Notes bibliogràfiques

Abstract

Although the use of Hebrew as a written language has never really been interrupted throughout the slow and age-old process leading from Biblical times to its re-instatement as a spoken language in the modern age, the term Biblical Hebrew is generally used to refer to the most ancient stage in its history, Mishnaic or Rabbinical Hebrew to refer to the post-Biblical language in which the Mishna was written (a language still in use in the early centuries of our era), Medieval Hebrew to refer to the language used by the Jewish sages of the Middle Ages and Modern Hebrew to refer to the language used today. Yet, although the Middle Ages marked an important stage in the very long history of development of the Hebrew language, the term Medieval Hebrew applied to the language of that period is not entirely appropriate, nor, indeed, is it universally accepted, unless it is used in a purely chronological sense, that is to say, it should be understood as medieval in the sense that it refers to Jewish writers and scholars of the Middle Ages, not because it has a distinct consolidated linguistic system with morphological and syntactical characteristics of its own, in a manner comparable to the so-called Biblical Hebrew and Mishnaic Hebrew. In fact, Medieval Hebrew is the result of the use made of Mishnaic Hebrew by different authors from many countries and cultural zones, both Muslim and Christian, at that particular time in history, who were influenced by the social, political and linguistic contexts in which they lived. Thus, subject to such a wide range of different influences, the Hebrew of the Middle Ages presents what might be called regional characteristics. When written under Muslim rule, it reflected numerous lexical and semantic influences from Arabic; when written in Christian cultural zones, particularly in the western Mediterranean area, Hebrew bore evident traces of Latin and the various vernacular languages of the various regions.