ABSTRACT
What Jews absorbed, therefore, they did not take in unaltered. Take, for example, child-adoption in sixteenth century Rome, a time when adoption as we
How did this process operate with respect to language? Jews, I have argued, thought in Italian.5 The proof lies in such repetitive usages as bayit she/ah (literally "her," but intending, in fact, "his" house also) found in hundreds of rental contracts entered into by Roman Jews during the sixteenth century. The Hebrew masculine bayit has been feminized, confused with the feminine Italian cas a, whose personal pronoun, too, must always be feminine, not agreeing in gender with that of the actual possessor as it would in Hebrew, but with the noun modified. This example has been multiplied by Sandra Debenedetti in her study of Italian usages in the Hebrew of the sixteenth century Roman Jewish notaries, the father and son Leon and Isaac Piattelli, who were active from about 1538 through 1605, the same notaries who drew the rental contracts just mentioned. She, too, insists Jews thought in Italian.6
