The Sefer Almansur contains a pharmacopeia of about 250 medicinal ingredients with their Arabic names (in Hebrew characters), their Romance (Old Occitan) and occasionally Hebrew equivalents. The pharmacopeia, which describes the properties and therapeutical uses of simple drugs featured at the end of Book Three of the Sefer Almansur. This work was translated into Hebrew from the Arabic Kitāb al-Manṣūrī (written by al-Rāzī) by Shem Tov ben Isaac of Tortosa, who worked in Marseille in the 13th century. Gerrit Bos, Guido Mensching and Julia Zwink supply a critical edition of the Hebrew text, an English translation and an analysis of the Romance and Latin terminology in Hebrew transcription. The authors show the pharmaceutical terminological innovation of Hebrew and of the vernacular, and give us proof of the important role of medieval Jews in preserving and transferring medical knowledge.

The authors present a critical edition of the Hebrew pharmacopeia Sefer Almansur (13th c., written by Shem Tov ben Isaac in Marseille), its English translation and an analysis of the Romance (Old Occitan) medical terms, which are included in the Hebrew text.

This volume contains studies based on papers delivered at the international conference of the PESHAT in Context project entitled “Themes, Terminology, and Translation Procedures in Twelfth-Century Jewish Philosophy.” The central figure in this book is Judah Ibn Tibbon. He sired the Ibn Tibbon family of translators, which influenced philosophical and scientific Hebrew writing for centuries. More broadly, the study of this early phase of the Hebrew translation movement also reveals that the formation of a standardized Hebrew terminology was a long process that was never fully completed. Terminological shifts are frequent even within the Tibbonide family, to say nothing of the fascinating terminological diversity displayed by other authors and translators discussed in this book.

Romance is a fertile ground for linguistic research. Instead of limiting their studies to one specialised area, some Romance scholars have managed to combine different aspects of the broad field of Romance linguistics in an impressive way. This volume is dedicated to the multifaceted research interests of Guido Mensching: Part 1 focusses on different aspects of the architecture of grammar and linguistic theory, covering Italian, Portuguese, French, Sardinian and Romance. The focus of Part 2 is on historical linguistics, discussing Old Occitan lexicography and Romance in Hebrew scripts. Part 3 is dedicated to aspects relating to plurilingualism, language contact and sociolinguistics. Part 4 explores research arguments that go beyond Romance philology but are nonetheless intertwined with it.

This manual provides a detailed presentation of the various Romance languages as they appear in texts written by Jews, mostly using the Hebrew alphabet. It gives a comprehensive overview of the Jews and the Romance languages in the Middle Ages (part I), as well as after the expulsions (part II). These sections are dedicated to Judaeo-Romance texts and linguistic traditions mainly from Italy, northern and southern France (French and Occitan), and the Iberian Peninsula (Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese). The Judaeo-Spanish varieties of the 20th and 21st centuries are discussed in a separate section (part III), due to the fact that Judaeo-Spanish can be considered an independent language. This section includes detailed descriptions of its phonetics/phonology, morphology, lexicon, and syntax.

Gerrit Bos (Ph.D. 1989) is Professor Emeritus of Jewish Studies at the University of Cologne. He has published extensively in the fields of Jewish studies, Islamic studies, and medieval science and medicine in Arabic and Hebrew texts. In July 2023, he celebrated his 75th birthday. On this occasion, his colleagues and students presented him with a Festschrift containing over twenty original papers. They deal with various topics belonging to his wider fields of interest ranging from the Ancient Orient, Jewish and Islamic theology and philosophy, medicine and natural sciences in medieval Islamicate and European countries, to Romance philology and linguistics.

The authors publish a previously unedited Regimen of Health attributed to Avenzoar (Ibn Zuhr), translated at Montpellier in 1299 in a collaboration between a Jewish philosopher and a Christian surgeon, the former translating the original Arabic into their shared Occitan vernacular, the latter translating that into Latin. They use manuscript evidence to argue that the text was produced in two stages, first a quite literal version, then a revision improved in style and in language adapted to contemporary European medicine. Such collaborative translations are well known, but the revelation of the inner workings of the translation process in this case is exceptional. A separate Hebrew translation by the philosopher (also edited here) gives independent evidence of the lost Arabic original.