An example of Judeo-Latin magical text from the Cairo Geniza. It is a quotation attributed to the 2nd-century philosopher Secundus the Silent when asked who God was: "An intelligible unknown, a unique being who has no equal, something sought but not comprehended".[1]
Judeo-Latin (also spelled Judaeo-Latin) is the use by Jews of the Hebrew alphabet to write Latin.[2] The term was coined by Cecil Roth to describe a small corpus of texts from the Middle Ages.[2] In the Middle Ages, there was no Judeo-Latin in the sense of "an ethnodialect used by Jews on a regular basis to communicate among themselves", and the existence of such a Jewish language under the Roman Empire is pure conjecture.[3]
The Judeo-Latin corpus consists of an Anglo-Jewish charter and Latin quotations in otherwise Hebrew works (such as anti-Christian polemics,[4] incantations and prayers).[2] Christian converts to Judaism sometimes brought with them an extensive knowledge of the Vulgate translation of the Bible. The Sefer Nizzahon Yashan and Joseph ben Nathan Official's Sefer Yosef ha-Mekanne contain extensive quotations from the Vulgate in Hebrew letters.[2] Latin technical terms sometimes appear in Hebrew texts.[2] There is evidence of the oral use of Latin formulas in dowsing, ordeals and ceremonies.[2]
^Gad Freudenthal, "Latin-into-Hebrew in the Making: Bilingual Documents in Facing Columns and Their Possible Function", pp. 59–67 in Resianne Fontaine and Gad Freudenthal (eds.), Latin-into-Hebrew: Texts and Studies, Volume One: Studies (Leiden: Brill, 2013), p. 61 and n., who quotes an earlier version of this Wikipedia article to characterize the conjecture: "a presumed Jewish language for many scattered Jewish communities of the former Roman Empire, but especially by the Jewish communities of the Italian Peninsula and Transalpine Gaul."
