Resumen de Jewish Forerunners of the Spanish Biblia romanceada: A Thirteenth-Century Witness (Bodleian MS Hunt. 268)

Jeremy N. H. Lawrance

• Despite Church prohibitions, almost twenty medieval Bibles in Spanish survive. The Old Testament versions derived in many cases from translations from Hebrew made by Jews. These were characterized by a unique rabbinical “calque-language” that would be preserved by Sephardim for centuries after the Expulsion in 1492; but the Inquisition destroyed the medieval Jewish copies. This article studies a new witness, the oldest known: a thirteenth-century Hebrew commentary on the Hagiographa with Spanish glosses. These fully confirm the amazing continuity of the Ladino scriptolect.