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Prolegomena as Historical Evidence: On Saadia's Introductions to his Commentaries on the Bible
Vehicles of Transmission, Translation, and Transformation in Medieval Textual Culture, Turnhout, (2011)
Аннотация
Sarah Stroumsa uncovers a surprising connection between these two worlds. According to the traditional view, the transformation of Judaism in the Islamic period was seen as stemming from its encounter with Arabic culture. Enabling this transformation was the ‘symbiotic' relationship between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbours in the shared cultural space of medieval Mediterranean society. This picture, Stroumsa argues, is too simple. In form and content, commentaries on the Bible which developed into a central literary genre of Jewish culture in the Middle Ages were most likely modelled on biblical commentaries of Syriac Christians. The adoption of the genre bears witness to a twofold shift: a linguistic shift from Syriac to Arabic and a religious shift from Christianity to Judaism. At the same time, Jews reshaped the genre in light of literary forms derived from other cultural traditions, for example Koranic exegesis and Greek philosophical commentaries, and made it useful for specific Jewish purposes such as the polemical debates between Rabbanites and Karaites on biblical interpretation. Stroumsa thus provides insight into the multilayered process of transformation that gave rise to a literary practice at the very core of medieval Judaism. Source: Editors
