Browsing by Author "Wagner, Esther-Miriam"

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Open Access
A Handbook and Reader of Ottoman Arabic
(Open Book Publishers, 2021-09-10) Wagner, Esther-Miriam
Written forms of Arabic composed during the era of the Ottoman Empire present an immensely fruitful linguistic topic. Extant texts display a proximity to the vernacular that cannot be encountered in any other surviving historical Arabic material, and thus provide unprecedented access to Arabic language history. This rich material remains very little explored. Traditionally, scholarship on Arabic has focussed overwhelmingly on the literature of the various Golden Ages between the 8th and 13th centuries, whereas texts from the 15th century onwards have often been viewed as corrupted and not worthy of study. The lack of interest in Ottoman Arabic culture and literacy left these sources almost completely neglected in university courses. This volume is the first linguistic work to focus exclusively on varieties of Christian, Jewish and Muslim Arabic in the Ottoman Empire of the 15th to the 20th centuries, and present Ottoman Arabic material in a didactic and easily accessible way. Split into a Handbook and a Reader section, the book provides a historical introduction to Ottoman literacy, translation studies, vernacularisation processes, language policy and linguistic pluralism. The second part contains excerpts from more than forty sources, edited and translated by a diverse network of scholars. The material presented includes a large number of yet unedited texts, such as Christian Arabic letters from the Prize Paper collections, mercantile correspondence and notebooks found in the Library of Gotha, and Garshuni texts from archives of Syriac patriarchs.
Open Access
'Wisdom and Greatness in one Place': The Alexandrian Trader Moses ben Judah and his Circle
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-07-22) Wagner, Esther-Miriam; Arad, Dotan
The manuscript collections of the Bodleian Library contain a corpus of dozens of documents from the archive of Moses ben Judah. A leader of the Jewish community in Alexandria, he was also a prominent businessman and in contact with individuals from Cairo to Sicily. This collection of documents at the Bodleian likely did not emerge from the Cairo Genizah, but from another depository, and appears to have been buried at some point. The documents, which include letters and deeds, shed light on the world of the Jewish elite of a Mediterranean city at the end of the Middle Ages, their communal and business life, connections between Jewish communities, and intellectual trends and tastes among educated Jews. They improve our understanding of the lives of Alexandrian Jews in the late Middle Ages and provide new data about the local leadership and its relations with the Nagidate (the central Jewish leadership) in Cairo, the cantors, the poll tax and its effects, and more. We hear about tensions within this society and the growing presence of European (Italian, Greek, Iberian, and conversos) Jews within the complex social mosaic of Egyptian Jewry in the late Mamluk period. The documents inform us about Alexandria’s Jewish community and the commercial networks of the Mediterranean world, in which Jews traded alongside Christians and Muslims. This volume makes an important contribution to the study of Judaeo-Arabic at a watershed moment. Sources from the late Mamluk period show Judaeo-Arabic at a linguistic border between Classical and Late Judaeo-Arabic. The volume will therefore further readers’ knowledge of historical linguistics of Arabic in general, and Judaeo-Arabic in particular. The phrase ‘Wisdom and Greatness in One Place’ in the title of the book is a quotation from the Babylonian Talmud (Giṭṭin 59a), the meaning of which is that it is rare to find combined in one man political leadership and intellectual pre-eminence.