Translating Religion: Linguistic Analysis of Judeo-Arabic Sacred Texts from Egypt

Translations of Hebrew and Aramaic sacred texts into Jewish languages, religiolects, and varieties have been widespread throughout the Jewish world. This volume is a study of the genre of these translations, known as the sarh, into Judeo-Arabic in Egypt in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The study places Judeo-Arabic along the Jewish linguistic spectrum, traces its history and offers insights to the spoken variety of Egyptian Judeo-Arabic, which set it apart from other Arabic dialects. The book also provides a linguistic model of the translation of the sacred texts. Rather than viewing the translation as only verbatim, the study traces in great detail the literal/interpretive linguistic tension with which the translators struggled in their work.