Yehoshua Blau

Yehoshua Blau was born in Cluj, Transylvania, in 1919.[1] His father, Pinchas (Paul) Blau, was a founding editor of the Hungarian-language Zionist newspaper Uj Kelet.[1] Blau studied at the Jewish Gymnasium in Budapest and Baden, and began studies in Jewish subjects at the Rabbinical Seminary and in Semitic languages at the University of Vienna.[1]

When Austria was occupied by the Nazis in 1938, Blau and his parents fled and immigrated to Mandatory Palestine.[1] He continued his studies in Hebrew, Bible, and Arabic at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, earning an M.A. in 1942.[1] He married Shulamit in 1945; they had two children, a scientist son and a daughter who became an Arabic teacher.[2]

Blau presented his dissertation, The Grammar of Judeo-Arabic, in 1948. During the War of Independence he served in the army and took part in battles in Jerusalem, and he received his Ph.D. in 1950.[1] Before establishing his full academic career, he taught in high schools and published several Hebrew grammars.[2]

Blau was appointed senior lecturer at Tel Aviv University in 1956 and lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1957.[1] He became a professor at the Hebrew University in 1962 and held the Max Schloessinger Chair in Arabic Languages and Literature, teaching there until his formal retirement in 1986.[1][2] As professor emeritus he continued to informally guide graduate students into his late nineties.[2]

In 1975, Blau was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and shared the role of senior scholar at Association for Jewish Studies conferences held at the University of Michigan and New York University. His assigned topics were the historical periods of Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic.[3] His research addressed Biblical Hebrew grammar, Semitic languages, medieval Arabic, Middle Arabic, Judeo-Arabic, Christian Arabic, and Genizah manuscripts.[1]

Blau was active in the Academy of the Hebrew Language from the 1950s, served as its president from 1981 to 1993, and edited the academy's journal Leshonenu from 1981 to 1999.[1] He continued to attend plenary sessions involved in ratifying new Hebrew terms and grammatical decisions until shortly before his death.[2] He was elected to the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 1968 and headed its Humanities Division from 1989 to 1995.[1][2] He was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 1983 and was also an honorary fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and a corresponding fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research.[1][2]

Judaeo-Arabic — Arabic used by Jews, typically written in Hebrew script and incorporating Hebrew and Aramaic vocabulary — stood at the center of Blau's scholarly output.[4] His foundational monograph The Emergence and Linguistic Background of Judaeo-Arabic: A Study of the Origins of Middle Arabic appeared in 1965 and reached a third edition in 1999; a second edition was issued in Jerusalem in 1981 by the Ben-Zvi Institute for the Study of Jewish Communities in the East.[5][1] The work argued that the ancient Neo-Arabic preserved in Judaeo-Arabic texts constitutes the missing link between Classical Arabic and the modern Arabic dialects.[6]

Blau distinguished two varieties within Middle Arabic: Standard Middle Arabic, defined as Neo-Arabic with a Classical Arabic admixture, and Substandard Middle Arabic, defined as Classical Arabic with Neo-Arabic admixture.[4] He explained that Jews adopted Arabic for commentaries and works of religious law because Arabic had superseded Aramaic in those fields, while Hebrew remained the language of poetry — a pattern he attributed to the lack of active Jewish command of Old Arabic, the absence of a Jewish religious-poetry tradition in Arabic, and the continuation of Hebrew piyyut conventions.[4]

Blau characterized Judaeo-Arabic as a special sociolect of Middle Arabic, distinguished above all by the almost universal use of Hebrew script and by the incorporation of Hebrew and Aramaic vocabulary.[4] He argued that a text should still be classified as Arabic rather than Hebrew when Arabic functional words and bound morphemes appear within Hebrew phrases, because the reverse pattern does not occur. He also observed that Hebrew words were frequently absorbed into Arabic grammatical patterns, especially in religious and Talmudic-legal vocabulary.[4]

His 1988 volume Studies in Middle Arabic and its Judaeo-Arabic Variety, published by the Magnes Press in Jerusalem, ran to 482 pages and brought together studies primarily concerning medieval Judaeo-Arabic.[6] Together with Professor Simon Hopkins, Blau discovered an early phonetic method of Judaeo-Arabic spelling, a finding described as enabling scholars to reconstruct the beginnings of Judaeo-Arabic culture.[1] His A Handbook of Early Middle Arabic presented Judaeo-Arabic texts in both Hebrew characters and Arabic transliteration.[7] His work on Middle Arabic and Christian Arabic provided extensive analysis of literatures that had previously received insufficient scholarly attention because they fell outside the traditional scope of Muslim-culture studies.[1]

His A Grammar of Mediaeval Judaeo-Arabic later appeared in expanded and revised editions.[1][8] A companion work, A Grammar of Christian Arabic, appeared in three volumes in 1966–67 and provided a foundation for research into medieval Christian Arabic alongside Judaeo-Arabic.[1]

Blau brought the same historical-linguistic approach he applied to Arabic to the study of Biblical and Medieval Hebrew. His English-language A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew was published in 1976 by Harrassowitz in Wiesbaden and included Hebrew textual excerpts from Genesis 37–45 and Jonah 1–4.[9] His Phonology and Morphology of Biblical Hebrew, first issued in 1971, is described as a foundational work for understanding Biblical Hebrew through a historical approach and later appeared in an updated and expanded edition.[1][10]

Blau's Hebrew Linguistics, published in 2013 by the Bialik Institute, brought together twenty-five articles on the Hebrew language and its history, with particular focus on the early history of Biblical Hebrew.[11] His theoretical position held that Biblical Hebrew appears surprisingly uniform because it was standardized and subsequently affected by the addition of vowel letters, vowel marks, and cantillation marks. He distinguished its archaic syntax from what he regarded as a relatively late stage of phonological and morphological development and argued that its historical study requires knowledge of its Northwest Semitic background.[4]

On the history of Hebrew more broadly, Blau argued that the Middle Hebrew of the tannaim derived from the living spoken language of Judea, citing its use in some Bar Kokhba letters as evidence, and that this form became extinct after the suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt.[4] He described Modern Hebrew as open to all historical layers of Hebrew, with morphology that is mainly Biblical, although the selection among competing forms was often influenced by Middle Hebrew. He further attributed major changes in Modern Hebrew phraseology, and lesser changes in syntax, to the influence of modern standard European languages.[4]

His pedagogical contributions to Hebrew education included the instructional series Dikduk Ivri Shittati, Yesodot ha-Tachbir, and the two-volume Yesodot Torat ha-Lashon, works from which thousands of high-school and college students learned Hebrew grammar.[1]

Among Blau's most labor-intensive projects was his annotated critical edition of Teshuvot ha-Rambam (the Responsa of Maimonides), assembled from Genizah fragments, manuscripts, and printed books and presented in the Arabic originals with corrections, translations, and notes. The edition appeared in three volumes between 1957 and 1961 and was supplemented by an additional volume in 1986.[12][1]

His Dictionary of Mediaeval Judaeo-Arabic Texts, published in Jerusalem by the Academy of the Hebrew Language in 2006 and edited for publication by Yechiel Kara, provided entries with explanations in English and Arabic and was intended as the capstone of his long-term Middle Arabic research project.[1][13] He also co-authored Otzar Leshon ha-Mikra (A Concordance and Dictionary of the Bible) with S. A. Loewenstamm and M. Z. Kaddari, published in three volumes in 1957, 1960, and 1968.[1]

Beyond his specializations in Judaeo-Arabic and Hebrew, Blau made significant contributions to comparative Semitic linguistics. His 1970 monograph On Pseudo-Corrections in Some Semitic Languages was published jointly by the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and Brill.[14] His comparative articles included studies of the origins of open and closed e in Proto-Syriac (1969), pronouns and the definite article in Semitic languages (1974), the parallel development of the feminine ending -at across Semitic (1980), and Arabic dialectal features paralleled in Hebrew and Aramaic (1985–86).[14]

He also examined the interaction between Arabic and Aramaic, contributing a chapter titled "The Influence of Living Aramaic on Ancient South Palestinian Christian Arabic" to the 1983 volume Arameans, Aramaic and the Aramaic Literary Tradition, edited by Michael Sokoloff and published by Bar-Ilan University Press.[15] A 2015 article on the extension of Targumic words in the wake of Biblical homonymic and polysemic vocables appeared in Leshonenu, documenting his continued scholarly productivity into his mid-nineties.[15]

Blau received the Ben-Zvi Prize in 1980, the Israel Prize in 1985 in the field of linguistics and Hebrew language, the Rothschild Prize in 1992, the Wilhelm Bacher Medal of Hungary in 1999, and the Mark Lidzbarski Medal in 2000.[1][16] His election to the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities came in 1968, and he later served as head of its Humanities Division from 1989 to 1995.[1][2] He was additionally elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and was an honorary fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society.[1][2]

Yehoshua Blau died in Jerusalem on October 20, 2020, at the age of 101.[2] His scholarly career extended from his doctoral work in the late 1940s to an article published in Leshonenu in 2015.[1][15] His books and hundreds of articles established him as a leading authority on Judaeo-Arabic and a prominent expert across multiple branches of Semitic linguistics.[1]

Blau's work provided foundations for the study of medieval Judaeo-Arabic and Christian Arabic and for historical approaches to Biblical Hebrew phonology and morphology.[1][10] His classification of Judaeo-Arabic as a sociolect of Middle Arabic and his reconstruction of early phonetic spelling conventions with Simon Hopkins expanded the tools available for studying Jewish literary and intellectual culture in the Arabic-speaking world.[4][1] His pedagogical grammars shaped the Hebrew education of thousands of students, while his service at the Hebrew University, the Academy of the Hebrew Language, and the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities made him a central figure in Israeli humanistic scholarship.[1][1]

Approved reference sources differ on the end date of Blau's presidency of the Academy of the Hebrew Language. The Encyclopaedia Judaica gives his term as 1981 to 1993, while the Jewish Virtual Library lists it as 1981 to 1988.[1][17] Both sources identify him as editor of Leshonenu from 1981 to 1999.[1][17]