Judeo-Latin (also spelled Judaeo-Latin) is the use by

Jews Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...

of the

Hebrew alphabet The Hebrew alphabet ( he, אָלֶף־בֵּית עִבְרִי, ), known variously by scholars as the Ktav Ashuri, Jewish script, square script and block script, is an abjad script used in the writing of the Hebrew language and other Jewi ...

to write

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

.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 Jo ...

'', 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 young ...

to describe a small corpus of texts from the

Middle Ages In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire ...

. 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 langua ...

under the

Roman Empire The Roman Empire ( la, Imperium Romanum ; grc-gre, Βασιλεία τῶν Ῥωμαίων, Basileía tôn Rhōmaíōn) was the post- Republican period of ancient Rome. As a polity, it included large territorial holdings around the Mediter ...

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 u ...

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 ...

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 Middle Ages, medieval Europe, like trial b ...

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 idiom ...

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

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

References

Further reading

External links