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Judeo-Latin (also spelled Judaeo-Latin) is the use by Jews of the Hebrew alphabet to write Latin.Ivan G. Marcus, "Judeo-Latin", in
Joseph R. Strayer Joseph Reese Strayer (1904–1987) was an American medievalist historian. He was a student of and mentored by Charles Homer Haskins, America's first prominent medievalist historian. Life Strayer taught at Princeton University for many decades, s ...
(ed.), ''
Dictionary of the Middle Ages The ''Dictionary of the Middle Ages'' is a 13-volume encyclopedia of the Middle Ages published by the American Council of Learned Societies between 1982 and 1989. It was first conceived and started in 1975 with American medieval historian Jos ...
'', Vol. 7 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1986), pp. 176–177.
The term was coined by
Cecil Roth Cecil Roth (5 March 1899 – 21 June 1970) was a British Jewish historian. He was editor in chief of ''Encyclopaedia Judaica''. Life Roth was born in Dalston, London, on 5 March 1899. His parents were Etty and Joseph Roth, and Cecil was the youn ...
to describe a small corpus of texts from the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages, there was no Judeo-Latin in the sense of "an ethnodialect used by Jews on a regular basis to communicate among themselves", and the existence of such a
Jewish language Jewish languages are the various languages and dialects that developed in Jewish communities in the diaspora. The original Jewish language is Hebrew, supplanted as the primary vernacular by Aramaic following the Babylonian exile. Jewish languages ...
under the
Roman Empire The Roman Empire ( la, Imperium Romanum ; grc-gre, Βασιλεία τῶν Ῥωμαίων, Basileía tôn Rhōmaíōn) was the post-Roman Republic, Republican period of ancient Rome. As a polity, it included large territorial holdings aro ...
is pure conjecture. The Judeo-Latin corpus consists of an
Anglo-Jewish British Jews (often referred to collectively as British Jewry or Anglo-Jewry) are British citizens who identify as Jewish. The number of people who identified as Jews in the United Kingdom rose by just under 4% between 2001 and 2021. History ...
charter and Latin quotations in otherwise Hebrew works (such as anti-Christian polemics, incantations and prayers). Christian converts to Judaism sometimes brought with them an extensive knowledge of the
Vulgate The Vulgate (; also called (Bible in common tongue), ) is a late-4th-century Latin translation of the Bible. The Vulgate is largely the work of Jerome who, in 382, had been commissioned by Pope Damasus I to revise the Gospels us ...
translation of the Bible. The '' Sefer Nizzahon Yashan'' and Joseph ben Nathan Official's ''Sefer Yosef ha-Mekanne'' contain extensive quotations from the Vulgate in Hebrew letters. Latin technical terms sometimes appear in Hebrew texts. There is evidence of the oral use of Latin formulas in
dowsing Dowsing is a type of divination employed in attempts to locate ground water, buried metals or ores, gemstones, oil, claimed radiations (radiesthesia),As translated from one preface of the Kassel experiments, "roughly 10,000 active dowsers in G ...
,
ordeals Trial by ordeal was an ancient judicial practice by which the guilt or innocence of the accused was determined by subjecting them to a painful, or at least an unpleasant, usually dangerous experience. In medieval Europe, like trial by combat, tr ...
and ceremonies. Leo Levi found some
Hebraism Hebraism �hiːbreɪz(ə)mis a lexical item, usage or trait characteristic of the Hebrew language. By successive extension it is often applied to the Jewish people, their faith, national ideology or culture. Idiomatic Hebrew Hebrew has many idio ...
s in a few epigraphs in Italy.Leo Levi, "Ricerca di epigrafia ebraica nell'Italia meridionale," La Rassegna mensile di Israel, vol. 28 (1962), pp. 152-153


References


Further reading

* Paul Wexler, ''Three Heirs to a Judeo-Latin Legacy: Judeo-Ibero-Romance, Yiddish and Rotwelsch'' (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1988).


External links


Taylor-Schechter K 1.115
a Judeo-Latin magical text Jews and Judaism in the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire Forms of Latin Judeo-Romance languages he:לטינית יהודית {{Jewish-hist-stub