CML Videoseminar. Giacomo Corazzol, "A Judeo-Greek translation of the Book of Jonah from Medieval Crete"

Giacomo Corazzol (Institut de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes, CNRS, Paris) will be speaking at SDU (and at York via videolink) on "A Judeo-Greek translation of the Book of Jonah from Medieval Crete."

Abstract

Judeo-Greek is the language used by Romaniote Jews (Greek-speaking Jews living in the Byzantine empire and, after 1453, in the areas formerly subject to the Byzantines) throughout the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century in order to write down biblical glosses, liturgical texts and biblical translations. Among the extant testimonies in Judeo-Greek, some can be localised in Joannina, Corfu, Crete and Constantinople. Others have been found in the Cairo Genizah. The Judeo-Greek translations of the Book of Jonah contained in ms. 3571A of the Bologna University Library and in ms. Opp. Add. Oct. 19 of the Bodleian Library represent the earliest Judeo-Greek translation of a whole biblical book. At the end of the nineteenth century Adolf Neubauer, the curator of the Hebrew manuscripts collection at the Bodleian Library, described it as “the earliest example of modern Greek prose” and claimed that this translation was made in Corfu. In this presentation I shall argue that both the Bologna and the Bodleian manuscript were copied in Crete around 1400 and I shall discuss the text within the context of late medieval Jewish Crete.