Ofra Tirosh-Becker | The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (original) (raw)

Papers by Ofra Tirosh-Becker

Tarbitz 89(4): 581-647, 2023

Yeshua ben Yehuda, a Jerusalem Karaite scholar of the eleventh century, included many quotations ... more Yeshua ben Yehuda, a Jerusalem Karaite scholar of the eleventh century, included many quotations from rabbinic literature in his Judeo-Arabic commentaries on the Torah. While most of these quotations are drawn from well-known compositions, some were quoted from treatises that are no longer extant, first and foremost Sifre Zuṭa on Deuteronomy. In this paper we focus on Yeshua’s quotations from the Mekhilta of Rabbi Shimon ben Yoḥai (Mekhilta de-Rashbi), for which we do not have complete documentation, and we discuss the contribution of these quotations to the study of this Mekhilta and its language.
Portions of Yeshua’s short and long commentaries on Exodus were preserved in many manuscripts. For this project we studied about forty-five manuscripts of Yeshua’s commentaries, many of which were fragmentary with pages incorrectly ordered. In twentyone of these manuscripts, we found a total of sixty-three quotations from the Mekhilta de-Rashbi.
Two editions of the Mekhilta de-Rashbi have been published so far. David Zvi Hoffmann’s 1905 edition was based mainly on Midrash Hagadol, while Jacob Nahum Epstein and Ezra Zion Melamed’s 1955 edition was based to a large extent on Geniza fragments. Further differences between the two editions are due to Hoffmann’s tendency to include sections from Midrash Hagadol whose origin could in fact be the Mishna or the Talmud, while Melamed refrained from doing so. Now, on the basis of the quotations preserved in Yeshua
ben Yehuda’s writings, we can confirm that Hoffmann’s approach was sometimes correct. For example, in his edition Melamed did not include the many homilies on the Sabbath in the Mekhilta de-Rashbi commentary on Torah sections ki-tissa – vayaqhel, as he attributed them to the Mekhilta of Rabbi Yishmael. Now, however, we can establish that they are indeed an integral part of the Mekhilta de-Rashbi as surmised by Hoffmann.
Quotations embedded in Yeshua’s writings enable us to reconstruct several new paragraphs of the Mekhilta de-Rashbi that were not preserved either in Midrash Hagadol nor in Geniza fragments. With the help of other quotations, we can prove that some uncertain reconstructions of Mekhilta de-Rashbi homilies, which are preserved only in Midrash Hagadol, were in fact correct, while others were incorrect and the sources of Midrash Hagadol in those cases were the Babylonian Talmud or Maimonides. Moreover, Yeshua’s quotations occasionally preserved a more reliable version of the Mekhilta de-Rashbi than the versions preserved in Geniza fragments and in Midrash Hagadol.
The quotations from the Mekhilta de-Rashbi embedded in Yeshua ben Yehuda’s writings reflect many linguistic features of Rabbinic Hebrew known to us from the most reliable manuscripts of rabbinic literature. These linguistic features, including orthography, phonology, verb and noun morphology, and syntax, further testify to the reliability of the transmission by Yeshua. The phonological characteristics of these quotations reflect a variety of pronunciation traditions of Mishnaic Hebrew. The vocalized manuscripts reflect some of the salient characteristics of the Palestinian pronunciation tradition of Mishnaic Hebrew alongside traits reflecting its Babylonian pronunciation tradition. The coexistence of these linguistic features points to a complex linguistic reality in eleventh century Jerusalem, where Yeshua lived and worked, indicating that multiple traditions were preserved there simultaneously.

Northern European Journal of Language Technology, Dec 14, 2022

Most linguistic studies of Judeo-Arabic, the ensemble of dialects spoken and written by Jews in A... more Most linguistic studies of Judeo-Arabic, the ensemble of dialects spoken and written by Jews in Arab lands, are qualitative in nature and rely on laborious manual annotation work, and are therefore limited in scale. In this work, we develop automatic methods for morpho-syntactic tagging of Algerian Judeo-Arabic texts published by Algerian Jews in the 19th-20th centuries, based on a linguistically tagged corpus. First, we describe our semi-automatic approach for preprocessing these texts. Then, we experiment with both an off-the-shelf morphological tagger, several specially designed neural network taggers, and a hybrid human-in-the-loop approach. Finally, we perform a real-world evaluation of new texts that were never tagged before in comparison with human expert annotators. Our experimental results demonstrate that these methods can dramatically speed up and improve the linguistic research pipeline, enabling linguists to study these dialects on a much greater scale.

Journal of Jewish languages, Oct 16, 2015

Revue des Études Juives, 2011

Developments in Phrasal Constructions Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal - What is new in the NP-strategy f... more Developments in Phrasal Constructions Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal - What is new in the NP-strategy for expressing reciprocity reciprocity in Modern Hebrew, and what are its origins? Miri Bar-Ziv and Vera Agranovsky -- The evolution of the structure of Free Relative Clauses in Modern Hebrew: Internal development and contact language influence Chanan Ariel -- The expression of material constitution in Revival Hebrew Keren Dubnov -- Circumstantial vs. Depictive secondary predicates in Literary Hebrew - the influence of Yiddish and Russian Malka Rappaport Hovav -- A Constructional idiom in Modern Hebrew: the influence of English on a native Hebrew collocation Nimrod Shatil -- The diachrony of Hebrew Quality Pseudo-partitives: Are they a calque of the contact languages? Developments in Word Structure and Word Distribution Yael Reshef -- On the impact of contact languages on the formation of the Hebrew superlative Edit Doron & Irit Meir -- The impact of contact languages on the degrammaticalization of the Hebrew definite article Uri Horesh and Roey Gafter - When the construction is axla, everything is axla: A case of combined lexical and structural borrowing from Arabic to Hebrew. Einat Keren - From Negative Polarity to Negative Concord - Slavic footprints in the diachronic change of Hebrew meguma, klum and sum davar Avigail Tsirkin-Sadan -- bixlal in Modern Hebrew: Inheritance and Slavic contact Shira Wigderson - The sudden disappearance of nitpael and the rise of hitpael in Modern Hebrew, and the role of Yiddish in the process Developments in Clause-structure and Its Constituents Aynat Rubinstein, Ivy Sichel & Avigail Tsirkin-Sadan -- Superfluous negation in Modern Hebrew and its origins Moshe Taube -- The usual suspects: Slavic, Yiddish and the accusative existentials and possessives in Modern Hebrew Ophira Gamliel & Abed al-Rahman Mar'i -- Bleached verbs as aspectual auxiliaries in Colloquial Modern Hebrew and Arabic dialects Olga Kagan - Predicate nominal sentences with the Hebrew ze and its Russian counterpart eto Nora Boneh & Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal -- Reconsidering the emergence of non-core dative constructions in Modern Hebrew Yishai Neuman -- Substrate sources and internal evolution of prescriptively unwarranted 'comitative complements in Modern Hebrew Developments in the Clausal Periphery 10 Isaac Bleaman - Verbal predicate fronting in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish 10 Yehudit Henshke - Patterns of dislocation: Judeo-Arabic syntactic influence on Modern Hebrew 13 Ora Schwarzwald & Sigal Shlomo - Modern Hebrew se- and Judeo-Spanish ke- (que-) in independent modal constructions 10 Itamar Francez - Modern Hebrew lama-se interrogatives and their Judeo-Spanish origins 13 Samir Khalaily and Edit Doron - Colloquial Modern Hebrew doubly-marked interrogatives and the contact with Arabic and Neo-Aramaic dialects 17 Yael Ziv -- The right periphery in Colloquial Hebrew: Effects of spoken modality and contact languages

Journal of Jewish languages, 2013

La Linguistique, 2019

Tous droits réservés pour tous pays. La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment ... more Tous droits réservés pour tous pays. La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscrite par votre établissement. Toute autre reproduction ou représentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France. Il est précisé que son stockage dans une base de données est également interdit.

Journal of Jewish languages, Dec 7, 2020

Journal of Jewish languages, Oct 3, 2022

We were saddened to learn of the death of Professor Bernard Dov Spolsky, our close colleague and ... more We were saddened to learn of the death of Professor Bernard Dov Spolsky, our close colleague and a member of the advisory board of the Journal of Jewish Languages. Spolsky was a prolific scholar and a leader not only in Jewish languages but in several fields, including applied linguistics, educational linguistics, sociolinguistics, and language policy. Spolsky grew up in New Zealand and, in the 1950s, earned his BA and MA at the University of New Zealand. He spent a few years in Israel and then earned his PhD at the Université de Montréal. After starting his university teaching career in North America, he moved back to Israel in 1980 and spent the rest of his career at Bar-Ilan University. His teaching spanned English, Linguistics, Anthropology, and Education. He held leadership roles in several organizations, including the American Association of Applied Linguistics, the Israel Association of Applied Linguistics, and the International TESOL Association. Several of his books served as foundations for entire fields and were translated into multiple languages:

Northern European journal of language technology, Dec 14, 2022

Jewish Quarterly Review, 2005

In addition to explicit citations from rabbinic sources (and translations thereof, as will be dis... more In addition to explicit citations from rabbinic sources (and translations thereof, as will be discussed in this essay), Karaite treatises also include paraphrases of passages from rabbinic sources, rabbinic terms and phrases as well as

Journal of Jewish Languages

The Tagged Algerian Judeo-Arabic (TAJA) corpus is the first linguistically annotated corpus of an... more The Tagged Algerian Judeo-Arabic (TAJA) corpus is the first linguistically annotated corpus of any Judeo-Arabic dialect regardless of geography and period. The corpus is a genre-diverse collection of written Modern Algerian Judeo-Arabic texts, encompassing translations of the Bible and of liturgical texts, commentaries and original Judeo-Arabic books and journals. The TAJA corpus was manually annotated with parts-of-speech (POS) tags and detailed morphology tags. The goal of the new corpus is twofold. First, it preserves this endangered Judeo-Arabic language, expanding on previous fieldwork and going beyond the study of individual written texts. The corpus has already enabled us to make strides towards a grammar of written Algerian Judeo-Arabic. Second, this tagged corpus serves as a foundation for the development of Judeo-Arabic-specific Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools, which allow automatic POS tagging and morphological annotation of large collections of yet untapped texts...

Language Contact and the Development of Modern Hebrew, 2016