253 NOTES ET MATÉRIAUX
GLOSSES IN GREEK SCRIPT AND LANGUAGE IN MEDIEVAL HEBREW MANUSCRIPTS
Nicholas de Lange – Natalie Tchernetska
The Cairo Genizah has shed new light on many aspects of Byzantine Jewish life (1 ). One detail which has so far not been studied is the practice of writing Greek in Greek script by Jews. This practice, which was previously undocumented and indeed unsuspected, can now be established beyond dispute thanks to the Genizah discoveries. The practice raises interesting questions about Greek-speaking Jewish culture in the Middle Ages, and about relations between the Jewish minority and the Christian environment. The use of Greek scripts by Jews is attested by inscriptions and manuscripts from the 3rd century BCE until the 6th century CE. The evidence makes it plain that Jews shared in the dominant Hellenic culture, and this is borne out by surviving works written by Jews, such as the philosopher Philo and the historian Flavius Josephus, which display a full engagement with Greek rhetoric and thought. In papyri and inscriptions we catch glimpses of the vernacular language. During this period it seems likely that for most Jews within the Greco-Roman world Greek was the only language they could speak and read, and Greek script was the only
form of writing they practised. In the West it was very gradually replaced by Latin script.
In Palestine Greek had a rival in the form of Aramaic. Hebrew language and script, rarely attested in the 2nd century CE (2 ), become commoner in Palestine from the 3rd century (3 ),
and in Egypt from the 5th (4 ). In Europe, apart from odd words and phrases on inscriptions,
which may have been copied from pattern-books or added later, it is not clearly attested before the 9th century, although it may have been introduced earlier (5 ).
(1) D. Jacoby, «What do we learn about Byzantine Asia Minor from the documents of the Cairo Genizah ? » , in Byzantine Asia Minor, ed. S. Vryonis, Jr, & N. Oikonomides, Athens, 1998,
pp. 83– 95. For a catalogue of relevant fragments see N. de Lange, «Byzantium in the Cairo Genizah » , Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 16, 1992, pp. 34– 47. (2) The only evidence comes from the Bar Kokhba letters found in Wadi Murabba‘ at and Nahal
Hever, some of which are in Hebrew. See N. de Lange, «The Revival of the Hebrew Language
in the Third Century » , Jewish Studies Quarterly, 3, 1996, pp. 342– 358, here p. 344. (3) N. de Lange, «The Revival » (supra n. 2). (4) V. Tcherikover, Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum, 3 vols, Cambridge MA, 1957– 63, vol. 1,
p. 101.
(5) N. de Lange, «The Hebrew Language in the European Diaspora » , in Studies on the Jewish Diaspora in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods, ed. B. Isaac & A. Oppenheimer (Te‘ uda, 12), Tel Aviv University, 1996, pp. 111– 37.
Scriptorium, 68, 2014, p. 253-264, Pl. 16.
