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NOTES ON TRANSLATIONS AND TRANSCRIPTION AND TYPOGRAPHICAL CONVENTIONS

Translations from French and Hebrew, both medieval and modern, are mine, unless otherwise noted. A general exception is Bible verses, for which I generally chose the NRSV (New Revised Standard Version) or NJPS (Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures. The New JPS Translation According to the Traditional Hebrew Text) translation, duly identified, after comparing them to the Hebrew.

Different types of texts seemed to require different presentations. For Hebrew texts containing only one or two isolated French glosses, I chose to present the Hebrew text along with an English translation, inserting the French word or words in the translation between square brackets. For texts containing significant portions in both Hebrew and French, I present the Hebrew-letter transcription, a transliteration of the Hebrew integrated with romanization of the Old French, and finally an English translation. Where a Hebrew text is readily available, I present only the English translation. Particularly in block quotes, I use small capitals to identify transliterations and translations of Hebrew portions and differentiate them from romanization and translations of French. In Hebrew texts, [!] indicates sic, and a rafe (horizontal line above a letter) does double duty for rafe and a scribal mark resembling an inverted circumflex. Square brackets enclose editorial emendations or explanations, and parentheses letters or words to be subtracted.

Strict transliteration, when provided, has been carried out according to the table of equivalences reproduced here. Although two transliteration symbols are used twice (s for samekh and sin, t for tet and taw), medieval Jews’ general avoidance of samekh and taw for writing French words leads to a one-to-one correspondence of transliteration symbols and Hebrew letters in the strict transliteration of French. Final and non-final forms of Hebrew letters are not differentiated in strict transliteration because their distribution is regular.

’	aleph	l	lamed
b	bet	m	mem
g	gimel	n	nun
ğ	gimel with scribal mark (inverted circumflex)	ň	nun with scribal mark (inverted circumflex)
d	dalet	s	samekh
h	he	‘	ayin
w	waw	p	pe
z	zayin	ṣ	tsade
ḥ	ḥet	q	qof
t	tet	č	qof with scribal mark (inverted circumflex)
y	yod	r	resh
k	kaf	s	sin
		š	shin
		t	taw

In most instances, however, including the transliteration of Hebrew borrowings into English and Hebrew titles in the notes and bibliography, I have opted for a simpler, general-purpose system of transliteration, omitting aleph at the beginnings of words; using ts for tsade, sh for shin, w, o, or u for waw, as appropriate, and y or i for yod, as appropriate; using v, kh, and f where called for; and indicating vowels but not vowel length. In quoting other scholars’ work, I retain their transliteration conventions. (The only one not listed above is ẓ for tsade.) Furthermore, the names of Jewish scholars are given in the form most often encountered in American scholarship: I write Joseph Kara, for example, instead of Joseph Qara. As in much American scholarship, my transliteration of Hebrew words reflects their pronunciation in modern Hebrew, rather than their pronunciation by medieval Frenchspeaking Jews, who, for example, pronounced final taw as /s/ (cf. today’s Ashkenazic pronunciation). An exception is my use of w for consonantal waw in transcribing medieval texts; however, in titles of modern works, as well as in the title of the Maḥzor Vitry, I have used v instead.

While it is more standard in academic works to put titles of short poems in quotation marks, I put them in italics here so as to avoid confusion with the symbols for aleph (’) and ayin (‘).

Finally, la‘az technically refers to a language other than Hebrew, but in the texts discussed in this book, it refers to French.