Jewish Studies

INTRODUCTION THE following work on the old Spanish Haftara for the Ninth of Ab seeks to serve two purposes. The first is to add a text typical of the older Judaeo-Spanish to the scanty repertoire available to the scholarly world. The researches and texts published by Subak,' Wagner,2 and Crews3 are chiefly the results of field labors which throw light on the dialect as it is spoken in modern times. Grinbaum's Judaeo-Spanish Chrestomathy4 contains some specimens of the older literary language, but they are often based on texts in Roman script which had already been accommodated to the dialect of Spanish prevailing at the time of their Romanization, with a loss of many characteristic features. The four verses which he quotes from our text are an example of this. The version published below is a transliteration of the text in the rabbinic Hebrew script published in Amsterdam 1643,5 which retains the characteristic J. Subak: "Zum Jiidenspanischen" in Zeitschrift fur Romanische Philologie, vol. 30 pp. 129-185; and other works. 2 M. L. Wagner: Beitrdge zur Kenntnis des Jiidenspanischen von Konstantinopel, Vienna 1914; Caracteres Generales del Judeo-Espanol de Oriente, Madrid 1930. 3 C. M. Crews: Recherches sur le judeo-espagnol dans les pays balkaniques, Paris 1935. 4 M. Grinbaum: Jiidisch-Spanische Chrestomathie, Frankfort-on-Main 1896. s5 In23r31 rnw1 ilny nyoPn ryrn? O-a Do 0TB'D~wD ... . nln py-io -yI-D. I have used the copy in the library of Dropsie College which formerly belonged to Haym M. Salomon, son of the "Financier of the Revolution." 13 14 THE JEWISH QUARTERLY REVIEW archaisms and Hebraisms of old Judaeo-Spanish. An English translation is appended.6 The second purpose is to investigate the sources of this Spanish version, thereby adding to an interesting chapter in the study of Jewish liturgy. The Background of the Spanish Haftara. In the Portuguese Synagogues of Amsterdam and London the custom persists to read the Haftara, or Portion of the Prophets (Jer. 8.13-9.23) prescribed for the fast-day of the Ninth of Ab which commemorates the destruction of the Temple, in a Spanish paraphrase as well as in the original Hebrew. This is the text found below. The custom exists in most other Sephardic communities too, although it has fallen into desuetude in the United States. Arabic speaking Jews have a similar Arabic paraphrase of which at least two different versions exist.

One of the most im p ortant contributions of modem linguistics to the scientific study of language has been the concept of the phoneme. Attempts at definition have been many and varied: thus Leonard Bloomfield speaks of the phoneme as a 'minimum unit of distinctive sound feature'. 1 Daniel Jones refers to a 'family of sounds in a given language which are related in character and are such that no one of them ever occurs in the same surroundin g s as an y other in words'; 2 while Bernard Bloch speaks of' a class of non-contrastive and phoneti cally similar phones'.' In spite of differences,. often considerable ones, in the details of definition, the concept has been tremendously useful in simplifying the description of!anguages, and, for historical linguists, stating linguistic change.• When we consider so complex a system of vowel representation as that of the Tiberian Masoretes, it is natural to ask what were the phonemes that they were attempting to re p resent. Various attempts have been made to clarify the question of the p ronunciation of Hebrew on the basis of living traditions and ancient transcriptions, especially from the Greek. s