Translating Religion: Linguistic Analysis of Judeo-Arabic Sacred Texts from Egypt.

• Author: Vollandt, Ronny
• Position: Book review

Translating Religion: Linguistic Analysis of Jutdeo-Arabic Sacred Texts from Egypt. By BENJAMIN H. NARY. Etudes sur le Judaisme medieval. vol. 38. Leiden: BRII. L. 2009. Pp. xxix + 360. $205.

The book under review deals with late Judco-Arabic translations of liturgical texts, known as sur[u.bar]h. Benjamin Hary's exemplary research is based on a corpus of translations of the Bible and the Passover Haggadah, stemming from eighteenth-to twentieth-century Egypt and referred to as "The Cairo Collection" in the study. In contrast to the translation of their Christian neighbors, which are largely neglected in scholarship, the study of Judeo-Arabic versions of the Bible has witnessed an increasing academic interest over the last few decades. This advance has been significantly fostered by the discovery of new manuscript material; including the Cairo Genizah and the St. Petersburg Firkovitch collections. It is now commonly accepted to divide Judeo-Arabic translations of the Bible into early (ninth-tenth centuries), classical (tenth-fourteenth centuries), and late periods (fifteenth century onwards). Our knowledge of early traditions emerges exclusively from manuscripts of the aforementioned collections, which were discovered and studied over the last decades. These traditions may be referred to as early non-Saadianic translations. The classical period is epitomized by the monumental translation enterprises of Saadiah Gaon (882-942), known as the Tafs[I.bar]r, for Rabbanite Jewry, and of Yefet hen 'Eli (tenth century) and Yeshu'ah ben Yehudah (middle of the eleventh century) for the Karaites. In regard to later translations, which are habitually referred to by the term sur[u.bar]h (sg. sarh 'translation', lit, interpretation), it is most useful to classify them according to their geographical provenance, namely, North-African, Egyptian. and Eastern (Iraqi and Syrian) traditions.

Translating Religion focuses on this later period of Judeo-Arabic translations and is geographically bound to texts of Egyptian provenance. The book should be particularly welcomed, since it constitutes the first monograph on the sur[u.bar]h readily accessible in the English language and therefore has the potential to attract the interest of a broader, non-specialist readership. Its author, Benjamin H. Hary, is associate professor of Hebrew, Arabic, and Linguistics at Emory University, Atlanta. He has published widely on Judeo-Arabic literature (including Multiglossia in...