Methodology & Sources
How this edition is made
Judeo-Arabic: A Digital Reader & Lexiconpresents the Hebrew-script Arabic of the Geonic and medieval period — beginning with Saadia Gaon's Tafsir on the Torah — alongside parallel Hebrew and English and a word-by-word lexicon. It is built for Hebrew readers who want to read these texts in the original rather than in translation.
Editorial principles
Source-first. Every text is given in its Judeo-Arabic original. Translations are aids, not substitutes: the Hebrew column reproduces a received translation (ibn Tibbon for Bahya; the Masoretic verse beside the Tafsir), and the English is editorial.
Glosses are provenanced. Tap-to-define glosses paraphrase Lane's Arabic-English Lexiconfor the classical sense, with a separate layer of notes — drawn from Blau's Dictionary of Mediaeval Judaeo-Arabic Texts — flagging where a word carries a specifically Judeo-Arabic or Saadianic meaning. The two are kept distinct so a classical gloss is never silently presented as a medieval one.
Alignment is explicit. The reader aligns the Judeo-Arabic to its translation line by line, not paragraph by paragraph, so a reader can always see which Arabic words a given rendering answers to.
Scope and limits. The concordance indexes 81,225 words across 187 chapters of the Tafsir; the lexicon holds 20,280 entries over 2,388 roots. Coverage is hand-curated for the highest-frequency vocabulary first; rarer forms may resolve to a root entry rather than an exact inflection. This is a living edition, not a closed critical one.
Bibliography & editions
The base texts, lexica, and manuscript sources this edition draws on.
| Type | Author | Work |
|---|---|---|
| Tafsir text | Saʿadya Gaon (ed. J. Derenbourg) | Version arabe du Pentateuque (Œuvres complètes, vol. 1)Paris, 1893 — base text of the Tafsir reader, via Sefaria. |
| Lexicon | E. W. Lane | An Arabic-English LexiconLondon, 1863–93 — classical-Arabic glosses paraphrased for tap-to-define, from the Perseus TEI edition. |
| Lexicon | Joshua Blau (ז״ל) | A Dictionary of Mediaeval Judaeo-Arabic TextsJerusalem, 2006 — source for divergence notes where Judeo-Arabic usage departs from the classical sense. |
| Library text | Baḥya ibn Paquda | Al-Hidāya ilā Farāʾiḍ al-Qulūb (Ḥovot ha-Levavot)Yahuda edition, with Judah ibn Tibbon's Hebrew — parallel-aligned in the reader, via Sefaria. |
| Library text | Moses Maimonides | Dalālat al-Ḥāʾirīn (Moreh Nevukhim)Judeo-Arabic page images, Friedberg Jewish Manuscript Society. |
| Library text | Saʿadya Gaon | Kitāb al-Amānāt wa-l-Iʿtiqādāt (Emunot ve-Deʿot)Judeo-Arabic page images, Friedberg Jewish Manuscript Society. |
| Library text | Judah Halevi | Kitāb al-Khazarī (Kuzari)Judeo-Arabic page images, Friedberg Jewish Manuscript Society. |
| Library text | Yaʿqūb al-Qirqisānī | Kitāb al-Anwār wa-l-MarāqibKaraite witness, included in the Advanced library. |
How to cite & license
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Editorial text, translations, glosses, and notes are released under CC BY-NC 4.0. Source texts and manuscript images remain under the rights of their respective editions and holding institutions (see the bibliography above). Questions and corrections are welcome at freedmaneli@gmail.com.