„NINCS NEKIK SE NYELVÜK, SE ÍRÁSUK” - A ZSIDÓK ÉS A LATIN NYELV A KÉSŐ ÓKORBAN
"Them do not have Language and Writing" - THE JEWS AND LATIN LANGUAGE IN THE LATE ANTIQUITY

Summary/Abstract: The Latin language did not enjoy popularity either among the Jewish population of Iudaea/Palaestina or that of the diaspora. This may be traced back to political, religious and cultural reasons. In spite of the strong aversion to Romans, Jews did use Latin, especially from the 4th century onwards, when Christianity was declared state religion. The most important evidences of the usage of Latin are the inscriptions. Some phrases in the Jewish epitaphs indicate a typically Jewish environment, which cannot prove, however, the existence of a Judenlatein (i. e. a coherent system of lexical, semantic, morphological and syntactic divergences). The examination of two Jewish epitaphs (CIJ 476. Monteverde catacomb, Rome, III—IVth century; CIJ 650. Catania, 383), a legal document (Collatio legum Mosaicarum et Romanarum) as well as a religious text (Epistola Anne ad Senecam), all formulated in Latin are to demonstrate our hypothesis. As regards Jewish inscriptions we do examine the sociolinguistical background of the epitaphs; while in the case of the Jewish-Latin literary texts we do research on the Biblical allusions.

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