Discover how Jewish languages have evolved over the centuries, offering us an extraordinary insight into the linguistic richness of Jewish life.
The spread of books in Jewish vernacular languages and Hebrew characters offers us an extraordinary insight into the linguistic richness of Jewish life.
For over two millennia, Jewish communities have used languages other than Hebrew for daily oral communication, including Aramaic, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-French, Judeo-Italian, Yiddish and Ladino. They used the Hebrew alphabet to write these languages down and developed sophisticated systems to transmit texts in them. Many of these vernacular languages became also languages of book culture. Produced and sold cheaply, using the tools of the book cultures of the host societies, these publications reached a wide audience.
Judith Schlanger, FBA, is President of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Oxford University and Fellow of Corpus Christi College. She researches medieval Hebrew palaeography and book history.
César Merchán-Hamann is Hebrew and Judaica Curator at the Bodleian Library and Director of the Leopold Muller Memorial Library, Oxford. He he holds a BSc in Mathematics, and took an MA and PhD in Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London. He was Librarian at Leo Baeck College in London, where he taught Jewish History, before becoming Deputy Librarian at the Leopold Muller Memorial Library at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. He has published articles on German-Jewish history, Yiddish, medieval translations from the Arabic into Hebrew, and Hebrew book and manuscript collections.
