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Fictitious toponyms in the responsa: Bashan's ruleset revisited

Fictitious toponyms in the responsa: Bashan's ruleset revisited

Nissan, Ephraim (2003) Fictitious toponyms in the responsa: Bashan's ruleset revisited. Revue Informatique et Statistique dans les Sciences Humaines, XXXIX. ISSN 0030-4972

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Abstract

Fictitious personal names and toponyms are not infrequent in legal casenotes as used for didactic purposes nowadays. There is a long tradition of fictitious names being used in the legal literature. The problem with medieval or early modern legal (here, rabbinical) responsa is that if they are used as evidence for historical purposes, as though they were chronicles, confusion may occurs. Historian Eliezer Bashan showed that this is the case, indeed, with particular reference to rabbinical responsa from the Ottoman empire where Holy Land toponyms occur. He set forth several tentative rules to decide whether a toponym is there to literally refer to the place it names, or whether, instead, the name is used fictitiously. This paper formalizes the ruleset.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: toponyms, ficticious personal names, Bashan's ruleset
Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics
Pre-2014 Departments: School of Computing & Mathematical Sciences
Related URLs:
Last Modified: 14 Oct 2016 09:01
URI: http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/618

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