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Medieval Hebrew Texts and European River Names Ephraim Nissan London [email protected]

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Medieval Hebrew Texts and European River Names Ephraim Nissan London Ephraim.Nissan@Hotmail.Co.Uk ONOMÀSTICA 5 (2019): 187–203 | RECEPCIÓ 8.3.2019 | ACCEPTACIÓ 18.9.2019 Medieval Hebrew texts and European river names Ephraim Nissan London [email protected] Abstract: The first section of theBook of Yosippon (tenth-century Italy) maps the Table of Nations (Genesis 10) onto contemporary peoples and places and this text, replete with tantalizing onomastics, also includes many European river names. An extract can be found in Elijah Capsali’s chronicle of the Ottomans 1517. The Yosippon also includes a myth of Italic antiquities and mentions a mysterious Foce Magna, apparently an estuarine city located in the region of Ostia. The article also examines an onomastically rich passage from the medieval travelogue of Benjamin of Tudela, and the association he makes between the river Gihon (a name otherwise known in relation to the Earthly Paradise or Jerusalem) and the Gurganin or the Georgians, a people from the Caspian Sea. The river Gihon is apparently what Edmund Spenser intended by Guyon in his Faerie Queene. The problems of relating the Hebrew spellings of European river names to their pronunciation are illustrated in the case of the river Rhine. Key words: river names (of the Seine, Loire, Rhine, Danube, Volga, Dnieper, Po, Ticino, Tiber, Arno, Era, Gihon, Guyon), Kiev, medieval Hebrew texts, Book of Yosippon, Table of Nations (Genesis 10), historia gentium, mythical Foce Magna city, Benjamin of Tudela, Elijah Capsali, Edmund Spenser Textos hebreus medievals i noms de rius europeus Resum: L’inici del Llibre de Yossippon (Itàlia, segle X) relaciona la «taula de les nacions» de Gènesi 10 amb pobles i llocs contemporanis, i aquest text, ple de propostes onomàstiques temptadores, també inclou noms fluvials europeus. Una versió es troba dins la crònica de l’any 1517 d’Elies Capsali sobre els otomans. El Yossippon també inclou un mite de les antiguitats itàliques, que esmenta un misteriós Foce Magna, aparentment una ciutat estuària de la zona d’Ostia. També ens ocupem d’un fragment molt ric des del punt de vista de l’onomàstica de la narració de viatges de Benjamí de Tudela, que associa el riu Gihon (el nom del qual es troba relacionat amb el paradís terrenal i amb Jerusalem) amb els gurganin, georgians d’un poble del mar Caspi. Edmund Spenser en Faerie Queene sembla que es refereix al riu Gihon quan parla del Guyon. També fem referència a qüestions relacionades amb l’ortografia hebrea de noms fluvials europeus (que tenen relació amb la pronunciació), com en el cas del riu Rin. Key words: noms de rius (del Sena, Loira, Rin, Danubi, Volga, Dnieper, Po, Ticino, Tiber, Arno, Era, Gihon, Guyon), Kíev, textos hebreus medievals, Llibre de Yossippon, Taula 187 Ephraim Nissan de les Nacions (Genesis 10), historia gentium, ciutat mítica de Foce Magna, Benjamí de Tudela, Elijah Capsali, Edmund Spenser 1 THE INCIPIT OF THE TENTH-CENTURY HEBREW BOOK OF YOSIPPON TheYosippon is a Hebrew book that adopts Biblical Hebrew as its language but in which, proper names are often in an Italian form. It was written in southern Italy in the tenth century, but a version also exists in Arabic. TheYosippon is primarily known today as the conduit by which Josephus Flavius’ history entered Jewish consciousness. The book opens, however, with a historia gentium (history of the nations) followed by a legendary tale of Italic antiquities. TheYosippon maps the Children of Japheth from the Table of Nations (Genesis 10) onto the European ethnic identities that had emerged in late antiquity and the earliest Middle Ages. Among other things, the Yosippon is credited with the earliest recorded mention of Kiev. The historiae gentium constitute one of the textual genres of the European Middle Ages (Carozzi and Taviani-Carozzi 1996) and it is hardly surprising that when reflecting on the ethnic identities that had emerged their authors should seek to find some connection to sacred history and to harmonize the new ethnography with the Table of Nations. In the mid- tenth century in southern Italy, a Hebrew book based on Josephus’ history emerged: the Book of Yosippon, written in pseudo-Biblical Hebrew and dated 953 (Flusser 1981, vol. 2:79 ff). Its first section is concerned with the Children of Japheth. Thus, the biblical Sepho, escaping to Italy, allegedly impersonated Saturn and Janus; a non-Virgilian Aeneas, crowned king of Africa, brings to Carthage a bride from Italy and builds the Carthage aqueduct because she is allergic to the local water. Hannibal’s invasion is conflated with that of the Vandals. Here, I use David Flusser’s edition (1981) and translate from the incipit of the Yosippon. Pay careful attention in the following passage to the names of the rivers: Adam, Shet, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared, Henoch, Methushelah, Noah. Noah begot Shem, Ham, and Japheth. The children of Japheth: Gomer, Ashkenaz, and Riphath, and Togarmah. And the children of Yavan: Elishah and Tarshish, Kittim and Dodanim. [Then condensed verses on the Tower of Babel.] 188 Medieval Hebrew texts and European river names These are the families of the children of Japheth and the countries where they propagated, by their languages, in their lands and nations: the children of on the (פרנצא) who dwell in the land of France ,(פרנקוס) Gomer are Francos who dwell (בריטנוס) Riphat are Britannos .(שיגנא) [River Seigne1 [i.e., Seine And 2.(לירא) [on the River Leire [i.e., Loire (ברטניא) in the land of Bretagne Seigne and Leire pour into the Sea Oceanus, i.e., the Great Sea. Togarmah are 1 I consider it likely that, here, gn in the Hebrew script reflects the scriptorial usage in the Roman script, regardless of how the word was actually pronounced in Italian. Today, the Italian name for the river Seine is Senna. 2 In medieval Italian, France’s river Loire was called Lera (though today, Loira, with the stress on the o). Dante Alighieri, however, called this river Era (which is also the name of a river in Tuscany). This occurred because he (or his milieu) took the initial [l] to be the definite article. This phenomenon occurs in Romance languages, and is known as the discretion, or deglutination, of the definite article. For example, the standard Italian name for ‘nightingale’ is usignolo, cf. Latin lusciniolus. The opposite phenomenon (of concretion, or deglutination, of the definite article) also occurs, with a form with an initial [l] originating from a noun that begins with a vowel, by mistaking the Italian definite articlel’ for the initial consonant of the noun. Both phenomena are found in Romance languages and dialects other than Italo-Romance. For example, in French, ‘the ivy’ is le lierre, which developed by concretion from an older form l’ierre (from Latin hedera). Rohlfs (1966, pp. 477–478, §341) lists many examples of concretion from Italian dialects and, moreover, points out that in Neapolitan, Egypt is called Naggitto, by concretion with the preposition in for ‘in’. Also the opposite phenomenon, i.e., discretion or deglutination of the definite article, occurs quite frequently throughout the history of Italian and its dialects, with the initial part of a noun being taken to be an adjective or a preposition (ibid., 478–480, §342). Rohlfs (1966) mentions the example of Era from Dante, on p. 479. Consider moreover that Dante was from Florence, thus, from Tuscany, and that there is a river called Era in Tuscany. It is 60 km long, and is a tributary of the River Arno from the left side. This may have made it easier for him and other Tuscans to assume that the name of the French river was the same. This is a fallacy in which theYosippon does not incur, and its author probably pronounced the name of the river as either Lera, or Leira; the Hebrew .is compatible with both forms לירא transliteration There exists a Tuscan proverb, criticizing people who all too often refer to the past nostalgically: L’Era, mal fiume, i.e., “Era is a bad river”, presumably either a tricky river to cross, or one that tends to overflow. This is based on a pun: era is also a verbal form, for ‘[it/he/she] was’. Israeli writer, translator, and poet Shlonsky exploited such puns in a poem, in which he described a situation as being “between Kvar and Ulay”, these being two Mesopotamian rivers mentioned in the Bible, yet whose names also respectively ( ּכְ בָ ר) mean ‘already’ and ‘perhaps’ in Hebrew. The name of the river, or channel, Chebar is variously folk-etymologized in Genesis Rabba 16; e.g., “because its fruits are large and .(I ּכְ בָ ר .as translated in Jastrow (1903, 619, s.v ,( ְ ּכ בָ רָ ה) ”do not go into the basket 189 Ephraim Nissan the Alans ,(פיצינק) the Pecheneg ,(כוזר) ten families,3 including the Khazars ;Flusser] (בוז) Buz ,(טורק) Turk ,(כנבינא) ‹’knbyn› ,(בולגר) the Bulgars ,(אלן) ,.i.e] (אוגר) Ugar ,(זכוך) ‹i.e. Ghuzz, east of the Khazars], ‹zkuk כוז :corrige ,All of these are camped in the north 4.(תולמץ) the Hungarians], and Tolmas and the names of their lands are like their names, and they are camped on Atil/Itil [i.e., Volga]), but Ugar and Bulgar and Pecheneg) התל the rivers of .[Slavic: Dunay] דונײ ,.Danube), i.e) דנובי are camped on the great river called who dwell in the ,(יונים ,are Greeks (Yevanim (יון) The children of Yavan 5,(אלדילם) Madai are al-Dailam .(מקדוניא) and Macedonia (יוניא) land of Ionia 6.(כורסן) who dwell in the land of Khorasan 3 The late Giorgio Raimondo Cardona provided a discussion (1966) of the children of Togarmah according to the Book of Yosippon.
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