Études Sur Le Judaïsme Médiéval Translating Religion: Linguistic Analysis of Judeo-Arabic Sacred Texts from Egypt, Book 38, (Paperback)

Translations of Hebrew and Aramaic sacred texts into Jewish languages, religiolects, and varieties have been widespread throughout the Jewish world. This volume is a study of the genre of these translations, known as the sarḥ, into Judeo-Arabic in Egypt in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The study places Judeo-Arabic along the Jewish linguistic spectrum, traces its history and offers insights to the spoken variety of Egyptian Judeo-Arabic, which set it apart from other Arabic dialects. The book also provides a linguistic model of the translation of the sacred texts. Rather than viewing the translation as only verbatim, the study traces in great detail the literal/interpretive linguistic tension with which the translators struggled in their work.