Dan ( D . Y . ) Shapira
Bar-Ilan University, Middle Eastern Studies, Faculty Member
- Dan (or, Dan D.Y.) Shapira is an Orientalist and grows more than fifty trees on the edge of the Judaean Desert. He's a Full Professor at Bar-Ilan University.edit
a Hebrew paper on the Late Ottoman / Early Republican Turkish Donme / Crypto-Sabbateans
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This essay is an attempt to explore different contexts of the phrase "you are the salt of the earth" found in Matt 5:13, one of the most confusing expressions used in the whole of the New Testament. The author deals with its original... more
This essay is an attempt to explore different contexts of the phrase "you are the salt of the earth" found in Matt 5:13, one of the most confusing expressions used in the whole of the New Testament. The author deals with its original meaning, exposing in the process the earliest layers of transmission of Jesus' sayings. Versed in the Hebrew scriptures, Jesus combined the meanings of MLḤ in Exod 30:35 (incense salted is potent/good/pure/holy) with that in Isa 51:6 and Jer 38:11-12 (something MLḤ might vanish away/wax old/become rotten) and put it in a new context. Jesus' pun-loaded with multiple layers of meanings and shades of meanings-was lost in translation as simply "salt."
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In the "Afghan Genizah," a recently acquired collection of texts in Judeo-Persian, Early New-Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic from the tenth to thirteenth centuries, I recognized a Judeo-Persian fragment of a Jewish, anti-Christian... more
In the "Afghan Genizah," a recently acquired collection of texts in Judeo-Persian, Early New-Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic from the tenth to thirteenth centuries, I recognized a Judeo-Persian fragment of a Jewish, anti-Christian polemic work. This fragment may be-or may not be-part of the Toledoth Yeshu literature. It contains a Gospel quotation in Syriac in Hebrew letters.
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a short popular piece in Hebrew
This article may be downloaded and/or used within the private copying exemption. Any further use without permission of the rights owner shall be subject to legal licences (§ § 44a-63a UrhG / German Copyright Act).
Introduction Juhuri / Judeo-Tat(i) / the Language of the Mountain Jews (zuhun tati; zuhun juhuri) is an Iranian language derived from a spoken form of a sister-language of Early New Persian [NP] and heavily influenced by Azeri Turkic and... more
Introduction Juhuri / Judeo-Tat(i) / the Language of the Mountain Jews (zuhun tati; zuhun juhuri) is an Iranian language derived from a spoken form of a sister-language of Early New Persian [NP] and heavily influenced by Azeri Turkic and Russian. It was traditionally spoken in Jewish communities of the Eastern and Northern Caucasus (Northern Azerbaijan, Southern-Central Dagestan, Nalchik, Grozny, and more), known as the Mountain Jews (dağ-çifut; gorskie jevrei; yehudim harariyim / qavqaziyim). All speakers, especially males, were and are multilingual (Azeri and other languages in Azerbaijan, Azeri, and/ or Qumıq and other languages in Dagestan, Balqar/Malqar in Nal'chik, in addition to Russian, and to some extent, Hebrew. By now, the heritage-speakers of Juhuri speak Russian, Hebrew, English, and Azeri, sometimes, even all of these. There are two very similar dialects, the Northern, Derbendi, in Dagestan and Nal'chik, and the Southern, Qubai, in Azerbaijan; the first one is sometimes more archaic than New Persian and is more remote from NP than the second one (Griunberg 1982: 232). Judeo-Tat does not reflect dialectal unity with neighboring Tati dialects, spoken, mostly in the past, by Muslim populations (both Sunni and Shiʿi dialects 1); these Tati Muslim dialects of Azerbaijan and Dagestan, in turn, are to be distinguished from the so-called Southern Tati dialects of northern Iran. 2 On the other hand, Judeo-Tat is close to a dialect of the New Persian type spoken, in the past, by a small Armenian-Grigorian community in northwestern Azerbaijan. During the 19 th and 20 th centuries, Judeo-Tat was adopted by smaller Jewish linguistic minorities of Transcaucasia and northern Caucasus (Neo-Aramaic, Kurdish, Azeri, and probably Adyge-Circassian 3). Though Jewish populations had been recorded in northern and central Dagestan more than a millennium ago, we cannot be certain that there is a continuous link between these Jewish populations and the Mountain Jews of southern Dagestan and northern Azerbaijan. There is no linguistic evidence to support the claim that the Mountain Jews descend from Iranian military colonies established during the Sassanid period (226-641 CE) on
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The article analyzes two variants of a Turkish-in-Hebrew-characters prayer from the period of 1727-1730 found in a Firkowicz manuscript from Sankt-Peterburg and in a Crimean-Rabbanite prayerbook kept in the Ukrainian National Library in... more
The article analyzes two variants of a Turkish-in-Hebrew-characters prayer from the period of 1727-1730 found in a Firkowicz manuscript from Sankt-Peterburg and in a Crimean-Rabbanite prayerbook kept in the Ukrainian National Library in Kiev. The prayer mentions not only the rulers, that of the Ottoman Empire and that of the Crimean Khanate, but also purely Islamic notions. The article analyzes other pre-modern Jewish prayers for the wellbeing of the state or the local ruler. The author's conclusion is that the versions from Sankt-Peterburg and Kiev, though having similarities with some other similar prayers, stand nevertheless aside
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“Qissa-ye Dâni’êl - or 'The Story of Dâni’êl' - in Judaeo-Persian: The Text and its Translation”, Sephunot 22 (1999), pp. 337-366
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This note proposes a new hypothesis, claiming that the word ἐπιούσιος of the Lord's Prayer in Matt 6:11 and Luke 11:3 was an attempt to translate rōzīq/g, a Middle Iranian loan word in Jesus' Hebrew/Aramaic, meaning "nourishment provided... more
This note proposes a new hypothesis, claiming that the word ἐπιούσιος of the Lord's Prayer in Matt 6:11 and Luke 11:3 was an attempt to translate rōzīq/g, a Middle Iranian loan word in Jesus' Hebrew/Aramaic, meaning "nourishment provided by God's mercy day to day," and not merely "daily [bread], needed for the day/for today." https://czasopisma.kul.pl/index.php/vv/article/view/14470
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When the Wissenschaft des Judenthums emerged in Germany, some Jewish researchers promoted the idea that German Jews preceded the forefathers of ethnic Germans in Germany. Therefore, they certainly deserved equal civil rights. When the... more
When the Wissenschaft des Judenthums emerged in Germany, some Jewish researchers promoted the idea that German Jews preceded the forefathers of ethnic Germans in Germany. Therefore, they certainly deserved equal civil rights. When the ideas of the Wissenschaft des Judenthums penetrated the Russian Empire, one of the motifs that developed there was the search for early beginnings of the local Jews. The Crimean Karaites were the first Jewish group in the Western world to adopt this discourse stressing ancient origins. The next Jewish subgroup to follow the lead was the community of the Mountain Jews, and the chapter demonstrates how this discourse developed in this community. The “antiquity discourse” among the Georgian Jews had its peculiarities, explained in the chapter. The antiquity discourse among the Bukharan Jews appeared only after the beginning of their aliyah to the State of Israel. The antiquity discourse among these three communities was a tool, borrowed from the Russian Jewish arsenal, but used to shield these communities from the threats imagined as coming from the cultural and political dominance of the Ashkenazi Russian Jews.
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The fifty years between 1680-1730 were one of the most fascinating in the history of Europe and in Ottoman history. A period of coalitions and wars, climate changes, and natural disasters took place. This previously unpublished chronicle... more
The fifty years between 1680-1730 were one of the most fascinating in the history of Europe and in Ottoman history. A period of coalitions and wars, climate changes, and natural disasters took place. This previously unpublished chronicle contains valuable information in various fields. It was written in Semi-Biblical Hebrew by a Jewish rabbi residing in the Crimean Peninsula, and includes insights on the political upheavals in the Crimean Khanate and the Ottoman capital; the wars between the Ottomans, Habsburgs, Venetians, Circassians, Sefevids, and the Russians, which he vividly describes; Persia and the Caucasus; the fate of Jewish communities; epidemics and weather; and weapons and customs. The book, a historical mine that reads like a sweeping thriller, is now available in English for the first time.
Learn more here: https://www.academicstudiespress.com/out-of-series/an-annotated-english-translation-of-debar-sepatayim
Learn more here: https://www.academicstudiespress.com/out-of-series/an-annotated-english-translation-of-debar-sepatayim
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In the “Afghan Genizah,” a recently acquired collection of texts in Judeo-Persian, Early New-Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic from the tenth to thirteenth centuries, I recognized a Judeo-Persian fragment of a Jewish, anti-Christian... more
In the “Afghan Genizah,” a recently acquired collection of texts in Judeo-Persian, Early New-Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic from the tenth to thirteenth centuries, I recognized a Judeo-Persian fragment of a Jewish, anti-Christian polemic work. This fragment may be – or may not be – part of the Toledoth Yeshu literature. It contains a Gospel quotation in Syriac in Hebrew letters.
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In this short article we publish, with translations, a macaronic Hebrew cum Middle Greek religious poem, accompanied by a refrain in Ottoman Turkish, all written in Hebrew characters and fully vocalized. The text comes from a Karaite... more
In this short article we publish, with translations, a macaronic Hebrew cum Middle Greek religious poem, accompanied by a refrain in Ottoman Turkish, all written in Hebrew characters and fully vocalized. The text comes from a Karaite prayerbook printed in Venice in 1528 on behalf of the Constantinople Karaite community. This poem and its origins played a role in different manipulations of Karaite identities and history during the 19th and 20th centuries.
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In this short article we publish, with translations, a macaronic Hebrew cum Middle Greek religious poem, accompanied by a refrain in Ottoman Turkish, all written in Hebrew characters and fully vocalized. The text comes from a Karaite... more
In this short article we publish, with translations, a macaronic Hebrew cum Middle Greek religious poem, accompanied by a refrain in Ottoman Turkish, all written in Hebrew characters and fully vocalized. The text comes from a Karaite prayerbook printed in Venice in 1528 on behalf of the Constantinople Karaite community. This poem and its origins played a role in different manipulations of Karaite identities and history during the 19th and 20th centuries.
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This note proposes a new hypothesis that ἐπιούσιος of the Lord's Prayer in Matthew 6:11 and Luke 11:3 was an attempt to translate adequately rōzīq/g, the Middle Iranian loan word in Jesus' Hebrew / Aramaic, whose meaning was... more
This note proposes a new hypothesis that ἐπιούσιος of the Lord's Prayer in Matthew 6:11 and Luke 11:3 was an attempt to translate adequately rōzīq/g, the Middle Iranian loan word in Jesus' Hebrew / Aramaic, whose meaning was ‘nourishment provided by God's mercy day to day’, and not merely ‘daily [bread], needed for the day/for today’.
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The Sepharadi prayer book, printed at Vilna in 1909 for the use of Mountain Jews, was mostly bilingual with spacious translation into their language defined in this publication as “Tati”. The language of this translation predates to... more
The Sepharadi prayer book, printed at Vilna in 1909 for the use of Mountain Jews, was mostly bilingual with spacious translation into their language defined in this publication as “Tati”. The language of this translation predates to Soviet engineering of the Literary Tati during 1920s-1930s; moreover, parts of the translation, especially of those portions of the Bible used in liturgy, may go back to the previous centuries. No study of the language of the Biblical translations to the language of the Mountain Jews was published yet. It’s the last call to turn efforts of all those who mind the linguistic heritage of the Mountain Jews to academic studies of this language, and especially of its vanishing dialects and the language of the Biblical translations found in this prayer book and elsewhere.
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This article presents a unique trilingual (Hebrew, Turkic, and Slavic) religious literary work from the personal archive of Avraham Firkowicz (National Library of Russia, St. Petersburg). The text, containing 129 lines (verses) in Hebrew... more
This article presents a unique trilingual (Hebrew, Turkic, and Slavic) religious literary work from the personal archive of Avraham Firkowicz (National Library of Russia, St. Petersburg). The text, containing 129 lines (verses) in Hebrew characters, is written in Firkowicz’s own hand. Its author has not been reliably identified, but it is assumed that he could be a Karaite Jew from Łuck / Lutsk (Wolhynia, present-day Ukraine) with a good speaking-level knowledge of Slavic and Turkish (e.g., Joseph-Solomon Lutski or Mordechai Sultanski). The language of the Turkic version is a variety of Crimean Judeo-Turkic with many Turkish (Oğuz) features; the language of the Slavic version is based on standard Russian of the early 19th century with Church Slavonic, Ukrainian, and Polish elements.
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After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, political élites of some of the former Soviet republics, especially the Turkic-speaking ones, found themselves in ideological limbo. The first President of Turkmenistan, Saparmurat Niyazov... more
After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, political élites of some of the former Soviet republics, especially the Turkic-speaking ones, found themselves in ideological limbo. The first President of Turkmenistan, Saparmurat Niyazov (Saparmyrat Nyýazow), has trodden his way out from the vacuum of legitimacy in the most original and interesting manner. In 2001, Niyazov, known also as Turkmenbashi (Türkmenbaşy), made public his book, Ruhnama, which later has been translated into about fifty languages. The book, appealing to the Oğuz Turkic heritage of the Turkmen nation, to her remote Parthian past, and to vague Islamic cultural inheritance, was supposed to provide guidelines for nation-building and cohesiveness. Atatürk's Nutuk was one of the literary models of Niyazov's book. Having fixed the newly-invented national mythology in writing, Niyazov was not only shaping his society in the desirable manner, but also legitimising his own rule. This paper analyses fragments of different—and not identical—versions of the first part of the work in several languages, mostly in Turkmen, Turkish, Russian, and English. The author suggests that the text of the Ruhnama was updated several times, with different translations reflecting different stages of fixing the original; the English text was translated faithfully from the elaborated Turkish translation, not from the Turkmen.
The fifty years between 1680-1730 were one of the most fascinating in the history of Europe and in Ottoman history. A period of coalitions and wars, climate changes, and natural disasters took place. This previously unpublished chronicle... more
The fifty years between 1680-1730 were one of the most fascinating in the history of Europe and in Ottoman history. A period of coalitions and wars, climate changes, and natural disasters took place. This previously unpublished chronicle contains valuable information in various fields. It was written in Semi-Biblical Hebrew by a Jewish rabbi residing in the Crimean Peninsula, and includes insights on the political upheavals in the Crimean Khanate and the Ottoman capital; the wars between the Ottomans, Habsburgs, Venetians, Circassians, Sefevids, and the Russians, which he vividly describes; Persia and the Caucasus; the fate of Jewish communities; epidemics and weather; and weapons and customs. The book, a historical mine that reads like a sweeping thriller, is now available in English for the first time.
The fifty years between 1680-1730 were one of the most fascinating in the history of Europe and in Ottoman history. A period of coalitions and wars, climate changes, and natural disasters took place. This previously unpublished chronicle... more
The fifty years between 1680-1730 were one of the most fascinating in the history of Europe and in Ottoman history. A period of coalitions and wars, climate changes, and natural disasters took place. This previously unpublished chronicle contains valuable information in various fields. It was written in Semi-Biblical Hebrew by a Jewish rabbi residing in the Crimean Peninsula, and includes insights on the political upheavals in the Crimean Khanate and the Ottoman capital; the wars between the Ottomans, Habsburgs, Venetians, Circassians, Sefevids, and the Russians, which he vividly describes; Persia and the Caucasus; the fate of Jewish communities; epidemics and weather; and weapons and customs. The book, a historical mine that reads like a sweeping thriller, is now available in English for the first time.