends awareness training on community languages and research in other communities.

This text presents the translation of the short story Mot Hazkena (The Death of the Old Woman), by the Hebrew-language writer Yaacov Steinberg. Steinberg was one of the most outstanding writers of the period of the revival of vernacular Hebrew in the Land of Israel, where he arrived in 1914, at the end of the second wave of immigration towards the ancestral land. The tale presented here describes the end of an old woman, whose life slowly and gradually fades away.

The language of Qoheleth is characterized by an awkward style and an unusual vocabulary. Past studies have assigned these peculiarities to linguistic factors, assuming that the book reflects an underrepresented dialect or register. The current study aims to expand the boundaries of this discourse by introducing extra-linguistic considerations into the discussion. Qoheleth is the only biblical book that is purely philosophical, focusing on abstract issues such as the purpose of life and the problem of free will. Such philosophical discussions require the use of an abstract terminology. The basic toolkit of any philosopher consists of conceptual phrases such as “time,” “space,” “cosmos,” “humanity,” “meaning,” etc. Yet abstract vocabulary was meager in the Hebrew at the author’s disposal. Paving a pioneering way in the realm of thought, Qoheleth’s author had to create a terminological system capable of expressing his new ideas. This article traces the ways in which the need for a personally-customized philosophical idiom shaped Qoheleth’s language. Exploring the origins of eleven key-terms in the book, this article reveals the dynamics that gave rise to Qoheleth’s personal lexicon. These include generalization and conceptualization of the extant semantic fields of certain terms in order to re-invent them as personal expressions reflecting the author’s philosophy. The author takes advantage of the “linguistic availability” of certain terms, that is, their foreignness or rareness that makes them better-suited, in his view, to bear newly created meanings. Taken together, Qoheleth’s neologisms constitute a personal idiolect, carefully designed to convey the author’s unique thought.

The Turkic language has adopted hundreds of thousands of Turkish words into its vocabulary throughout history, with the methods of word derivation in its systematics. It is a reality that in the formation of a rich vocabulary of Turkish, in addition to Turkish words, words adopted from foreign languages with which it interacts in various fields such as religious, socio-cultural and literary also have an important place. Karaim, which is among the dialects of the Northwest group of the Turkic language, has also adopted words to its vocabulary by borrowing from languages such as Hebrew, Slavic, Arabic and Persian as a result of some relations.Karaim periodicals such as Karay Awazy, Onarmach, Halic, Sahyszymyz, Luwachlar, Przyjaciel Karaima ve Mysl Karaimska published in the second quarter of the 20th century, not only kept the Karaim written language alive in that period but also present important information about the vocabulary of Karaim’s Trakai and Halic dialects.In this study, Karaim periodicals, which were created with the special efforts of pioneers such as Mardkowicz and Tınfovic in the second quarter of the 20th century, are searched and the loanwords determined from these publications is classified according to their origins and thus, it is aimed to contribute to the studies in this field., Türk dili, sistematiği içindeki kelime türetme yollarıyla tarih boyunca yüzbinlerce Türkçe kelimeyi söz varlığına kazandırmıştır. Türkçenin zengin bir söz varlığının oluşmasında Türkçe kelimelerin yanı sıra dinî, sosyo-kültürel, edebî vs. gibi çok çeşitli alanlara bağlı etkileşimlerde bulunduğu yabancı dillerden alıntılanan kelimelerin de önemli bir yer teşkil ettiği bir gerçekliktir. Türk dilinin Kuzeybatı grubu lehçeleri arasında yer alan Karayca da yine birtakım ilişkiler neticesinde söz varlığına İbranice, Slavca, Arapça, Farsça vs. gibi dillerden alıntılama yoluyla kelimeler kazandırmıştır.20. yüzyılın ikinci çeyreğinde çıkarılan Karay Awazy, Onarmach, Halic, Sahyszymyz, Luwachlar, Przyjaciel Karaima ve Mysl Karaimska gibi Karayca süreli yayınlar, hem o dönem içinde Karay yazı dilini canlı kılarken hem de Karaycanın Trakay ve Haliç ağızlarının söz varlığına dair önemli bilgiler sunmaktadır.Bu çalışmada, 20. yüzyılın ikinci çeyreğinde Mardkowicz ve Tınfoviç gibi öncülerin özel gayretleriyle meydana getirilen Karayca süreli yayınlar taranmakta ve bu yayınlardan tespit edilen alıntı kelimeler kökenlerine göre sınıflandırılarak, bu alanda hazırlanmış çalışmalara katkı sunulacaktır.

Israel’s population includes over a million Russian-speaking immigrants and more than 300,000 native English speakers. These groups differ in social integration and in the status of their heritage ...

This article explores the theme of “translating poetically organized discourse to be sung.” The 2010 English translation of the Hebrew Psalms, entitled The Revised Grail Psalms: A Liturgical Psalter (RGP), is presented as a case study. The Hebrew Psalms, for the most part, were composed to be sung, yet more often than not, they are translated to be read. Such translations are primarily characterized by the absence of poetic rhythm, despite the plain evidence and significance of poetic rhythm in the Hebrew. The RGP, on the other hand, privileges the rhythmic dimension of the Psalms. As a result, the RGP is said to be remarkably “adaptable to the exigencies of different musical settings,” and more importantly, eminently singable. Nonetheless, the challenges of translating and formalizing a text according to a given rhythmic principle are in practice formidable, for when translators set out to feature a lyric’s rhythmic dimension, its semantic, rhetorical, and syntactic art is often found lacking. This article examines some of the principal reasons the translators of the RGP chose to re-emphasize the Hebrew Psalms’ rhythmic art and, more importantly, how those translators negotiated some of the more problematic translation challenges that ensued from that choice.

This study investigates the effects of the two leading prime ministerial candidates’ personal Facebook and Twitter accounts and the effects of exposure to the general social media and web discourse in Hebrew on voters’ agendas during Israel’s April 2019 election. All the posts that appeared on the contenders’ accounts at a point in time in each of the four pre-election campaign weeks were analyzed to identify prominent issues. Social media and web content in Hebrew were also analysed over the same period. The data was compared with 2,217 responses to questionnaires completed on the four dates. The questionnaires also surveyed voters’ political orientations and the likelihood of their following the candidates’ accounts. The results revealed a significant correlation between contenders’ and voters’ agendas. However, significant differences were identified in agendas between those respondents who followed both leading candidates, those who followed a single candidate, and those who followed neither.

This article will look at the ideology of veganism in the AHIJ. Since the early 1970s their diet has been a core part of their ideology and of their message to the world. Acknowledging that a black/Jewish meat-free diet is far from the exclusive property of the group, let alone a new development on their part, I will argue that it is an expression of the syncretic “bricoleur” nature of Black Israelite thought (Dorman 2013), reflecting, drawing on, and transforming traditions existing in both African American and Jewish thought in and before the twentieth century – principally articulated as a concern for health in the former and a messianic return to the peaceful Edenic existence in the latter. However, Ben Ammi skillfully intertwines it into their theology by arguing that a return to the veganism of the Garden of Eden is part of the community’s redemption of humanity from primordial sin and ultimate overcoming of the curse of death. The article will show that Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam has been a fundamental influence on Ben Ammi's thought, as well as sharing the rabbinic interpretation of key biblical passages.