A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Bavli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature

Preface

[ . . . ] A few remarks on foreign words in the literature which for the sake of brevity is here called Talmudic, may not be out of place in this preface.

The intercourse between the Jews of the Talmudic ages with Greek- and Latin-speaking gentiles was not only that of trade and government, but also of thought and ideas. Along with the apostles and teachers of young Christianity, and even before their time, Jewish champions of religion and morality lectured in the private rooms of princes and princesses, noblemen and matrons. Instances of intimate association of prominent Jewish teachers with emperors, kings, philosophers, and scholars and their families are related in the Talmudic records in numbers large enough to account for the adoption of words like philosophy, astrology, epilogue, &c., not to speak of such terms as were borrowed by the Jews together with the objects or ideas which they represent. A footstool was called hypopodion, a tablet pinax; the profligate gourmand’s emetic taken before meals, or rather between one stage of the banquet and the other, was called by its jocular name άποχοτταβίζειν (to play the cottabus), and adopted in the general medical sense; and so forth.

This accounts for the large number of Greek and Latin vocables in the so-called Jerusalem Talmud grown up under the Greco-Roman influences of the Caesars, and more still in those Targumim and Midrashim which were compiled in the Byzantine empire. The Agadah, taking its illustrations from the daily environment, speaks of Caesar, Augustus, duces, polemarchi, legiones, matrona, schola, &c., while in legal discussions the institutions of the governments, in so far as they influenced or superseded the Jewish law, had to be called by their foreign names. Agoranomos and agronomia, angaria and parangaria, epimeletes, epitropos, bulé, and innumerable other terms were embodied in the Jewish vocabulary, although not always dislodging their Hebrew or Aramaic equivalents.

Owing to copyists’ mistakes and acoustic deficiencies of transmission in distant ages and countries in which these foreign words were but vaguely understood, the student has on this point to contend with a vast number of corruptions and glossators’ guesses at interpretation. In most cases, however, these corruptions are recoverable through the medium of correct or differently corrupted parallels. אנדוכתרי (אנדכתרי, אונד׳, [b.] Giṭṭin 20a), not recognized by the commentators, and probably no longer understood by the Babylonian Rabbis, who received the word from Palestine together with the legal subject with which it is connected, fortunately finds a parallel in a worse copyist’s corruption in the Jerusalem Talmud, namely הרנירק טיאניס (Yer. Giṭṭin IV, 45d), and both in אנטוקטא (Treatise Abadim, od. Kirchheim, ch. IV). A combination of these corruptions together with an examination of the subject under discussion leads to vindicta or vindicatio(-nis) (see Révue des Études Juives, 18. p. 150). It should be said, however, that this is one of the worst corruptions the author has met with.

Another class of corruptions owes its existence to the natural tendency to adapt foreign words to the organic peculiarities of the people. The people pronounced An-drianos or Andrinos more easily than Hadrianos; un-keanos was more congenial than okeanos, agard’mos and agromos are popular mutilations of agoranomos; אקיטגלג and אקידכלכ are organic transformations of lectica; although the correct forms Hadrianos, okeanos, &c. are by no means infrequent (see Collitz, “The Aryan Name of the Tongue,” in Oriental Studies, Boston, 1894, p. 201, note). [ . . . ]

The difficulties besetting the study of Talmud and Midrash will be overcome in the degree in which modern scholars will take it up for philological and archaeological purposes as adjuncts of those who are too much engrossed in its practical and doctrinal side to allow themselves time for what seems to them unessential. But even what has been heretofore rediscovered, as it were, thanks to the labors of Leopold Zunz, Samuel Loeb Rapaport, Heinrich Graetz, Zacharias Frankel, Michael Sachs, Solomon David Luzzatto, Abraham Geiger, M. Joel, Joseph Perles, Alexander Kohut, and a host of others, is enough to prove the marvellous familiarity of the Rabbis with the events, institutions, and views of life of the world outside and around their own peculiar civilization. What is more, we have been familiarized with the philosophical impartiality and sober superiority with which they appreciated what was laudable and reprehended what was objectionable in the intellectual and moral condition of the “nations of the world,” as they called the gentile world around them; kings and empires, nations and governments, public entertainments and social habits, they reviewed through the spyglass of pure monotheism and stern morality. [ . . . ]

The author also expresses his gratitude to the friends who have assisted him in the arduous task of proof reading, among whom special mention is due to Miss Henrietta Szold, of Baltimore. He also acknowledges his obligation to the Rev. Dr. S. Mendelsohn, of Wilmington, N.C., for the index of Scriptural citations appended to this work, a contribution which, the author is confident, will be welcomed by all Biblical students.

The religious sentiments inspiring the author at the completion of his labors of five and twenty years are too sacred to be sent abroad beyond the sanctuary of heart and home.

Philadelphia, May, 1903.