The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

44 The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context
atmosphere of eleventh-century Spain. 34 By then the tensions between
the literal and applied senses of scripture had grown and the cause of
the former was then carried forward in Spain and France while the
latter tended to recover an honoured place as the situation of Jews in
the Orient deteriorated after the period of the Fatimid dynasty. The
move towards the literal interpretation had been championed by the
Karaites, whose linguistic interest and textual orientation in the golden
age of their biblical studies in tenth- and eleventh-century Jerusalem
led to a high level of lexical and syntactical exegesis. 35 There is no
doubt that the Karaites and Rabbanites exercised both positive and
negative influences on each other and the latest research clearly
demonstrates that the Rabbanites were torn between a desire to steal
the copyright of the devil's best tunes and the need to avoid betraying
what they saw as the authentic nature of the talmudic-midrashic interpretation
of scripture. The Karaites too were not without their
polemical intent, as is indicated by the strange phenomenon of surviving
folios of their Bibles from Palestine and Egypt in the eleventh
and twelfth centuries that record the text of the Hebrew Bible in
Arabic characters with Hebrew vowel-points. If Geoffrey Khan's
theory is correct, such an idiosyncratic system was employed as a
means of retaining an independent religious identity in the face of
Rabbanite influence and incursion. 36 Other strange combinations of
languages that occur in the Genizah include Judaeo-Greek, Judaeo-
Persian, Judaeo-Spanish and Judaeo-German and a number of texts in
these Jewish dialects written in Hebrew characters testify to the
34. M. Perez, 'Another Fragment from Kitab Al-Targih of R. Jehuda ibn
Bal'am', PAAJR 57 (1991), Hebrew section, pp. 1-16, and 'Another Fragment of
Moses ibn Gikatilla's Commentary on Psalms', Sinai 108 (1991), pp. 7-17.
35. The Cambridge doctoral dissertation of Meira Polliack, provisionally entitled
'Mediaeval Karaite Translations of the Hebrew Bible into Arabic' (1993) covers the
general topic and her article 'Additions and Alternate Renderings in the Arabic Bible
Translations of the Karaite Yeshu'ah ben Yehudah' in a forthcoming issue of JQR
deals with a more specific aspect. See also n. 50 below and the relevant sources cited
in Z. Ben-Hayyim, Sefer Ha-Meqoroth (Jerusalem, 1963).
36. G. Khan, Karaite Bible Manuscripts from the Cairo Genizah (Cambridge,
1990); "The Medieval Karaite Transcriptions of Hebrew into Arabic Script', Israel
Oriental Studies 12 (1992), pp. 157-76; 'The Opinions of Al-Qirqisani concerning
the Text of the Hebrew Bible and Parallel Muslim Attitudes towards the Text of the
Qur'an', JQR 81 (1990), pp. 59-73.