Categories
Books

Pahlavi and Judeo-Persian Bible Manuscripts

The Pahlavi Psalter. Ps 5 recto: Psalms 121 (opening is missing) and 122; discovered at Bulayïq/ Turfan oasis. © Turfanforschung (BBAW), Digitales Turfan-Archiv
The Pahlavi Psalter. Ps 5 recto: Psalms 121 (opening is missing) and 122; discovered at Bulayïq/ Turfan oasis.
© Turfanforschung (BBAW), Digitales Turfan-Archiv

Pehlivanian, Meliné, Christoph Rauch & Ronny Vollandt (eds.). 2016. Orientalische Bibelhandschriften aus der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – PK. Eine illustrierte Geschichte. Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag.

The volume presents an illustrated history of the Oriental Bible Manuscripts from the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. It includes discriptions of the manuscripts which are among the oldest and most fascinating items in the Oriental Collection of the State Library of Berlin. The overwhelming majority of the manuscripts presented here come from the very cradle of the Abrahamic religions. The texts range across more than 1,500 years of Christian and Jewish history in the Near and Middle East and Africa, from Late Antiquity to the 19th century.
They are written documents which have, not least, also left
traces in the Islamic tradition. Another concern of the volume is to allow readers insights into the extremely extensive and varied collection of Oriental manuscripts in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, whose outstanding treasures are in many cases only known to specialists in the field. The biblical texts, written on leather, parchment, papyrus, and paper bear witness not only to the complexity of the religious and theological traditions, but also impressively document the diversity of materials to be found in the Oriental manuscript culture, and not least the artistic achievements of the “Peoples of the Book”.

Some most related chapters of this book regarding the Iranian Studies are:

  • Dennis Halft OP: “The ‘Book of Books’ in Persian” (pp. 150-154)
  • Dennis Halft OP: “A Persian Gospel Manuscript and the London Polyglot” (pp. 155-157.)
  • Desmond Durkin-Meisterernst: “A Middle Persian Pahlavi Psalter-Fragment in the Berlin Turfan Collection” (pp. 114-116).
  • Simone-Christiane Raschmann: “Christian Texts from Central Asia in the Berlin Turfan Collection” (pp. 105-113).
  • Friederike Weis: “Illustrated Persian Tales of the Prophets (Qis.as. al-anbiyāʾ) (pp. 163-172).
Categories
Books

The Bible as a Judeo-Persian Epic

Moreen 2016Moreen, Vera Basch. 2016. The Bible as a Judeo-Persian epic: An illustrated manuscript of ʿImrānī’s Fatḥ-Nāma. Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute for the Study of Jewish Communities in the East.
Shervin Farridnejad writes:
ʿImrānī, one of the great Judeo-Persian poets, was probably born in Isfahan in 1454 and died in Kashan after 1536. Inspired by Shāhīn, the other great JP poet, ʿImrānī’s works concentrate on the post-Mosaic era from Joshua to the period of David and Solomon. Among his 12 poetic works, Fatḥ-Nāma “The Book of the Conquest” is his first and remains one of his important works.  He began the composition that comprises approximately ten thousand couplets in 1474. The content of this masnavī (narrative poem in rhyming couplets) deals with the legend of the conquest of the Holy Land by Joshua as well as events from  Joshua to the reign of Solomon.
Categories
Journal

Judeo-Persian Literature

Iran Name 1,2Iran Nameh, New Series, Volume 1, Number 2 (Summer 2016)

The second issue of Iran Nameh, New Series, Volume 1, Number 2 (Summer 2016), a memorial volume in honour of Professor Amnon Netzer (1934-2008), the Iranian-Jewish historian and researcher of Iranian Jewry and Judeo-Persian Literature is published. The volume comprises bilingual Persian and English contributions on different aspects of Judeo-Persian Literature and Iranian Jewry.

Table of Contents

Categories
Articles

Judæo-Iranian Languages

Torat Adonai, Constantinople: Eliezer ben Gershom Soncino, 1546 Detail. The right column contains Jacob Tavusi’s Judeo-Persian translation (BL Or. 70.c.10) © The British Library

Borjian, Habib. 2015. Judeo-Iranian Languages. In Lily Kahn & Aaron D. Rubin (eds.), Handbook of Jewish Languages, 234–296. (Brill’s Handbooks in Linguistics). Leiden: Brill.

Judeo-Iranian languages referring mostly to a group of Jewish variants of Iranian languages, many of them dialects of Persian, spoken or written with the Hebrew script by Jews in greater Iran over a period of more than a millennium. The corpus of Judeo-Iranian literature is very important for both linguistic and literary reasons, as it includes some of the earliest documents of New Persian, and because it constitutes a sizable literature written by Persian Jews.

 

About the Handbook of Jewish Languages

This Handbook of Jewish Languages is an introduction to the many languages used by Jews throughout history, including Yiddish, Judezmo (Ladino) , and Jewish varieties of Amharic, Arabic, Aramaic, Berber, English, French, Georgian, Greek, Hungarian, Iranian, Italian, Latin American Spanish, Malayalam, Occitan (Provençal), Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Syriac, Turkic (Karaim and Krymchak), Turkish, and more. Chapters include historical and linguistic descriptions of each language, an overview of primary and secondary literature, and comprehensive bibliographies to aid further research. Many chapters also contain sample texts and images. This book is an unparalleled resource for anyone interested in Jewish languages, and will also be very useful for historical linguists, dialectologists, and scholars and students of minority or endangered languages.

Habib Borjian is a scholar of Iranian lingustic, comparative historical philology and typology in Center for Iranian Studies at the  Columbia University as well as the senior assistant editor of Encyclopaedia Iranica.

Categories
Online resources

On Judeo-Persian 2

McCollum, Adam. 2015. On Judeo-Persian language and literature. Part Two: Texts and Bibliography. Ancient Jew Review.

In a two-part series, Dr. Adam McCollum addresses the possibilities for the field of Judeo-Persian language and literature. Part One addresses the state of the field and Part Two includes a helpful bibliography and four text samples.

You can find out more about Adam McCollum and his work over at his blog, hmmlorientalia, or at his highly recommended Twitter account: @adamcmccollum.

Categories
Online resources

On Judeo-Persian 1

McCollum, Adam. 2015. On Judeo-Persian language and literature. Part One: State of the field. Ancient Jew Review.

In a two-part series, Dr. Adam McCollum addresses the possibilities for the field of Judeo-Persian language and literature. Part One addresses the state of the field and Part Two includes a helpful bibliography and four text samples.

You can find out more about Adam McCollum and his work over at his blog, hmmlorientalia, or at his highly recommended Twitter account: @adamcmccollum.

Categories
Books

From Old to New Persian

Utas, Bo. 2013. From Old to New Persian: Collected essays (Beiträge Zur Iranistik 38). Edited by Carina Jahani & Mehrdad Fallahzadeh. Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag.

In a long series of essays, written during almost half a century, Bo Utas analyses the development of West Iranian languages, particularly Old, Middle, and New Persian, from various perspectives. The focus is placed on the transition from Middle to New Persian and the final essays (hitherto partly unpublished) especially elucidate this process in the light of an interaction between oral and written language.
This book is the second volume of collected articles by Bo Utas. The first volume, Manuscript, Text and Literature. Collected Essays on Middle and New Persian Texts, was published on the occasion of his 70th birthday as no. 29 in the series Beiträge zur Iranistik in 2008.
The seventeen articles in the present volume cover a time span of about 2,500 years and encompass all the stages of Persian. It also contains two entirely new articles, “The Grammatical Transition from Middle to New Persian” and “Between Spoken and Written: The Formation of New Persian”, which sum up much of Bo Utas’ philological research.

For more information, see the preface to this volume and the ToC.

Categories
Books

Judeo-Persian manuscripts in the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America

Moreen, Vera Basch (ed.). 2015. Catalogue of Judeo-Persian manuscripts in the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (Études Sur Le Judaïsme Médiéval 63). Leiden/Boston: Brill.
The intellectual legacy of the ancient community of Iranian Jews rests in several large but neglected Judeo-Persian manuscript collections. The largest in the West, and the third largest collection in the world (198 manuscripts), belongs to the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York. Primarily a work of reference, this Catalog informs scholars in the fields of Judaica and Iranica about the range of subjects (history, poetry, medicine, philology, etc.) that engaged Iranian Jews between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. It reflects the intellectual parameters of Iranian Jewry by describing the extent to which they were acquainted with classical Jewish texts while they were deeply enmeshed in the literary and artistic sensibilities of their Iranian environment.

About the Author:

Vera Basch Moreen, Ph.D. (1978), Harvard University, is an Independent Scholars who has taught Islam and Judaism Islam at several colleges. She specializes in the history and culture of Jews in the Muslim world, primarily Iran. In Queen Esther’s Garden: An Anthology of Judeo-Persian Literature (New Haven, 2000) is among her many publications.
Categories
Books

A grammar of early Judaeo-Persian

Paul, Ludwig. 2013. A grammar of early Judaeo-Persian. Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag.
Early Judaeo-Persian (EJP) is the form of Persian that was spoken by Jews, and written in Hebrew script, in ca. the 8th-12th centuries C.E. Most EJP manuscripts have been found in the Cairo Geniza from the late 19th century onwards. Since the dialectal basis of EJP is different from the Early New Persian (written in Arabic script) that was spoken in north-east Iran at the same time, the study of EJP is essential for an understanding of the development of New Persian. So far, only isolated grammatical features of EJP have been studied. The present work is the first attempt at a comprehensive description of EJP grammar in its own right, based on the study of the most important EJP texts, published and unpublished.
For more information, see the ToC and the preface to this vollume. You can also download and read a sample chapter of this book.
 About the Editor:
Ludwig Paul is professor of Iranian Studies at the Asien-Afrika-Institut, Universität Hamburg. He is a scholar of Iranian Linguistic, dialektology as well as Iranian modern history.