Biblia Arabica

[ht Jack Sasson from Sabine Schmidtke]

“Biblia Arabica: The Bible in Arabic among Jews, Christians and Muslims”becomes the first project in the humanities to be awarded the DFG’s DIP(German Israeli Project Cooperation) grant

The research project “Biblia Arabica: The Bible in Arabic among Jews,Christians and Muslims”, conceived by researchers from Freie Universität Berlin and Tel Aviv University, has won one of this year’s DFG DIP grants(“Deutsch-Israelische Projektkooperation”). It is the very first project from the humanities ever to receive this prestigious grant. The project, which results from the cooperation between Professors Camilla Adang and Meira Polliack of Tel Aviv University and Professor Sabine Schmidtke of Freie Universität Berlin, will study the rich and varied traditions of translating the Hebrew Bible and New Testament into Arabic, starting from the 8th century CE onwards. The DFG will fund the unique and innovative research programme for the duration of 5 years (2013-2017) with a total

budget of 1.7 million Euros.

Shortly after the expansion of Muslim rule in the 7th and 8th centuries CE, Christians, Jews, and Samaritans living in the Muslim world began to translate their sacred texts: the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Samaritan Pentateuch into the new dominant language of the time: Arabic. Many of these translations, from languages such as Hebrew, Greek, Syriac and Coptic, have survived and have come down to us in a vast corpus of manuscripts and fragments that hail from monasteries, synagogues and libraries, especially in the Middle East.

Compared to other translation traditions of the Bible throughout its history, the Arabic versions are the most abundant in terms of the number of surviving manuscripts and later on prints. Moreover, they reveal an unusually large variety in stylistic and didactic approaches, vocabulary, scripts and, ideologies. Although originally intended for internal consumption by the different denominations that produced them, the translations were also quoted and adapted by Muslim writers, who were familiar with many biblical episodes and characters through their own sacred scripture, the Qur’an.

But whereas much attention has been paid in modern scholarship to the translation of scientific and philosophical works from Greek into Arabic in the early Abbasid period (first half of the 9th century CE), the parallel endeavour of translating the Bible (in the broadest sense of the term) into Arabic has hardly been studied in any systematic way. The ”Biblia Arabica“ project aims to redress this imbalance by way of an integrative and internationally-led study which will uncover and describe the different medieval schools and individuals that took part in this scriptural translation enterprise, their aims and agendas, styles and techniques, as well as the social and cultural implications of their innovative and ambitious endeavour. The nucleus of the project is the study and survey of thousands of early codices and fragments, many of which are lying dormant in monasteries across the Middle East and libraries around the world.

From the study of manuscripts the project will move on to investigate translation as an act and a process, and the manner in which translators from different faiths influenced each other in an inter-religious and

inter-cultural context.

Most of the results of the project will be published in the recently established book series Biblia Arabica: Texts and Studies, published by Brill in Leiden and edited by an international team of six scholars, including Camilla Adang, Meira Polliack and Sabine Schmidtke.

[PJW: the sentence "Compared to other translation traditions of the Bible throughout its history, the Arabic versions are the most abundant in terms of the number of surviving manuscripts and later on prints" seems to me to be incorrect, as I would guess that Latin would win hands down]