Les gloses marginales du MS Saraval du Sefer ha-shorashim de David Qimḥi

Abstract

The MS Saraval 6 of David Qimḥi’s Sefer ha-shorashim entails in its external margins a lot of annotations (glosses and superglosses) written in an Italo-Romance dialect spelled by means of Hebrew letters vocalized with a high degree of precision. On the base of phonetic evidence it is possible to identify on the geolinguistic map of Italy in which dialect those marginalia have been redacted: it appears to be a Sabine dialect of Abruzzo (region of L’Aquila). This article ends with a tentative reconstruction of the history of the manuscript from a city in the region of L’Aquila (maybe Civitaretenga) to Ancona where the presence of the manuscript is attested thanks to a note doodled on the second last page. The fact that the manuscript was handled from one owner to another no less than three times within two years could be ascribed to the overall instability generated by the advancing French troops during the First Italian War (1494-1497).

Keywords

• Qimḥi (David)
• Sefer ha-shorashim
• Judeo-Romance glosses
• Abruzzese dialects
• Abruzzo
• history of Italian Jews