A Medieval Coptic Hebraism? Coptic Adaptations of Saadiah Gaon’s Judaeo-Arabic Translation of the Torah, Their Transmission and Textual Practice

In the framework of the learned textual practice working group I will examine Saadiah’s Tafsīr, an Arabic translation of the Pentateuch of originally Jewish provenance, became a foundational text also of the Coptic Church, whose study and preservation had to be cultivated vigilantly, which text-critical functions it fulfilled as a point of comparison to other Arabic versions of the Pentateuch, and which learned textual practices this kind of scholarship entailed. In a larger context, my contribution sets out to investigate whether there is sufficient evidence to speak of medieval Coptic Hebraism, in which the Tafsīr and the scholarly, text-critical occupation with it, had the function of acquainting Coptic intellectuals with the otherwise inaccessible Hebrew Urtext of their own biblical text in Coptic.