Jewish Palestinian Aramaic Poetry from Late Antiquity.

• Author: Joosten, Jan
• Position: Reviews of Books

Jewish Palestinian Aramaic Poetry from Late Antiquity. Edited by MICHAEL SOKOLOFF and JOSEPH YAHALOM. Publications of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Jerusalem: ISRAEL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES, 1999. Pp. vi + 384, plates (Hebrew).

The main extant sources of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic--also known as Galilean Aramaic--are the Palestinian Targums, a number of Western Midrashim, and the Palestinian Talmud. Subsidiary sources are some scanty epigraphic remains (inscriptions, amulets) and miscellaneous rabbinic fragments. Among the latter, a number of religious poems stand out as an especially interesting corpus. Having been collected and analyzed in the preparation of Michael Sokoloff's Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic (Ramat Can, 1990), these poems, including a few items discovered after 1990, are given a scholarly edition, with introduction, Hebrew translation, notes, and indexes in this impressive volume.

The provenance of the texts included is varied. Two of them are attested in old papyri discovered in Egypt. The largest group is made up of texts from the Cairo Geniza, some of them known from more than one manuscript. Nine texts are found in old prayer books (the Roman mahzor known from a manuscript dating to the fourteenth-fifteenth centuries and the Romanian mahzor attested in a manuscript of the same age). And four poems are contained in the Second Targum of the Book of Esther (for which a manuscript dating from the year 1189 was used). Although all these texts are poetic, they belong to different literary genres (liturgical, magical, didactic, etc.), and their subject matter is diverse. Nothing indicates that they date from the same period or background, nor that they were ever viewed as a group before their present publication in one volume. The one unifying factor is that they are written in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, thus attesting to the use of this dialect in late antiquity, roughly between the fou rth and seventh centuries.

Although these texts do not appear to have played a part in the liturgy of the synagogue, many of them are related to the great feasts: Passover, Shavuot, Tish'a beAv, Purim, and the new moon of Nisan. Another large group is wedding and funerary songs. There are also a number of didactic poems. No clearly defined Sitz im Leben can be determined, but taken as a group it appears that these texts give expression to a popular piety that was fairly distinct from the more "official"...