The article examines the evolution of Judaeo-Arabic translations, ranging from early biblical renditions to modern adaptations of European literature. Early pre-Saadian translations, written in a phonetic transcription, preceded Saʿadya Gaon’s Tafsīr (Bible translation), which adhered to ‘classical’ linguistic norms and became the authoritative translation for centuries. However, later translations introduced local dialectal features to meet the needs of diverse Jewish communities. The theoretical framework of ‘centre versus periphery’ is employed to analyse the dynamics of translation traditions, highlighting the interaction between cultural centres like Meknes, Morocco, and Constantine, Algeria, and their peripheries. By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Judaeo-Arabic translations extended to Haskala novels and French and English classics such as Robinson Crusoe, demonstrating the influence of global cultural trends. The study emphasises the dual role of these translations in preserving Jewish identity and adapting to contemporary linguistic and cultural shifts.

The article explores the various uses of the Hebrew determiner kol in Biblical Hebrew, which occurs approximately 5,400 times in the Hebrew Bible. It analyses the distinctions between distributive and collective quantification, focusing on how kol interacts with different noun types and syntactic environments. While kol with indefinite singular nouns is universally distributive, its use with definite plural nouns can be either distributive or collective. The study also addresses contexts where kol interacts with definite singular nouns, indefinite plurals, and non-count nouns, comparing these uses with its descendant in Modern Hebrew. Using corpus-based examples, the analysis highlights semantic nuances, syntactic constraints, and the development of kol as a universal quantifier in Classical Biblical Hebrew prose.

The article investigates orthographic practices in the Dead Sea Scroll fragment 4QIsam (4Q66), dated to the first century bce, with a focus on variants in Isaiah 61.3. The study highlights a scribal correction involving the addition of a yod to differentiate between meanings such as ‘oaks of righteousness’, ‘gods of righteousness’, and ‘chiefs of righteousness’. This orthographic adjustment reflects broader Second Temple exegetical concerns, aiming to clarify ambiguous terms with significant theological implications. The analysis situates the scribal practices of 4QIsam within the linguistic variability of ancient Hebrew and its interaction with other traditions, such as those behind the Greek, Syriac, and Targumic translations, which often diverge in their understanding of these texts. This study demonstrates how even small orthographic details can reveal profound interpretive strategies in ancient scriptural transmission.

This article delves into the reception of Haim Naḥman Bialik and his work across Jewish communities in North Africa during the first half of the twentieth century. Unlike studies to date, I do not dwell on any single author or piece; rather, I offer a panoramic perspective, with figures, texts and events. I suggest that the volume of dialogues and historic events revealed in the article, as well as their multiple aspects, speak to North African Jewry’s deep familiarity with Bialik and his work, shedding light on his status as a national bard in the region. Highlighting his status as a cultural icon, the article explores four key aspects: Bialik references in the Jewish North African press during his lifetime and after his death; Bialik’s impact on North African Zionist activists; studies and translations of Bialik’s poetry, as well as North African poetry inspired by his works; familiarity with, and demand for, Bialik’s books.

Aramaic incantation bowls dated to the fifth to seventh centuries C.E. contain valuable details about the daily lives, hardships, and fears of named individuals. Despite the bowls’ potential to provide novel insights, previous studies on the women of the bowls have primarily focused on the possibility of female authorship. These studies often disregarded the poetic structure of the incantation bowls, which consist of fixed textual units that recur repeatedly throughout the corpus. This essay argues that the formulaic nature of the bowls challenges the argument of female authorship. Additionally, it suggests that this same formulaic nature can be used to explore new avenues of research on women and gender in Late Antiquity. This involves focusing on common ailments and mishaps related to women, frequent accusations against female adversaries, and aspects of demonology that reflect male and female perspectives alongside gendered social values. The results of this study may be useful for further research on women’s lives and social values in Late Antiquity, as well as for reframing the search for women’s voices and agency in this period.

In this article, we introduce an innovative methodology that applies concepts of geographic dialectology to the realm of corpus texts. As a case study, this methodology is applied to the diverse array of presentative particles found in Algerian Judaeo-Arabic, based on a substantial textual corpus from 19th and 20th century Constantine, Algeria. This corpus encompasses texts categorized into four distinct groups: Judaeo-Arabic translations of the Bible, post-biblical texts, non-canonical Hebrew texts, and original writings. We identify six primary presentative forms, each with distinct usage patterns across text groups. Analyzing these patterns, we calculate text similarity and construct a ‘geographical-like’ map of the corpus. This map serves as a visual representation upon which we delineate lexical isoglosses corresponding to specific presentative particles. This analytical approach illuminates the utilization of presentative particles throughout the textual corpus, revealing underlying relationships and idiosyncrasies that might otherwise evade detection.

The traditional Sovietological paradigm of Stalin’s nationalities policy—presented as an anti-national policy geared toward the assimilation of non-Russian ethnic groups in the supernational entity of the “Soviet people” and its Russian culture—has, in recent decades, given way to a more complex approach that has identified strong tendencies in the ideology and practice of Stalinist Bolshevism to foster “primordial” ethnic identities. Most of the historiography on Soviet Jews, however, has found it hard to break free of Cold-War Sovietological assumptions and continues to view the policies of the Stalinist regime toward the Jews as seeking their assimilation and eventual disappearance. The present article attempts to re-examine this view and point to the ambivalent and even negative attitude of Stalin and his acolytes to the issue of Jewish assimilation—this based on a closer reading of Stalin’s relevant writings and archival sources pertaining to the Birobidzhan project and the period of anti-Jewish persecution, some of which have never been studied before, and on the critical insights of recent studies on the subject of Stalin’s nationalities policy.

These last three books of Josephus’s Antiquities detail Jewish history between the establishment of direct Roman rule in Judea in 6 CE and the outbreak of the Judean rebellion against Rome in 66 – a rebellion that culminated in 70 with the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple. Along the way, these books also constitute the main source for the context in which Christianity was born. This volume offers a translation of Josephus’s Greek text, along with a commentary that aims to clarify the history to which Josephus testifies and also its meaning for him as an exiled Jerusalemite and rebel-turned-historian.

Migration is a salient characteristic of Jews.1 From the end of World War II through today, some 5 million Jews moved between major continents and countries. Of the Jewish population, which ranged from a minimum of 11 million to a maximum of 15.7 million during this period, this was an unprecedented number. The direction of Jewish migration attests to Jews’ desire to leave undemocratic regimes where they often suffered discrimination and persecution, especially in Eastern Europe and Muslim countries, for Western societies that granted them freedom and equal rights. The main destination of Jewish migration was Israel, which became a home for approximately two-thirds of all Jewish migrants; another one-fifth moved from countries in distress to North America, Western Europe, and Oceania; and the remaining 15 percent were Israelis who favored another country (DellaPergola 2009, 2011a, 2019, 2023).

Studies of slavery in the Sasanian Empire have focused mainly on the legal status of slaves, based primarily on Middle Persian legal compilations. While these studies have advanced our understanding of Sasanian institutions of slavery, the social history and daily experiences of enslaved individuals remain largely unknown. An overlooked source for reconstructing the social history of enslaved individuals is magical texts and artifacts, in particular the Aramaic incantation bowls. This article therefore focuses on three analyses of the Aramaic bowl texts: occurrences of slaves in lists, magic spells to retrieve runaway slaves, and persistent textual and pictorial connections between slaves and demons. These analyses not only enrich our picture of slavery in the Sasanian Empire but also demonstrate the usefulness of studying magical artifacts for reconstructing the social and cultural history of societies in Late Antiquity.