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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 Capsali’ 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 of Tudela, and the association makes between the river Gihon (a name otherwise known in relation to the Earthly Paradise or ) 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, , Volga, , Po, Ticino, Tiber, Arno, Era, Gihon, Guyon), Kiev, 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: ’inici del Llibre de Yossippon (Itàlia, segle ) 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 troba dins la crònica de l’any 1517 ’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 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 . TheYosippon is primarily known today as the conduit by which 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 from the Table of Nations (Genesis 10) onto the European ethnic identities that had emerged in late antiquity and the earliest . 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 . Here, I use 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: , Shet, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared, Henoch, Methushelah, . Noah begot , , and Japheth. The children of Japheth: , Ashkenaz, and Riphath, and . And the children of Yavan: and , and Dodanim. [Then condensed verses on the .] 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 ,(פרנקוס) Gomer are Francos who dwell (בריטנוס) Riphat are Britannos .(שיגנא) [River Seigne1 [i.., 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 ). 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 , and is known as the discretion, or deglutination, of the definite article. For example, the standard Italian name for ‘nightingale’ is usignolo, cf. 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 , 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, 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 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 , 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 ,(פיצינק) the Pecheneg ,(כוזר) ten families,3 including the ;Flusser] (בוז) Buz ,(טורק) Turk ,(כנבינא) ‹’knbyn› ,(בולגר) the ,(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 ], 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) 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. 4 In the words of Pritsak (1982, 39): “Constantine Porphyrogenitus has recorded the name [Gosta(‑s)] in Greek as Κώστας […] According to Constantine, Gosta(‑s) was the name (or title) of a Pecheneg governor in the period between 860 and 889, that is, after the had occupied the southern Ukraine. This Pecheneg province had the name Ταλμάτ (Talmáč; Yōsippōn has the Bolgarian variant of that “Turkic” name, with ṬYLMṢ, tilmáč) and was situated on the left bank of the ,טילמץ ;/the change /a/>/i Dnieper”, and, to say it with Constantine Porphyrogenitus’ Ad Administrando Imperio: “beyond the Dnieper River towards the eastern and northern parts that face Uzia, and Khazaria and Alania and Kherson and the rest of the Crimean Regions (τὰ κ λ ί μ α τα) ”. 5 In her critical edition and Hebrew translation of the Arabic version of the tenth- century Book of Yosippon (best known in its Hebrew version, from southern Italy), the late Shulamit Sela made the following comment about one detail in the current (early medieval) identifications of the items in the Table of Nations fromGenesis: “Madai, they are al-Dailam, who dwell in the country of Khorasān” (Sela 2009, Vol. 1, 102, my trans.). Among her other considerations in fn. 10, Sela remarked that also Ibn Khaldūn, citing Ibn Iṣḥāq, made the same identification of Madai with Dailam. Sela suggested that a bilingual pun involving Hebrew and Arabic is involved: Madai can be interpreted as Ma day? “What is enough?” or “Why enough?”, and the Arabic Day lam? can be interpreted as “Why day?” (i.e., day here is the Hebrew word inside the Arabic question). Sela credited (ibid., fn. 18, pp. 102–103) C. Zuckerman for dating the Table of Nations of the Yosippon to no later than 945, because that is when a Rus’ invasion of the region north of the Caspian ended (cf. Zuckerman 1995). 6 The name of Khorasān or Khurasān, a country in northeastern Iran, and presently lying in both Iran and Afghanistan, is interpreted by some of the Pathan people of Afghanistan as being derived from the utteranceKha urasan, i.e., “We got here safely”, this referring to the myth about ancestors having emigrated there (and being identified, by a myth, with the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel). As part of the legacy of there having been medieval emirates in southern Italy, at present in the Calabria region (the western tip of the Italian “boot”), the family name Corasaniti is found, which etymologically means ‘ones originating in Khorasān’. In 190 Medieval Hebrew texts and European river names

,.Toscana, i.e) תושכנא who dwell in the land of ,(תושקני) are Toscani .([i.e., Arno, which crosses the town of Pisa] פיסא) Tuscany) on the River Pisa are Russi [Russians, or Varangian .(שקשני) are Saxoni dwell on the Great Sea.8 Russi are (אינגליסי) Saxoni and Inglesi .(רוסי) Rus’]7 of Kiev: thus, the Dnieper]9 which pours] (כיוא) camped on the River Kiwa Gurgan: the Caspian Sea). Elishah are Alemania) גורגאן [into the Sea [of שבתימו Giovo])10 and] יוב) who dwell between the mountains of Yov (אלמניא) Longobardi), who) לנגוברדי Sebtimo).11 And of them [i.e., they include] the) came from beyond the mountains of Yov and Sebtimo, and conquered Italy, And .(תיצאו) Pao)12 and Ticino פאו) and dwell there till now on the rivers Po Italian: Borgogna]) who] בורגוניא) of them [the ]: the Burgundians ביוריא) Rhône). And of them: the Bavarians רודנו) dwell on the River Ròdano

Calabria during the ninth century there were Arab emirates in Tropea, Santa Severina, and Amantea. The family nameCorasaniti was signalled by D’Erme to Tonghini (Tonghini 1997, 218, . 16). Moreover, D’Erme was able to detect the impact of an Iranic epos on Calabrian folkloric narratives; see D’Erme (1977). 7 By Rus’, a particular medieval polity or cluster of polities as well as the Scandinavian (Varangian) ethnic elite of early medieval Russia is intended. 8 These are the North Sea and England’s Anglo-Saxons. Flusser thought that the Angli referred to were the ones from the Continent before Britain’s conquest, but I disagree. 9 Kiev was apparently named after a person called Kūya. This is a Khwārizmian Iranic name, and it originates from “a minister of the armed forces of the Khazar state”. More precisely, “the offices of ministers were hereditary”, and “Aḥmad . Kūya was the Khazarian wazīr during the time when Mas‘ūdi was composing his work in the thirties and forties of the tenth century” (Pritsak 1982, 53–55). A typical Eastern Iranian adjectival suffix‑awa was added. This yielded the toponym Kūjāwa.* “Thus the name Kiev itself, in its oldest, non-Slavonic, form is, linguistically speaking, of Khwārizmian (eastern Iranian) origin, but politically and culturally it must be recognized as Khazarian ( and Onoġurian) element” (Pritsak 1982, 55). 10 This is the passo del Giovio (i.e. the Jaufenpass or the passo di Monte Giovo), south of the ethnically German town today known as Vipiteno, in South Tyrol, Italy. This is not Mons Jovis as denoting the Greater St. Bernard Pass in the western , as the Longobards did not enter Italy via this route (ideed, the Burgundian-held Greater St. Bernard is ruled out as the Longobards’ point of entry into Italy). Flusser, whose edition is in other respects admirable, got one of these Alpine passes wrong. It should also be stressed that the passo del Giovio should not be mistaken for the municipality of Giovo, in the province of Trento, which has almost 2300 inhabitants and an altitude ranging from 207 to 1107 a.s.l. 11 The Septimerpass, in the eastern Alps. Its present-day Italian name ispasso di Sett. 12 Now Po. From Latin Padus, hence the archaic form Pao. 191 Ephraim Nissan

And the .(רינוס) Byzantine Greek: Baiuria]), who dwell on the River Rhine] i.e., into the] (ביניטיקיא) Ticino and the Po pour into the sea of Veneticia Adriatic Sea]. Tarshish came with Macedonia into the same religion, and from them, ,And when the Ishmaelites conquered the land of Tarsus .(תרסוס) Tarsus its inhabitants fled into the territory of the children of Yavan [i.e., into the but intending )עם ’remnant of the ], and they fight ‘with ,(רומאני) against’) the Ishmaelites who are in Tarsus. Kittim are Romani‘ Kanpanya [probably the כנפנײא) who are camped in the plain of Campania .(Tibereo תיביריאו) Campagna Romana]) on the River Tiber

And so forth. Elijah Càpsali (1483–1555) of Candia, i.e., Crete, authored, in Hebrew in 1517, a history of the Ottomans, along with histories of and Spain (Capsali, edn. 1975–1983). He wrote it in a punning musive style (a mosaic of adapted quotations, especially biblical). Chapter 3, in Book One, speaks of the “generation of the propagation” (dor ha‑pallagáh) from the Tower of Babel. It abounds with narratives, but in those passages in which genealogies from the Table of Nations are quoted, identifications are missing, except in one short passage about the Children of Japheth. It has, in fact, been lifted from theYosippon , albeit from a rather inferior version than that of Flusser’s text. According to Capsali’s text (Capsali, edn. 1975–1983, 35):

the children ,(כורסאן) who dwell in the land of Khorasan אזרל״וס Madai are ,(מוקדוני״אה) who dwell in Macedonia (היונים) are the Greek (בני יון) of Yavan on the River (תשקנ״א) Tubal are the ones who dwell in the land of Toscana Tiras are ,(שבשא״ני) [Meshech are Sabsani [Saxoni, Saxonians ,(פישי״אה) Pisia [Inglesi, English] (אונגלי״זי) and Unglezi (בוש״ני) [Bosni[ans ,(רוסי״ש) Russis are camped on the river (רומ״י) who dwell on the Great Sea, Rumi/Romi [?]Riphath are Bretons ,(גורג״אן) which pours into the Sea of Gurgan בירא on the River Leira בירטנ״יא ”who dwell in the land of “Birtanya (ברטונ״ים) .and its waters pour into the Sea Oceanus which is the Great Sea (ליר״א) Togarmah are ten families, and these are their names, each by name and [corrupted, i.e. Pechenegs] (פרצי״נך) and Partsinakh (כוז״ר) family: and Turki (נרבי״נא) and Narbina (בול״גר) and Bulgar (אליקנ״וס) and Alikanos and Talmah (אונג״רי) and Ungari (זכו״ך) and Zekhukh (בו״ז) and Buz (טור״קי) All of these are camped in the north, and their countries are named .(תלמ״ה) are Atlakh (הית״ל) after them, and the ones camped on the rivers of Atil/Itil 192 Medieval Hebrew texts and European river names

But Ungar and Bulgar and Partsinakh are camped on the great river .(אטלאך) .and they dwell there until this very day (דונב״י) called Donabi Capsali’s Ch. 3 concludes by explaining that as the Turks converted to the religion of the Ishmaelites, they were annexed to , because Mehmet (Turkish for ) was descended from Ishmael, himself descended from Shem, the son of Noah, even though the Turks are descended from among the children of Gomer, the son of Japheth, the son of Noah. Ch. 5 tells how the Turks travelled from the East into Anatolia (emulating the wording of Gen. 11:2, concerning ‘ar, the area in where humans settled after the Deluge),13 and the story is told of how Othman had a dream, won a contest, and was crowned. In Ch. 6, the constellations bless Othman (but we detect irony in the onomastics: the constellation of Kĕsīl, i.e. Orion, blesses Othman with huge wisdom; in Hebrew however, kĕsīl also denotes ‘fool’). See Nissan (forthcoming).

2 THE MYTHICAL ESTUARINE CITY IN LATIUM, FOCE MAGNA, IN THE YOSIPPON

From the list of peoples in the Yosippon, we can see that the relation of the Children of Japheth to Asia Minor had been totally severed, with the notable exception of Tarsus and Ionia. Following the list of peoples, the Yosippon goes on to recount the tale of Italic antiquities: “When

13 There exists a modern hypothesis identifying this toponym from Genesis with Sumer. “According to the advocates of the "Šin‘ār=Šumer" hypothesis, the name Šumer itself is a dialectal form of ki‑en‑gi(‑), the current designation of southern Mesopotamia in Sumerian texts. Assuming that ki‑en‑gi(‑r) is to be interpreted as /Kengir/, one could argue that the Sumerian /ng/ became a /m/ in the Akkadian variant of the name, /nḫ/ in the Hittite and el-Amarna designations, and /n‘/ in the Šin‘ār”, as explained by van der Toorn and van der Horst (1990, 3), who disagree: “Nearly all the above arguments are open to criticism. It is not certain at all that ki‑en‑gi(‑r) is to be understood as /Kengir/”, and so forth (ibid., 4). “In the light of these observations, it is uncertain whether Šin‘ār derives from Šumer. In spite of the linguistic difficulties, however, the two must in some way be connected. In all likelihood the name is of a pre- Sumerian origin, which adds to the complexity of the problem. Ran Zadok’s proposed solution, namely, that the Hebrew designation and its various equivalents go back to the name of one of the Kassite tribes, the Šamḫarites, is not very attractive either” (van der Toorn and van der Horst 1990, 4, citing Zadok 1984). 193 Ephraim Nissan the Lord dispersed the humans on earth and they were subdivided into subdivisions, the children of Kittim constituted one group, and they and they dwelt there on ,(כנפנײא) camped in the plain of Campania Tibereo). And the children of Tubal camped תיביריאו) the River Tiber and their border was on the River Tiber. They ,(תושכנא) in Toscana :after her builders (boneiha (סביני) built a city, and they called it Sabini The children of Kittim built .(אשר בנו אותה) who had built it (על שם בוניה Foce Magna: i.e., the Great Estuary)”. In my) פוצימגנא a city and called it opinion, Focemagna (‘the Great Estuary’) is a legendary precursor of the port city of Ostia. Interestingly, the Yosippon has Tuscany border on the Campania region (or did he mean the Campagna Romana?), and the border is on the river Tiber. Now Campania is south of Latium. Flusser (1981, 9, fn. 4) points out that the Yosippon identifies Tubal with the Sabini (Sabines), and that even though there never was a city called Sabini, there was an important county called Sabino, at the time when the Yosippon was written. Flusser (ibid., fn. 5) admits he “did not manage to identify this legendary town. The second element in this name appears to be magna, i.e., ‘great’ in Latin”, while it seems quite clear to me that the first element is Italianfoce , denoting the mouth or estuary of a river. Concerning the non-Virgilian narrative of Aeneas in the Yosippon, and also concerning Focemagna, I had an exchange of emails with the classicist Mike Fontaine, and on 4 June 2015 I wrote, among other things, that “the Aeneid was famous, but belonged in Rome’s high culture. But the plot, much simplified, trickled down socially, until eventually it became hardly recognisable. For example, the Book of Josippon mentions an apparently legendary ancient city of Focemagna (with the ‘gn’ in the Italian compound still pronounced g + n), and therefore, the compound meaning ‘big estuary’ in Italian, it must be where the Tiber reaches the sea”. There is also the possibility that the spellinggn in the Yosippon (using the Hebrew letters and ) was just a scriptorial convention (reflecting that convention when using the Roman script), and that the pronunciation was already [ññ]; I find this quite likely. In my correspondence with Prof. Fontaine (4 June 2015), I also wrote: “Instead of just the town of Ostia, they imagined some big city”. Fontaine replied on June the 8th: “This is great, thank you! The legendary city of

194 Medieval Hebrew texts and European river names Focemagna sounds much like Virgil’s Laurentum, which (the experts say) was never a real city. I wonder if there could be a connection somehow”.

3 NAMING THE RHINE: BETWEEN THE HEBREW TRANSCRIPTION AND PRONUNCIATION

.‹rynws› רינוס We have seen that in the Yosippon, the river Rhine is called This spelling is also found in other medieval Hebrew texts. From the Hebrew transcription, it is not obvious which pronunciation this ryynws›, and› רײנוס represents. In present-day Hebrew, the spelling is the pronunciation is ['raynus]. In present-day , the Rhine is called .(pronounced der rayn, cf. German der Rhein) ר דער ײַ ן In the Hebrew script as used when writing the Hebrew and languages, the only comprises consonants, but some letters (the one for the , as well as the ones for , , ) can be used in a mute role (called a ), in order to signal the position of a vowel. For example, a spelling with w may signal the position of the vowel o or of the vowel u. A spelling with y (the letter yod) may signal the position of the vowel i or of the vowel e. A spelling with yy signals that the y is there in a consonantal role, and has to be read as a glide. Likewise, a spelling with ww signals that the letter is consonantal, rather than just as a mater lectionis. When the text consists of Hebrew words, readers rely on their familiarity with the lexicon and word-forms from morphology, but when non-Semitic words are transcribed in the Hebrew script (except when diacritical marks for are employed along with the letters of the alphabet), guessing is of little help, and one is supposed to already possess the word when eventually coming across its transcription in a written text. אFor example, note the difference, enabled by there being the letter ,’Palaeocene‘) פליאוקן Pliocene’) and‘) פליוקן for the glottal stop, between inserted as a mater lectionis in order to א with an פאליאוקן also written ,appears in its consonantal role א signal the vowel a, whereas the second as a glottal stop). rynws› in medieval› רינןם Concerning the river Rhine being called Hebrew texts, Jits van Straten remarks (2013, 276–277):

195 Ephraim Nissan

[Max] Weinreich’s transcription of the name of the Rhine as it appears in the Medieval as rinus, which he calls linguistic evidence, is unnecessarily complicated and historically unnecessary as well. Transcription into renus is historically more precise. Renus is the Latin name of the river, which was also used in the German literature. Why should the Jewish inhabitants of Cologne have used another name? Originally, they spoke Latin as well. The use of the Hebrew letter jod for the vowel e is quite common, as A. Darmsteter14 observed in 1872. Furthermore, keeping to Germany, there are 28 ways in which the name Regensburg appears in the Judaica,15 ten of these having a jod for the first lettere in Regensburg.

In fact, as van Straten points out, “Jews lived in Cologne continuously from before 321 until 1423/24. The reason that nothing is known about a Jewish presence in Cologne between the 4th and 11th century, is mainly due to the capture of Cologne by the Vikings who destroyed the archives” (van Straten 2013, 276). A pre-Carolingian synagogue was destroyed in the 780/790 earthquake (as was an underground hypocaust system, whose remains were discovered in 2010, and which “[d]uring the early fourth century [was] installed in an existing first-century building”), then a new Carolingian floor was built and the building was repaired or rebuilt ibid.( , 275–276).

4 THE RIVER GUYON FROM EDMUND SPENSER’S FAERIE QUEENE, THE BIBLICAL GIHON, AND BENJAMIN OF TUDELA’S GEORGIANS RESIDING ON THE BANKS OF THE GIHON

In 1960, Fowler wrote as follows about Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1589–1596), concerning a misunderstood river name which, Fowler claimed, was actually the Gihon (Giḥón), one of the four rivers formed from the river issuing out of Paradise, whereas in 1919 it had been claimed that the river was a river from the recently discovered New World:

14 Referring to Arsène Darmsteter (1846–1888). 15 TheGermania Judaica research project is a list of all human settlements in the German Empire that have ever had Jewish inhabitants, and entry by entry the sources are given together with the forms of the toponyms. 196 Medieval Hebrew texts and European river names

On the analogy of other Books of the Faerie Queene, we should expect the name of the hero of Book II to have some meaning or significant mythological association. Yet this is apparently not so; for the only current explanation of Guyon, Lilian Winstanley’s, is of another order. She connects it with the Guyan (Guienne) of Elizabethan chronicles, thus making way for an historical allegorisation identifying Guyon with Coligny.16 The true explanation is more marvellous, and more in keeping with the usual precision of our literature’s most curious mythologist. In Gen. ii. 10–14, we read that a “river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads. . . . And the name of the second river is Gihon: the same is it that compasseth the whole land of .” Josephus (Ant[iquitates] Iud[aicae] I. i. 3), in his discussion of the four rivers of Paradise, correctly interprets Γηών — which he says is called the (Νει̃λον) by the Greeks — as “that which wells up to us from the opposite world” (Heb[rew] Gîhôn, a bursting forth). But for the medieval world, the sound etymology of Josephus was to be ousted by others, less sound, which his elder contemporary Philo was using for a mystical interpretation of the rivers. In Philo’s Platonizing allegories, Eden is the wisdom of God, from which emanates the generic virtue of the river before its division. The four distributaries — Pheison, Geon, , and — signify the particular virtues springing from this generic virtue (Leg. Alleg. I. xix). The first river, Pheison, is Prudence (xxi). The second, Geon, is courage (ἀνδρεία), because Γηών means the breast, the abode of courage; also because it flows round Ethiopia (that is, lowness), and cowardice is low. Thirdly, the tiger is the animal least capable of being tamed; Tigris, therefore, must be self-mastery. Euphrates (“fruitful”) is justice, the fourth virtue, which appears when the others are in harmony. The particular order of the virtues depends on their correspondence with the reasonable, passionate, and lustful parts, in a tripartite division of the body. […]17

16 Fowler, pp. 289–290, citing Lilian Winstanley, “Introduction” to: Edmund Spencer, The Faerie Queene, Book II, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn. 1919, pp. lxii–lxxix. 17 On pp. 291–292, Fowler argues: “There is no reason why Spenser should not have learned the allegorisation of Geon as Temperance directly from Ambrose, or from Philo, who was obligatory reading for any synchretising Platonist. But if an intermediate source is insisted on, there is one in the mythographer Valeriano”. 197 Ephraim Nissan

is one of the rivers of the (Gen. 2:13), as (ּגִיחֹון) Giḥón well as a spring and torrent near Jerusalem (:33,38,45; 2 Chron. 32:30, 33:14). Gijón (whose name is pronounced the same as Hebrew is a city on Spain’s northern coast, north of Oviedo. This is a case (ּגִיחֹון of fortuitous homonymy. In the medieval travelogue written in Hebrew (very soon after translated into Latin) by Benjamin of Tudela,18 the author listed countries whose Jewish communities submitted themselves to the authority of the Exilarch in Mesopotamia; here, he apparently identified the river Giḥón with a river in the :

And all the communities of Shin‘ar [i.e., ], and Persia, and Khurasan and Diyarbakir(?),19 ,(אל־ימן) which is ,(ושבא) and Sheba (וכראסאן) and all the land of Aram-Naharaim,20 who dwell on the mountains of Ararat, and the land of Alania,21 which is a country surrounded by mountains, and it has22 no exit except the Iron Gates made by Alexander, and they broke them. and 24,(סיבריה) And the nation called Alan23 is there. And the land of Siberia all of the country of the Togarmim (Turks)25 until the mountains of (?),26 and ‹who are called ‹gwrgnyn (גורגן ‹corr. ‹gwrgn גורנן) ‹the land of ‹gwrnn gorganin)27 [This Hebrew-script spelling unvoices the last consonant גורגנין)

18 Benjamin of Tudela went back to Spain in 1172/3. His reports are reliable for southern France, Italy, Sicily, the Greek islands, the Holy Land, and also Mesopotamia. as though it meant: “A friend) ידיד ביך :but in MS Rome די אר כלך :Spelled variously 19 which comes close to Diyarbakir, like in MS ודיאר בך :is in you (.)”); in edn. ודיארביך :Epstein .in both MS Epstein and edn. Asher קוט,But quite differently 20 אלינײא :and MS Epstein אלניה :vs. edn. Asher אל־ניה Spelled 21 22 Var. edn. Asher: they have [no exit etc.]. אלאן :but edn. Asher אלן Spelled 23 ;Elsewhere, the toponym is badly misspelled סיבריא :In MS Epstein the spelling is 24 which would suggest that this is the “land of) שכריה :and MS Rome סיכביא :edn. Asher .(”[ ׁשֵ כָ ר] beer וכל ארץ התוגרמים 25 The אסנה :’), and in edn. Asher‘) אשור :but in MS Rome אסוה Spelled 26 reading in MS Rome is the lectio facilior; is it nevertheless the correct version? 27 The Georgians of the Caucasus. Note, however, that Jurjān, properly the name of a town and a river, can also be understood as referring to an entire a region which corresponds to areas of Iran adjacent to Turkmenistan on the Caspian shores, along with present-day western Turkmenistan. 198 Medieval Hebrew texts and European river names

(from d to ): ‹smrknt›. But in the Yosippon’s versions, this toponym and they are ,(גיחון) is variously spelled.] who dwell on the River Giḥon the Girgashites [one of the Canaanite peoples from the Pentateuch, who supposedly emigrated] and are engaged in the religion of the Christians; ,‹and the land of ‹tɁwbwt 28,(סמרכנת) and until the gates of Samarkand but in edn. Asher: the וארץ טובות וארץ הודו) and the country of good countries [with agreement in the plural] until the country of India: The Exilarch [the Jewish communal leader in .(וארצות טובות ועד ארץ הודו Baghdad] gives them the permission, in all of those communities, to appoint upon each and every community a rabbi and a cantor, because they come to him to obtain the ordaining and the permission, and they bring to him gifts and presents from the ends of the earth.

This subdivision into countries makes sense, when one considers the polities of the Near East and Caucasus around the year 1200, or somewhat earlier. Benjamin of Tudela himself went back to Spain in 1172/3. His identification of the river Giḥón may have been transmitted to him orally by some informant and may have been motivated by some folk-etymology. Apart from appearing in relation to the Earthly Paradise, the river Giḥón also refers to the waterspring from which the waters of the Pool of Siloah are obtained. The Pool of Siloah Šillóa( ḥ) in Jerusalem stores water from the Gihon (Giḥón) Spring in the Kidron Valley (also known as the Valley of ), and the waterspring is known in European languages as the Fountain of the Virgin or the Fountain of Siloam. The Wikipedia entry for “Gihon Spring” states that this waterspring is29

[o]ne of the world’s major intermittent springs – and a reliable water source that made human settlement possible in ancient Jerusalem – the spring was not only used for drinking water, but also initially for irrigation of gardens in the adjacent Kidron Valley which provided a food source for the ancient settlement.

as though it meant “the cities” or “the) המדינות :Variously spelled. In edn. Asher 28 as though in relation to) שנירנית provinces”). In MS Rome the reading is unclear, either Mt. Sĕnir, i.e., Mt. Hermon, north of the Bashan Heights, to the northeast of the Galilee) .(’as though in relation to ‘joy) שמחית or 29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gihon_Spring. 199 Ephraim Nissan

The spring rises in a cave 20 feet by 7. Being intermittent, it required the excavation of the Pool of Siloam which stored the large amount of water needed for the town when the spring was not flowing. The spring has the singular characteristic of being intermittent, flowing from three to five times daily in winter, twice daily in summer, and only once daily in autumn. This peculiarity is accounted for by the supposition that the outlet from the reservoir is by a passage in the form of a siphon. The same entry also explains that “The name Gihon is thought to derive from the Hebrew Giha which means ‘gushing forth’” (the action name is gīḥā),́ and that “The name Fountain of the Virgin derives from legend that here Mary washed the swaddling clothes of ”. [Also note, in Jerusalem, “Mary’s bath”, Ḥammām al‑Sáyyidah Máryam: legends claim that Mary bathed there (Dow 1996, 91), or that the Queen of Sheba did. An aqueduct was first provided by King who had a tunnel (the Shiloah Tunnel, Niqbát hašŠillóaḥ) excavated, connecting the Gihon Spring to the Pool of Siloah.

5 CONCLUDING REMARKS

Medieval Hebrew texts are replete with toponyms, including the names of rivers. Here, we have considered the incipit of the tenth-century Book of Yosippon, a passage that relates the Table of Nations from Genesis 10 to early medieval peoples or places. For example, the Yosippon contains the earliest mention of Kiev, but it does so by referring to the Dnieper as the “River [of] Kiwa”, just as the same passage refers to the Arno as the “River [of] Pisa”. The second section of this study is concerned with the tantalizing mention, in a part of the Yosippon dealing with imagined pre- Roman Italic antiquities, of a mythical city in Latium, Foce Magna, which on the evidence of its name would have been an estuarine city in Ostia, at the mouth of the Tiber. In the third section, we considered the problem of the relation between medieval Hebrew transcriptions and the phonetics of toponyms, in particular in mentions of the Rhine. We then turned to a hypothesis that associates the river Guyon from Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene with the river Gihon mentioned in Genesis, one of the four rivers issuing forth from the Earthly Paradise. We also considered how

200 Medieval Hebrew texts and European river names Benjamin of Tudela’s travelogue associates the river Gihon with a people of the Caucasus or the Caspian Sea.

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202 Medieval Hebrew texts and European river names van der Toorn, . and P.W. van der Horst. 1990. Nimrod Before and After the Bible. The Harvard Theological Review 83(1): 1–29. van Straten, . 2013. Demography and the Dissemination of Yiddish in . In Knaanic Language: Structure and Historical Background. Proceedings of a Conference Held in on October 25– 26, 2012, ed. O. Bláha, R. Dittmann and L. Uličná, 269–281. (Judaica, 9.) Prague: Academia. Winstanley, L. 1919. Introduction. In Edmund Spencer, The Faerie Queene, Book II, lxii–lxxix. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn. 1919. Zadok, R. 1984. The Origin of the Name Shinar.Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und vorderasiatische Archäologie 74: 240–244. Zuckerman, C. 1995. On the Date of the Khazars’ Conversion to . Revue des Études Byzantines 53: 264–268.

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