Vidro, N; (2020) Grammars of Classical Arabic in Judaeo-Arabic: an overview. Intellectual History of the Islamicate World , 8 (1-2) pp. 284-305. 10.1163/2212943X-20201010.

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Abstract

This article presents an overview of medieval Classical Arabic grammars written in Judaeo-Arabic that are preserved in the Cairo Genizah and the Firkovich Collections. Unlike Jewish grammarians’ application of the Arabic theoretical model to describing Biblical Hebrew, transliterated grammars bear clear evidence of Jewish engagement with the Arabic grammatical tradition for its own sake. In addition, such manuscripts furnish new material on the history of the Arabic grammar writing by preserving otherwise unknown texts. The article discusses individual grammars of Classical Arabic in Judaeo-Arabic and tries to answer more general questions on this little known area of Jewish intellectual activity. An analysis of the corpus suggests that Jews who copied and used these texts were less interested in the intricacies of abstract theory than in attaining a solid knowledge of Classical Arabic. Court scribes appear to have been among those interested in the study of Classical Arabic grammar.

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