Jewish Forerunners of the Spanish Biblia romanceada: A Thirteenth-Century Witness (Bodleian MS Hunt. 268)

Abstract

Abstract Despite Church prohibitions, almost twenty medieval Bibles in Spanish survive. The Old Testament versions derived in many cases from translations from Hebrew made by Jews. These were characterized by a unique rabbinical “calque-language” that would be preserved by Sephardim for centuries after the Expulsion in 1492; but the Inquisition destroyed the medieval Jewish copies. This article studies a new witness, the oldest known: a thirteenth-century Hebrew commentary on the Hagiographa with Spanish glosses. These fully confirm the amazing continuity of the Ladino scriptolect.