Studies in Rabbinic Hebrew

Shai Heijmans

May 2020 · Open Book Publishers

About this ebook

This volume presents a collection of articles centring on the language of the Mishnah and the Talmud – the most important Jewish texts (after the Bible), which were compiled in Palestine and Babylonia in the latter centuries of Late Antiquity. Despite the fact that Rabbinic Hebrew has been the subject of growing academic interest across the past century, very little scholarship has been written on it in English. 

Studies in Rabbinic Hebrew addresses this lacuna, with eight lucid but technically rigorous articles written in English by a range of experienced scholars, focusing on various aspects of Rabbinic Hebrew: its phonology, morphology, syntax, pragmatics and lexicon. This volume is essential reading for students and scholars of Rabbinic studies alike, and constitutes the second in a new series, Studies in Semitic Languages and Cultures, in collaboration with the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge.

About the author

Shai Heijmans is a post-doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies in the University of Cambridge. He has completed his MA thesis on the morphology of Palestinian Aramaic, and his PhD on Greek and Latin loanwords in Rabbinic Hebrew, both at Tel Aviv University. His research interests are Rabbinic Hebrew, Palestinian Aramaic, and pronunciation traditions of Biblical Hebrew. He is now working on a new edition of the Mishnah according to Codex Kaufmann.