[Avodah] Who wrote Perush Yonatan?

Motti Yarchinai motti.yarchinai at yahoo.com.au
Thu Dec 29 06:55:30 PST 2022


In many chumashim, there is a commentary on Targum Yonatan headed "Perush Yonatan." Does anyone know who wrote it, or t least when (approximately) it was written?
Note, I don't ask who wrote the Targum Yonatan itself, because no-one knows. It is wrongly named Yonatan, reputedly because some publisher mistook the abbreviation T"Y for Targum Yonatan and thought it meant Yonatan ben Uziel, but he did not translate any of the first section of Tanach. TY actually stood for Targum Yerushalmi (meaning it was a "western" translation, not of "eastern" (i.e. Babylonian) origin, but nobody knows who the author was, only that he was from Eretz Yisrael. Among scholars, it is more correctly called Targum Pseudo-Jonathan.
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan is not exactly a translation in the strict sense of the word, because he adds material of non-biblical origin, which is not in the text of the Torah, even by implication. A striking example of this is in his translation of Bereshit 1:16. It contains a bit of calendar arithmetic, which he no doubt felt had great significance, but it was completely non-understandable, until a fragment from the Cairo Geniza material published by Solomon Shechter at the turn of the 20th Century shed light on what he meant by it.
The author of Perush Yonatan is one of those who did not understand its significance because he tries to correct the time quantity mentioned by TY, but his correction makes even less sense and, in light of what we now know (information that was buried for centuries), the time-quantity contained in TY needs no correction at all, and that information may go some way to explaining TY's motivation for including it in a translation, where it really has no place, because it is not part of the text he is purporting to translate.
I would like to know (at least) when, and by whom that perush on TY was written. The one person I know (a Rabbi Mattis Kantor) who might know the answer to that question, is, I fear, no longer in a condition to answer the question.

Motti
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