Samuel N. Rosenberg

The Indo-European dialects

This work translates Meillets classic philological study from the original 1908 French edition and the authors 1922 introduction to a new printing. Indexes, missing from the French editions, have been added by the translator for the convenience of the reader, as well as bibliographical references to salient works from the half-century after original composition.

Exegesis and Romance: Revisiting the Old French Translation of Kallir

Until recently, scholars rarely asked what language resounded in medieval places of Jewish prayer. The great liturgical and customary compendium known as the Maḥzor Vitry emphasized the Hebrew prayer practices of a literate (and male) community of users.2 The chance survival of liturgical hymns, or fragments of hymns, composed in the vernacular, did little to unsettle the assumption that the formal worship experience of medieval European Jews was dominated by Hebrew. A Judeo-French lament for thirteen v ictims of an auto da fe in Troyes in 1288, a snippet of a drink ing song scrawled in a Passover haggadah, or even a bilingual wedding song preserved in the Maḥzor Vitry could be associated with paraliturgical activity.3 Thus, they seemed to confirm the belief that the vernacular made few, if any, inroads into the Jewish house of prayer. Neither the growing trend toward affective devotion in the larger culture, nor the rise of Romance prose was seen as a factor that might have created an opening for vernacular prayer.4