Il mio cuore e a Oriente: Studi linguistica storica, filologica e cultural ebraica dedicati a Maria Lusia Modena.

• Author: Rubin, Aaron D.
• Position: Book review

Il mio cuore e a Oriente: Studi linguistica storica. filologia e cultural ebraica dedicati a Maria Luisa Modena. Edited by FRANCESCO ASPESI, VERMONDO BRUGNATELLI, ANNA LINDA CALLOW. and CLAUDIA ROSENZAWEIG. Quaderni di Acme. vol. 101. Milan: CISALIPINO. 2008. Pp. 816, illus. (paper).

This hefty volume is a collection of forty-nine articles in honor of Maria Luisa Mayer Modena of the University of Milan. who has been publishing in the fields of Hebrew and Jewish languages for fifty years (her first article appeared in 1960). Of the forty-nine articles, forty are written in Italian. eight in English and one in French. All contributors but one are affiliated with universities in Italy or in Israel. The book is divided into three sections: Camito-semistica, indoeuropeistiea e so-strato mediterraneo (eighteen articles): Filologia ebraica. Jewish Languages (seventeen articles); and Hebraica (fourteen articles). At the end of the volume is a bibliography of Mayer Modena's publications.

The first section of articles is rather diverse in terms of subject matter, as the section title suggests. Article topics include a Phoenician inscription (Maria Giulia Amadasi Guzzo), Quranic manuscripts (Alba Fedeli), a Samaritan-Arabic manuscript (Sergio Noda Noseda), Hebraisms in the Vulgate (Guido Cifoletti). Latinisms in Swiss Italian (Giovanni Bonfadini), Armenian infinitives (Andrea Scala), Vedic verbs (Massimo Vai), and other articles on Syriac, Egyptian. Greek. and comparative linguistics. There is very little to de the articles in this section together, though it is noteworthy that Mayer Modena has published something in connection with several of these seemingly disparate topics. For example, the article on Vedic verbs is quite far afield from biblical or Jewish studies. but Modena published an article on the Sanskrit word mirmirah in 1997.

The honoree is probably best known for her work on Jewish languages, in particular on Judeo-Italian, on which she has published many important articles. Therefore, the second section of articles, on Hebrew philology and Jewish languages, is what we would expect...