The Torah has never spoken only one Jewish language.
This remarkable edition surrounds the Hebrew Torah with several different ways Jews read and understood it. Alongside the biblical text and Rashi’s commentary appear the ancient Aramaic Targum of Onkelos, an Arabic translation and interpretation associated with Saadia Gaon, and a Persian translation by Jacob ben Joseph Tavus.
The Arabic is especially important. Saadia Gaon, one of the great Jewish scholars of the tenth century, lived in a world in which Arabic was the everyday language of enormous numbers of Jews. His Arabic translation and interpretation of the Torah, known as the Tafsir, made Scripture accessible in the language in which those Jews spoke, thought, and studied.
But look closely: the Arabic on this page is not written in Arabic letters. It is Judeo-Arabic—Arabic written in Hebrew characters. For centuries, Jewish communities generally maintained their own systems of education. Children learned to read the Hebrew alphabet for prayer and sacred study, even when Hebrew was not the language they spoke at home. When Jews wrote their everyday Arabic, it was therefore natural to write the language using the letters they already knew. The result was an enormous Judeo-Arabic literature, encompassing everything from biblical commentary and philosophy to letters, legal documents, and everyday notes.
This page makes that linguistic world visible. A Jewish reader could move from the Hebrew Torah to Aramaic, then to Arabic, without ever leaving the Hebrew alphabet. Persian appears here in Hebrew characters as well. The alphabet itself helped bind together communities speaking very different languages.
The page is therefore almost a map of the Jewish world in print. Hebrew stands at its center. Around it are Aramaic, the traditional language of Targum; Arabic, carrying the legacy of Saadia and the Jews of the Islamic world; Persian, serving Jews farther east; and Rashi, whose commentary originated in medieval northern Europe. The printer brought all of them together on a single opening.
Constantinople was an especially fitting place for such a book. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the Ottoman capital stood at the crossroads of Jewish communities whose languages and histories stretched from Europe across the Middle East. This polyglot Torah turned that diversity into a page that could be read.
